Weekend Abduction & the Box of Evil

I guess I probably owe a write-up of my past few days in Newry. ;)

On Friday evening, I got a fairly-innocent-but-with-barely-concealed-motives type of text from Steve asking me how far Lifford was from my house. For those who don't know (i.e. practically everyone reading), there's a well-known greyhound track at Lifford, which is just across the border in Donegal and approximately 30 minutes' drive away. Since he was down with his family to race some of their dogs, would I like to meet up?

After about an hour watching the dogs, which included watching a dog Steve had said was a good runner shoving one of the other dogs off the track (thus falling far behind, but managing to catch up enough to come in second), he suggested that since I'd come all the way out here, why not go back with them to Newry for a few days?

[I should probably say at this point that Lifford, being in Donegal, is probably a bit further from Newry than Derry is. But the transport would be free, thus saving me about £16 in bus fares that I normally pay if I want to visit Steve at home.]

I pointed out that I had no change of clothes. He pointed out that several of my t-shirts had ended up in the laundry I'd "helped" him with at the end of term (read: done for him :P) and that Newry has two shopping centres to take care of any other items that might need changing.

So - with parental permission on both sides, naturally, since we're good little children - we headed for Newry after the races.

We didn't do a huge amount of stuff over the course of the visit: a bit of shopping, a lot of wandering around, and an attempt to play FF8 over the course of the visit. Unfortunately, the last activity floundered a bit after we went for dinner and discovered on our return that the memory card had developed Alzheimer's, or possibly SBS (spiteful bastard syndrome).

Seven and a half hours wasted! [sniffles]

Yes, I know it's a bit sad to have spent that much of the day on a computer game. The question is, is it more or less sad than watching The Parole Officer and finding yourself liking it?

We also watched most of the World Cup final - having got distracted away from it for about half an hour we initially wondered what Tom's "Great header, Zidane!" text message was about... and there really are no words to capture the moment we saw the replay. Except maybe "lol", but obviously that's not a word.

Damn, I should have stayed one more day to see Gavin's band again. Or brought Steve back with me, since apparently everyone in my house was surprised when I turned up alone. I would have done it if I'd known it'd be that easy to bring people round to the idea...

On the last day Steve bought me a chocolate fudge gateau (small one) to take home, as a present. Chocolate makes everything good. :)

Louise wouldn't stop bugging me about what was in the box, and the combination of nosiness and apparent inability to think for herself about what was likely to have been in it (plus the fact that she kept asking me for, oh, about a solid hour) annoyed me. Consequently, and completely understandably, I told her it was a "Box of Evil".

After I'd shown my da what was in the box, I came back into the kitchen (from down the hall, where all the bedrooms are) with it semi-open. Louise's ears/nose/something metaphorical pricked up immediately.

"You opened the Box of Eeeevillllll! You told me not to open the box!"
I stayed deadpan despite my annoyance and calmly said, "Yes, and now one of them is under your bed," and retied the box shut.

The look on her face as she ran off to check was unbelievable. Even Kathryn had figured out there was a cake in the box...