Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

I was in Manchester over the weekend. (That was definitely a good thing.) Despite the best efforts of both my self-sabotaging brain and the universe in general, I did actually get there. I made all my connections, got lots of knitting done and read a decent chunk of my book. I spent a couple of days hanging out with uni friends, one of whom I haven't seen in a decade, another who I haven't seen in nearly 8 years. Sometimes when you hangout with people you haven't seen in years its awkward or whatever and you're reminded why you haven't seen each other in years, but this wasn't that at all. It was so easy and comfortable and restorative to hang out with them. I'd forgotten how good it is to spend time with these friends. And we've made vague plans to all hang out again at the end of the Summer in Fermanagh. (G's parents have a holiday home there - I made a post about it when I went there in May 2010 - good grief that was a while ago.) And one of the guys couldn't make it, because he had literally started a new job a fortnight before, so we've resolved to go visit T near Frankfurt at some point soon! ("I've just renewed my passport, I can totally do that! Let's visit lots of European places while we don't need visas!" - We watched Eurovision, heckling cheerfully and arguing about which cities we wanted to visit.) And for that matter M & his girlfriend H - who we were staying with - are Finnish and none of the rest of us have been to Finland so that needs to happen too. We ate lots of food, got rained on, found a random Hungarian folk/food festival, visited some historic pubs, talked about architecture and film theory and laughed so fucking much. It was amazing, I'm only sad it couldn't have been longer. It's been ten years since the summer we all lived in each others pockets, it feels like both forever and no time at all, and we're all still here.

(M gave me a DVD of an obscure Japanese samurai movie from the 80s - it's got a 20ft animatronic centipede, I'm delighted by this prospect! - we've always communicated best in movies. And G set both M and I targets for writing about films! I may actually get stuff written, she's always been the best at keeping me on deadline.)

I managed to keep my work fuck-ups to the bare medium, only a tiny, 'this skill needs more practic' slip up. And I've been learning about building graphics in Avid over the last couple of weeks and yesterday one of my colleagues (who is much much more knowledgeable about Avid editing than me) asked me something about our gfx templates that he couldn't remember and I was able to answer all his questions - I knew things he didn't; I could have danced with glee!

I've socialised and done a bunch of little things to help take care of my team at work.

I got a haircut on Wednesday and I was brave and did something different with it and I think I like it. Though I need to learn how to style it properly, its an adventure, it defies gravity when I blow dry it and hair gel is now something I own. I'm starting to feel that its delightfully androgenous, but ask me again in a few weeks because styling it may end up bugging the shit out of me!

(This post was originally titled, 'Good Things and Bad Things' but as I wrote it I came to realise just how many good things had happened this week and the few bad things faded into insignificance. I'm going to get dressed, bake some pastry things, go to work and shout my brain down about the bad things with the good things.)