Archive for December, 2008

Yesterday was the usual Tuesday night A-Soc social once again at The Library as the union is closed until next week. They finally had food back on this week so I took the chance to order one of Scream’s rather tasty mixed grills to which they didn’t have any steak for :o. I mean, what is a mixed grill without the steak? They ended up doing me double chicken and double gammon though so I’m not complaining.

Attendance was good, Nicola is back in civilization if only for a few days and The Gijs put in a guest appearance too. As ever, a successful night in the end.

The signs that I am getting older are coming thick and fast these days. If it wasn’t bad enough that I moved my alarm forward to 7:30am or went down to London tools up with a hat, scarf and gloves because I can no longer go out in the middle of Winter wearing nothing but a thin shirt, I’ve now gone another step further and bought a diary to plan my time.

Unfortunately the combination of the calendar on my phone and Facebook events just isn’t cutting it anymore. Plus I’m still very much a fan of the old pen and paper system, it almost certainly still has it’s place in modern day life. Plus with the AHS and Skeptics in the Pub kicking off and me generally having a life outside of A-Soc (even if they are directly A-Soc related) I felt it was time to take the plunge.

We dropped by Tesco on Boxing Day to pick up some bread. It was rather busy because while apparently the whole of Leeds was at Tesco on Christmas Eve, they can’t go a whole day with the supermarket closed and so need to get straight back in there the day after.

Turns out though that there isn’t much point visiting Tesco on Boxing Day because they don’t really stock food anymore…

This is old news now but I’ve finally got round to uploading my phone pictures.

In case anyone is struggling to read the headline it says…

They’ve stolen all our jobs
1.3m migrants took EVERY Brit vacancy since 2001!

In all seriousness, surely there should be laws against the Daily Star publishing this kind of thing. I mean, people will read this and some will actually believe it! Anyone else thing the BBC should start a campaign to get loads of people to complain?

I’ve been listening to quite a bit of Pet Shop Boys recently, if only so I know how to keep Rich happy on Wednesday. Anyways…

After a moderate days work and having done my technical wizardry to help my uncle sort his network problems out, I headed off to meet everyone for the usual Sunday jaunt. Tension aside it was the usual night of good fun though because it’s holiday periods Xscape was rather busy – it took us 30 minutes to get a lane, we could only get one between the nine of us and only get one game in. But I don’t care too much as I don’t really go for the bowling.

Afterwards things got a little crazy though. Becky went for KFC! Not McDonalds, but KFC! I mean, that’s just insane. That’s now how Sunday nights work. These are crazy times we’re living in, crazy times…

As you probably noticed, yesterday was Christmas Day.

I quite enjoyed it to be honest. For the first time in, well, possibly ever, I didn’t have to get up that early. When I did I headed round to my parents for Christmas dinner which was excellent as always. I spent a few hours with the family which is perfect in terms of a managable amount of time and then headed off back home in the evening for Christmas dinner at my house.

Norm wasn’t working after all so had very kindly agreed to cook the dinner which made things even easier as I pretty much just rolled up, did a bit of tidying and that’s about it. In the end there were six of us which is a good number in terms of being able to cater easily enough while still having a good group there. So all in all, a good day.

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monarchy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]

Last night saw the first A-Soc social of the holidays, regular meetings having been suspended until everyone gets back to Leeds in January. Given it was holidays, and indeed the 23rd of December, we did alright for attendance, I think we had a total of eight of us in the end.

I was a good night as I got to chat to Paul about some of my suggestions regarding the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and we also battled with Facebook to try and sort it out as his new phone is geared towards Facebook but won’t actually let you register or anything.

In a highly amusing situation also, Norm got ID’d. Clearly the big beard is taking years of his look 😀 .

Having arrived at the pub quiz on Sunday after much nagging to get there asap, I was pleasantly suprised to find Zoe was dishing out Christmas presents (no wonder they get coined my real friends 😉 ). I can’t help feeling her mind is a little too devilish though… 😀

Having being partying for three nights in a row, I managed to pull myself out of bed in time for Christmas dinner which had been skillfully cooked by my housemates. It was a nice meal indeed and featured all the expected trimmings laid out with a set of plates and table dressings kindly proved by Norm’s mum.

Having spent three hours eating and a can of 24 later I headed upstairs to squeeze in the normal Sunday workload (which unfortunately is still going but I have some free time to catch up on Thursday lol) before heading out to my mum’s birthday shindig at 7:30.

It turns out my mum is rather popular. I thought I did well getting 19 people out to my birthday do on a Sunday but apparently, I was very much beaten by the 20-30 people that turned up to the pub to wish my mum a happy birthday.

Finally having spent a few hours catching up with friends and family there I dashed over to the Crusader to catch the end of the pub quiz and arrived just in time to find everyone leaving. But no worries as it just meant moving on to get food so all was not lost. In the end, I ended up getting to bed at a reasonable time too, not bad for such a packed day.