Archive for March, 2007

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.

It was Sunday night close. Martin (store manager) was back from his holiday in the morning so the close had to be spotless. I lift up the bin to empty the grease traps into the main bin and, disaster. I drop the bin. Nooooooo! It’s all happening again. Last time I coated the koral in grease we were there till 5am. What’s worse is Becky is stressed out so I need to deal with this before she notices.

Luckily, myself being “Chris Worfolk of the great grease trap disaster of 2006” (which I can now confidently claim as my title given we’re now in 2007 and nobody managed to outdo me in the final few months of the year nor had anyone previously outdone me) I had a fair clue what to do. Scrap the little 1 litre spray bottles of bottles of diluted degreaser. 4 litre bottle of undiluted heavy duty degreaser poured straight on for the win. 20 minutes later and all was good again.

We actually got out just before 3:30 which I didn’t think was too bad given it was such an ace close (everything got done). We then headed over to Texaco for a sandwhich but on finding it closed we went on a mini-road trip to Castleford to the Shell 24 hour garage. They were selling two bottles of 500ml coke for £1.40 which I thought was impressive. They are £1.20 in the union which should in theory be nice and cheap compared with a 24 hour garage in which everything is usually at least twice the price it is in shops that open sensible hours.

I ended up getting to bed about 5:50 and slept until late afternoon on Monday getting up just in time to inform my parents I wanted feeding. I managed to get a lift back into town after dinner as my parents were driving in to go see Rocky Horror Picture Show (and indeed dressed up for the occasion) and soon found myself heading out to the Royal Park Pub. As a venue it sucked as always but the company was good. This was followed by food, debate and then sleep (which will be taking place as soon as I have posted this – so long).

By the way, last night’s closing song was Baby One More Time.

Saturday started off with a good old fashioned fairy cake baking session at Michelle’s. It’s been literally about seven years since I’ve done any baking and safe to say my baking skills have slipped a little but anyways. We hit The Old Bar at 7, 8ish where Maths Chris, Norm, Kieran and Matt had been drinking Guinness for several hours in order to collect badges and hats. B got the pleasure of sitting around watching them though because Maths Chris was observing his tradition of breaking lent for St. Patrick’s Day, B and Michelle saw this as a good excuse to start drinking.

Myself, Michelle, Maths Chris, B and Norm headed into Wendy at about 10:30 with Kara promising to join us soon. Predictably she decided to bail on us and go home with Si though. Luckily Sarann and Kat showed up for a bit to keep numbers up. Most people ended up bailing at 1:20, Michelle lasted an extra 10 minutes.

One thing I did find out last night was that orange juice is well cheap in Stylus. I ordered a pint which is £1.50 in The Old Bar but only got charged £1. I thought I might have been under-charged but apparently not as I ordered a second one and it was the same price. Not bad at all.

I discovered today that Si did indeed break my laptop.

Recently it had started blue screening whenever Si touched it. If the reason why is what I think it is, then Si did indeed break it. I found that one of the two clips that holds the battery in place on the laptop has unlocked (it was locked before I gave it to Si). So the battery could half slide out which would be consistent with the theory that the problems were caused by loss of power from the battery. Could Si be the next Craig in training?

Term finally ended yesterday. Our celebrations began early and by early mid-afternoon we had found our way round various bars and planeted ourselves in The Old Bar. As people came and went the drinking continued late, till around 12:30 to be precise before we headed up to The Terrace because The Old Bar was closing at 1.

We found The Terrace shut. George, it has to be said, you are possibly the worst insider ever. After being assured The Old Bar was open until 1 and The Terrace was open till 2 we discovered The Terrace actually closed at 12 and the bars had simply swapped opening times round. So we headed back down to The Old Bar for another drink.

By this time it was down to just myself, Michelle and Norm (Pocket Sarann, Matt and Kat were in Fruity) so we headed off for the traditional take-away and back to mine. We also incurred the strange phenomenon of a double guest star of Sarann and Kat though they didn’t stay too long and the discussion never got particularly deep. Still all in all, not a bad night.

I recently got my “you need to re-apply for your student loan” form and so being quite into this whole computer thing and because you get entered into a prize draw for an iPod if you do it online I headed into the interweb to fill out my application form. I tried to log in three times by guessing my password, had my account locked and proceeded to fill out the paper form.

Seriously, there has to be a better way than this? How am I honestly expected to remember my password after a year? It doesn’t appear to have been my commonly used ones. They have some kind of “remind me of my details” thing but do you really want to go through that every time you want to log on? No wonder nobody uses online systems.

They’ve clipped my wings again, torn them apart and then, left me. No use to fly away, to my yesterday, of freedom.

So turns out, just in case there was any doubt that the failure of Monday was my fault, that it completely and utterly is. I went down to speak to events who pointed out that our booking form still said we wanted access at 8pm (which is the time we originally wanted when we were holding a 9pm-2am gig) so they weren’t an hour late on getting the bar open (it’s interesting though that the technician set up at 7pm fine and the bar staff arrived at the time they normally would for a 7pm start). Still it’s enough to officially confirm my classification under failure.

I then headed up to the ARC to get some stuff sorted. To which I found had closed early due to staff illness. Because that’s really what you want to see when you discover you have indeed just bankrupted a society as well as being out of pocket yourself and with an event that requires large amount of funding to be only a few weeks away.

This is a really, really horrible time of year. I have a feeling this is one of those blog posts that is going to be re-drafted several times before eventually being dismissed into the ether without ever being posted.

Everyone is depressed. A lot of people have run out of money, we all have coursework piling up, the days aren’t getting lighter quick enough, whatever the reason is, it’s not a nice atmosphere to be in. As I have previously commented on I am hoping that the Easter holiday will be our salvation.

That said, I’m still in several moods as to what to do with the time. I have plenty of coursework and I could really use some de-stress time but then I also have a growing financial need that probably isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

What I’m really not liking at the moment is the constant ups and downs though. It’s not the first time people are having this massive war on Facebook and then act like there is nothing wrong face to face. I’m probably guilty of it myself but I try not to be. Point and case I called Lee on what he posted about me on news. When I did he said, “that was news, you’ve got to leave it on news.”

There was a big group conversation last night while I was asleep apparently as I found it sitting on my desktop just now in which Phil commented on the tensions. And I quote:

“you want me to reference my notes, your notes, chris’ notes, matt’s general mood, claire’s notes”

I think the most important point to come out here is, my notes are normally like that (notice how I’m not even dignifying the use of the term “notes” rather than “imported blog posts” with a response)! That’s my thing! You’re all invading my turf, I’m the sad depressed emo kid of the group, get your own personality traits hippies!

I feel this is a very disjointed post. I’ve veered off into Easter plans and demarcation. The point is, a lot of The Circle is getting at each other and it’s creating a really bad atmosphere. Of course, the self-analytical bit is the comparatively easy part. Fixing it is the tough problem. Perhaps we can’t actually do anything but weather it and wait for it to fix itself. Still, in the hope of someone having inspiration, suggests into the comments section of my blog please.

So turns out I am a complete failure and I should just crawl back into the hole I emerged from. Hmm, should have seen that one coming.