Archive for the ‘Friends’ Category

It’s possibly the end of an era. The Crusader has closed down! No more pub quiz on a Sunday night 🙁 . At least for the moment, the pub is up for sale but it’s been up for sale for a long time and apparently built up quite a lot of debt while they were unable to find a buyer and so has now been closed down.

Every cloud has a silver lining however and this has been a bit of a catalyst for ideas as to what else we can get up to on a Sunday night. The quiz wasn’t that important, mainly because we lost every week, so maybe this is the start of something new.

As a result the first of our new ideas for night’s out was to go to Xscape in Castleford to shoot some pool. I’ve never been to Xscape before it is a fairly impressive place in terms of size and facilities (complete with a 24 hour Friday Saturday McDonald’s just over the road) and the pool was good, £4 an hour all you can play.

It’s a good enough replacement to fill the void left by pub quiz, we got plenty of conversation in as I hitched a lift down there with Zoe, came back with Rich and had a phone call with Scoj live from Ireland too. As usual Becky ended the night on the floor too. Fast times indeed.

So it turns out Rich has friends! We headed out for his official birthday gig on Saturday and went down to Mojo which was a little different to what I had expected. Not having been there before and it having come highly recommended I imagined it as a trendy bar with wide open spaces and a well lit atmosphere. Needless to say, I was wrong, very wrong. Not that I’m complaining – it is basically what Cockpit should be if they actually spent some money on it.

We also swung by North Bar, another bar which I had heard a lot about but never actually drank in. Service took a bit of time but they had an impressive range of beer so I guess they can be forgiven.

I also met one of Rich’s friends who used to be involved with the Christian Union while studying at the University of Leeds which was interesting. Quite an interesting insight into the rest of Rich’s life in general to be honest.

While myself and Zoltan were sitting around in The Terrace last week, RAG came round selling tickets for speed dating and being tired of his moaning about being single I decided to sign him up, which of course meant I had to sign myself up as well.

After all, it’s a fantastic opportunity. 3 minutes to chat to 20 different people about A-Soc, what more could you ask for? I managed to get it into quite a few conversations and Zoltan even had a conversation about it with someone who had already talked to me so that was a nice little double team 😀 .

Less importantly (because let’s face it, it isn’t more importantly as I was going to start this paragraph with :p ) Zoltan seemed to have fun so everything worked out for the best. It was actually quite a lot of fun, you don’t really have time to get bored of someone or run out of things to say because you’re only there for a few minutes and you’re bound to find a few people you really have a good conversation with unless you’re an especially boring person. Plus it’s another thing to tick off my things to do before you die list.

Last night saw the long awaited return of podcasting. For those who haven’t checked it out yet, the sixth show is due out today and next Friday’s abortion debate is probably the best show we have done.

Yet again though I feel that the quality of the podcast has stepped up with the latest round of shows that we recorded last night. One reason for this was the addition of Dr. Gijsbert to the team which really got some good discussion going alongside the ever talkative Nicola as well as myself, Liz and Fonze.

Between us we managed to get some really good discussion going and managed to stay on topic a little more than normal, with plenty of room still for discussing other matters of course. I haven’t edited them together yet but they will be well worth checking out when they are released. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until the end of the month to hear them 😉 .

Having been invited down to Fonze’s church to do Alpha, myself, Norm, Paul and John went down this evening to check out a session. We arrived at the second week which was all about why Jesus died.

Having met Simon, the head guy, who was a nice guy as you would expect, we enjoyed a meal of rather higher standards than we are used to expect – I love it when the CU provide free food but they simply don’t have the resources to add the fancy touches such as a place mat full array of cutlery.

The session then took the form of a video lasting around 40 minutes which was reasonably interesting then we had a group discussion afterwards. It was good although it was no replacement for the speakers offered at Christianity Explored, it’s just not the same as an interactive speaker you can question on their talk afterwards.

We ended up heading back to The Terrace and got to know John a bit more who seems to be a really sound guy. He is doing joint honours artificial intelligence so we have some common ground and he also has excellent slogans on his t-shirts so it’s win win.

With September Wendy House having arrived and many people back in Leeds, last night offered quite a spectacular turn-out for people connected with the circle. Fairly ironic really given that Wendy House as a whole was not overly busy.

We started off in The Old Bar with guest appearances from Bo and Ben plus Nicola joined us along with Kate (who really does have an amazing hourglass body when put into a corset) and Colette, Nicola’s friend from 6th form, all of who were sporting amazing outfits.

Wendy was the traditional mix of 80s and alternative with the few token modifications to the playlist. There were some notable omissions from the modern classics section (no Paramore, no Fall Out Boy, no Green Day, the list goes on) though we did at least get a bit of Evanescene at the end.

Afterwards we headed back to Nicola’s for the afterparty. Only 5 of us ended up going back – Nicola, Colette, Sarann, Moz and myself but never the less we talked long into the night and ended up staying until gone half seven by which point the day light had well and truly arrived. I finally got to bed at just after 8. Guess I’m not quite past it just yet after all then 😉 .

While at the White Rose as explained previously I always ensure I pop my head round to take a look at the food court’s D to see if I can spot anyone as I know a few of the managers there.

As usual, I was disappointed to see a lack of recognisable faces and so turned away until, what the computer scientist in me would probably want to call echoic memory (I realise it’s not actually from computer science but we cover it in HCI) kicked in and at second glace I spotted Gary running kitchen!

Of course, this won’t mean anything to you as none of the right people read my blog for this to be of any significance. But there you have it. We all miss Gary. He was a legend. And fantastic if you got talking about cars, plus actually has some real money so rather than driving around in a crappy little one litre Cosrsa he now powers around in a Mondeo ST. Living the dream people, living the dream.

Saturday night having come round again, Michelle and Norm’s joint party (that Norm didn’t have any say in and couldn’t actually come to 😉 ) had arrived.

Being unable to get the time off work I didn’t finish until late and given an unending series of problems ending with the building alarm refusing to set leaving us waiting around for the morning shift to turn up I didn’t make it to the party until gone 3am.

I was greeted by a rather drunk Moz who seemed rather pleased to see me. As pre-arranged with Nicola (who was passed out on the couch) I tried to take her up but she was a little too drunk to stay conscious for more than 20-30 seconds at a time. For someone who is such an outgoing party animal she’s quite a light weight (though to be fair she had, had a long day and is keeping up with me for hours at work at the moment).

The real winner of the evening was the amount of drunken stories that emerged that night and the next morning. Always entertaining.

Apparently.

I missed much of the drunken conversation last night but apparently Norm’s response when they started playing Ring of Fire was “last time I played this I ended up having sex with a man.” Sarann is a fantastic resource for remembering such comments.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.