Not being able to close up on Saturday I ended up getting stuck on the open. This means getting up shortly before 4am which is very much not appreciated and there is something just freaky about getting to lunch time and having finished work for the day.
At least it gave me a chance to work with Danny for once, who was equally happy about the opportunity greeting me with a hug as I walked in the door. Suprisingly, or perhaps not, Becky was still there finishing up the paperwork from the night before too. Good times.
I’m quite impressed by how light it is in the evenings now. I don’t want to think about the fact that this will only keep itself up for another few months and then it will start getting darker again but then really we probably have five months before it is getting dark at an early time again which is probably long enough.
Rich and I headed out, as usual, on Thursday though with limited success given that Rich hadn’t had much time to prepare anything as he is feeling rather under the weather at the moment and while we were out his flask exploded. Not really the best start to the evening.
Apparently, though we had, had a better evening than Rich’s flatmate Liam who had managed to pick up food poisoning off Burger King. Rich suggested that he make up a formula of water, salt and sugar to rehydrate (apparently there is a special formula which makes it work best) and in a somewhat ironic twist, the only salt they had in was some salt packets from guess which restaurant…
With me having some free time on Tuesday afternoon, I headed down to Tropical World, accompanied by Norm and Lil, finally having moved to Roundhay over nine months ago now.
It’s an amazing resource really – a tropical jungle in the middle of Leeds; it’s quite random. I’m not sure how many other cities have them but I don’t think it’s many.
It was well worth the visit, if only to be warm for a little while lol, and I got plenty of pictures too so you can’t go wrong.
It’s hard to believe that it’s only 17 days until Rationalist Week 2009! I don’t really think it has fully sunk in yet just how soon it is, especially given the planning started over 6 months ago now.
This year’s events timetable is more packed than ever and the event is going to be unprecendeted not only with using previous weeks as benchmarks but measured against every other awareness week on campus too!
You can find a second by second countdown as well as a full events timetable on the Rationalist Week information page on the A-Soc website.
Yesterday saw a total of 87 arrests by police in London related to the protests surrounding the G20 summit currently going on.
Of course, none of us are suprised. It would have been far more of a shock if the events had have passed peacefully. Indeed it was perhaps a suprise that so few people were arrested given the protestors broke in to a brand of the Royal Bank of Scotland and continued to ransack the building. Because that is what the banking system could really do with right now.
It seems somewhat ironic that a group generally consisting of socials and tree huggers who would traditionally have been considered pro-peace (or at least that is what they would claim) have become the blight on society that they have replacing football hooligans as the unwanted trouble making element of our society.
Yesterday was a busy day at work. We ended up being £140 off the record day which was somewhat disappointing, not to mention it put us hours behind.
So in the end we didn’t get out until after 3am which as we were switching to British Summer Time resulted in it actually being after 4am and so not setting off home until about 4:20 I ended up getting to bed at 5am! Most unhelpful when I had to get up today at a reasonable hour to get some work done.
People being very unoriginal and lazy (not to mention late) we were forced to repeat a restaurant tonight. Still at least we did it in style with Nando’s as you can never have too much chicken. Rich went for hot this time and after pointing out my lack of nerves for only going for medium proceeded to struggle to eat his food because it was too hot 😀 .
Afterwards we headed for some ice cream and I finally met our new store manager Matt who seems like a decent enough guy even if we barely exchanged any words. Still I’m sure I’ll find out in full next Saturday.
With the Easter holidays having arrived activities have somewhat subsided and so I was able to get an evening free to head to the Deer Park with Si for some dinner. It’s been a while since we’ve been out for some good and the odd bottle of coke so I actually really enjoyed the short catch up even if in the grand scheme of things a few weeks isn’t that much.
On Thursday myself and Rich headed out to continue our work for the newly formed Humanist Action Group.
Rich had cooked up a chicken strew this week which we were hoping would be a little more popular than soup but apparently not. This was probably due to the fact that there were less people out this week but it didn’t help when one of them turns out to be a vegetarian.
It is good to see some people are really getting somewhere though, one woman who we talk to every week now has a job selling The Big Issue and as such is getting a house from the council too. It’s almost inspiring to think that we have only been doing this a few weeks and we’re already seeing people get back on their feet (not by anything we’ve done or anything, it’s just nice to see).
Having got the wrong month in February, we finally headed down for the long awaited karaoke social at The Eldon. It was in theory a joint Jazz & Blues and Atheist Society social but I’m not sure anyone from J&B actually turned up. Luckily, even with it being the holidays, A-Soc managed to put out a decent turn out and provide most of the musical entertainment too.
I signed up for to sing but ended up leaving before it was my turn so unfortunately everyone missed out on my Cerys Matthews impression to the tune of Catatonia’s Mulder and Skully but we did get Zoltan singing Rick Astley’s timeless Never Going To Give You Up so who can complain?
