A packed weekend

[simont]

On Saturday my plans were to go into town and do some errands, and to go to kaet and sphyg's wedding. I wasn't sure I'd have time to do the former in the morning without risking being late to the latter, but when I woke up at about 6am by accident I decided I could probably manage a sufficiently early start after all. So I dashed about town faffing with things, and was able to go back home and faff there too, and still finished in plenty of time to get to the wedding without having to hurry.

I was amused to notice, at the wedding itself, that we're now officially well and truly in the age of the digital camera: just before the bride began her entrance, there was a chorus of four or five of those ‘boop-bip-bup-BEEP’ noises that digicams make when you power them up. In an earlier era there might have been situations where many mobile phones would go off at once, or lots of digital watches would chime the hour over a period of about five minutes, but I think this was the first time I'd heard digicams in chorus in that way.

High points of the day included:

• the bride and groom making their exit after the ceremony accompanied by the Blake's 7 theme – and also accompanied, not entirely sotto voce, by ceb telling them they were ‘very, very, very silly’ :-)
• Dan's quintessentially Dan introduction to his speech: ‘the groom's speech should be short, sweet, and contain no linear algebra’
• Benedict scoring a palpable verbal hit on me while we were all sitting around after the wedding breakfast: he reached across the table with a long modelling balloon (of which there were quite a few about) and either poked or patted me in the head – it was unclear which he intended – twice. ‘Did you just kill me or knight me?’ I asked, ‘It was hard to tell which.’ He gave me that contemptuous look that only small children can manage, and said ‘It's … a … balloon.’ :-)

Eventually the fact that I'd woken up at 6am asserted itself, so I went home earlyish and fell over.

However, I wasn't due for a proper night's rest just yet, because the next day I had to get up early to go out to the new house and take delivery of my new white goods. (Yes, on a Sunday.) So I did that, and then spent a lot of the afternoon actually washing some clothes in my shiny new washing machine (which I've been looking forward to for some time, because I'm convinced the landlord's washing machine in this flat doesn't rinse properly at all), getting home just in time to discover that I'd missed most of Dan and Lucy's post-wedding pub get-together. Oops.

Then Sunday evening was unexpectedly taken up by an email from drswirly, who's on holiday in Cornwall and has therefore had a chance for uninterrupted thinking about maths; in this case he'd managed to solve a well-known mathematically impossible problem, by a method of cheating I'd thought up a month or two ago. So, of course, I immediately had to check his answer and write it up to go on the web, which took me a lot of the evening. So, for anyone who's interested, there's now a new mathsy page up on my website: ‘Reaching row 5 in Solitaire Army’.

And I had this morning off work, but still no chance for a lie-in, because this time I had to go out to the house and meet a guy coming to measure up for my pre-emptive recarpeting. That's done now, and I'm back at home with a couple of hours to spend relaxing before I go to work for the afternoon. Phew.

Comments

[deerfold.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I went to a wedding last year where the bride and groom approached the dance floor to the Blake's 7 theme...

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

We deliberately had no dance floor ;P The linear algebra comment came about from the fact that our living room is scattered with textbooks on quantum mechanics and pieces of paper covered in matrices.

[lnr]

Mike and I improvised our own dancefloor in the the bit just outside the main room we were using for a while, but the music wasn't really loud enough to dance to from there.