Archive for the ‘Friends’ Category

Last night saw the long awaited return of podcasting. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, the sixth show is due out today and next Friday’s abortion debate is probably the best show we have done.

Yet again though I feel that the quality of the podcast has stepped up with the latest round of shows that we recorded last night. One reason for this was the addition of Dr. Gijsbert to the team which really got some good discussion going alongside the ever talkative Nicola as well as myself, Liz and Fonze.

Between us we managed to get some really good discussion going and managed to stay on topic a little more than normal, with plenty of room still for discussing other matters of course. I haven’t edited them together yet but they will be well worth checking out when they are released. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until the end of the month to hear them .

Having been invited down to Fonze’s church to do Alpha, myself, Norm, Paul and John went down this evening to check out a session. We arrived at the second week which was all about why Jesus died.

Having met Simon, the head guy, who was a nice guy as you would expect, we enjoyed a meal of rather higher standards than we are used to expect - I love it when the CU provide free food but they simply don’t have the resources to add the fancy touches such as a place mat full array of cutlery.

The session then took the form of a video lasting around 40 minutes which was reasonably interesting then we had a group discussion afterwards. It was good although it was no replacement for the speakers offered at Christianity Explored, it’s just not the same as an interactive speaker you can question on their talk afterwards.

We ended up heading back to The Terrace and got to know John a bit more who seems to be a really sound guy. He is doing joint honours artificial intelligence so we have some common ground and he also has excellent slogans on his t-shirts so it’s win win.

With September Wendy House having arrived and many people back in Leeds, last night offered quite a spectacular turn-out for people connected with the circle. Fairly ironic really given that Wendy House as a whole was not overly busy.

We started off in The Old Bar with guest appearances from Bo and Ben plus Nicola joined us along with Kate (who really does have an amazing hourglass body when put into a corset) and Colette, Nicola’s friend from 6th form, all of who were sporting amazing outfits.

Wendy was the traditional mix of 80s and alternative with the few token modifications to the playlist. There were some notable omissions from the modern classics section (no Paramore, no Fall Out Boy, no Green Day, the list goes on) though we did at least get a bit of Evanescene at the end.

Afterwards we headed back to Nicola’s for the afterparty. Only 5 of us ended up going back - Nicola, Colette, Sarann, Moz and myself but never the less we talked long into the night and ended up staying until gone half seven by which point the day light had well and truly arrived. I finally got to bed at just after 8. Guess I’m not quite past it just yet after all then .

While at the White Rose as explained previously I always ensure I pop my head round to take a look at the food court’s D to see if I can spot anyone as I know a few of the managers there.

As usual I was disappointed to see a lack of recognisable faces and so turned away until, what the computer scientist in me would probably want to call echoic memory (I realise it’s not actually from computer science but we cover it in HCI) kicked in and at second glace I spotted Gary running kitchen!

Of course, this won’t mean anything to you as none of the right people read my blog for this to be of any significance. But there you have it. We all miss Gary. He was a legend. And fantastic if you got talking about cars, plus actually has some real money so rather than driving around in a crappy little one litre Cosrsa he now powers around in a Mondeo ST. Living the dream people, living the dream.

Saturday night having come round again, Michelle and Norm’s joint party (that Norm didn’t have any say in and couldn’t actually come to ) had arrived.

Being unable to get the time off work I didn’t finish until late and given an unending series of problems ending with the building alarm refusing to set leaving us waiting around for the morning shift to turn up I didn’t make it to the party until gone 3am.

I was greeted by a rather drunk Moz who seemed rather pleased to see me. As pre-arranged with Nicola (who was passed out on the couch) I tried to take her up but she was a little too drunk to stay conscious for more than 20-30 seconds at a time. For someone who is such an outgoing party animal she’s quite a light weight (though to be fair she had, had a long day and is keeping up with me for hours at work at the moment).

The real winner of the evening was the amount of drunken stories that emerged that night and the next morning. Always entertaining.

Apparently.

I missed much of the drunken conversation last night but apparently Norm’s response when they started playing Ring of Fire was “last time I played this I ended up having sex with a man.” Sarann is a fantastic resource for remembering such comments.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.

When I left work on Wednesday, it was dark.

Though that was mainly due to the fact that I didn’t leave work until 21:45. That was a long meeting. Dean said it would finish around 6 when we first planned it. Of course none of us actually believed that it would ;).

I headed over to Napa to get in a quick drink for Michelle’s pub thing before finally grabbing some dinner and going home to get some work done. Managed to get to bed at 2am which wasn’t going to result in a good night’s sleep. Still as long as the podcasting session the next day didn’t go on too late…

I really enjoyed Saturday night. Sat in a car park in Castleford eating some kind of chicken wrap.

But as myself and Becky talked the night away we arrived on the scary fact that we are approaching 22. Making our next landmark birthdays 30! I’m almost 30! That’s so old, so amazingly old. I mean, you’re actually past it by then, on the downward slope, your life effectively over. How scary is that?

The chances are that most if not all of my friends (well technically they aren’t friends, they are colleagues as they are outside the circle) from work are never going to read this blog post. Never the less, I would like to say thanks for this weekend. It’s been amazing.

Having got out at a very reasonable time on Saturday night we settled down on the benches outside for a beer and sat around chatting for a while before heading off to Cass for a sandwhich. It was so like old times. It’s something that has really been missing from the night shift but very gradually, we’re bringing it back.

Sunday night we headed down to the pub quiz to spend our winnings from last week. We didn’t fair quite so well in the quiz this week though we did manage a rather impressive turn-out. We soon found our way to drive-thru and then by a series of interesting events, the car park at Tesco Garforth where we had spent countless nights over the years. Maybe my youth hasn’t quite slipped away just yet.