The Irish made me do it

Damn those Irish. They made me sing karaoke last night.

The people who live across the hall from us, she's Irish, he's Norwegian. Her family was visiting from Ireland (mother father brother and sister in law), and they were having a NYE party. With karaoke. We all know my feelings about karaoke...it's one of those no no's I always swear I won't do. Actually, though, it was pretty good karaoke, through a Playstation, so it was the original music and with the original video and you sang along with the singer, which totally helps you stay on target. AND it also scored you and you could competitively sing against another person. And it was 80's music. Which I like. Duh.....

Let's just say, this girl can sing a raunchy Roxanne. More a la "Moulin Rouge" than the Sting version. I made the Irish dance and holler, and was referred to as a "super star" and also as a "prime article". I think that last one is good.

It was fun. We blended our little NYE gathering with theirs and it became a good ol' drunk fest. We drank ALOT of champagne (some of which we bought in Tallinn, on another night when we were drunk, which explains why that one bottle of champagne was SO DAMNED expensive.....though it seemed reasonable at the time. It WAS good, though.) The fireworks were really wonderful, especially considering it was raining, sleeting and foggy. We ice skated on the deck for a bit in our shoes. Hey, we were drunk and it seemed a good idea at the time.

For our party I managed to pull together a fairly decent spread of munchies. This is made more impressive, to me, by the fact that we had not done any grocery shopping since before Christmas and no shops were open when we got back from Tallinn yesterday afternoon, so I basically had to create a party spread from whatever I had on hand. This turned out to be hummous with "toast points" (ok, so it was slightly stale bread that I toasted the hell out of in the oven), cheese cubes (diced cheese from the Gouda and other cheeses we had on hand), a 7 layer dip, variety of chips and nuts and chocolates and stuff, plus a fruit salad brought by Martin and Aime and a yummy plate of onion bahjis and chicken wings brought by Will and Mary. Plus Grant brought me a pint o' wee heavy from Scotland that I did not share with anyone and some amazing whiskey fudge, plus some Dalwhinnie scotch for Rich. It's always a good idea to be friends with someone from Scotland if you like Scotch whiskey or beer. The relationship is beneficial.

This morning there was the inevitable exchange of switched wine glasses from our neighbor's flat to ours, a gathering of misplaced clothing (jackets, sweaters, shoes, etc.) and a cheesy eggy bacony breakfast served to our two overnight guests, Martin and his daughter Aime, who, since the party was still going at 3am, decided to just crash here rather than face the cab ride home. They are brave souls, as we don't actually have guest facilities and so one got the floor and the other got the sofa. But at 3:30 am, who really cares WHERE they sleep as long as they do so......Aime and Martin left around 1pm.

It's now 2:30 and we are still in our jammies and have no intentions of changing out of them.

I'm recharging camera batteries, then will offload my pics from Tallinn and try to post some here today, the internet willing. It's been slow all day.....