Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Ha, yeeeah. That’s just a few hundred pounds I happened to have in cash.

I don’t actually have any spare cash, I just happened to get my expenses back from A-Soc today. It needs to go into my bank account ASAP to make the books balanace this month but until the bank opens tomorrow I’ve got nothing else to do than look smug 😉 .

These past few days have been fairly laid back. I’ve not felt too well so I’ve taken it easy. Next week is going to be rather busy though. With A-Soc’s meeting, A-Soc’s social, Pro Life Through Pro Choice meeting, I-Soc’s freshers’ dinner, the Alpha course I’ve been invited to, podcasting, One Life, Liz’s houseparty and the TKD social I recon it’s going to be a rather tiring week.

Tuesday night saw the A-Soc members’ dinner party to welcome in the new acamedic year and say thanks to our existing members for sticking with us before the intake of fresh faces arrives.

No less than eighteen people turned up to sample the “delights” – a modest four courses by comparission to our last dinner party but never the less when you scale that up to that many people that is rather a lot of food to cook. Luckily Liz and Michelle very kindly contributed dishes, as did Tesco.

The real hero of the night was Fonze however who battled his way through the various dishes and a mountain of washing up alongside myself for the entire night.

I haven’t really had a debrief with most people as I didn’t get chance to get that much chatting done on Tuesday night though most people seemed to enjoy the food – I got no less than three adjectives in Paul’s thank you text message. I’m still fairly convinced the rice was awful and the soup was stone cold but for now everyone is at least pretending the food was edible.

And, as with last time, nobody died (that I know of), so perhaps we can chalk this one down as another success.

I have been up since 7am this morning!

It’s been a while sinve I’ve been up this early. Before 8 is fairly common if I want to grab myself some breakfast but an hour before I normally get up, that is just unpleasant. Luckily, still having feeling a bit rough and knowing I could really do to get up early, I successfully made it to bed at 11 last night so I got a good night’s sleep in none the less.

The problem is, it’s just a cascade effect. I wanted to get in the office a bit early today to get some work done and therefore I had to get up before 8. If I get up before 8 I’m up early enough to deserve a McBreakfast. Which pushes my alarm to an even earlier time. And I had preparations to make for tonight’s dinner party and I wanted to get my steak cooked for lunch and son on, pushed by alarm all the way back to 7am.

Still, far later than I used to get up when I was doing opens so things could be worse I guess. And I can sleep in when I have some time off – which is now only 3 months away 😀 .

While it is true that I didn’t make it to bed until gone 8 yesterday morning, I was on a relatively low amount of substances. While everyone else was consuming large amounts of alcohol and other drugs, I didn’t drink that much and kept my non-alcohol fluid intake at a sensible level.

I think I have a right to moan then when I felt absolutely dead yesterday. I woke up about 2 in the afternoon having had some sleep (not a great deal but I was half asleep for the last hour of Nicola’s anyway) and felt shocking. I figured I might need some food but one lunch later and I was still feeling awful so I ended up going back to bed.

I was feeling a bit better by the evening so I got up again at 8 as I really needed to get some urgent work done before Monday morning came round again and having drugged myself up I forced myself to go see everyone from work for an hour as I was determined the day wasn’t going to be a total write off and wasn’t feeling too bad by this point.

Never the less, I feel robbed of a day. While everyone else was off their face on alcohol and MDMA, I was taking it easy and yet I came away feeling worse. I could well have picked up a mild form of Nicola’s cold in which case I’ve certainly been robbed there is only fair way to pick up a cold off someone 😉 . Ah well, as long as I don’t slow down I’ll be fine. Right?

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 😉 .

Some pictures of tonight’s podcast…

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.

Glyn having gotten chips and curry sauce for lunch today set me on a mission to go find a curry for lunch.

I was going to see what Co-op had to offer but Matt having never been to the White Rose suggested we take a trip there and so we headed in to see if anywhere in the food court offered such a meal and as it happened, several places did.

I ended up getting chicken tikka and chips from the Asian food place. What I got, I was highly impressed with. Not only was it still fairly warm when I got it back to the office (I drove back so technically I got a tikka to ride 😉 ) but it was very nice indeed, having spent the last several years eating at student takeaways you really appreciate the difference when you enter the real world. Good stuff, recommended.

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.