Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Last Sunday I spent five and a half hours in meetings. I think that has to be somewhere near a new record for a Sunday.

The day started with a Reason Week planning brunch, which was productive, though didn’t actually include any food which was disappointing. Things are starting to fall into place for the week, which is promising given how close we are to it lol.

The second meeting was a Foundation trustee meeting which produced some interesting results – more on that will be announced soon, I’m sure.

Earlier this evening Jonni dragged us out to Eccup so we could have dinner at a pub named the New Inn which he had been raving about for a while.

It was a bit of a mission to find. Having headed up Scott Hall Road I ended up on some windy country lane which was only one car wide and had trees overgrowing, entirely blocking out the sky making it feel like the Forest of Fangorn. Having got through that we eventually found what I can only describe as being similar to Westfall at night with no lights and just the occasional rustic farm signpost.

Never the less we eventually found the place and ordered ourselves up a couple of 16oz t-bone steaks. The photo really doesn’t do them justice, we spend a good 30 minutes going at them and what was left at that point still looked like an entire meal. Ignore the massive onion rings, compare the size of the plate to Kat’s meal behind. Needless to say, I was eventually defeated (which to be honest, I’m quite proud as, as I actually managed to tell myself to stop eating because I was full lol).

On Monday, we headed down to Sheffield Skeptics to see a talk by Richard Wiseman. Despite struggling to see the screen, which is a little annoying in a talk mostly about optical illusions lol, it was a really enjoyable evening and managing to get a quick chat with Richard I can see it was well worth going down for.

On Tuesday, Atheist Society began it’s regular Tuesday night meetings (See You Next Tuesday 😉 ) with a screening of the Chris Morris film, Four Lions. It’s an awesome film and well worth a watch. Though it did take us ages to get the film working despite bringing it on four different formats! So you can’t say we didn’t have a backup plan lol.

On Wednesday, I headed up to York for a York Brights meeting. It has been a while since I last saw them and could be a while again with Perspective Citywide starting so it was good to see everyone, and interesting conversation was provided aplenty as always.

Finally, on Thursday I was at a Humanist Society of West Yorkshire committee meeting which was great because the meeting was both efficient and productive – which tends to make a change from most committee meetings I’m in lol.

Last night was the first Wendy House of 2011. The turn out was reasonable, we had about ten of us and it being reasonably quiet, we soon settled into a corner of the dance floor and danced the night away through to the end. For a chance, neither myself nor James had dressed up – Jonni was devastated 😉 .

It’s been very busy at work over the past few months as we prepare to expand by launching our own website. This finally happened last week and we’re now live, albeit in beta with our product ZonePlay which is a new kind of sports betting in which you can bet on what will happen next.

If you’re interested in checking it out, we’ll be trading every football game you’ll find on British television so next time you’re watching the match, just head over to the website, click the game and hit “play for fun” to get started.

As part of work’s expansion, I’m pleased to say that I’ll be taking on additional responsibility working on the project management side – so when things go horribly wrong in the future it genuinely might be my fault :S .

One of the problems we were having over at CWF was that we had a lot of lecture footage on DV tape – but nothing to play the DV tapes on! So having spent months trying to find a solution – trying to find a friend who has a high def DV camera, seeing if those “transfer to DVD” companies would just transfer to a computer format, asking local rental companies if they had DV tape decks, I finally gave up and simply rented a camera to play them back on.

Once I tried this however I was informed by the rental company that the very basic camera I had ordered was unavailable, so would I be willing to upgrade to a better camera, for free. Normally this would be a no brainer but I actually wanted the cheaper camera – the more expensive, the more complicated it was going to be and the more there was to potentially break. Never the less I agreed and ended up with this amazing camera – that I was just using as a tape deck!

There was a bold start to the year when I announced that 2010 was to be the year of CWF in January. I spoke at North Yorkshire Humanists, Leeds Skeptics celebrated it’s first birthday as well as holding one of the best attended 10:23 protests in the world and HAG set a new record. Meanwhile CWF launched it’s YouTube channel and I set David Cammeron right on the subject of Humanist soup kitchens.

Stewart Lee provided a great introduction to February where we launched the Humanist Community of Leeds as one of CWF’s big projects of the year. Meanwhile Atheist Society was busy raising money for charity and serving curry to Pagans. Down South the AHS convention took place in Oxford where Rich did a great job as CWF promo girl.

It was a busy month for CWF in March with the launch of Atheist Stock and the announcement of Enquiry 2010 in the first week! Ricky D shut down the RD.net forums while HCoL launched its blog. Comedian Robin Ince spoke to Leeds Skeptics while I spoke to Leeds Atheist Society on the subject of animal consciousness as well as on BBC Radio Leeds on the Catholic Care adoption agency.

Media coverage of HCoL was building by April including coverage by the BBC website and BBC radio. At Leeds Atheist Society we had a Scientology speaker for the first time ever. We had an Easter special at HCoL before myself and Gijsbert went down to London to discuss CWF with the BHA. The month ended with Reason Week 2010 kicked off by at Leeds Skeptics and the Atheist Society AGM at which John was elected president.

In May the Answers course returned while the country elected a new government. Chris Morris released Four Lions while we released big news about Enquiry 2010. Finally, in a surprise result, my car actually passed it’s MOT.

The big news in June was the Enquiry 2010 conference which was a huge success and featured speakers including A C Grayling, Chris French, Evan Harris, Andrew Copson and many others. Gijsbert was elected onto the University of Leeds Equality & Diversity Committee, I got new housemates and Humanist Week took place.

Much like March, the first week of July was one of launches with the first CWF newsletter being released and the Secular Portal Resource Library being launched as well as us opening the CWF office in Leeds city centre. Leeds Skeptics moved to Mr Foley’s and world cup fever even infiltrated HCoL. Meanwhile Leeds Atheist Society partied hard at their End of Year Ball and we hit Bristol for the AHS AGM.

I started August with two radio appearances, the first on UFOs and the second on psychics. HCoL launched their new branding and we partied down at Leeds Pride. CWF became a registered charity and held it’s first AGM as well as launching the Humanist Chaplaincy Network as well as announcing Sunrise 2010. At work we suited up, something the rest of the world would soon copy in the form of International Suite Up day.

I was out of the country for most of September as I toured Europe with my good friends, Norm, George and Kieran. We made our way through Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Milan, Monaco and La Rochelle. But before we headed off I squeezed in a quick radio interview following Stephen Hawking officially declaring there is no god, represent the University of Leeds Humanist Chaplaincy at the staff fair and oversee CWF’s Sunrise Conference and on return managed to finally achieve Pub Week too.

York Rock Church provided a great start to October while Leeds Atheist Society build on freshers’ week with a classic Make Your Own God event. CWF announced Atheist Stock now had over a thousand images, I saw Stewart Lee in Harrogate, turned 24 and spoke at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire while Gijsbert spoke at the One Life course and joined me in London to meet Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. I also spoke at Leeds Skeptics and Durham University, raised money for WaterAid and launched the new Perspective website while we finally realised our dream of having a wench and had our first poker night.

If October started well, November was full on cracking as we watched Linkin Park from the sky, followed by Paramore a week later and finished off that week with Gorillaz, curtesy of o2, all expenses paid. I was keeping busy with talks at Leeds Atheist Society and Bradford University, meanwhile my sister graduated. LAS held their interfaith panel and I spoke at their debate on the burqa while HAG launched their new website. We saw the first annual Worfolk Lecture and myself speaking at Durham Union alongside BHA vice-president Richard Norman on the motion “this house has no faith in atheism.” Finally we finished off the month with the LAS Weekend in Edinburgh.

Sex was the subject of December with Intimiate Details launching. HCoL moved to the evening and HAG ran their first holiday food drive. We returned to Manchester on two occasions to watch Meat Loaf from the o2 corporate box and to see the amazing Tim Minchin and CWF launched the Humanist Library Project. Finally we rang in the new year with our traditional New Year’s Eve house party.

On Friday, we held a cocktail party to ring in the new year. Having had a lot of fun making spreadsheets of the various cocktails we could make, compiling it into an ingredients matrix and calculating which cocktails we could make with the most efficient subset of ingredients we eventually came up with a menu of twenty different cocktails.

We then made little menus so that people could cross them off as they drank them, which ended up turning into a competition – perhaps a mistake when the average cocktail contained three shots! Congratulations to Oli for winning, drinking his way through nine of them.

Unfortunately my camera ran out of battery half way through the night so I didn’t get chance to see all the photos Sarann took with it – until I opened them all up this morning and found it full of pictures of Kat’s shoes :S.

All in all, I’m going to label this as “best new year’s ever” because everything worked out so well. Of course the real challenge starts here – I’ve drunk 5 of the 2,800 cocktail recipes I have in my book, which means 2,795 to go…

On Tuesday we headed down to Red Hot World Buffet for the Atheist Society’s annual Winter Solstice meal.

Or at least, that is where we thought we were heading. We had decided that we didn’t need to book because only six people had confirmed as coming on Facebook and it was a Tuesday and it was a buffet and it was huge.

However, on the night, 12 people turned up and when Norm, who had gone on ahead of us, asked how long the wait would be on an appropriated sized table – he was told, two weeks! I mean seriously, who holds their Christmas party on a Tuesday and goes to a buffet? Standards these days.

Luckily Spice Quarter were kind enough to fit us in so we enjoyed a high quality buffer after all.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to my sister Katie who graduated with her bachelor’s degree in theatre costume design on Monday.

The degree is accredited by Teesside University which I’m told is currently University of the Year being the first new university to win the award. This to me seems somewhat analogous to Stewart Lee’s “world’s tallest dwarf” (very impressive in relation, but still never the less a dwarf, and therefore restricted by law from holding positions with a minimum height requirement such as a firefighter, or owner slash operator of an enchanted beanstalk).

Never the less, I’m sure most of us are all too aware of just how much work there is to earn a degree in any subject that doesn’t contain the word “media” in the title, so congratulations are certainly in order.