The mating habits of the common english long-corded masonry drill

As we all know, the courting ritual of the common english long-corded masonry drill appear to be, approximately:

(1) Creep stealthily on tippy-toes into position early in the morning
(2) Wait until about eight in the morning, and then begin the mating duet at top volume, the two harsh rasping one-tone voices sliding past each other in an endless but irregular rhythm
(3) Profit!

My point is, they seem to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with their mounts, the opposably-thumbed independently-trading true british builder. Perhaps they could train those to, preparatory to guiding their riders toward a particularly rich vein of brick for the cacophonous masonry drill mating orgy, play their native pleasant forest sounds over a large set of speakers?

On a related note, does anyone else feel less tired when they wake up gradually or predictably, than if they're suddenly yanked out of a sleep cycle? And find it more relaxing, even with something bad, than when it's out of their control? In actual fact, the drilling was brief, but I couldn't go back to sleep while keep expecting it to start up again at the moment's notice of some small noise or other.

Friday dinner and games

I had a really good weekend. On Friday, I was productive enough at work to be able to leave a little early and do shopping for Meggie, Mobbsy, Sonic and Martin coming round for dinner and games.

Food

I made a pasta and veg bake, heavier on the vegetables than normal, and with some "beef" quorn, coated in a little flavour and friend. With sides garlic bread, salad and sweetcorn, which felt very nice. As always, I made a large bake and saved the rest for the weekend, but I think I should start learning to cover half of the tin when I bring it out so no-one expects to eat 1/6 of it :)

As always, my cooking is a little uninspired, compared to people who are practised. But the presentation is certainly quite nice, with tablecloths, dishes for every dish, jugs of squash, trays to bring out glasses or plates from the kitchen. Ideally I'd practise more on my own and then invite people round, but until then, if I'm inviting people round, cooking is probably more interesting than take-away, so I invite without apology.

I certainly don't expect people to come round for my cooking :) But on the other hand, it's sufficiently competent than maybe it's as nice as we'd eat elsewhere -- I certainly like it. But I can't decide if my habitual apology for not having something more exciting is a nervous reflex (I think not, I do do that sometimes, but am fairly clear that I don't feel bad about anything here) or just acknowledging that it's acceptable, (but I won't pretend it's superb).

Games

We had to nurse the conversation along politely a bit, but it was very pleasant, they are very nice people. We played Mobbsy's birthday Caylus the Unforgettable.

This is a resource-collecting-building-german-like game. The rules are a little intimidating, but it's pretty well designed, once we started, the rules were entirely intuitive. It was pretty late, we didn't have time for a whole game, though I don't know how quick it might be if everyone knows what they're doing from the start and has got used to the various different strategies of a turn. But it seemed a pretty good game.

One suggestion for how to speed up getting into a game is to give everyone arbitrary unrelated goals, instead of playing for points -- try to build this building, try to accumulate money. This game (or similar) are sufficiently open-ended that those are probably not a completely bust strategy, but means you can play the first turn without seizing if you can't play it with a perfect strategy. *Martin* has the right idea here, his personal aim is "evil" :)

On the other hand, my head is too full of games, I don't have enough board game generalising skill to play without thought (which is lamentably sometimes not instant), and feel it'd be more fun when you're familiar with it. So it's a good post-dinner game, but I may never get round to playing it (or other board games) for years, if silly games and emergent games take precedence in my head.

Saturday: Jogging and Poohsoc and Ceilidh

Saturday morning Tim and I went jogging in Milton Country Park again. Jogging there, or on the tow-path is definitely correct, it's very pleasant.

Contrariwise, jogging ought to work, but seems very problematic, not simply because of the rep it's acquired as what people do gratuitously. The bottleneck often seems to not be tired, but in being able to breathe, I'm flattened by that almost instantly, whereas later on, I would ceilidh for three hours, and feel fairly exercised afterwards.

Afterwards, we went to Tesco's coffee shop, talked about linguistics, programming, and romance.

I spent the afternoon answering some emails and so on, and then went to poohsoc, which was very entertaining. I would say more, but really, indescribable is most appropriate.

Finally, I went on to the ceilidh, which was very fun. Everything just clicked, all of the dances were easy, there were lots of nice people there (fivemack, atreic, sonic, Jenny S. T., Poohsoc Ed, hmmm_tea and thethirdvoice) to dance with.

There were several pleasing dances I remembered but hadn't seen for ages, the basket dance, and the flirtation dance. And there was a waltz-like dance, which for once I did in the nick of time manage to adapt my old waltz reflexes to (otherwise it makes me even worse than a beginner).

The callers were good and amusing (and I think new?), although I think unpractised at calling for beginners, I maybe ought to know by now what all the terms mean, and which way round the hall one waltzes at country dancing, but it's something that, even if you don't want to walk through in detail, is helpful to just mention so anyone lost can get the idea and be guided into the specific steps by watching people near them.