I’m loving this loooooooong weekend business.

My weekend started last Tuesday at 5:00 pm when I went to eat burgers, drink beer/vodka lime and soda, see Bran Nue Dae at the cinema with two friends. The movie was bizarre. Filled with messages (sometimes stereotyped) about Aboriginal and white Australian culture, and sexual innuendo at the same time. In parts I sensed bitterness. There was a great cast – Jessica Mauboy looked stunning, and Deborah Mailman played a great drunken harlet, and Missy Higgins was really ocker. I don’t know though, I didn’t feel immersed in the movie.

Wednesday – Friday was camp, and I’ll dedicate a separate blog post to that.
I love this restaurant – it’s got modern Asian food.

Friday night I had dinner at Tom Phat in Brunswick. I love this restaurant – it serves modern Asian food at a great price. I ordered the twice cooked duck in plum sauce with Asian greens, and for dessert I had coconut icecream with mango and banana crumble – yum! My Mum was down with two of our friends, and we laughed and laughed, so much so Mum was crying! It was a lot of fun – I love spending time with Mum, she is one of my best friends. And our other two friends are a scream – I enjoy being able to discuss anything with them, and there never feels like there is a generation gap between us.

Saturday, the four of us shopped til we dropped. I almost did drop after being so tired from three days at camp. But like all good shoppers, I have stamina, and managed to walk the entire giant shopping mall and then some. I love shopping. I particularly love finding bargains.

I was very happy with my purchases, especially the MacBook Pro which I’ve been eying for ages. And now I have it, it’s as wonderful as I imagined it would be. Of course, I probably didn’t need to buy a MacBook Pro, per se, I could have make done with a middle level PC. But since I bought my iPod Touch and iPHone, I’ve fallen in love with the asthetics of Apple’s products. Using it makes me feel like Carrie Bradshaw.

Like this.

Writing this blog on my MacBook, sitting on my bed, makes me feel like I’m writing a proper newspaper column, just like Carrie did. Except I abhor her collection of beige bras. For someone so fashionable she wore the yuckiest bras most of the time, and exposed them underneath her fabulous fashions. I recall she sometimes even wore the bras as a standalone piece, AS OUTERWEAR. Gosh.

An example.

I would NEVER do this. I may expose a pretty pink bra strap under a dress, but not the WHOLE GODDAMN BRA!

Anyhow, I digress.

This is my MacBook, it features the draft of this very blog post. And so a new love affair begins.

I purchased a Catherine Manuell Design laptop case so my MacBook’s home is as beautiful as it is. I love Catherine Manuell’s luggage collections.

I had to google the instruction for taking a screen shot. My case is the black and white one with the flap, sort of in the middle of the page.

And I also have a collection of brushes and wipes in a little beauty case so I can wipe my vaseline from the MacBook and brush dust (ie, dead skin) away. It’s quite a hassle being me, but more so interesting!

So as I mentioned before, I went to my friend Alana hen’s night on Saturday. Alana and I met when I started at the department store back in 1999 – she was the first person I met on my first day (aside from my manager). She showed me the ropes. Her sister also worked there. We became friends, and we both moved away from the country, and it’s only in recent months that we’ve met in person again.

I went to the hen’s night only knowing four people, but departed having made some new friends, which is really nice. Everyone there made me feel very welcome.

It was a 1920s flapper theme, and everyone dressed up! I love it when everyone follows the theme.

There were a few games – popping balloons with body parts, a quiz about the hen from her partner’s perspective, and lots of great food made by her family and those slushie machines filled with daquiris.

At 11:30 pm, the stripper arrived. I’d never seen a stripper in real life before. It was a little awkward, I found, and I sensed Alana and some other girls felt his closeness awkward, too. It was a lot of fun, and I did have a big giggle when he came to me and asked me to rub his bum, but I declined oiling him up with baby oil.

Most of the girls at the hen’s night headed into the city to a nightclub after the stripper festivities. I haven’t been to a nightclub since the last hen’s night I went to in 2006. Wow, things have changed. Girls wear NOTHING now, it seems. I enjoyed myself there more than I anticipated, probably because I was with a great group of people and I got in amongst it on the dancefloor, dancing to some songs I actually knew.

I had a thoroughly good time, but didn’t get home til 3:00 am and though I only had half a daquiri and the rest soft drink, I felt pretty ordinary yesterday.

Here are some pictures from Alana’s hen’s night. We all looked stunning!

Today I’ve been pottering around my suburb doing groceries, buying supplies for my computer and reading magazines. Tonight I will cook, for the first time in eight days – how I miss cooking! And tomorrow I aim to ‘shop my closet’ – as in clean it out and find some gems I’d forgotten about and pack the stuff I don’t wear off to St Vinnies. The Big Day Out is happening – though I’m not going I will hear it from my place, well it will be a mix of that and the Hottest 100, for which the number one sing has already been leaked. I am liking this ‘me time’ too.

This is the life – long weekends should happen every month!