Catching up on things

You’ll notice its been pretty dead on the ol’ Fat Web for the month of February.

That’s not to say nothing has happened.  Far from it.  Just a set of circumstances where we’ve had people crashing on the couch and some extra visitors passing through so I haven’t really had the opportunity to take five and blog about stuff.

But now its the last day of the month, its raining outside and here I am with some time on my hands to write a long rambling update about this, that and the other.

Lets start with what I’ve been up to.  Work has been keeping me very busy as I am well and truly getting stuck into managing an operation that is in the process of incorporating two companies and brands into a single entity.  So there’s plenty of new faces to meet n’ greet, plenty of new staff to hire and some fun stuff like hiring contractors to build extensions to our site.  It all feels quite new and exciting at the moment and I definitely felt a bit of Patrick Bateman-style pride in getting my own corporate AMEX card and business card with this job.

Outside of the office, I’ve been re-discovering my taste for single malt whisky.  Jen picked up a couple of bottles of Talisker as well as something called Ardmore on a recent visit to the UK.  Talisker was something an old colleague in Sydney introduced me to.  You have to try it.  It has a wonderful amber colour to it, a brilliantly smooth and sweet flavour going down the hatch and its accentuated by a lovely peaty aftertaste.

With the poor weather we’ve been having lately (particularly wet on the weekends), there’s nothing better than spending a night in with some good company, whisky and a few round of games.

In carrying on our ongoing board and dice game nights, we recently picked up Ticket To Ride and tried out Perudo.  Ticket To Ride was an interesting game which took a couple of hours to play and it wasn’t particularly clear to us the first time who actually had the upper hand until right near the very end.  Now that everyone in the household has an idea of how it all works, I think we’ll get a lot more out of our next few sessions.  The board itself and the pieces look terrific in the Marklin Edition I might add.

Something that we took to a little quicker was Perudo, a South American dice rolling game.  According to my friend Jarrod, its more or less the same thing as a popular Chinese game called Liar Dice.  Each player rolls five dice which are kept hidden from the other players and then an ongoing round of bluffing goes on as you try and guess at the quantity of dice showing a given numerical value.  It’s a perfect social game as it only takes a minute to learn, the poker-style bluffing gets ever more entertaining with drinks involved and you can finish a game in 10 minutes flat.

The social calendar has been pretty stacked this year too.  Next week we’re going to the Australia v Indonesia Asian Cup qualifier which will be a great way to send off the team before the World Cup in roughly 100 days time and we’ll also be attending the Richard Dawkins lecture when he comes to town to plug his new book.

This weekend, me and Jen went to see the R-rated muppet stage production Avenue Q.  It was a highly entertaining night out.  The performances, set design and live band were all world class.  Well, as good as you’ll get for a show that has a Gary Coleman character, a repressed gay Republican muppet and an extended puppet sex sequence.  I think its got quite an extensive run in Australia at the moment so I’d recommend it if you’re one of our local readers.

One show I was disappointed to miss was Soundwave 2010 music festival which had Faith No More, The Weakerthans and Anvil.  I’m pretty jealous that Munch got to go  🙁

As for whats keeping me entertained on a week night, I’ve finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore and have now moved onto reading my first ever book written by an Australian author – Cloudstreet by Tim Winton.  A review of Kafka On the Shore will be forthcoming.  Also, the new season of Survivor has been amazing thus far and there’s also been a couple of good games that have come out in the last couple of weeks.

Thats about it for now.  I’m hoping to get over my little bout with writers block and start blogging a bit more actively again.  I’ve started with a long overdue review of Uncharted 2 and I’ll gradually get around to clearing out the backlog of stuff I’ve played, read and watched over the past couple of months.  I’ll probably bitch a bit more about Lost too.