sunday afternoon was devoted almost exclusively to rearranging the ground floor furniture (and the dirt underneath said items) to finally set up (partially) a home entertainment system that was obtained from a barkada gone stateside.
to that end, a huge, semi-heirloom buffet table was set up next to the ground floor windows to take the full weight of the 29-inch tv - and all the other furniture in the room had to be relocated elsewhere to accommodate.
that effort ended at a late hour, and after that i had some data wrangling to do: moving gigabytes of data from and to my usb hard disk (semi-reference material for a project of ours).
read: slept late.
monday's dawn, and early-ish to work. spent most of the day figuring out why my dvd burns of an esteemed gentleman's data kept dying on verification. turns out that the media he'd purchased would fail if the data exceeded 4GB in size... ...funny for something marked 4.7GB capacity, but you get what you pay for.
now, there was this late movement afoot to watch the (likely temporary) re-release of "meet the robinsons," but i was feeling the siren calls of the land of nod and hence decided to go home at dismissal time to get a sleep on.
...the best laid plans of mice...
no sooner had i closed the apartment gate behind me and passed the door of unit "a," than the screen door opens. it's charlie, one of the landlord brothers. in the course of the pleasantry exchange, i decide that now would be a good time to discuss a cable connection for the 21-inch tv displaced by the events described earlier. he invites me in and we continue the conversation - and he sets an opened beer before me.
i've been invited to their little drinking sessions before (often when they see me pass by their door on my way in), but i've almost always found a way to beg off, bar once before: they were commemorating their late father's birthday, and i could find no way to excuse myself. that time, they served vodka with lime, and between the three of us (two brothers and me), we polished off a whole bottle of absolut.
okaay...
i do warn him that one beer and i'm a goner...
anyway, his brother julius arrives, and their drinking begins in earnest. me, i manage to nurse a beer, and 3/4ths of the next after that.
wide ranging conversation. salient points: their ancestry is of pre-world war european aristocracy - genealogy was purportedly traced back to even napoleon bonaparte. charlie is 62, julius is 50 (and youngest of the brood). i'm still not sure what charlie does for a living, but he certainly does travel a lot. julius is a purser at an airline where the ownership adheres to a particular accounting precept of not releasing money on mondays...
ten o'clock rolls around (my, how time flies), and i make my semi-staggering exit. at this point, i've gone over my previous one-bottle-instant-sleep limit.
i drink two glasses of water before turning in, and sleep comes easily.
but the headache on waking up, oh man. gonna be a loong day. hmm. i forget if we came to an agreement about the cable connection. oh well...
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