Archive for July, 2009

On Tuesday night we said goodbye to Aidan at BuzzBet. As such we headed down to The Box for a few drinks before heading over to The Original Oak for some food. Going for something a little different I went for the ultimate chicken burger which I can highly recommend.

While I’ve only been at BuzzBet a month, it will be sad to see Aidan go as he was always a good laugh in the office. No doubt our paths will cross ways in the future though.

With Kieran up in Leeds for the SoC 2009 graduation we headed out on Monday night for a beer or two. While there was a very disappointing turnout it was never the less a very enjoyable evening start with some food at Wetherspoon’s before heading down to O’Neils and ending up back at ‘spoon’s for more drinks.

It was great to see a lot of people who seemed to be struggling at some point to come through with flying colours. Congratulations to all who made it!

Taking a quick break from work yesterday to learn more about the original colour and shape of various fruits that many people now amuse have always been like that I came across this picture.

We decided to make use of Craig’s free house and order takeaway last night so headed down to Noori on Garforth main street.

On discovering they actually had a full eat in restaurant we decided to just stop there though and enjoyed a very nice meal at a good price. I went for the dupiaza and in true British style – got a side of chips with it 😀 . All in all, highly recommended, very good food for the price.

We’re becoming increasingly annoyed with The Library. The food is sub-standard and quite frankly that is hard to achieve when you run a student pub. It’s not like it’s any cheaper than anywhere else either so they can’t really play that card.

On the plus side though we have some very productive discussions – including the decision to rename Lil to Ubuntu.

A much overdue return to Wendy House arrived last night. While the music was it’s usual mix of good stuff and bad stuff it was at last a reasonably quite night with enough people on the dance floor to give it some atmosphere but plenty of space to dance.

I’m having a nightmare finding a new place to live at the moment, with the two places I have had lined up both being flooded and now my temporary house also has water coming through the ceiling. Perhaps God is finally going to reveal himself to me in the form of a second great flood in which I must build an ARC that is also a Tardis to accommodate two of each of the billions of species on this planet.

In any case I have found a place I rather like, so while I’m not holding my breath as given recent experience it is highly likely to go tits up again, would hopefully suit me quite nicely, especially given the central location, righr next to the Corn Exchange in town.

So, here’s to hoping. Pictures of the views out of the windows are below.

On Saturday night I attended the annual BBQ of the North Yorkshire Humanist Society (so don’t get confused – it wasn’t a BBQ where we cooked North Yorkshire Humanists 😉 ).

The BBQ itself was good although I feel I was mis-sold when told it was in York as it was in a village just outside named Haxby – not a problem when you’re coming from York but on the far side when driving up from Leeds.

It was interesting to see the demographics in North Yorkshire, the age range is much better than West Yorkshire although this could have been disorted by the fact it was a bit more of a social event than a regular meeting.

They seem an active enough society though, they hold 11 meetings a year (just missing out August) which is more frequent than a lot of societies which take extensive summer breaks and they seem to have quite a bit of committee rotation going on.

Yesterday saw the July meeting of Skeptics in the Pub with a talk by myself entitled “Swine flu – will anyone survive?”

The basic conclusion of the talk was no, unfortunately not. We are all almost certainly going to die. The good news though is that most of us probably won’t die from swine flu, which is a bit more of a positive outlook.

After a bit of a shakey start were Carpe had forgotten to reserve us the room we got going with quite a few new faces which was good to see.

Headed down to London for the AHS meeting on Thursday.

The station car park was full which resulted in me parking literally a mile away. Still cost me £3 as well because the parking ticket machine ate half of my money. I scribbed on the ticket though “I have this machine £3!” and didn’t get a ticket despite it expiring so one way or another I got an almost fair amount of parking (I should have only paid £2 really). Interestingly, if you phone the help number on the parking machine, you get a modem on the other end.

Got the train down fine and found my way to 1 Gower Street which was very irritating as I came from King’s Cross so I started at something like 137 Gower Street. That is one of the very annoying things about London – just because you’ve found the right road doesn’t mean you’re anywhere near where you want to be!

The BHA offices were nice enough, they were very much old converted houses with many small floors over about four different levels. We finished up there and headed round to the College Arms for a pint which again was small but nice enough.

Myself and Andrew were both getting the train back from King’s Cross so we headed off not long after though unfortunately by this point it had started raining. Having already got a coat I offered my umbrella to Andrew who hadn’t brought anything. This turned out to be somewhat of a mistake as the heavens properly opened and it began pelting it down, I was not impressed by the time we finally reached the station. Especially because earlier I had thought to myself “should I switch to my walking boots in case it rains?” and decided against it in the end.

It was also rather irritating how many people were on the train back to Leeds at 9:30 at night though it gradually thinned out as we headed northwards from an almost full carriage to an almost empty one.

It wasn’t the most pleasant journey back, I hadn’t brought a jumper because I was trying to travel light and I thought I could just put my coat on if I was cold but it having been soaked right through that wasn’t really an option so it was rather cold, especially with me not being overly dry. I did manage to get a discounted hot chocolate from the snack cart though which was most welcome.

By the time we reached Leeds I was ready to give up for the night (though I still had to drive to Halifax and back, but that is a whole different story – coming soon) so I gave in and jumped in a taxi back to my car. Well worth not freezing to death on the talk back to my car and more importantly, my beautifully warm Wikipedia hoodie.