Ring out the old, ring in the new

Current mood: Christmas is over (all twelve days of it)... Awww.
Current music: Cerebral radio - 'The Perfect Year', from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1993 musical, 'Sunset Boulevard'

Happy New Year! How are you all? Did you celebrate the arrival of 2006? I spent the strike-of-midnight moment getting showered in confetti, which is very jolly. I was watching a little post-prandial circus show at the time. My local shopping centre managed to invite a circus troupe over for a couple of performances during the Christmas hols - Neil Goldberg's Cirque, in fact. They did a show starting at a quarter to midnight on New Year's Eve, and having had a nice family dinner in some restaurant, I just thought I'd stick around and watch it. The seats were getting full up, except for the front row, so I plonked myself onto an empty seat. Unfortunately the front row means that one runs the risk of catching someone's attention... And sure enough, a couple of chaps in blue wigs wandered down from the stage and pointedly invited me up. Mucho embarrassing. Oh well, at least all I had to do was wave my hands in the air. The Clowns in Blue snatched another girl from the standing spectators; one nabbed her shopping bags as the other dragged her on-stage. The poor girl was almost wilting in the spotlight - she tried to run away but the be-wigged ones stopped her. She did the whole hands-in-the-air thing with a 'may-I-sink-into-the-earth' look on her face, and just as her arms were up in the air the wicked little imps flipped her over backwards in a somersault, and carried her backstage when she bolted! Luckily for me I was wearing a skirt at the time, otherwise it might've been me. Whew, that was a close one. *Breathes sigh of relief*


Oh, and it was the entire cast of circus performers who were responsible for the confetti. Their show was pretty good, actually - people juggling rings, swinging polyhedral frames through the air until they blur, and balancing chandeliers on their noses. The usual stuff, but done stylishly. And there were a couple of bronzed strongmen who did some fiendishly painful-looking balancing feats. The female commentator seemed rather fond of them - but then we're talking about two muscular, nearly nude dudes wearing these teensy little gold-coloured shorts and doing the splits. Hmm, I wouldn't be surprised if their fan club consists entirely of ladies...


Anyway, I have to backtrack a bit. I apologise for the dearth of blog entries of late. I was in the middle of writing one, sometime in mid-December, when I had a little accident the following day - a bit of a disagreement between some glass and my fingers. Unfortunately it was a lose-lose situation; the glass broke in my hand and my fingers got cut rather deeply. The doctor had to put a couple of stitches on one of them. Now for those of you lucky enough never to have needed stitches, what happens is this: After the wound gets cleaned, you get injected with local anaesthetic to numb the injured area before the stitches can be made. Funnily enough (or not, as I felt at the time), the injections hurt me a darn sight more than the actual injury. I suppose fingers are the most sensitive parts of the human body but AAAAAAGGHHH it wasn't nice. And I'm not sure they did it properly because the stitching still hurt. And the stitches looked ugly. At any rate, two of my poor little fingers were wrapped up in huge bundles of gauze and white bandage for a week, which meant I was off work the week before Christmas. And then Christmas came along in a rush, and not being able to access the office means no Internet connection, which of course equals no blogging.

But hey, now I'm back (and so are my fingers). So you'd better watch out...