How to work out, relax, stress out and go broke all in one short weekend.

1. Get the weekend off to a kick-start by consuming TGIF drinks in colleague's office, behind closed blinds ... TGIF drinks being 5 bottles of wine between 8 people in 2 hours.

2. Play several terrifyingly embarrassing rounds of billiards to remind yourself of a few more "well back in the old days, when I was a kid I could put 'em down behind my back and with both eyes shut" stories ...

3. Decide to get the fall gardening done: purchase 20 kilos of topsoil, 5 kilos of fertilizer, 3 boxes of bulbs, 1 large plant and 1 medium flower pot. Carry all purchases home in plastic bag perched on shoulder, destroying any resemblance to a proper back that you may have had formerly and facilitating your discovery of muscles you never knew you had over the course of the subsequent days.

4. Spontaneously decide to invite a couple friends over for dinner. Recall that you have no food in the house, run to the airport grocery store (the only one open, of course, it is Switzerland), return home and observe that your afternoon gardening activities have endowed the balcony with three inches of topsoil, numerous bags of organic trash and towers of empty plastic pots. Remedy the situation, then beg forgiveness from your guests for not serving dinner until 10PM.

5. Receive phone call from exhausted and travel weary significant other. (Mutually) convince him to travel four more hours to Geneva "to relax for a day", arriving at midnight amid dinner entertaining and pleasing the neighbors by running laundry at 2AM.

6. Rise and shine early in the morning to attempt to join in on group hike, hoping they can squeeze a spot in for significant other despite required pre-registration. Inquire as to whether and confirm that, indeed, the group will have returned to Geneva by 7PM in time for significant other to catch last train back home.

7. Convincingly pretend to enjoy the spectacular fall colours while noting that significant other's pulse is increasing by the second as it becomes obvious that our overly large hiking group will, in fact, NOT, under the best of circumstances, possibly make it back to Geneva at the promised hour.

8. Make wise decision to leave hiking group in the dust and return to civilisation, while the hope of hitchhiking into the next town and catching a bus back to Geneva still glistens.

9. Curse the thousands of cars that pass without having pity on two good looking hitchhikers, pump your fist at the four buses that bypass the designated stops without doing as much and chase after the ONE taxi you see cross your path as the minute hand continues moving steadily towards stressed significant others' "I'm-going-to-miss-my-train-and-never-make-it-to-work-tomorrow" meter.

10. Become desperate, beg hotel to call a taxi. Get stuck in traffic. Hire driver to take you the entire hour's drive from France to Geneva. Negotiate fixed (very cheap) flat rate of 100 EUROS. At this rate, it's a bargain.

11. Thank God and all the heavens above that they didn't stop us on the border for review: significant other is travelling internationally without personal identification. Inform taxi driver thereafter with hoots and hollers of glee at having made it across without incident and endure unmistakeable, incredulous, "you've got to be shitting me" looks.

12. RUN out of French taxi, run INTO Swiss taxi at designated taxi jurisdiction line (do we WANT to know how much our "low-cost" hiking day has just cost us??), then run up to apartment to hastily throw still-damp laundry into suitcase.

13. Make mad dash for tram in order to catch last train out East. Steal a hug, a kiss and three relatively calm breaths on the platform.

14. Then realise it's practically Monday, your whole body aches, you've been running all day and you officially haven't a penny to your name until pay day at the end of the month.

Just another manic week-end.