Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Tonight’s Halloween party provided an excellent if flimsy excuse to get my decks out in preparation for the festivities. It’s been quite a while since I’ve really had them out as I don’t have space in my room anymore so it was cool to get everything tested last night.

Having said that, when I got my old laptop out to boot up, the hard drive was missing.

I mean, it was still physically there. But the computer couldn’t see it 🙁 . Might have to try hitting it until it works again.

I didn’t do any work on Sunday. Well near enough anyway.

And I didn’t do that much work on Monday either.

It was really weird. I spent most of Money sitting around feeling guilty that I was only doing a bit of work. But I recon if I could get rid of that feeling I could really enjoy days off once again.

Myself, Norm and Michelle went for lunch at the Deer Park which was good. Not just because you can never, ever go wrong with a mixed grill but also because it was a re-discovery of the ability to just go for a pub lunch in the middle of the day, something we used to do like every day but never really do anymore. Or, if you will, back in the day.

By last Sunday that time of year had rolled around again so we headed out to Nando’s for a meal Sunday evening. It being Sunday night and all with a lot of people having work Monday morning, turn out was limited to those really hardcore people, a select group of myself and 18 of my good friends.

We arrived at The Light at 7 as planned to find that Nando’s had in fact run out of food.

I’m not kidding.

Apparently, they were closing for a week to refurbish so rather than maintain a sensible stock level and transfer any remaining food to a different restaurant they just let it run out. So we headed down to the one at the bottom of Briggate. I like to think of it as a surprise party as we didn’t tell them we were coming.

Having got down there they said it would take us an hour to get a table and to come back then. They also asked for an exact number of people, which I gave them based on how many people we had there at the time. After that, we headed off to the Hog’s Head around the corner for a quick drink while we waited.

Problem was, people started turning up faster than they could seat people. By the time we had got back we had another two people and by the time they had found seats for those two we had another two people! Needless to say the staff at Nando’s were not amused. But I was 😀 .

The food was excellent as usual, although we did find a chicken brain in Kate’s meal.

Afterwards, we headed up to Bourbon which was of course closed – it’s like an A-Soc event all over again. So we ended the night at the Cuthbert Broderick next door drinking until kick out time. Good times.

So, apparently Nando’s do chicken brain now. It worked out quite well with me having my new camera as we could get good photos.

Our resident neuroscientist Rosie says she can’t say for sure if it was indeed a brain but it sure looks like one and having spent hours researching it she assures me it definitely isn’t a liver or kidney and Oli points out that the reason it doesn’t quite look like you would expect is that it would shrink during the cooking process.

Nando’s remained defiant it wasn’t a brain although the manager admitted it was in the end (after saying, well if you wish to believe it’s a brain to which I of course replied “yes, yes I do”) so who can say. The important thing is Kate got a voucher because that’s really what you want after finding a brain in your chicken 😀 .

4:30 in the morning I started work today!

I mean seriously, who isn’t asleep at 5am? Apparently nobody because we didn’t get any customers until nearly 6am.

I remember back in the day when being on an open meant you had to get up early. Now you’re just getting up in the middle of the night. And it’s dark for the first four hours which is wierd. Still due to ridiculous over staffing I was done by not long after 12 so it all worked out I guess.

With colds running rampant throughout wider society particularly on campus, last night’s podcasting suffered from the fact that almost everyone involved was either ill or had lost their voice.

Never the less we battled on and made some rather interesting shows including a long discussion about the potential of parodying jazz cafe with a slightly less clean focus 😉 . We also managed to get Fonze to speak at this one, mainly due to so many other people bailing so it’s worth listening to to hear him break his long time silence.

I went for a meal with my parents on Wednesday night. I mean, that’s like a thing to do when you’re really old isn’t it?

I was hoping it would result in a fairly reasonable night in terms of sleep given I left at like 8:45ish so I could get to Tesco for 9 but by the time I had shopped (including 38 litres of drinks 😀 ), got home, unpacked, had a shower it was like 11 and I still had a load of work to do which saw me into the early hours. Oh well, better luck next time.

It’s possibly the end of an era. The Crusader has closed down! No more pub quiz on a Sunday night 🙁 . At least for the moment, the pub is up for sale but it’s been up for sale for a long time and apparently built up quite a lot of debt while they were unable to find a buyer and so has now been closed down.

Every cloud has a silver lining however and this has been a bit of a catalyst for ideas as to what else we can get up to on a Sunday night. The quiz wasn’t that important, mainly because we lost every week, so maybe this is the start of something new.

As a result the first of our new ideas for night’s out was to go to Xscape in Castleford to shoot some pool. I’ve never been to Xscape before it is a fairly impressive place in terms of size and facilities (complete with a 24 hour Friday Saturday McDonald’s just over the road) and the pool was good, £4 an hour all you can play.

It’s a good enough replacement to fill the void left by pub quiz, we got plenty of conversation in as I hitched a lift down there with Zoe, came back with Rich and had a phone call with Scoj live from Ireland too. As usual Becky ended the night on the floor too. Fast times indeed.

I’m really struggling to keep up with my blogging at the moment. Not that I am not managing to do it but I have so many events to blog about that I haven’t got round to, I have drafts awaiting completion and other ideas which I really want to talk about.

I’m not sure sure why though, while my life certainly is busy, I’m not sure it is really any busier than it used to be. And I don’t think it’s apathy as I have been blogging on a regular basis regardless. Maybe I’m just getting old and can’t quite justify blogging at 2am when I have to be up for work a few hours after?

Having said our goodbyes to Rich as people continued to drop us angry calls about not being at the union yet, myself and Liz headed up to Wendy House on Saturday. We didn’t have quite the group turn out we managed last month which was quite nice as we could actually keep track of each other (well, most of the time lol).

I also got chatted up by some random girl named Sarah which was annoying really as since then I’ve spent most of my time questioning whether I really am a man having stopped her when she started kissing me. In my defence, I was sober which, according to Zoe at least, makes it all ok.

Made it home a little earlier than last year and had KFC waiting for me when I did. Such a good decision 😀 .