Pulling the night shift

As I woke up yesterday, I had a real bad craving for three things: Tabasco, instant coffee and M&M's. I can't really tell you why, but I guess that the MRE review I wrote yesterday had something to do with it. I really needed some of that Tabasco-sauce, and fast.

Since it was saturday, we went into the city to for some general exploring and buying of needed things: all in all the trip was well worth the trouble. This French dude, who holds an outrageously expensive store with all sorts of military surplus material, was (of all things) having a discount sale. Now, last year we bought a set of French CCE - fatigues from this dude, and we were basically ripped off. I swore never to return, but Pierre certainly knew how to get into my soft side this time too. Now, he had organized a discount sale in his store, with every price being cut to half from its' original price tag: every clothing rack was layered with notes saying that since his store was about to close for good, all had to go - and for a good price too.

We searched the racks for awhile, when Pierre saw me again: he certainly remembered me from last year, and he came to talk to us. He saw me fondling the US 3-color desert DCU's, and he started raving about how they were so cheap and wonderful - and you could only get them in ripstop for this specific offer. To tell you the truth, the 3-color DCU's were in excellent condition, and they had been hardly touched. Since most of them were made out of the more expensive 50% Cotton/ 50% Nylon Ripstop fabric, I decided that for the price of 50 Euros, a set was going to be mine. Who knows, I might actually be able to sell this with a good price back home at one time or the other.

So, we tried the DCU jacket and the trousers on, and then paid Pierre and left again. He practically begged us to buy the set, and luckily this one wasn't too badly worn either - it was new and manufactured out of freakin' ripstop ! What a find ! I could actually sense from the last time, that Pierre and his little business in this material wasn't going to last too long: he had pretty much the same sort of stuff as the official surplus dealers do, and sometimes with alot more hefty price tags on them. So, I guess that Pierre's business going belly-up like this wasn't much of a surprise, since nobody would be interested of buying overpriced army surplus like this anyway.

To tell you the truth, we actually set out to buy regular clothes, not these cammies. We were originally looking for some trousers, but since we didn't find the kinds we were looking for, we just bought a few more T-shirts for 9 euros. We also ran into a youth orchestra of some sorts, which I'll be covering with details and pictures in my next post. I also took a few dramatic pictures of a nearby church. We also bought a dart board for those pesky dart games in the summer heat.

After concluding our business downtown, we went back home and did a short tour at the grocery store: I bought all the things I had badly craved for along with some other stuff. Then we returned to the house, and I started playing around with the dart board. We also ate some killer liver steaks with the proper sauce + potatoes , and then continued throwing the darts. My girlfriend send me an SMS, informing me that she'd be going to the lake for a short swim.

As the night fell, I decided to keep on throwing darts: afterall, that was the most exhilatering activity I've had for the past two weeks, so I kinda feel instantly motivated on doing it when you get the chance. After an hour of throwing the darts on the board, I felt the need for the instant coffee. I boiled some water while listening to some random, less familiar song from Dee Dee Snider and his band of merry 80's Glam rockers from my MP3-player. You know, to tell you the truth, I'm kinda surprised that of all possible things, I suddenly felt the need to drink (instant)coffee. The reason for my amazement is, that me and coffee haven't exactly gotten along in the past. I remember the horrific event from something like three or four years ago, which pretty much cut my relationship with coffee to shreds.

It all went down like this: it was a nice winter morning during some generic winter holiday, when I had been up all night, probably playing games or something. Since I needed to stay awake, I drank a whole pot of fresh coffee. Since the coffaine kept me up and running, I felt pretty odd from all that sudden energy, but continued on anyway. At some point, I went outside and walked into our garage where the car was being kept (for an unknown reason). However, as I exited the garage, I also hit my head real freakin' hard on the ceiling of the garage, which was way too low for me. The ensuing pain was freakin' gigantic, and I'm pretty sure that I had a mild concussion or something , since there was quite a bit of force used in our little "meeting" with the ceiling.

So, I quickly rushed inside the house, and the extra energy transmitted to my body via the coffee suddenly betrayed me: somehow the energetic feeling added to the horrible pain in my head and made me puke. For the remainder of the holiday, two days tops, I remained in the bed while screaming for mercy from the horrible headaches. As I slowly returned back to reality, I swore never to drink coffee again. And that promise held for four years.

As I sipped on the coffee while sitting on the bench in the yard, I remembered the whole winter holiday and the infamous "Coffee Incident" that came with it. It's kinda funny though, how a person is willing to try the same stuff again after given time to atone. Even if you swore under heavy pain and sorrow, that you'd never touch the shit again, you suddenly find yourself boiling hot water into the cup in order to drink instant coffee again. Funny how "what comes around, goes around" applies to my life too - this way.

Around 1 o'clock AM it started raining real hard: thank whoever's responsible for that. We finally got proper rain here, since the entire climate was starting to resemble Sahara or Arizona with the 30 degrees celcius rates. I can't remember when was the last time I actually was able to sleep well: seems like for the past weeks it's been nothing but suffocating dry heat, that made you constantly sweat even indoors and made standing in the sun almost impossible. Finally the weather's going to cool off. Hooray for that.. And, as a buddy of mine said once: "thank god for small favors". He is an atheist though, but the saying sure does hit the spot.

I'm going to get some sleep now, but I'll write some stuff about that Gothenburg Youth Orchestra that we ran across yesterday. For now though, you potential readers out there, try to get some sleep too ! All these clear nights with lots of light and warmth can mess with your head !!