yesterday...

Boxing Day - for most people, that means either watching the cricket, or doing some crazy shopping. Usually, I would be the former, but so far 2006 has been one of surprises and of things most unusual.

Woke up at 7:30 and got to Ben's house by 9am, left around 40minutes later to farewell Charissa at the airport. Afterwards, went back to his place and played chess (the first time in YEARS) and I looked like I knew what I was doing, but in reality I had no idea. So, I gladly went to lunch seeing as my (brave? myriad? futile?) attempts to save my king were doomed to failure from the start. Haha...

After lunch, we just bummed around, took silly photos of Joey, and were willing guinea-pigs for Vanessa's culinary experiments (jkjk - the muffins were very very good!) until Sam came over and we all got back into the car to drive all the way to Chatswood where we'd be having dinner with their newly-married cousin (Elaine) and her husband (Matt).

It was a very memorable evening, with games played like SuperSmash Mario Bros, EyeToy, Jenga, Texas Holdem Poker (woohoo I finally know how to play) and some crude game from Matt's childhood years consisting of shooting down your opponent's castle with counters, catapults, dinosaurs and I think Luke Skywalker made an appearance also. Confused? Haha we were still finding counters buried in all sorts of places at the end of the night.

Funniest memories include:
- Ben winning all the chips in poker, then on the very last round, lost it all! (but actually he won, coz the "prize" for the winner was to sing a song on Singstar)
- Jono gaining a Superstar reputation for singing the girl's part in 'Shut up' by Black Eyed Peas (you know how it goes: "shut up just shut up shut up" etc etc)