It’s a new week, and I final­ly feel like myself again. The only time I have an unsta­ble mind is when I wake up between two and four every night. All the thoughts I push to the back of my mind come flood­ing back, and I have trou­ble falling asleep for anoth­er hour or two. Other than that, I’m okay, more or less. All it took was a house­warm­ing par­ty and a week­end of no wor­ries.

Trolley and I start­ed prepa­ra­tions on Friday. We were expect­ing 14 peo­ple (with three not drink­ing) and we got that exact­ly — Pat, Jen, Jeff, Pita, Mike, Iain, Aaron, Karen, Kat, Sebastien, Eric, Jen, Trolley, and I. In all, we had four bot­tles of Keith’s (left over from pok­er night last week), three bot­tles of wine, a 12 of Corona, and two 5‑Liter Kegs of Grolsch. In addi­tion to this, Aaron end­ed up bring­ing six more Keith’s, while Mike gave me a mick­ey of Smirnoff, and Pita sup­plied a 12 of Blueu (the dis­tin­guished Quebec vari­ant of Blue). A few major drinkers pow­ered through the alco­hol, and while we ini­tial­ly believed our­selves to be over­stocked, we end­ed up with only a few Blue and the wine.

It was a pret­ty good mix of peo­ple. While I was grilling burg­ers on the new bar­beque, peo­ple were min­gling, hang­ing out on the couch­es, catch­ing up on hock­ey on TV. Some were even soak­ing up the sun in my lit­tle back yard/patio, which has an accom­mo­dat­ing set of stairs and a few lawn chairs. There was­n’t as much seg­re­ga­tion, and I think that Aaron, Trolley, and Pat helped blend the two (and a half) groups a bit. For a suc­cess­ful par­ty, I’m always sure to have all three in atten­dance. To my sur­prise, we all end­ed up play­ing some four-play­er Gamecube games towards the end of the night, some­thing I was­n’t sure that every­one was inter­est­ed in.

All-in-all, it was a good par­ty, even if I was too busy run­ning around, mak­ing sure every­one was well fed and thor­ough­ly drunk, to hang out with my guests. I even got a few house­warm­ing gifts. Trolley and I built the bar­beque Pat gave us in time for the par­ty, and Iain got me a nice set of crys­tal low balls (which have a nice weight to them, but need to be hand washed). Aaron gave me a set of six solar-charged patio lanterns that real­ly make my yard stand out from the rest. I could­n’t ask for more.

Pita crashed that night, but not before I got him burned for the first time. I think his mind was a lit­tle too rigid, and he was ana­lyz­ing things a lit­tle too much to be able to relax and enjoy it. He stayed for the rest of Sunday, and we played the old Gamecube games we used to enjoy back when we were still liv­ing togeth­er. I had such a good time, that I was able to real­ly for­get about every­thing else that’s going on right now. It was like a lit­tle get­t­away in my own house.

I need­ed this week­end.