Archive for the ‘Humanism’ Category

Last weekend saw Atheist Society’s annual summer camping weekend, this week hosted by Dalesbridge at the far end of the Yorkshire Dales near Austwick and Ingleton.

Despite it throwing it down with rain for days beforehand the sun came out once we got there and beyond the odd shower it was generally good weather which made for an excellent time all around.

It was a mix of walking and drinking which is what you want on any camping holiday. There is something brilliant about starting the day at 8:30am with a bacon sandwich and a beer.

In between drinking on the site and checking out the local pubs we also made it round the waterfall trail, white scar caves and even a rather large mountain climb all the way up to the base of Penyghent 😉 .

Tuesday saw the usual A-Soc meetup at The Library, which is our new home for the moment due to the fact that they serve food and I prefer not to wait until like midnight to eat on an evening. And for pretty amazing prices too, I got a beer and a burger for £3.50 though it did have a notable lack of dressing.

Most of the evening was spent planning the oncoming society camping trip to the point were we even have Lil coming – crazy times!

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.

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.

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.

Last Tuesday we sat down for our final planning meeting of the academic year as we prepared for the next one. It was a likely to have rather in vain giving we were missing half the committee but never the less with union deadlines arriving we had plenty of items to discuss.

It ended up a rather circular discussion with the odd bit of productive points made but on the whole we just went over the same topics again and again. For 3 hours. Fun stuff.

Having left work at about 6 last night I headed off to meet Nicola for the usual Thursday night HAG activities. It was a mildly successful night, there were a few people out so a bit better (or perhaps worse) than last week.

Finally pulled up outside my house at about 9pm when I got a text from Zoe inviting me down to the pub. Of course this left me with no option but to head out again (after all I hadn’t been to the pub since Tuesday at this point!)

It’s tough getting through these long nights but somehow I manage it 😀 .

Last night saw the first of the end of year planning meetings for Atheist Society. It has been a while since we have had a real hardcore planning meeting but last night we bashed out ideas for next year for a solid three hours and will no doubt be doing something similar next week too.

We got plenty of good ideas down and the vision for next year is starting to take shape so it should be another great year for the society (as if we have anything else :p ).

Afterwards we headed down to The Old Bar for the usual Tuesday night social which was well attended given so many people have gone home. Plus George was there so it was basically win win.

Thursday saw HAG head out with some new volunteers in the form of Sophie and Jon. Turns out, we’ve solved the problem again though.

What we need to work on now is exporting HAG to various other cities around the UK, after all as it stands we have a higher success rate than Narconon ;).

Tuesday saw the End of Year Ball which this year saw several of the freethinking societies in and around Leeds unite. While it was mostly an A-Soc affair we got people from Skeptics, York Brights, the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and HAG there, even if this is mostly the same crowd lol.

We kicked things off at Spice Quarter where I managed to get through a reasonably respectable five plates though I believe I was significantly trailing Zoltan who was on a mission to eat everything they owned.

The made in front of you stir fry had to be the winning dish as you literally can just pile everything on your plate and get them to stir fry it. Interesting, despite what sause I asked for it all seemed to come out of the same pot but it actually tasted like what I asked for so I’m not going to complain.

Afterwards we headed to Bourbon for their Mix Tape Project night which was really good if people did start disappearing – the last people to leave the place where myself and Paul! That’ll show those kids who can really party… :D.

In the end we had 34 people turn up which I think is quite respectable.