Catching Up.

Tonight I'm heading out to dinner with a couple of mates. One of them is my mate who's going through a marriage break up and the other is the mate we've both had basically all out lives. We're going to a Chinese restaurant called "Happy's". It's been around for as long as we've been going out for, probably longer and it usually is a great feed.
My mate who's going through the break-up has been taking it in turns with his ex-wife to stay somewhere else then their home on the weekends. This weekend is his turn and he's staying in a hotel in the centre of town. It's really quite sad but I guess it makes sense. I wouldn't want to go and live my Dad or somewhere else and not see the kids. Neither of them really want be away from their home but they've realised that they need their own space and spending the weekends away from each other is something that they are doing to try and keep what friendship they have left intact. They are in the process of selling their house and once it's sold they'll go their separate ways. I'm not sure if they are planning on trying to reconcile their differences as from the sounds of it, they've been trying to save their marriage for a while now and have been talking to a councillor, but they have ended up deciding that it's time to move on.
It will be great to catch-up with both my mates but it's kind of a shame that the only reason we're doing this is because of the circumstances. If you don't count going camping together maybe once a year for the last few years, we've never gone out for dinner with just the three of us just because we can, maybe we did once or twice 20 years ago, but that's about it. It's something that we should have been doing all along and something that I'm going to try and make time for every few months when we can't be camping together.
I'm on call for work so it won't be a big drinking session or anything, even though after the week I've had that would have been well and truly welcomed. I do have to be really extra careful with having any drinks and then driving as in NSW they've just introduced a new law that is if you are caught over the limit, you will lose your licence for three months on the spot. You'll still have to go to court and most likely pay a fine but you can also lose your licence for longer if the judge thinks you deserve to. I've always been fairly careful with driving after I've had anything to drink, if my wife is with me I always make her drive even if I've only had one drink as she doesn't drink at all. Being on call means that I shouldn't really be drinking at all as I may have to go to work at short notice, work wouldn't have a problem if I'd had a drink or two, but getting pulled over on the way to work and blowing just over the limit would be a right royal pain in the back side. I'd have no time to organise any alternate arrangements and just be walking home and have to call my boss and tell him what happened so he could go in to work. To top it off, not having a licence would mean that I couldn't be on call any longer so I'd lose the restriction allowance that they've been paying for the last few months.

Bomber
I've still never been called in.