Yesterday was pretty crummy, not helped by my feeling rotten due to it being 'lady time'. Ugh.
As you know, I've been feeling homesick lately and really wanting to work, so was left feeling pretty down after talking to the exec I was working for before leaving Britain, who was telling me about the success of the programme I would've produced had we not left, which was a Blackadder documentary I subsequently watched on the mega iPlayer and was amazing and just the kind of TV I want to make. And now he's working on a similar one-off about Fawlty Towers and again, I'd love to make that. I'm aware that not many of these talking heads/archive docs are being made, as they're not very cost-effective, but they're exactly what I'd like to be doing and it's so frustrating that I know one of the few execs making them, but can be of no use to him!
Meanwhile, Maxy was working on this very excellent piece about what Obama's priorities will be when he gets into power (not long now - wooooo!).
But yesterday started to improve when I discovered Pandora, a website playing free internet radio that you tailor to your own taste! You create different radio stations, made up of bands that you like - so I've got one 'station' based on Regina Spektor, Josh Ritter, Hello Saferide, Belle & Sebastian, Ryan Adams, Carla Bruni, Aimee Mann and a couple of others - and that station will play songs by other artists which are musically similar. It's part of the Music Genome Project, which aims to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them. It's awesome and I'm discovering lots of new bands and artists through it.
Last night Joe (of Molly and...) was having birthday drinks at Bourbon and I reeeeally didn't feel like schlepping up there because I was still feeling like poop, but we went and I'm really pleased we did, because we ended up having a great time. We got there just as lots of people were leaving, so got to hang out with Joe and Molly a lot and also saw Joanna again and met a couple called Robbie and Kelly who seem really cool. They're getting married later this year, after Robbie proposed at the ice rink in Central Park, which is pretty good skills.
After a gruelling workout with Carlos this morning, I had lunch with Alison, during which she confessed that she's really really unhappy and that her and Brewster are having problems, which is really sad. I really don't warm to Brewster any more - I think he's weird and controlling and have watched as Alison's personality has been really curbed by his disapproval and firm sense of how things should be. It sounds like they're having no fun at all and that things with Emily have been made difficult by Brewster's conviction that she doesn't like him, so refusal to go to their house, which removes Alison from her usual milieu and circle of friends. Alison's at her wit's end and doesn't know how to stop Brewster being controlling and jealous and argumentative.
I'm always aware that I'm a bit useless in these situations, telling friends what they want to hear and not saying what I mean and/or have been saying to Max about the situation. So this time, I tried very gently to suggest that perhaps Brewster wasn't in the best place to be having a relationship at the moment and that maybe Alison would be happier by herself. It seemed to help and was so sad to see Alison at such a loss, because she's doing everything right but the situation isn't getting any better. I think it's tough, because right from the get-go, they've been a very intense couple, talking about marriage and staying together forever from very early on, so the inclination now is to do everything they can to stay together, when really it might just be a case of - 6-7 months down the road realising that they're not right for each other.
Tonight we had to take our Christmas decorations down which, while not as upsetting as Alison's predicament, was very sad. Especially when we couldn't get the tree out of our flat without shedding a bajillion needles all over the communal hallway. Ugh, it was so annoying. And when I tried to hoover them up, our neighbour came out and shouted at us for making too much noise (our vacuum is totally bust and makes the most deafening grinding noise while leaving more on the floor than it picks up) while his baby was trying to sleep at 8pm. By now I was very grumpy indeed and in no mood to be on my hands and knees, picking up individual pine needles by hand. But that's what we had to do. Ugh.
Then we headed out into the dark, extremely rainy night to meet Oliver, Zoe and Zoe's friend Tom at Bedrock Billiards, up on Columbia Road. The torrential rain did nothing to help my grumpiness, so by the time we were turned away from Bedrock Billiards because they wouldn't accept Max's ID (you needed ID to get through the door, even though we weren't drinking, and Max doesn't have a driver's licence, so uses 'UK ID card' he had to get for Glastonbury once), I was ready to explode and suggested we just give up and go home.
But Max, Oliver and Zoe persuaded me to stick around, while Max nipped home for his passport and I'm really pleased I did, because - once Max returned - we had a fantastic night discovering the unbelievable awesomeness of shuffleboard!
Firstly, Bedrock Billiards rocks. I'd heard of it as being something of a DC institution and passed it often, as it's just up the way, but this was the first time we'd been there. It's a basement pool-hall, basically, with pool tables and shuffleboard and table football and loads of boardgames. It's really dark and has an AMAZING jukebox and I can imagine whiling away many hours there.
Secondly, shuffleboard is the game of kings! I'd only vaguely heard of it before, associating it with old people on cruises. But it turns out to be a cutthroat combination of curling and boules that's very easy to pick up and extremely fun.
The way we played it - and I don't know if we were adhering to Olympic standard rules - was two 
people go head to head, each with four puck-type things. They take it in turns to slide one puck down the table, which is covered with weird silicone balls that convey the puck down the table on its smooth metal undercarriage.
There are three scoring 'zones' on the board, demarcated by horizontal lines - the closest zone is one point, then two points, then there's a small sliver of a three point zone right at the end of the board, but aiming for that regularly leads to the puck whizzing off the end of the table and no points being scored.
Like in boules, part of the strategy is to protect your pucks and to whack your opponent's puck(s) off the board and out of the scoring zones. There's some complicated thing to do with only the player whose puck is the furthest down the board when all eight have been played gets to score, and then only those of their pucks which are further down the board
than their opponents' are counted. So if I'm in the 3-point zone and my opponent only made it to the 1-point zone, I get to score, but say two of my pucks are in the 1-point zone and the other slid off the table, then I only get three points. Geddit?
We were all pretty rubbish at first, with pucks flying wildly off the end of the table on regular occasion, but then we all started getting quite good, Oliver being particularly brutal in his whacking of his opponent's puck off the table.
Oliver and Zoe had a fierce rivalry going on and it's soooooo obvious that they fancy each other - they were like a couple of teenagers (in an amusing way, rather than annoying), Oliver stopping just short of tugging Zoe's pigtails.
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