Last night was the celebration of my gran’s 77th birthday, and the whole family congregated at my mom’s place for a nice lasagne supper followed some delicious cake and goodies. Everyone except Chantelle (shame, my poor baby was working once again) was there, and it was really good to hang with the whole family again. Riley and I got Pops and Ryan to show off their remote controlled helicopters and before long we had …taunted’ Ryan into giving up the controller to the two of us to show them how it is done.
We started off pretty poorly in the front garden with me seeing if I could take a chunk out of the brick post box (unsuccessful) while Riley cut mom’s flowers down to size (successful). Complaining that the area wasn’t big enough, we then convinced Pops and Ryan that we needed to take the choppers out on the big field. Riley’s first attempt had the helicopter getting away from us, forcing us to run quite a couple of meters just to retrieve the fallen wreckage. I didn’t fair much better, sending the chopper high up into the air, only to have it bank too sharply, lose thrust and then plummet back down to the earth like a miniature spinning top of death.
It seemed that we were determined to see who could cause the most damage to dad’s training chopper, with me grabbing the early lead when I broke one of the blades, damaged the fuselage and bent the stabiliser. However, Riley wasn’t to be outdone and eventually dropped it from far higher that what I had, effectively causing most of the chopper to fall apart and give Ryan and Pops some welcome hobby repair work for the evening.
Not that Ryan had time to spend on the helicopter of course. Last night was also our four man football evening that we had arranged last Thursday with Karl and his buddy Jeremy (the guy behind the increasingly syndicated Urban Trash and Ditwits South African cartoon strips).
Now apparently the two of them have been practicing on the FIFA 06 I loaned Karl, but that doesn’t mean all that much if you consider the vast change in game play from FIFA 07 and onwards. Nevertheless, the two of them were feeling confident enough to take on Ryan and myself (we advised against it in the beginning), and so the two teams for the evening were born.
I’m not sure how many games we eventually ended up playing, but be safe in the knowledge it was quite a lot (considering we went on from 20:00 to just before 23:00), and the relatively inexperienced KJ team put up quite a fight, managing to eventually score two goals towards the end of the evening’s battle – much to chagrin of Ryan and myself (both Karl and Jeremy managed to put one in – though Karl left his right until the end – in serious danger of being labelled as the only guy not able to score). Honestly, I don’t remember how many goals both Ryan and I put into the back of their net, but it is sufficient to say I finally ended my dry spell and leave it at that. Surprisingly enough, Ryan and I actually worked quite well as a team considering it was the first time we played together, forcing more than enough decent runs and breaks through KJ’s defence.
I know I enjoyed the evening’s gaming and I’m hoping that our competitors did as well – I’m hoping to entice them back for another round sometime – who knows, maybe they’ll score three goals this time around! :P
On a completely random side note, it does appear that I might have sent one of the two growing, balcony inhabiting pigeon chicks to an early death when it took fright and plunged over the edge of the balcony the other day – this observation is based entirely on the fact that my balcony is now only inhabited (read shat on) by 1 teenage and 2 adult pigeons. I am guessing it should have seriously considered adding Red Bull to its daily diet.