Ten toilet doors

I’ve been teach­ing Doug 500, which accord­ing to the site I was just read­ing, is Aus­trali­a’s national card game. I was check­ing the site to see which cards were excluded from the deck, because I can never remem­ber if it’s red 4s or black 4s. Appar­ently, Amer­ic­ans do play it, but it’s not common, and they have very dif­fer­ent rules. Only one round of bid­ding and they call the kitty a widow! Poor kitty. Worse still, they appar­ently call a misà¨re bid “Nullo” (the latter actu­ally sounds more Aus­tralian, unfortunately).

Need­less to say, I’m teach­ing him the Aussie rules.

And it’s been a trip down memory lane for me, back to a time when my great friend Justine, who’s hope­fully still read­ing this from her new digs in Deutsch­land, lived down the lane­way and she, 

pluces

and 

hawk_eye

 and I used to play it all the time; back fur­ther still to when we played it so much at Man­ning Bar with 

coopstock

and others and in nightclubs that we developed hand sig­nals for bid­ding and our own code for “My hand is pure shit and I can’t do any­thing with it” (see the sub­ject line).

I miss those more simple days when all we had to worry about was making the rent and get­ting the next paper in on time. Of course, that’s look­ing back with rose-colored glasses: there were jeal­ousies and mis­un­der­stand­ings and drama and all that. But those nights were pure fun, drink­ing and smoking and talk­ing and just enjoy­ing the com­pany of friends. Thank you for being a part of my life, guys.

PS: Talk­ing about uni, what a coin­cid­ence. The music I’m listen­ing to is Kim Cunio, who stud­ied Com­mu­nic­a­tions with me at UTS before he went on to become a genius ABC Clas­sics-recor­ded bari­tone spe­cial­iz­ing in sacred medi­eval music.