I had a fantastic Labour Weekend. So good catching up with all my friends. As a result of the excessive fun, I have caught a cold and am suffering at work. Today was terrible, I couldn't concentrate and I kept sneezing and after drinking that disgusting Lemsip crap I felt like throwing up.

Anyway.

I finished up at work on Friday and met Laura and Raymond at Cha for dinner. It was still relatively early, so Raymond and I went back to his apartment and Laura went back to hers at around 7.40pm. Then Raymond wanted to have a shower and by the time he finished...it was 8.05pm.
Picked up Laura at 8.10pm
Got to the flat at 8.15pm
Picked up Jono at 8.25pm
Arrived at the airport at 8.30pm
Boarded the plane at 8.40pm
Took off for Auckland at 8.50pm

Yeah, rushed, much. In the chaos I left my keys at the flat, but that wasn't too big an issue. I got picked up by Casey at the other end and met Bob, Ted, Amber and Han at Momo's, where I proceeded to knock my glass over and cut my hand in the process. After bleeding profusely, they decided to give me a free drink (YAY).

I turned up at church on Saturday morning, much to the surprise of the music team (apparently Jin hadn't told them I was on). So yeah, I got to play piano, and that was great jamming with the boys again. So much fun, far more fun than at Central Baptist. Afterwards, we distributed some flyers for the Light Party before I headed over to St Heliers to meet the Grammar Gang for lunch at La Vista. Great food there, so good to catch up with everyone. I was free for the rest of the afternoon and it was still early, so we went down the road to play Mini Golf. There were so many fails there, it was awesome. Props to Amnon for beating Richard!

It was still early in the day so we went back to Mat's flat and just hung around for a while, watching Family Guy and playing some Smash Bros Brawl. I really can't stand the Wii control scheme (and that's not because I've been working with it for the past week). The Wiimote has so few controller buttons that they could not possibly encapsulate all the techniques into a user-friendly scheme. Once I started with the Gamecube controller, it felt so much better. MetaKnight and Dedede are awesome! :3

Left the flat and went to Cinta's place for dinner with her, Alice, Jo and Reuben. We had apricot chicken, some cheese and cauliflower, boiled vegetables and roast potato, and Oreo cheesecake for dessert. Awesome stuff. We spent the rest of the night solving those stupid take-apart-shape-and-put-them-together-again puzzles.

Sunday morning was church, had heaps of fun on the piano but it wasn't my best day (I screwed up the offering piece) but I think people just appreciated me being back on the piano, which was really nice. We had testimonies from our group heading to Cambodia for a short term mission, as well as a delicious curry lunch for fundraising. I hung around for a few hours for BASIC and then the guys went to play pool. All I can say is... black ball fail.

I went out with Dad and Uncle Tony and family to this teppanyaki place in Ponsonby called Fuji. Entertainment was fantastic, food was delicious, but unfortunately not as filling as I would have liked. Really had to work for our food as well! I caught a piece of egg in my mouth, and two bowls of rice flung in my general direction.

Met up with the youth group guys at Momo's (haha, again). I didn't cut my hand this time, which was great. I had a taro milkshake with mango pudding, but didn't feel like eating much more. We were keen on going out after that, but nothing happened and we just went to bed.

But Matt, Sam and I ventured out the next day in the blazing sun to Mission Bay, where we enjoyed some unhealthy breakfasts in the form of ice cream, waffles and pancakes. We hung around Bastion Point before heading into town. We took at stop at Yifans where Matt played the new Street Fighter - I really like the art style, with the black paint strokes. I had to rush off soon after to meet Casey, Bob, Laura and Raymond for yum char at China. Good food, again, but unfortunately I was still a bit stuffed from breakfast. However, I did manage to cram a durian puff and a mango puff, so all is well.

Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing dad's computer, then met up with my sister for a chit chat. Her cat is adorable <3 and very vocal too. Being the awesome sister that she is, she managed to get me this:



It was a quick dinner at Uncle Tony's before heading to the airport. What a weekend. Catch all the action in the gallery.

Some things I forgot to mention last week: I saw Hamish Carter, Olympian, Gold Medallist and Auckland Grammar old boy, at the BNZ Food Court. He was buying sushi. I wanted to say hi to him but I was too shy and he was talking to someone else and it would have been cool to get a picture with him in retrospect but there were so many people around I would have looked really stupid and touristy and Azn.

Speaking of Azn, I got interviewed by some Azn magazine so if you see my mug somewhere, you'll know why. She asked me if the Government should be spending more money on the defense force.

Anyway, it has been a pretty bad start to the week. Yesterday I spent the whole day battling with freaking Metrowerksfail over some stupid access paths problem. Apparently, if you have two files of the same name but in different directories, and each of the directories are in your access paths, they are treated as duplicates. What a load of fail.

Following that, I played pretty badly at badminton. I was just smashing the shuttlecock in anger most of the time :p

Today I was just fixing some stupid sound problem and it boiled down to nothing to do with sound, but rather the directories in which the resources were located. Blah.

Anyway..Grammar traditions never die. One of the long-standing traditions between me and my Grammar friends is to congregate sometime around December 6th (preferably on that day, but generally ) at Auckland Grammar School and play some games...like handball.

Following that, we usually head to BK and stay late before going our separate ways. Anyway, this time, since we actually had a proper place to hang out (ie, the flat), we opted for Domino's and took it all back to the flat where it disappeared within around 10 minutes.

After that, we proceeded to play Cranium, using the pristine unopened box from my 21st that all my friends had so generously given me..but that didn't last long. Question: If you had to act out "tour guide" for charades, how would you do it? :O

Finally, we had a huge Mafia marathon until 5am where there were epic battles and epic frustrations and epic idiocy. I even enjoyed the times when I wasn't the overlord, because unlike SOME PEOPLE WHO I PLAY WITH, my Grammar friends don't kill me off in the first round.

So yeah, with 7 hours of sleep, I woke up groggily and proceeded to watch Simon play "Stalker", and get owned. Apparently he's making progress on that, so good on him. He kept getting shot on the first mission, and he had to use like 8 bullets to kill everyone and blahblahblah. When everyone had finally woken up, we had two games of DotA where we were royally sassed, then I finally drove home to beat the traffic. \o/

Tonight! We are going to Momo's because Ted is leaving for Taiwan tomorrow. I have to remember to get some money off him for his Parachute ticket. Oh yeah, we're going to be playing Mario Party DS at Momo's... haha. That'll be fun :O