Easter

i've always been a bit down on Easter. As a kid Christmas was pure joy - presents, mystery, brilliant food, decorations, santa, carols while Easter seemed to be 18 hours of church over 3 days with a miserable payoff in chocolate at the end.

This Easter was a vast improvement. Firstly Lize and I had the four days together. Not since 1991 has this occurred. (Either of us always had some shitty job that got in the way). So Good Friday we had some mates around, barbequed some salmon, prawns and calamari and drank lots of yummy wine. I know this isn't quite in keeping with the spirit of the day, but there wasn't any steak or Jack Daniels so I'm marking it down as a day of fasting if not prayer.

Saturday we lunch with Lize's folks and her brother and sister, partners, kids etc. Goose and turkey, more yummy wine, chocolate.... Easter was starting to feel like the last days of the Roman Empire. Anyway after the family do, we had respective hen's and buck's nights to attend. The buck's night was great. We started off at my old bar, where they had the guitar hero game projected onto the wall. The combination of beer, classic rock and air guitar is possibly not that attractive to some people but we had a ball. After a couple of hours of this we dragged the buck, now dressed as a wizard (last year he foolishly took part in a promotional campaign at his workplace, a tourist theme park, appearing as a wizard) to the plastic paddy pub. There after fortifying ourselves with steaks and parmas we began the serious task of plying the lad with disgusting shots - chartreuse and tabasco anyone? and offering the lady patrons a chance to sit on the wizard's knee, a proposition that proved more popular than you might think. Being a bit older and wiser I headed off before the nightclub stage but by all accounts things went swimmingly, with no strippers or fights and the buck ending up dancing onstage with the hen in a romantic stylee.

After this arduous evening it was back out to my parents for Easter lunch - chicken, lamb, more chocolate and simnal cake but by this stage I was on the lemonade so no wine for me. The rest of the day was spent in romance and repose, watching the first season of Entourage and a bit of footy. We capped off the weekend by watching an amazing thunderstorm with a couple of cuba libres on Monday night and saw Ballarat get it's first good rain in a month.

Easter is rising in my estimation.