My social life seems to be spinning out of control. I seem to have managed a week in which I've averaged more than one social event per day.

Chris and Yasmin are partly to blame, I suppose, but at least they're unlikely to get married more than once :-) Good reception on Friday, though, with giant Jenga and giant Connect 4 and giant darts and a few other giant games. Then home from their reception to receive visitors from Impropriety, who I'd invited round for DVD-watching after discovering that crazyscot had managed not to see Galaxy Quest before. So that was my Cosmic Wrong set right for the week. To Prue's on Saturday afternoon, for a barbecue in honour of two other friends of hers leaving ARM (neither of whom I know terribly well, so I'm not sure which one invited me!), and then on to Kirsten's birthday do, which was a reasonably normal party until most of it dived into the paddling pool at about half past eleven at night. Reasoning that I'd been doing well on hugs up to that point but most of the people I might hug were now soggy, I bailed out and got what turned out to be an excellent night's sleep.

Today Who, tomorrow pizza, Tuesday the Calling; previously there had been pub on Thursday, and on Wednesday I'd first visited Impropriety and then gone on to Chris's ‘stag evening’ (actually an ‘oops I forgot to do a stag thing well let's at least go to the pub’ evening). That makes seven days with a total of ten things in. I'm a little scared by that.

Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, I had a momentary weakness and ordered a GameCube and several games, which all arrived on Friday; so that's also been taking up my time. In fact I'm writing this just after a session of blowing up black and white things in Ikaruga (now that's what I call a shoot-em-up) and am probably about to go and blow some more things up in Metroid Prime (a fun game with a thoroughly infuriating beginning: in the introductory level you get shedloads of weapons and equipment and cool stuff, and the game gives you a tutorial on how to use it, and just when it's all starting to become instinctive and you naturally use the right weapon for the right thing, it all malfunctions and the next level shoves you on to a planet with only the most piddly of weapons and no cool abilities, and now you know exactly what you're missing. Gah).

All in all, the chance of me getting anything useful done outside work in the near future seems remarkably low…

(The GameCube felt like a terrible indulgence, somehow. I think this might be because it's the first computing appliance I've ever owned which was solely for playing games on. Most machines I've had have been at least partly for programming and other useful stuff, and the games were an added bonus; even my PS2 was partly bought so I could install Linux on it and use it to write games, so that felt more like financing a creative urge than lazing about blowing things up. But with the GC, for the first time in my life, I have no excuse at all.)