Party Pooper

8 Days Til Christmas! And less than a week now until I'm home for the holidays! And I think the only gift I don't have is one for my cat, Gerry. But I can just stop at Petco on Christmas Eve and take care of that I should think ;) And Jenn and I have managed to salvage our relatively new tradition by cooking our gourmet feast on Christmas Day as opposed to Christmas Eve, yay!!

Let's see, Friday night I was out with the stroke team, both current and alumni members, for a Christmas tapas meal/night out. It was an extremely entertaining night for reasons I can't share on here, but I'll be home soon enough to tell y'all about it in person. And last night was housemate Nicole's big birthday extravaganza. Something strange has been going on with me on and off this weekend, where I've been getting nauseous and light-headed, but I thought I was ready to go for the night out, since I was starving when we set out for dinner. We had a fabulous thai dinner in Soho, and from there headed over to Waxy O'Connors in Leicester Square. We'd been there about 20 minutes or so, and I suddenly felt really light-headed and slightly nauseous. I tried to tough it out for a few minutes, but finally went upstairs for some fresh air with a sympathetic bouncer watching over me (no, I wasn't feeling like that from alcohol, I'd had one glass of wine with dinner, and one sip of my rum and coke at the bar). Dave (Nicole's boyfriend) came looking for me after 10 minutes or so, to tell me they'd moved to a different part of the bar, and I decided to give it another go. Luckily, they'd found a little area where I could sit down, which was worlds better. I announced myself to be the designated Party Pooper, and bowed out of rounds, but had a great time regardless being chatted up. But eventually, the group decided they wanted to try another part of the bar, to which I said, no way, unless I can sit down-- so Nicole and another girl Jo ran off, and came back to say they'd found the Princess a stool, so we moved. And I was affectionately-sarcastically referred to as the Princess for the rest of the night. Which was rather ironic, considering the "stool" they'd found for me put me at about knee height with everyone else. There's a pic of it below, because hey, if you can't laugh at yourself...

From there,we went on to the Comedy Store at midnight. Everyone but me was battered at this point, but that didn't stop them from going through pitcher after pitcher of beer at the comedy club...including our housemate Leeanne, who heckled and shouted at and screamed with laughter at the three comedians in the first part of the show, and then abruptly decided she was bored at intermission and left. The show was really really good, and everyone had an ace night, which made my job as babysitter (by default being the only sober one) very hard. It took forever to get everyone out of the club, and to find the night bus. While we were traipsing around London I played referee to fights (verbal spats) that were only happening because people were drunk, and somewhere lost the quarter inch cap off the bottom of the left shoe of my favorite and most comfortable pair of high heels, lol. I also had to prevent Dave from trying to get off the night bus twice because he wanted to get onto the tube, being too drunk to realize the tube wasn't running. Our night bus driver by the way was tearing around London like the night bus in Harry Potter, and I was holding onto the grab bar for dear life, most of the way. But we finally caught a cab at Liverpool Street Station, after managing to convince the driver to take 6 people for an extra tenner on top of the metered fare (he was only insured to carry 5), and we walked in the door just after 4:30am. What a night!