Piers is away in Amsterdam with his buddies so I’m enjoying a weekend of solitude, the happiest feature of which is that I can have candy for breakfast without being told off.

On a normal day, we would Skype (since MSN has shut down) while he’s at work and I’m at home. And we’d exchange notes about our respective meals. I know it makes us sound like rather drab people but there’s an element of competition to it.

“I’m having a giant breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and toast. What are YOU having?”

“Pfft. Sounds boring. I’M having Rowntrees Sour Pastilles! :D”

Then the scolding comes.

“You can’t have sweets for breakfast!”

“Why not?”

“It’s not a proper breakfast!”

“It’s made with 25% real fruit juice!”

Okay, maybe that just makes us sound sad.

BUT this weekend he is away, so, while we still exchange meal notes via phone text, he is less eligible to be judgemental of my meal choices because he himself is not in any position to be Mr Healthy, right now.

Piers has gone away to Amsterdam for three days to celebrate(?) one of his mate’s upcoming marriage. Yes, it’s a 3D2N stag party and I don’t need to tell you what men do at stag parties. What more a stag party in Amsterdam involving 10 hot-blooded males.

Okay, I’ll tell you anyway.

They drink beer. Enough beer to displace every ounce of fluid in the human body, including the brain, which begets a vicious cycle of poor choices.

(From Wikipedia: “The total amount of water in a man of average weight (70 kilograms) is approximately 40 litres.”)

Here’s a look at the first half of their itinerary (because it’s still happening even as I’m blogging). The times are approximate because I’ve had to piece everything together from sporadic text messages.

Friday

1:30 pm – Arrive in Amsterdam.

4:30 pm – Arrive in rented apartment after picking up keys, commuting a terrible distance and getting supplies (read: beer) at supermarket.

5:00 pm – Drink beer in apartment while taking turns to shower (1 tiny bathroom shared by 10).

7:00 pm – Have dinner and beer at Irish pub.

8:00 pm – Drink beer at an ice bar (where every bloody thing is made of ice).

XtraCold IceBar Amsterdam. Not sure if this is the one they went to but this seems to be the famous one.

9:40 pm – Move to another bar to drink more beer.

12:40 am – Move to yet another bar to drink yet more beer. (A few of them went home at this point.)

Saturday

7:30 am – Take turns to wash up in tiny bathroom. (Piers reported that this took 3 hours, which sounds ridiculous, but I calculate that it’s only 18 minutes per bloke, a miracle, conjecturing that it would have taken 10 hours if it had been women.)

11:00 am – Brunch at Subway. (To get rid of hangover before the real adventure begins.)

12:00 pm – Heineken factory tour.

2:00 pm – Drink beer in a bar and smoke cigars.

5:00 pm – Beer bike adventure. (This is a vehicular monster powered by beer guzzling cyclists. They have rented it for 2 hours.)

TBC…

This is as far as I know because it’s only Saturday afternoon right now, although I am given the impression that tonight is the big drinking night.

Wow, really? You mean Friday wasn’t?

It is not such a stretch now to believe that each of these blokes is going to contain 40 litres of beer in his body by the end of tonight, is it?

I am so wracked with envy.

Instead of enjoying wondrous experiences such as drinking ice cold beer while sitting on a chair made of ice and putting my elbows on a table made of ice, instead of cycling through the colourful streets of Amsterdam, City of Freedom, pedalling nonstop for two hours while drinking beer out of a giant barrel, instead of drinking beer for 60 hours till I’m capable of sweating beer if only it weren’t so darned cold in Europe now, instead of all that, I am stuck at home playing as much as I want on my iPad, eating anything I want at any time, and looking forward to the premiere of Britain’s Got Talent 2013 on TV tonight.

I am so missing out.

Cheers.

Now, my iPad beckons! I bought 2 new games yesterday (on Piers’ credit card since he’s gone and left me alone {although that’s just a convenient excuse since I buy any games I want any time I want to on his account because I needed a UK credit card to buy games here, hee}.)

I have about two hours to play until BGT, so yay.

My only hope is that Piers and his pals come home in one piece (I mean, a piece each, not collectively) because I’m a bit worried about spontaneous explosion due to liquid overload.

So, wish them well for me.

Have a great rest of the weekend, guys, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

As if.

It seems like Piers really appreciates the smoothness of my skin, seeing as he tries to compliment it every so often.

I happen to disagree with his assessment of my epidermic qualities but that is not the point of this story.

Piers, in fact, has once again one upped himself in the compliments department. (Also read the pumpkin story).

One night, as we lazed on the sofa together watching television, he gently stroked my arm and said, “Your skin is so smooth, like our new frying pan.”

I’m not sure how many of you girls out there would have wanted to wallop your boyfriends on the head with the frying pan he just tried to compare you to.

“A frying pan?” I said dangerously.

“What?” he said, looking quite innocent. “It IS very smooth,” then quickly added, “Which is why we bought it,” as if that was supposed to cement his argument.

I said, “You don’t compare girls to frying pans!”

“Why not?” he said.

“Because frying pans are… frying pans!!” I said

“And the good ones are really smooth!” he said.

It went on like this for a while. I decided to save my strength to prepare myself for being compared to a washing machine or lamp shade or whatever next.

That is not to say that Piers is not a good boyfriend, notwithstanding his penchant for comparing his girlfriend to household items.

Piers is as useful as a rowboat. Because rowboats take people places and Piers does that too, like taking me to the movies. And he does it very well.

Actually, I wish to amend my former statement. Piers is more useful than a rowboat because rowboats don’t buy you popcorn and soft drinks, too.

And that’s how we compliment boyfriends, right?

Congratulations for encountering this rare spawn on Sheylara.com. You have found a new blog post!

You are now reading yet another possibly futile attempt by me to jump start my blog again after yet another long period of unexplained disappearance.

To somewhat explain things, in the last 12 months, I’ve had to write a total of 33,408 words worth of essays for my Montessori course. And that’s not counting the 20,000 words that got written and deleted in edits.

My brain thought it best not to churn out any more words than was absolutely necessary. Hence the blog freeze while the essays took precedence.

But it’s now 2013. My course is over and I have lived a life of leisure for a whole month. I have watched four seasons of The Big Bang Theory, tried to read about 10 books all at once on my Kindle, and played numerous inconsequential games on the iPad and Facebook.

And now my stupid fickle-minded brain wants me to stop being a lump of clay and get writing again so here we are.

I thought I might start with a graphical update because I’m aware that some of my readers are not Facebook addicts, therefore have not seen my latest attempt to annoy Piers.

Here’s a photo taken in July 2012:

And here’s one from October 2012:

To my annoyance, the attempt to annoy Piers did not succeed.

Before I had my hair cut, Piers was, like:

“Noooooo nooooooooo do not get a fringe. I like your hair all long!”

After the hair cut:

“Oh, you look quite nice.”

Since then, I have experimented with different ways to wear my fringe.

25 December 2012:

5 January 2013:

12 January 2013:

You can see that I have since Christmas acquired the hobby of taking pixelated photos in front of random light sources. It is because this is totally random and there is no reason other than happenstance.

And, actually, the side-swept bangs are more the result of laziness at trimming my fast-growing hair than the aforementioned stab at experimentation. It’s a bit like sweeping all the dirt under the carpet and pretending it doesn’t exist.

You see what I mean? I sweep my bangs to the side to prevent them from poking my eyes out.

You might be interested to know that, after decades of hating my hair, I still hate my hair.

But that’s old news, so I won’t go into it. Otherwise, get me started and I can’t stop.

In other news, there is no other news. My course is over, I am a lady of leisure, I hate my hair. That about covers it all.

So, then, until the next time! Which, if things go according to plan, will happen within the decade. I promise.

I hadn’t intended to blog about the annual Bournemouth Beer Festival at all because I had agreed to go to it in a moment of distraction (while I was busy writing an essay or something).

Beer isn’t my thing.

In fact, drinking isn’t my thing. I don’t mean just alcohol. I mean the act of drinking any liquid at all. I am seldom thirsty and I don’t really enjoy drinking liquids when not thirsty because it’s unpleasant. (Like maybe trying to stuff a huge hamburger down your throat when you haven’t got an appetite.)

I do enjoy drinking tasty beverages when I’m thirsty or when I’m eating food at the same time, but drinking just by itself is a chore. Well, I can’t explain it adequately without veering off the point of this post, so you may just put this down on your ever-growing “Sheylara is weird” list.

The point of today’s post is something incomprehensible.

The beer festival was to start at 6:30 pm, so Piers’ friends had arranged to meet at a nearby bar at 6 pm, the reason being that they wanted to have a beer while waiting for the beer festival to start.

Huh?

This makes as much sense to me as someone, say, making a quick stop at McDonald’s half an hour before going to a buffet dinner. (Keeping in mind that the purpose of the beer festival is for people to drink as much beer as possible from a selection of 200 types of beer, within five hours.)

After being in England for a year, I have concluded that the Brits have an internal trigger that shuts down common sense whenever the word beer is mentioned.

Still, they are very lovable people. Despite the fact that beer isn’t my thing, (and also risking the ire of my orthodontist because my Invisalign aligners were sitting in my handbag instead of on my teeth for the whole five hours), I did enjoy myself very much.

It costs £5.50 to attend the beer festival. For that price, you get a beer glass (which you can take home), a beer guide and £1.50 worth of beer. The beers cost £1.50, £2 or £2.50 for half a pint.

You basically use your own glass all night and keep going to the counter to refill your glass after choosing the beer you want.

Because there are 200 beer descriptions in the beer guide, Piers couldn’t be bothered to read them. He was going to choose his beers randomly, so I offered to choose for him, which meant I got to taste more of the ones I wanted to try! And, if I didn’t like mine, I would swap with him! Haha.

The first beer I tried was called Blueberry Classic Bitter. It’s award-winning and I liked it, the word “like” being used very loosely here since I am not a beer person. You can smell blueberries when drinking it and the aftertaste it leaves is blueberries!

But the highlight of my night was actually the pasty which cost a cutthroat price of £3.50. But I would have bought another if I had room left in my stomach. It was so tasty, like a giant curry puff, and actually as filling as a full meal.

I enjoyed it so much that I had Piers buy us pasties for lunch today. Now I’m convinced that they are very, very filling.

Back to the beer fest.

Piers had two giant hot dogs which earned him a lot of flak from all his friends, none of whom ate a single thing all night.

When Piers appeared at our table with his first hot dog, his friend Jamie actually looked astounded and said, “What is this, man? This is a beer festival, not a food festival!”

I’m not sure if Jamie noticed the crowd around the snack stand all night, where people were queuing up to shell out £3.50 for a hot dog or a pasty.

I really don’t know if Piers and I are the weird ones, or his friends are. Just remember that his friends are the same people who went for pre-beer-fest beers.

(Piers and I actually didn’t go for that because I had to wait a bit for Iron Man to finish his 4-hour training so I could put Black Widow on her 4-hour training before leaving home.)

((That’s me playing Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook. It’s a great game for which I willingly gave up 4 other Facebook games to play, cos it takes more time and I don’t have time to play everything.))

Anyway, when Piers appeared later in the night with his second hot dog (all nine inches long of it), I think his friends were quite ready to put a straitjacket on him. (But maybe they are the ones who need the straitjackets to keep them from overdosing on beer. Piers, on the other hand, just needs to be locked up in a room with his Xbox 360 so that he’ll leave me alone to play Marvel on Facebook.)

After a pint of beer and a bit, I had to change to cider for the rest of the night. There’s a small cider counter with about 20 different kinds of cider, which was lucky. They were sweet, therefore more pleasant to drink.

But I kinda wished I enjoyed beer because there were many really wicked sounding ones I wanted to try because they sounded cool or cute, such as Diablo IPL, Empire Strikes Back and Rabbit Punch. (I tried Diablo and it was horrible, like really strong and bitter.)

Like all parties, it got more fun as the night wore on and people had more beer in them. People start doing crazy things, don’t they? Such as breaking a pencil with one hand and trying to karate chop one of the halves into two again.

Here is a picture of Nick (on the right) holding out a shortened pencil in his hands and Lewis (on the left) helping Sarah perform a flying kick at the pencil.

I regret to inform viewers that a pencil was harmed during the photography.

But that’s life.

We move on from mourning the pencil to showcasing another bit of tomfoolery performed by the noteworthy Rich, whose life purpose is to prank people.

He was telling me how he had no qualms at all about walking up to a total stranger to have a chat for no reason at all, maybe to show that he’s very confident or something. Then, he proceeded to prove himself by suddenly dragging this bloke over to our table and making me pose for a photograph with him.

Apparently, he had told the bloke that I was the one who had sent Rich to get him to come over and have a photo with me. What a cheat!

Here’s Rich (on the left) and his victim, Alex, who turned out to be really nice; it was near closing and he had a whole stack of beer coupons left so he gave them all to us.

Not that anyone needed anymore beer, is my opinion.

It is probably a good thing that I don’t really enjoy beer. One can always do with fewer fattening vices in one’s life. I already have too many of such vices, as it is (cream, butter, chocolate, fried chicken…).

But I’ll probably go to the beer festival again, next year. The Brits may get really silly around beer, but I guess that makes them quite fun to be around with.

As long as they don’t come near my apartment to sing drunken songs in the middle of the night while I’m trying to sleep.

I was eating hot cross buns for breakfast today, so I sang the hot cross bun song to Piers, who was eating toast and bacon.

“Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!” I sang.

He stopped eating his toast and bacon and gaped at me. “What on earth is that?” he managed to say past his stupefication.

I gaped at him in return. “What do you mean what on earth is that?! It’s the hot cross bun song!”

He just looked blank, or shocked, I’m not sure.

“How do you not know the hot cross bun song?” I said, “Do hot cross buns not come from England?”

“Yes,” he said, “But there isn’t a song! You must have made that up!”

“Also,” he protested, “They do not cost a penny each!”

Which is true. They cost about 20 pennies each at supermarkets (and 80 pennies for the ones we got because they are branded hot cross buns).

Still, Piers is so ignorant of his own culture. Here’s a video of the song in case you haven’t heard it, either. There are many different tunes for this rhyme, but this is the one I know.

I remember when I first visited England last year, Piers took me to the supermarket and bought up all the different kinds of breads. He would, for example, pick up some crumpets and go, “I love this,” and I would say, “I’ve never had it,” and he would say, “What!!! You must try it!”

So he bought hot cross buns, crumpets, bagels, muffins and crusty bread, and then tried to serve them all to me in one meal.

It’s silly, but it’s one of the things I love about him; He doesn’t mind being impractical for the sake of happiness, joy, laughter and gluttony.

He does mind very much, though, when I put his photos on my blog, but I don’t care, lol.

So, here’s another photo of him, holding his newborn niece.

Okay, another one…

LOL. I think that’s a funny one.

But enough.

Here’s one of me or he’ll be really mad at the injustice.

That’s about it for today, really.

But I don’t want to end this post with my photo, so here’s a photo of trees to round things up.

This is a famous street in England called Beech Avenue, which is a long straight road flanked on both sides by — wait for it — beech trees!

There are supposedly 365 trees on one side and 366 on the other side, one for every day of the year and the extra one for the days in leap years.

It’s quite a spectacular experience driving through this road and seeing the trees looming up endlessly.

Okay, that’s all. It’s dinner time and I must go. We’re going to have fish and chips from Chez Fred, which is really good.

There is, apparently, also a fish and chips song, but I think we’ve had enough of kiddy songs for the day. Kthxbye!