Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

As part of appeasing my mum as is the tradition on Mothering Sunday I joined my family for a visit up to Hartlepool to visit my sister who is at university up there and had offered to host the day’s celebratings by cooking a meal. As predicted it was quite boring. But they do have a nice church.

On Thursday myself and Rich headed out once again, this time joined by Nicola, to do our bit. We were going to do a bit of cooking beforehand but Rich was unfortunately detained at work and so we ended up doing soup again, not that it is overly a bad choice.

There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the group now which hopefully will continue to grow and we can expand our activities.

Wednesday saw me head over to York for the Brights meetup over there. Nick kindly lent me his GPS which resulted in it being rather easier to get there but when I took the suggestion to follow it’s directions on foot things went a little worse. After some serious walking and a quick phone call I eventually found my way to Stonegate though and met everyone else.

The conversations made for some very interesting discussions, while there is usually this in most of the events I go to, the night’s discussions were especially interesting. As ever it also provided me with a good excuse to do some name dropping which is always fun.

Sunday saw us forego our usual restaurant trip in favour of staying in and getting takeaway. Myself and Craig went for Chinese which I feel was a very solid choice. If nothing else it provided me with some salted pork and chicken to eat the next day which is always a winning combination!

I can now also highly recommend the mini spring rolls from Canton Flavour, not that I have ever really had something from there I wasn’t impressed with. It turned out being not much cheaper than our usual night out though definitely worth it.

Saturday was our long awaited awesome house party. Well, I say “awesome”, I wasn’t actually there because it had finished and everyone was asleep by the time I got there. What a rager.

Rich having become increasingly flustrated with the lack of action in Humanist communities suggested that we should really be getting out there and doing good work and leading by example. As such, last Thursday (the 12th) we headed out to feed the homeless.

It was an interesting experience. We took soup and coffee which went down reasonably well although most of them weren’t overly interested in the soup, they just wanted the coffee. It’s also suprising how few of them there actually are on the streets.

Interestingly enough though there isn’t that much support in Leeds. There is one shelter, St. George’s Crypt but that is basically all there is. Maybe it’s just not that much of a problem but it was certainly nice to be able to provide those that were out with a hot drink.

I got woken up yesterday morning by Liz knocking on my door informing me the police were hear. Always a good way to start the day.

Turns out someone had been down the street doing over cars. They smashed my quarter light, realised my car was deadlocked so smashed the passenger side front window and got the stereo. Awesome.

Great time to find out that your car alarm doesn’t work. But Evans Halshaw assured me it has been through the full Network Q check thing, which shows how worthwhile that is (this is after they failed to notice my central locking didn’t work).

So yeah, turns out I’m £200 worse off than I thought I went to bed on Tuesday night. It seems somewhat futile to bother trying to save money or pay off overdrafts, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Tuesday evening started off with the usual A-Soc committee meeting which brought up some interesting discussions, followed by the usual A-Soc meeting which this week was Michael’s talk which by all accounts was excellent.

Unfortunately I missed the talk as I was down at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire attending their event on Ashley Montagu as a critic of Darwin which was also very interesting. Too many choices on Tuesday!

This was followed by hitting The Terrace for a few drinks at which we bashed out some great ideas (or as a titled the sheet at the time, ideas that seemed great when we were in the pub 😉 ) for Rationalist Week so hopefully some of them will actually be useful!

Sunday saw another exciting night with Rich not being on the close and Craig not being at band we were able to meet up in The Mill beforehand and have a few drinks before heading off to the local Toby Carvery for a meal. There is just something so satisfying about saying “I’ll have every meat please” 😀 .

Last week was No Vices Week which was a week (well, 5 days lol) in which we avoided takeaway and alcohol and donated the money we saved to Rationalist Week. There wasn’t a huge uptake but some of us actually managed most of it.

It almost killed me to be honest. Day after day I was like “aww, I can just get McDonald’s on the way home” and then remembering I couldn’t. I drove Norm to work on Tuesday morning thinking I could just go for breakfast to fill the gap before I started work and then realised I couldn’t so I headed for “non-takeaway” breakfast – which was closed! Needless to say, I was not amused.

The other worry of course was that with me and Lil not eating McDonald’s we would put on a lot of weight (we are of course living proof that McDonald’s keeps you thin). Luckily Lil came up with the answer in us just sugaring our bread and eating a loaf a day. Seems to have worked.