Unfortunately the image is imprinted on my retina

I’m struggling to post this week. It's only Tuesday, yet I feel the weekend and the work week have already left me battered and bruised. By the time I got home yesterday I could do nothing more than collapse in a heap on the couch. Last night was particularly worrying as I watched the entire State of the Union address and all the commentary and analysis afterwards because I couldn’t summon up the energy to reach for the remote. I’ve also noticed that while at work - listening to the radio of course, to block out the cacophony that is my neighbour Jose on a conference call. Man does he have some decibels – I can’t even manage a bit of chair dancing when a good tune comes on. It’s very disturbing. Usually I’m fairly energetic and full of beans, but not this week. I feel old and I am not in the least bit happy about it. Sigh!!

Perhaps I’m sickening for something. It wouldn’t surprise me; it seems that every other person that sits near me has succumbed to some germ or other, Emma, my other office neighbour, has had flu-like symptoms for over a week now and in the ladies the other day I had the pleasure of hearing someone wretch. Ugh!! Hopefully it was a case of morning sickness and not something viral. Touch wood that other than blocked sinuses which have been giving me headaches these past few days I feel fine, well except for the tiredness of course.

I’m hoping this weekend will be a quiet one; I think I need it, if I recall correctly I’d resolved to lay off the partying in January after the excess of Christmas, but instead I just seem to have continued the festivities into January. Maybe I’ll have better luck in February. All I have planned for this weekend is dinner and drinks with Melissa at Bar Blanc, a fairly new restaurant in the West Village, so I should have plenty of time for recuperation.

Not so this past weekend, it was the hen party/bridal shower/baby shower extravaganza in Princeton to celebrate Ash’s impending nuptials at the end of March and Val and Sigrun’s – who flew in from Iceland no less - impending Spring babies – a girl for Val who’s due in April and a boy for Sigrun who’s due in May.

These weekends have become something of a tradition of late as one by one the others get engaged and married. There are only two of us left who are single now. We had our usual trip to a spa where we had either facials or massages and then for lunch after which Susan whisked away the bride and moms to be for an hour or two so that Andrea, Steph and I could go back to the house and gussy it up with bridal, baby and phallic themed decorations including a pack of todger balloons I’d bought at a shop on 6th Avenue and W 4th street – I think it was called Fantasy Palace should any of you New Yorkers be in the market for things of that ilk, beware though as these particular balloons were extremely difficult to blow up. Not that I can say I’ve blown up many balloons recently, so it could be that I’ve lost the knack or perhaps the lack of exercise over the last few months has significantly hampered my lung capacity, but these seemed to be much harder to blow up than normal balloons. I managed to fully inflate one, but couldn’t manage to inflate a second any further than the testicles before I ran out of puff, so instead of struggling with the rest of it I knotted it where it was, snipped off the excess and turned it into a heart. Ahh what I lack in the handling of phallic balloons I more than make up for in the arts and crafts department. Andrea fared no better, in fact she was worse than me as she managed to explode the one she was inflating and gave up after that, however Steph was our champion todger balloon blower after managing to inflate three. Yes, THREE. In fact she did it with such ease I suspect she must practise a lot in her spare time.

Anyway the bride and moms were thrilled with the decorations and cakes we’d had made for them and while waiting for our dinner to cook we cracked open the champers – grape juice for the moms to be – and had the bride moms open their gifts. It’s the first time I’ve been to a baby shower, or a bridal shower for that matter. Last time I was living there we didn’t go in for all that shower gubbins in England. In fact as I recall it used to be considered bad luck to buy baby gifts before the baby was actually born, but maybe things have changed. Ditto on the bridal shower, not that it was bad luck, but we didn’t do a separate hen party and bridal shower, we just do the hen party. It costs you a fortune with all the additional parties to pay for over here, but it was fun to watch them opening their gifts. As you can imagine there were oodles of baby clothes for the moms to be as well as lots of nice undies for the bride, plus a few novelty items including a classy set of ‘pecker maracas’ – also available from the Fantasy Palace on 6th Avenue kids – and a set of candy pasties per the photo above. A pair of candy pasties which the bride to be decided would be a good idea to try on after a few too many glasses of champers. She failed dismally on the Mr & Mrs style questionnaire we tested her with scoring a pitiful 6 out of a possible 30 and so was required to take a sip for each of the 24 questions she got wrong, so was understandably quite trollied, still it was a bit of a shock when she streaked into the living room wearing only her knickers and the candy pasties as the rest of us were finishing off our drinks, it was funny though; especially when we showed our hungover bride to be the photos the next morning, although we were nice and let her delete them…well, we did after emailing one to the groom ;-)

Anyway kids I shall leave you with that image in your heads and a word to the wise should you ever be considering your own candy pastie purchase. Apparently they are a bugger to remove…in fact in Ash’s words ‘they almost ripped my nips off’ so be very careful ;-)