checking of the list..

apparently there's a sort of boxing day bingo checklist thing. I don't know if it's a thing but it's a thing I just saw, so, sort of a thing. Most of the squares deal with stuff that doesn't apply here in our household, being a couple of expats not living near relatives no kids not in the US (or UK where this particular checklist thing I have before me seems to originate from) so.. pretty much all but a few that reference drinking, in ways usually considered inappropriate, ie breakfast, and well.. drinking more. Those, I've already done a little bit.. I reckon there'll be enough of that to make up for all the rest. Oh and eating leftovers. The first thing I did, even more the booze. Still got more seasonal movies to watch, so might add that one to the list in lieu of one about someone's auntie. Hope everyone had a fun christmas if they bother with that stuff, a pleasant regular day if that's what it is and a peaceful time where no one bothers you if that's what you wanted.

Well it wasn't quite 20 years..

One can now again enjoy a nice whiskey or vodka or other spirit containing more than 20% alcohol here in the Czech republic, legally, provided it was not brewed/bottled in 2012. Oh did I happen to mention you couldn't.. well not unless it had been bought before or brought back to the country from wherever you happen to be..

Ok, it started when a couple of weeks ago there was some tainted alcohol being sold here. Apparently fake booze, laced with industrial cleaners or something horrific like that, in regular bottles, so you can probably guess it was pretty fucking poisonous, and some people died, and many got very sick. As you can imagine, this was quite a big deal. This was just before I left for Israel, and it was a big story while we were gone.

Just before we got back, prohibition was introduced. We returned to a city full of jazz and bobbed hair and rolling down stockings and ok, I exaggerate, but hard alcohol was not allowed to be sold.

Beer and wine's status stayed the same as it was, so life for us here changed remarkably little. Some spirits and liqueurs were still available, and bars got inventive and had cocktails with.. like other stuff. There were witty jokes on bar signs, offering non-alcoholic cocktails.. and prohibition parties with flappers on their signs, back in those temperately warm mid to late September of 2012 days...

Then today it finished. Any spirits made before the cutoff.. I guess any from 2011 can be sold and served again. That's still a lot of booze that will be gotten rid of, and it seems as if my first guess when I heard about this was right, it was a mostly  to put a freeze on selling alcohol so that all the poison shit could be gotten out of the system, and would not continue for very long. It's still not completely over I guess, and a lot of places have lost a lot of money over this.. but, one must be as safe as possible, one supposes. I mean without entirely giving up alcohol that is.

It's not yesterday, it's not the day before but..

I feel like dorking out, and feel like doing it Monday style, with a Tuesday word, so there.

quaff: to drink heartily

I'm so gonna use this one, I mean I still haven't gotten around to adding ululate to my regular conversation, but I might have more uses for this one I rather suspect.

1. To drink a beverage, esp. an intoxicating one, copiously and with hearty enjoyment.

transitive verb:
1. To drink (a beverage) copiously and heartily

Yep. This one applies to my life.

I leave it up to you, reader.

Yes, this is a desperate ploy to get a few more little numbers under that "comments" heading, I'm tired of those 0s dammit. Yesterday's whine worked a little, so I might as well keep up the shameless bit..

caption this..

now of course if I get no comments I'm going to look really sad.. the life of a blogger is hard :)

A modest christmas

Like many out there affected by the economic downturn it's going to be a modest christmas for me and mine this year. Hey.. I'm like other people.. I'm part of an international trend.. what do you think of that.. I'm almost normal!

Well, not really. It's always modest for me, and this year's necessity for simplicity has little to do with the rest of the world.. I mean, yeah, there's not much money.. but it's mostly because of.. yeah, it's cos of money. That and there's no turkey to be found and my people are pretty disorganized and haven't so far gotten our shit together.

So this year it's going to be chicken, some salad.. beer at our place with our tree with puppy purses and slithery snake.. not even any tinsel. But it's ok, because we'll be together.. *tears well up in eyes* and there will be booze. Actually that makes my tears well up more than the together bit :)

Anyway.. I'm sitting here at my "office" 7:55pm on the night before christmas eve, wishing I could go home but er.. doing something.. let's just say it's due to not being able to buy something.. and I'm doing something which I can't do at home because.. well because, and I should have started much earlier because I'm crap at sewing and stuff and I know it so I should have anticipated this.. that's all I'm saying.

I'm on holiday..

It is technically part of my inaugural week o gimmicks, but Gold told me I'm not allowed to work on this day and being a good christian I'm simply not allowed to. So no gimmick today, just rambling. I think that's a chilled enough way to spend the day.

I didn't contribute yesterday either, being a weekend, and me having gone to a wedding party for someone I'd never met before on Friday night. The people, despite me never having met them before, were more than friendly and very generous with alcohol etc.. which I readily consumed. And yesterday I was fucked up. All day. Too much to even focus on a computer screen. So I didn't.

I wake up today and get online and the whole world has changed.. medals have been won, Georgia has been invaded and something about John Edwards which really doesn't matter but people keep going on about it anyway.

I think I'll go back to resting now.

I shall have to find a reason to use this..

Word of the Day

bibulous \BIB-yuh-luhs\, adjective:

1. Of, pertaining to, marked by, or given to the consumption of alcoholic drink.

2. Readily absorbing fluids or moisture.
Vineyards are everywhere, especially when Felix approaches Paris, the most populous city in Christendom -- and the most bibulous too, since lousy local wine had to be drunk before it turned sour in a few months.
-- Eugen Weber, "Renaissance Men", New York Times, April 13, 1997

Ever since the joys of the fermented grape were discovered, the bibulous have been waking up feeling the worse for wear.
-- Sally Chatterton, "The Daily Website: www.hungover.net", Independent, September 3, 2001

Bibulous comes from Latin bibulus, from bibere, "to drink."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for bibulous

Sunday Sermon

It's the time of week for preaching, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some of the wisdom I've acquired over the years with some of the younger, more impressionable of you.

Kids, don't do drugs. Drugs are bad mmkay. And don't drink. Don't have sex either, not until you're married anyway, and certainly don't get into that hookups jazz. Trust me, I've been there, I've done it all, and it was.. well to be honest it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun, those years of moving around one exciting city to another, meeting new people, the parties, the wild experiences, oh, the great stories I have... but that's not the point. The point is that now I don't do those things. Not as much anyway. And my life today is, well it's ok. I'm pretty happy and certainly haven't had any terrible tragedies brought on by boozing or fucking or anything, but that's not the point.

The point is that it's bad. Nobody warned me about these things, which never existed before my time of course. Well, actually they did but I wasn't listening but that's not the point. The point is that I'm telling you now that these things are bad, so you don't have an excuse, you know these things are bad. So don't do them!