Thursday was an evening of problems. Having left work at a reasonable time to run home and get a shower I phoned Nicola to sort out times for the evening. Which didn’t work because her phone is broken. And her backup phone is lost. That is like a double RAID array failure. I did say that girl was trouble.

Anyway I Facebooked her all the details but she didn’t reply. Running late I decided to run by Parkinson building anyway just to see if she had got the message and turned up but she hadn’t. So I headed off towards Rich’s when I got a phone call from her asking where I was as she was about to get to Parkinson .

Minor problems compared to when we got down to Rich’s and realised that we didn’t actually have a flask for the coffee lol. Rich had left his at Rationalist Week and mine was packed away somewhere but apparently not in my HAG bag so we ended up having to make a short trip to Tesco for some cold drink alternatives as well as some food.

In the end it all worked out rather nicely though as we made it back just in time for Question Time.

Last night with HAG we, for the first time ever, ran out of coffee. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing as it means there are plenty of people to once again receive said coffee but this can be put down to the fact that our Thursday night excursions have been a bit patchy recently and so the issue has managed to gain a foothold again.

It can also be attributed to the fact that I only made half as much coffee as normal because we only get through half of it at best usually. Luckily we didn’t have to turn anyone down though, we just cut the night short. This resulted in us being back in time to watch Question Time so it all worked out in the end .

Being a developer I don’t drink tea or coffee. That’s not exclusively true, if we’re making proper coffee at a dinner party I will have a cup but I tend to play that down as I feel a slowly developing taste for coffee and the fact we throw dinner parties are both signs that I am getting old. But back on the point, when I need that pick me up, it’s all abou the energy drinks. You just can’t beat them.

Just reading over the front of my can of Red Bull though I notice is proudly announces…

0g fat
123 calories
0g salt

Which is great. Though it makes me question why it would be an achivement to have no fat or salt in a drink. I mean, is that normal? Did it used to? It’s like when you see “suitable for vegitarians” on a chocolate bar and wonder why it wasn’t before (interestly, McDonald’s strawberry milkshakes only became suitable for vegitarians about 6 months ago, think about what that means :p).

Futher round the back of the can it goes on to say…

A serving (250ml) contains the equivalent of approx. 0g of salt

What does that mean? Approximately means it actually does contain some salt I presume. And equivalent means it has some kind of salt substitute equal to the amount of salt that would be in there if there was salt in there? Which means none as there isn’t any? So they have replaced the salt with 0g of something similar?

What are the betting lawyers were involved here?

Camping having been cancelled, it was down to Chris the wonder kid to throw together some kind of A-Soc event to ensure we did something over the weekend. So, us now having a dining room and all we throw together a dinner party for those of us that were still around over summer.

In the end it turned out rather well – we managed a full seven courses as well as offering people a choice with several courses and best of all, nobody died. Nobody at all. There was a turn up for the books indeed. So given I haven’t really cooked for like a year or two now, I’m going to chalk it down as a victory.

It also presented some interesting experiences. I gave the port a try, which I didn’t find very drinkable but there you go, it wasn’t particuarly good port anyway, and some of Norm’s fancy Brazilian coffee which I did manage to stomach. I think that is a sign of me getting old. But should be good for all nighters I guess. Not that anyone is going to be pulling out a cafetiere during such times.