Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Am I stressed?

I’ve been taking a battering from insomnia recently. When I’m at uni I normally get to sleep fast enough but it’s taking me hours. When I’m at home on the close at work I’m usually so tired by the time I get home that I just fall straight to sleep as soon as a lie down. But even then I’m struggling to drift off.

I’m even struggling to fall back to sleep when my alarm goes off on a morning and I reset it for an hour later which I can normally do for an entire day.

It’s not normal for me. Sure I have those nights when I just can’t sleep but most of the time I don’t have a problem, I certainly don’t go through prolonged periods of insomnia yet I seem to have been unable to sleep for about two weeks now. It’s going to kill me if it keeps up, I have coursework to do, not to mention work and A-Soc and all the things I never got time to do during term time.

The Llama have a new crazy ass menu. They are not actually enforcing the new pricing structure so it costs £6 for the 2 for 1 meals which there are now a limited selection of – chicken melt has been moved to the steaks section so it costs £6 on it’s own and burgers now only seem to be on the beer and burger for £5 deal though they may still be on the 2 for 1, we didn’t ask for clarification. All in all though, not a good change.

I found out why my Dell didn’t update the time properly – it was running quite out already. A month out in fact, it thought it was April.

Thursday consisted of heading to The Pack Horse for the Computing 50th Jubilee celebrations as they were holding a quiz about the history of computing. All the other teams had a big advantage over us given that they lived through most of it though :p. The celebrations continued on Friday with a giant buffet and free bar consisting of the specially brewed ales for the celebration. The night ended with a short but relaxed drink in The Library.

Saturday marked the arrival of Michelle’s sister Rosie so myself, Michelle, Rosie and Norm headed to Walkabout for lunch. It was (unsuprisingly if we had put any thought into it) a lot noiser than on a weekday and so probably a bad choice of venue but never the less the food was quite good. I had to run off to work the Saturday close soon enough though.

After work we headed off to find a petrol station deciding that Texaco was too expensive so we went to the BP in Crossgates. They were night pay window only though so we headed to the one on Otley Road so that we could go in store. They had closed both sliproads off the inner ring road however so we ended up on the Armley Gyratory! The roadworks are just stupid, closing both sliproads is an absolute joke, it doubles the length of your journey. Anyway, we managed to get a sandwhich in the end and headed back to my halls to eat given we were so close, then headed home.

Sunday I was on the close again, and we were actually fully staffed at least on the closing team which seems to make a refreshing change these days. Monday was yet another close, we were staffed for a normal weekday but because it’s Easter we were fairly busy which was flustrating when I was trying to get the close done. We still got out before 2 though.

Then yesterday I headed back to campus in time to catch a lunch at The Llama as it’s been far too long.

Despite getting to bed as late as usual last night I managed to drag my ass out of bed and make it down to The D for breakfast. Didn’t quite wake me up as much as I had hoped though, I think my spirit was all beaten down by the miserable weather. I did manage to get some productive work done though, I posted my student loan application form off, did a bit of shopping then made it to DEC-10 to finish off the A-Soc posters and do a very small amount of SY23 and SE24.

Speaking of the posters, curtesy of Izzy we now have two of them printed and they are looking pretty cool! Let’s just hope that everything on them is typo and error free as I only had time to proof them on screen so nobody else has proofed them and it wasn’t even a printed out copy, though to my credit I did read through everything as it was copied over from Writer to PowerPoint which I normally wouldn’t bother to do. Still though, I’m going to have to use a few of the stockpile of faith points that I haven’t really invested anywhere else ;).

Got out of work Saturday night and got to sleep at gone 6am due to having problems sleeping. I then got woken up at about 10:30 by the sound of drilling. Awesome. So working on about 4 hours sleep I spent my time going round Argos and Tesco picking up garden furniture for Rationalist Week – I now have 12 plastic stacking chairs and 3 flat pack round tables in my bedroom and there is more to come.

I then went to work at 2pm for unit classes before my normal 5-close. Evil. Unit classes ended up running for 5 hours so I got to do nothing for the first 2 hours of my close plus as soon as I walked into the kitchen at 7 I got sent on my break. To be fair though I was on a really long shift and little sleep so I don’t feel too bad about spending 5 hours sitting around. Plus I past all the test so I should have three stars on their way.

Liz (the shift runner) turned up and was promptly sent home sick so Jay ran the shift who was supposed to be part of the closing team, hence we were down a closer and resulted in me being by myself in the kitchen from 9pm onwards. Again evil. We got out at about 2:30 though due to the fact the kitchen was left in a somewhat shocking state (by my standards anyway, that would be a normal close for some people and by some people I mean Rich lol).

I ended up going back to Amanda for a bit and we ended up watching the first half of Hot Shots. I then headed home and got to bed at like 5 or something. I intended to get up at 2 but kept going back to sleep and ended up getting up at 5:40. Had some dinner at home and then headed back to uni to join everyone in The Terrace.

End result, day one of my coursework blitz so no coursework get done. But to be fair, I was expecting most of today to be a write-off. Let’s home tomorrow is a bit more successful.

I never blogged about Friday night. I can’t remember most of it now. It involved The Terrace though.

The day started with a trip down to Weatherspoon’s for breakfast (I had suggested we go to try and sort out our sleeping patterns and Phil took me up on the idea) so at the early time of 10am for students who normally sleep until dinner time we grabbed some along with Michelle and Cara who had just arrived in Leeds.

The afternoon consisted of me getting a bit of productive work done before hitting The Terrace at 8. As it was Friday they had the DJ in, much to most people’s disappointment though I wasn’t too bothered. Kat turned up on the one night they had loud music :D. I don’t know how she does it, it’s like when she turns up to the Llama and that is the day when they take ages to bring us our food. I think Allah is on a mission to make her jaded. John also turned up which was cool as I haven’t seen him in a while and I feel he’s become a bit disconnected from the circle.

I was up for heading into Fruity afterwards due to Easter being one of the few opportunities it wouldn’t be packed but there was only myself and Michelle left by the end of the evening and she wasn’t particularly feeling up for it so we headed for food and back to mine.

Don’t forget gang, the clocks have just gone forward an hour. I found out this morning that my phone with it’s duel modes for standard time and daylight savings time is great except you have to actually tell it when you’re changing. So it’s just as difficult as just adjusting your time automatically. Interesting. Another time saving feature from Sony Ericsson.

The time gap explains why I’m getting in at 4am. That said I got in later than this last Sunday due to our mini roadtrip to Castleford. Not that we came straight home, we sat around outside talking for quite a while about a strange variety of topics. Kayleigh may not be as low as 8 people from work after all (don’t worry if you don’t get the context, this joke was not meant for you). Looks like I might be doing a 5 hour pattern tonight, need to be up early to go buy random stuff.

In an effort to expand our places of lunching, today’s destination was Walkabout. Due to everyone being rubbish the turnout was just myself and Michelle but that’s everyone else’s loss as it was really good. It’s only mildly more expensive than The Llama (£3.50 a meal and they are individually priced it’s not 2 for 1 so saves all the hassle of getting an even number of people) plus the drinks are cheaper than the union (only marginally more expensive than The Llama, cheaper for spirits).

I tried the chicken and chips basket meal which actually did come in a basket which was cool. They actually followed through on their Check 25 policy as well which I was quite impressed with given several places claim to use it but I clearly don’t look over 25. The sofas were quite decent although they went a little far back.

After lunch we headed up to the Brotherton Library (I had to show Michelle were it was) and on getting in there she found out she had to go to the Edward Boyle library so we then trecked down there at which point Michelle checked something out of the library for the first time. Only 3/5’s of the way through her degree.

The evening ended with a gathering in The Terrace. Again people are being rubbish, nobody else turned up until 8:20 at which point Adam arrived (who said in his text he would arrive at that time) with nobody else making an appearance for another 15-20 minutes. It’s really nice in The Terrace at the moment as they aren’t blasting out music and it’s nice and quiet over Easter. I’ve always liked The Terrace when it’s like that so I think I’ll be making full use out of it over the next few weeks.

“Come back to mine and I’ll show you my pretty underwear” Kat says to Norm.

It’s fill in your own context as usual.

Wednesday night was chilli night up at Bodington hosted by Maths Chris accompanied by his rice cooking assistant B. We made three seperate ones, a totally plain no chilli one, a mild one and a really, really strong one. While several people chowed down on the latter, Michelle somehow found the one which didn’t actually have any chilli in and therefore in no way could it be hot, too hot for her tastes. That girl amuses me.

All in all I was quite impressed. Given I don’t actually like chilli (or rice for that matter) I actually quite enjoyed dinner. And it puts me the cost of a meal closer to getting an overpowered sound system so everybody wins.

At 9pm I rolled out of a 3 hour non-stop A-Soc meeting to plan Rationalist Week. With it being less than four weeks away we’re really getting into the swing of things. I now have a whole new to-do list on top of my regular to-do list of things that need sorting out for the week and we’re busily working away on posters, leaflets and a whole host of other material in preparation.

If we can pull it off it’s literally going to be amazing. Given that we have such a small active member base compared with the other societies (Christian Union, ISOC and JSoc are some of the biggest societies on campus) it will be a fantastic achievement and a true credit to all involved.