Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’ve added a new category named essays to my blog.

It will house all of my long whiney posts that you probably won’t reach the bottom of but should because that’s where the message is. It will hopefully be sufficently different from the thoughts category in a number of ways.

First off, they should be longer and more involved. I’ve gone back and categorised a lot of old posts into the category but rejected a lot of them simply because they were too short even though they perhaps otherwise fitted the bill.

Secondly they should be relevant to the wider audience. A lot of the posts in the thoughts category are just literally stuff I have thought about or which is relevant to my life but anything categorised into essays should have meaning for at very least a group people who don’t know me personally.

Finally they should be on some kind of important topic or aspect of life. As such many also share the categories of politics and religion, but not all of them do.

If you think there is something I should write about, why not suggest it in a comment.

For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.

I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.

The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.

Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.

Having won tickets to the rugby league Four Nations final, I headed down on Saturday to watch the game. Luckily England had pulled a surprise victory over New Zealand beforehand so had made it through to face Australia in what would hopefully not be a repeat of their first encounter in the competition.

We started off quite well scoring the first try to take an early league and were only trailing by 4 points at halftime. However shortly after the second half had kicked off Australia realised that rather than trying to break our line, if they just kicked the ball past us and ran after it we wouldn’t really know what to do eventually leading them to win 46-16.

Still, no matter how many times you witness it, it’s still funny to watch someone shout advice about the rules to 26 national-level professional players whose job it is to play the sport and several officials whose job it is to marshall the sport even though they are at the other side of a 40,000 seater stadium.

All in all I have to say I really enjoyed it, I thought I would get bored at some point during the match but I never did. Although I did lose the £1 I had wagered on the match even with Australia having a 12 point handicap. Gutted.

As part of my aim to try new things, I gave some kind of new foodstuff a go today. It’s some kind of weird green thing that the nice lady in Co-op informs me is known as a “vegetable.” How very quaint.

Combined with the tomato ketchup I had I believe that counts as two of my five a day.

How exciting.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that while I was running around on Halloween trying to sort my costume out I found Poundsaver already laid out with wall to wall Christmas crap, Radio 1 played their first Christmas song last week.

Still on the brighter side of news as we enjoyed lunch on Sunday we were able to watch them busily work on setting up the German Christmas Market on Millennium Square. You just can’t beat a big German sausage and a litre of beer.

Saturday saw Atheist Society’s legendary (as if any of our events aren’t 😀 ) Halloween party, hosted by our el presidente Sophie. It was a great night which ended in us performing a Satanic ritual which seems a bit on the edge but is really quite mild compared to the fact that Zoltan was dressed as the prophet Muhammad 😀 .

On Thursday Oli paid me a visit with a number of suprises including a Lil and a late birthday present in the form of a box of wine 😀 . As my blog readerable is mainly sophisticated well educated individuals similar to myself it would almost seem patronising to remind you that such a produce is the finest type of wine as it can breathe when in a box rather than being stuffed up in a bottle.

This was followed by pizza which included extra for myself and Oli and Lil is trying to lose some weight plus the fun of watching a woman take out a bike just outside our house. The guy seemed alright which makes it ok to laugh about. Oli had to rush off in a hurry to catch a train shortly after which resulted in me not getting chance to grab a photo so I present instead one of the classic Chris and Oli pictures. Enjoy.

When I went to bed on Sunday night I wondered if I would feel any different turning 23.

Turns out I would feel much worse as I woke up the next morning with my cold having returned with avengence. Still I eventually dragged myself out of bed and got as far as sitting on top of my bed for another few hours until I felt good enough to move.

Luckily Michelle was here to cheer me up so we headed into down to grab some lunch ending up at Brio in The Light which did a rather nice Italian roast chicken dish.

This left me with an afternoon of taking it easy on my birthday and as such I headed home for a business meeting. Well, sort of anyway, myself and Norm had a teleconference with the BHA so we could consult on Humanist Week 2010 – exciting times and all that.

Finally in the evening we headed down to River Plate on The Calls which served some absolutely amazing steaks including my delicious fillet and George’s huge 700g cow. I would highly recommend it if you are looking for a great restaurant though obviously it’s Calls prices. We managed to balance the night out by ending at ‘Spoons though so all was good.

Oh how the tables have turned. Today was a somewhat strange Sunday lunch in which George ate and I didn’t. Due to a combination of not feeling too great and wanting to keep my spending under control I didn’t bother actually ordering any, though I did manage to stretch to a beverage of course. Turns out, that’s all you really need. Although I kind of new I didn’t need an entire mixed grill every other day anyway ;).

On Friday the long awaited launch at work occurred as we took our first live bet from Belgium, albeit a test one. From here on in we’re trading so if you happen to find yourself in Belgium, near a newsagents and get a sudden craving to place a sports bet, you’re in luck. You can also see our website.

In celebration, we opened the first (presumably annual) Buzz keepie uppie tournament which Jason was victorious over with 17 and after some champagne and generous gifts from Rob we headed over to The Original Oak to celebrate.