Archive for June, 2009

I went round Oakwood drive-thru on the way home to grab some food last night and noticed this notice in the window.

If you can’t read the notice it says…

For the Safety & Security of both our customers and staff this restaurant is remotely monitored with a direct contact to the Police.

This means that they have a security office somewhere monitoring the cameras to make sure there isn’t someone up to no good. My question is though, what is a “direct contact to the Police”? I mean, that implies to me they can contact the police directly.

But, I can do that. The Police gave me their phone number too. I would imagine most people have it actually, it’s quite easy to remember, it’s only three digits.

Having got the night off on Saturday and Kate being bored as well we decided to hit the pub along with Norm, Liz, Oli and Si. Not that any of us live near the Deer Park any more but I still really love the pub and most of us drive these days (not like back in the day) so it seemed like a good enough choice.

Afterwards we headed into town which has always seemed like enemy territory on Saturday night – full of angry drunken locals, many of which I probably know and choose not to associate with for good reasons. Still Bourbon is always a good place to be as it wasn’t overly busy but there were enough people there to keep it lively.

OMG.

I mean, you think you’re doing alright, you’re cruising through life, got my car sorted, getting my house sorted, got through the first week of my new job. And then something like this happens.

I think we can all agree that there is a a hole in all of our lives. Whatever you thought of Jackson (who was found innocent of course) his music was universally loved, he was rightfully refered to as “the king of pop” and his album Thriller remains arguably the biggest selling album of all time.

If anyone else is planning to fly out for the funeral, let me know and we can organise something.

I made it home on Friday at around 6pm thinking I would have a rather relaxed weekend.

I had been scheduled to work on Friday but I had explained to work the week before that I didn’t work Friday evenings as it clashed with my real job but to ring me if they wanted me to do a different shift, which they hadn’t.

So anyway 6:30 rolls around and I get a phone call from work asking if I was coming in.

Predictably, really. Luckily I had kept my Friday evening free so I could head in. It turned out to be a reasonable night although it was gone 4am when I got home. You have to allow for a quick beer after work though, especially when you have a shopping trolley to chill out in.

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.

Wednesday I headed over to my parents for dinner for what I thought would be a relatively easy evening with plenty of time to sort out my room when I got back home.

As is turns out the NHS had just dumped a load of work suddenly on my previous job, Open Door Desig so I ended up heading over there to give Nick a hand ith it. It was relatively simple stuff to take care of though it was going on 10 when I left there so by the time I got home I didn’t have much time to sort my room out. I have since thankfully so I’m no longer living in a cave of boxes which is nice.

The first of our weekly summer socials for Atheist Society rolled round last Tuesday and with many of the undergraduates having left for the summer it felt just look old times. It was a really good night in the end and The Library were still serving food when we got there which is always a good thing.

One thing I will also mention about Warwick was our accommodation. Rather than go with a traditional hotel we rented a serviced apartment for the weekend by Louis Home Group. It worked out rather cheap, around £55 each for the weekend and operates an “express check in system” which is a fancy way of saying you just turn up and don’t actually check in 😀 .

Inside it was really nice, we had a bathroom, two double bedrooms one with an en suite, a fully equiped kitchen with fridge, freezer, oven, microwave and dishwasher, a lounge with a big flat screen TV (though we couldn’t get any decent reception on it) and secure parking. I was really impressed with the quality of it all, the showers were amazing, you could actually have a temperature between freezing and boiling.

They also include a welcome pack which comes with everything you needed for breakfast such as bread, butter, mini cereal boxes and individual bottles of orange juice as well as a big bar of chocolate and a bottle of wine. Highly recommended if you’re looking for somewhere to stay.

Last weekend was the AHS national conference 2009 hosted by Warwick Atheists. It is an interesting setup they have down there, it is a campus university based in the middle of nowhere as most of them are – but most of the students don’t live on campus. That seemed the point of a remote campus university to me but there you go. It’s also not in Warwick, nor in Leamington Spa were we were all staying lol.

We did however get the pleasure of spending some time in Leamington Spa as well as visiting my first 24/7 McDonald’s (though I’m sure most of you can’t really appreciate how exciting that is for me :p ), it’s good to know what where ever you are you can always really on Wetherspoon’s for a cheap pint.

Warwick’s campus was quite nice, they have a great bar there called the Dirty Duck which serves what I can only describe as duck steak – it’s like a full size big steak rather than the breast fillet you get from chickens and was absolutely delicious. They also do a fine carvery which we sampled on the Sunday.

In terms of AHS stuff we now have an exciting new committee with Jenna as president, Adrian as secretary and Stuart as treasurer. A number of other appointments were also made, congratulations to all who got positions! I am stepping down as webmaster as I believe I can better serve the AHS as a trustee so Michael will be taking on the web duties.

All in all the coming year is looking pretty bright for the AHS.

Having been planning to move on Friday I got a call from my letting agent on Thursday informing me that I couldn’t move in as there was a leak somewhere in the building and they couldn’t find out where it was.

Ignoring the fact that they should know who owns the building and thereby get them to fix it or at least get their permission so they could fix it I don’t see it was the end of the world because it’s one of the bedrooms and everything else is unaffected.

But there you go.

So by Monday night our contract was about to run out and all my stuff was still in my current house giving me 5 hours to move all of my stuff (and pack some of it too as I hadn’t had time to disassemble my desktop before Warwick) as well as put the finishing touches to cleaning the house.

Thanks to the help of my parents and Fonze we actually got it done and I am now fully moved out of West Park Place and into another house on Roundhay until my new place is ready. Now I just need to make a start on the sea of boxes so I can actually reach my bed.