Groan! Too many belly laughs

Much as I would have liked an early night tonight, I am forced to sit up a while to relieve the pressure upon my distended belly. I've just been out to dinner with a few young gorgeous bloggers (TJ, Foo, Zoe and Dean), celebrating Dean's 5th blogbirthday.

A small but jolly party, we made the walls of La Pasa in Canberra City ring with snarky laughter as we caught up on lots of stories that never get blogged and revisited quite a few that have. I highly recommend La Pasa as a restaurant. It served modern Singapore cuisine, and lots of it. We did the usual Aussie thing of ordering a dish each to share, and were gobsmacked at the size of the dishes when they arrived. The following photo really does no justice to the food, but it gives you an idea:

From left to right: Sesame chicken (with a sweet vinegary sauce); deep-fried prawns with peach (in a mustard sauce); tofu combination; Some kind of deep-fried curried chicken (actually nicer than it sounds); and some very nice duck. Yes, we went a bit overboard on the deep fried stuff, and we'll all suffer for it tomorrow, but it was all very delicious, and while we couldn't finish the dishes, we picked companionably at them after we'd finished until we were really finished, and then somehow had to wheel ourselves out onto the street. Oh, and I forgot to mention that we had entrees too, most notably duck pancakes. Oh, little piggies we!

TJ is looking better than her blog, which seems to be in malfunction land, Foo was quietly droll with some terrific jokes, Zoe was in fine form and Dean was very happy to have made 5 years. I didn't recognise Dean when he walked in, because he was dressed in a suit and a very smart grey wool coat, and I usually see him in t-shirts and jeans. He's Bumblebee's favorite new adult acquaintance at the moment, because I invited him to B's birthday party (they'd bonded really well at the piratey blogmeet last year) and he turned up with not one, but TWO lightsabres as a birthday present. That went down in the Annals of Birthday, I can tell you.

Groan! I have a sweet greasy after-taste lingering in my mouth, and want my belly rubbed soothingly by cats... time to lie down with a very easy-to-read book. I'm reading Liam Hearn's Otori trilogy at the moment. My lovely old nana asked my son what he wanted for Christmas last year and he said 'Deltora', meaning Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest series. She thought he said 'Otori', having just read the series and loved them. So she gave him the books, and they're way too old for him. Still, they're quick and easy. I've been using them as my lying-in-the-bath books, but they're perfect right now for a sore-bellied duck who doesn't want to think too hard and has to waddle off to bed.