A Nice Coffee

16 September - Woke up and my first thought was - where the hell am I? Flashes of the previous night of booze capped with mary jane helped to explain why I was sleeping on a remarkably comfortable couch. Took a while to get going but dropped by a local caf for breakfast and was very disappointed by the pancakes - first of all, no bananas like the menu promised, they didn’t bring the (imitation!!!) syrup until I pestered them for it and the pancakes themselves were cold, flavourless and soaked with the acidy juice of the berry compote that it came with. A boycott I say! Well, it will probably be a while before I have the opportunity to be in rushcutters so I can boycott the place but it's on my list. I think it was called Ash's café. Consider yourself warned, ash's. Also, afterwards james made a coffee - it was verra nice (happy, james?). Afternoon was pretty uneventful - read a little, wrote a little, ate a nice macaroon and tried a few nice wines at a liquor store's exhibit (one EnZed wine made from a variety of grape with a german name w particuarly delicious - incredibly smooth and not tart at all) but I was far too cheap to buy them. Had planned on spending the night over in North Sydney to make for an easier arrival for the harbour bridge run the next morning. Due to the fact that I had not done a competition run for 9 months and had not run at all for at least 5 months I was a little hesitant about it - thouht about running over in the evening but by the time I headed over it was already lateish and I thought i'd the best that could happen is that i'd hurt myself so took the rolling solution and got over there in double quick time. As young Ethan's birthday was approaching a thomas the tank engine ultimate set had been purchased in celebration - a fairly impressive toy as they go but a rather fiendishly challenging process of putting it together - reasonably complicated but incredibly big (2.5 x 1.8m) and had to be done on the floor (wooden floorboards that were very brutal to my knees and wrist) - also, despite the hundreds of pieces of track and road there was no way it could be set up without doing it to the specific plans in the box - from my cursory examination of the instructions I concluded that there was no configuration that could be made that wasn't exactly as the box specs - in my mind a trainset has to offer the option of creating your own designs - every track set I ever remember offered that, lego, train sets, scalectrix (was that what those car sets were called?) - very strange.