Happy Birthday Chatterbox!

Last weekend both Christian and Barb had their birthday (do you know how many headaches a shared birthday causes???) and we went out Go Karting and to dinner to help them celebrate.

Christian won the night at Go Karting (as he usually does) and got a very nice trophy for his efforts. My niece Darcie thinks it was 'Birthday Luck' (gotta love the brutal honesty of children) but I tried to explain that Christian wins everytime he drives a Go Kart so there wasn't much luck involved at all. But he had a great time and everyone seemed to have fun (except for Barb who had a slight mental breakdown regarding getting the kids to Mum but that worked out ok in the end).

After dinner we all came back to our place to have a few drinks and I was surprised to find Christian partaking in the revelry. Christian may have one drink occasionally but that's all he has. I've never seen him drunk as the only time he's been drunk was his bucks night and I obviously wasn't there. But he decided to have a few and his drink of choice was Pulse (one of those energy drinks with vodka).
I'm a bit hesitant to give all the credit to the alcohol as it could have been the caffeine (Christian also never consumes anything with caffeine in it), but after a couple of drinks he got rather ... different.

Barb describes Christian as 'The Iceman' as she claims he never shows emotions and never speaks. I must admit that in company, it takes a lot to get Christian talking and even then he's quite reserved, except for his cutting sarcasm. But once you get a few drinks in him, you can't shut him up!
I knew it was going to be fun when he swaggers outside, gives me the thumbs up and announces 'I'm Pulsed!'
Man is he a funny bugger when he's drunk! I've told him that he'll be drinking with me on more occasions as I spent most of the night laughing harder than usual. And the next day I had so many people message me commenting on how much of chatterbox Christian was and how good it was.

I think everyone got to see a different side of him.

Barb also had a good time but she didn't drink. She tried but after one sip gave it up as a lost cause as she had a bit of a bender in Kal a while back and now can't even look at a bottle of booze without feeling ill. Mum had taken the kids so it was nice for her and Mike to just sit back and relax. They didn't stay too long past midnight however since with three kids getting sleep is a bit of a novelty. Best take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself!

Oh, and also over the weekend, Mike (other Mike) and I swapped cars like we'd said we'd do a few weeks back. Before we left for Go Karting we had a bit of time to kill so I suggested he take my car for a spin. It's the first Corolla he's ever driven and he seemed to like it. When we got back he offered to let me drive his GTR to Wanneroo where the Go Karting track was and after my initial panic, I accepted his offer.
I've never driven a four wheel drive before or a turbo (the GTR is a twin turbo just to add to my panic) so it was very different to my little car. I was very worried I was going to break something but as Mike pointed out, his clutch is pretty much stuffed and if I broke it, it would just be putting it out of its misery.
So I drove out there and didn't break anything which was good, and then I also drove it back and had heaps of fun.

We also had a really good chat and, unlike Christian, who is such a natural at driving a car that he doesn't understand where I'm coming from, Mike actually got what I was saying. For example, I've never been able to heel-toe so he told me about how he learnt to do it and made me feel a bit better about no being able to do it and also a little more confident to give it a go. We also said that when summer comes we should take out cars down to the drags so we can see the time difference between my car and Christians' (his is almost the same but is super charged) and I found that Mike didn't laugh when I said the only thing stopping me from doing that was I can't do a burn out and I'm scared I'll make a fool of myself when I'm warming up my tyres. Apparently he felt exactly the same way with his old car and that's one of the pluses with this one - 4WD means you don't have to.

So it's been good to have someone to chat to about crap like this who a) doesn't laugh at me and think I'm silly or b) like you lot, are falling asleep while I talk about it ;-)

Anyway, I'll leave it at about that for now. Nothing else too exciting has happened except for going to see Transformers (that movie rocked!).
I'll catch you guys around later!