Saturday, August 23, 2003
I'll have more details about my new job later, but one thing about it I will mention is that it's from 5pm to 11pm. This means that I won't (for the most part) have to re-jig my preferred lifestyle of sleeping late and waking up late, but it does mean that I have to sacrifice my evenings and avoid going to the cinema or attending family parties on weekdays... which can actually be a perk. For those who don't know yet, my hyper-large and extended family -- all 100+ members -- often hold fancy parties either at home or at my cousin's hotel. With so many family members, there's always an occasion for a party, and this time around it was my grand-uncle's 81st birthday. This was a problem because firstly the big Newcastle vs Man United game starts an hour before the party, and secondly because with so many people out of town there is a genuine shortage of people my age in the family. Mind you, I had Kavi and Haneal, but it's always nice to hang around with the rest of the family.
And with that in mind, we set off for the hotel early, grabbed a seat at the bar and decided to watch the game from there (or as much of it as we could before we'd be forced to go down to the party). It was a generally entertaining game (Man U won 2-1) but the bar had a... strange atmosphere. Despite a good 80% of the bar patrons sitting down to watch the game, the TV was muted and instead soft lounge music was played. As if that wasn't bad enough, halfway though the second half the music went off... to be replaced by a live band. Urgh.
Saw Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday. It's surprisingly good. I wasn't expecting much at all, and though it does drag slightly in places and contain a plot that trips over itself on a regular basis, it's a great movie. It's always fun to watch with some great action pieces, dash of humour and an all-star cast ably headed by the superb Johnny Depp. And the clever little references to the Disneyland ride are also appreciated.
Lastly, one other thing I've been watching over the past few nights is the new Simpsons Season 3 DVD set. It's great so far, given that it's too old to be one of the seasons constantly re-run on the BBC, and recent enough that the less-funny-more-morals attitude of the first two seasons have been dropped for the familiar formula we know and love. And so I've been watching a lot of episodes that I haven't seen in a long, long time. And this is the interesting bit: The last time I saw half of these episodes was when they first ran in the US, and I was spending four months with my ailing grandmother in Los Angeles. Brings back a lot of memories...
Posted at 11:37 PM
