Where did the weekend go?

brrm came to visit yesterday, which was nice as I hadn't seen him for ages. Clever badger that he is, he has also managed to fix pto452, or at least identify the problem -- the float, which is supposed to be petrol-tight, isn't. Am currently trying to work out a good way of draining a fair amount of petrol out of a hairline crack... may have to resort to sucking it out like sucking poison from a snakebite! brrm also let me test-drive his Rover, because it's the sort of size/style of car I'd be thinking of buying if I was going to buy a real, usefulmodern, boring car. :-) I managed to embarrass myself with my bad driving (not dangerous, just graunching gear-changes and nearly-stalling and suchlike), and terrify myself with vicious crosswinds on the A14. Despite this, it seems to be quite a nice little car, & I think I'd get used to it fairly quickly.

Beer festival last night was pretty much a washout -- not much beer left and they still weren't serving food, despite having said that they would be. I'm very annoyed about that -- the posters said that food would be served 6pm-9pm every night, and, well, call me picky, but I think if you say that you're serving food then you have to have slightly more on offer than half a dozen stale-looking sandwiches (all of which seemed to contain ham, so tough shit for any veggies who might have been looking for a meal). The woman serving at the bar seemed baffled as to why the sandwiches weren't good enough ("Don't you fancy a sandwich? Did you want an evening meal?"), and said that they had served food on Friday and Saturday, and then proceeded to tell me about all the different meals (lasagne, shepherd's pie, macaroni cheese, etc.) which I could have had on Friday night. Gee, thanks. All in all, I felt very guilty about dragging brrm to the festival (particularly since he had to pay to get in as he's not a CAMRA member).

[I'm wondering about whether to write and complain about the food situation, but the problem is, I didn't volunteer at the festival -- which means that if I do complain I'll probably just get an earful of abuse from Sean. Again.]

Anyway, we went to the Carlton instead, for some of their consistently excellent food and equally excellent beer -- not to mention a much nicer environment in which to eat (the only place to sit down at the beer festival was the smoking area, where the air was sufficiently hazy with smoke that it was hard to see the other side of the room). It was good to talk to people, but I ended up drinking far too much and nearly falling asleep in the pub. And then stupidly staying up really late talking to the people who wandered back to 13FR with us, despite being half-asleep and only vaguely following the conversation most of the time.

As a result I was knackered this morning, and -- just my luck -- Sunday lunch shift at the Carlton today was the busiest I've ever seen it. We apparently served at least 50 lunches in 3 hours (most of them in the first 2 hours). This is, of course, a cue for everybody who's ever worked in catering at all to pipe up and say what a pitiful turnover that is... but all I know is that I was rushed off my feet, not only taking food orders (and taking some of them to the tables, though Terri does most of that) but also doing nearly all the drinks in both the public bar and the lounge bar. By 3pm I just wanted to go and hide under a table and cry, but things calmed down around then so I got to have my lunch and relax for a bit. It's just a shame that by that point brrm had decided to go home while the weather and the light were still favourable; I hardly even had a chance to say hello to him while he had lunch in the pub. :-/

On the plus side, though, Al was at the pub, and he had brought me my pair of stilts! He's been promising to make some for me since the beer festival at the Carlton last summer, and now he has done. They're only ("only"!) 30-inch stilts, but that's probably a good height to start with. Now I have to work out how the hell to get on them...

Anyway, I got home at 4:30ish, came up here and pottered around on the computer, and now suddenly it's nearly 7pm and I have no idea where the time went. Still feeling dazed and knackered... fortunately though I don't have to get up tomorrow morning for work, hurrah. I think I'm going to have a very long soaky bath, with a trashy book, and then go to bed. And stay there.