Posts Tagged ‘summer’

On my previous trips to Finland I discovered just how much daylight there is when you go north. However, there was always some kind of a night in Finland.

For example, here is a photo I took shortly before midnight while visiting in mid-July:

It is not exactly a proper night, but it has got darker. There is something you could genuinely refer to as night there. Iceland is not like that. Even by the start of June, anything you would describe as night has disappeared.

It is difficult to represent exactly what it looks like because you are always interpreting the scene through the exposure setting. However, I took a few photos from my hotel window shortly after midnight.

I purposely have not done any editing on these images. There is a clear difference between the first two and the last one, depending on what I told my camera to set the exposure by, but none of them really class as anything other than daylight.

This was from my bathroom window, a room which you could easily use without switching a light on. Equally, while you have to have your lights on at all time while driving in Iceland, it was enough light to do without them.

My gran’s side is quite a large family and we used to get together on a regular basis. Unfortunately, as people have got older, it is become a little too much to organise a large party, so they have gradually faded away.

That is until my parents stepped up and said they would organise a summer BBQ.

We ended up taking ten dishes – four breads (bloomer, stout, focaccia, stilton and bacon rolls), two sides (coleslaw, noodle salad), two starters (tomato and goat’s cheese tart, smoked trout pâté) and two dessert (devil’s food cake and eclairs). Most of it got eaten though due to the volume of food other people also brought we ended up coming home with boxes of new things as well!

We were reasonably lucky with the weather. There was a tiny bit of rain, but not enough to drive us inside, and the night was chilly but not survivable once we had the fire put going.

For the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s summer social, we organised a trip to Thwaite Mills Watermill, a working watermill located on the River Aire just outside the city centre.

Having had to make a last minute cancellation of my trip down to London to attend the BHA AGM, I decided to head down to Leeds City Museum to attend the HSoWY summer social. Given how many people are away over summer, especially for HSoWY, it was quite a respectable turn out, and the city museum is always worth a visit.

With Mr Foley’s looking like our home for the moment, we had a great Skeptics in the Pub meeting in July with a really strong turn out despite it being in the middle of summer. Perhaps due to the excellent quality of talk delivered by Jonni on “The Mind, Illusion and the Need for Science.”

Lachlan having sent us over a picture of himself on the beach in Melbourne where they are currently enjoying 42 degree days we decided to enlighten him on the sudden heatwave that had hit the UK causing us to head off to the beach on Monday. A quick snaps and non involvement of Photoshop later and the email was on it’s way. You can’t tell by the pixels or anything…

Props to Vince for touching up everything slightly given the time constraints we were working under.

Despite flagging turn outs to recent Tuesday night summer socials, we ended up getting around a dozen people down to The Library tonight, possibly given more life by the recent camping trip but hopefully something that will continue throughout summer.

The final A-Soc social of the summer ended on a rather good note with 17 people turning up. We were yet again screwed over by the union but never the less things proceeded well with us re-grouping in The Old Bar for a night of good fun that didn’t end until gone midnight.

Especially given Nicola and Zoltan were at a gig, Moz is in Europe, Rich is missing in action, Bo was on a date, Gijsbert has just disappeared, Brett couldn’t make it down, Rosie is in America Bevis couldn’t make it either. These are just A-Soc hardcores if you also add people like Oli, Chinese Matt and Charlie we did fantastically to say so many people weren’t there.

Roll on freshers’ week!

Last night saw another A-Soc summer social. I arrived for the commitee meeting to find the union was locked down for a commerical event, of course, they didn’t bother to let us know. Not only could we not get in The Terrace but they actually closed down the front of the union and just presumed people would find their way to The Old Bar. Luckily the bouncer was kind enough to point people in our direction so it wasn’t a total write off.

We archived a nice healthy 16 people to the meeting and the preceeding committee meeting was attended by twice as many commitee members as last week so things looked fairly good. I think we’ll chalk another line on the old success tally for this week.

It’s not even 10am yet and I am awake and watching Doctor Who. I’m not like out of bed or anything, but I’m fully awake and able to blog and everything.

Personally, I don’t think this is a good thing. I’m getting far too old when I’m awake at 10am. You would think being awake so early would give me more time and yet, we’re half way through August and I’ve only just started on series 2 of Doctor Who. Summer is running out…