Brie Is Poor Man's Camembert

8 December – Last night’s plans to go and see a band out at Balmain were halted by a fair amount of discomfort caused by excessive bicycle riding and a late night bout of queasiness which kept my head stuck in the bowl of the toilet for most of the night.  Presumed that it was something along the lines of gastro – one of my least favourite 24 hour bugs – expel most of the contents of the stomach, drink ridiculous amounts of fluid to try to rehydrate then expel most of that again. The cooking of flesh downstairs did not do much for my comfort level and crashing early didn’t seem to help with getting anything approaching a good night’s sleep – constantly waking to drink water then desperately trying to keep it down.  Called Kurt in the morning to let him know the predicament – one of the other riders had gone to Adelaide for the weekend so we were going to be down two.  That’s not great considering it’s a Friday but there was no way in the world that I was going to be able to cope with working today so I just had to let it go. It really hasn’t been very busy at all for the last few weeks so I’m sure they’ll cope (however, it’s always situations like this which seem to be bring out the work – the rest of the crew should be happy that there’s just more to go around for them).  Not the most comfortable day due to strains of previous night but did take opportunity to check out the latest attempt to make James Bond palatable to a 21st century audience – incredible action and stunts but international terrorism and high stakes poker do not really go that well together in my view and the last one and a half hours (of something that could quite easily have been reduced to half that) proved far too convoluted and confusing to my sodden brain.  Who’s that guy?  Why did he kill him?  I though he was his friend ...  It would have helped to have the wikipedia entry to refer to but what’s one going to do?  Afternoon was taken up with various computer based errands (ie errands that can be done without getting out of the chair) but concluded evening by carrying on the James Bond theme with a few games of low stakes Texas Hold’em over at James’ bachelor gaffe in Bondi – brain still not functioning at 100% capacity but that wouldn’t have helped me get any decent cards.  Was onto a scorcher in the first hand of the second game when I was presented with an Ace high flush and went all in only to be trounced by a sleeper straight flush which ended the night’s playing for me.  It had rained whilst we were playing the games so the slick streets made for some very enjoyable sliding all the way back and that’s what it’s really all about.