Posts Tagged ‘rationalist week’

Well that’s it kids, Rationalist Week 2009.

What a week. If nothing else it has been incredibly tiring, I arrived on site at around noon on Sunday and didn’t leave until 2am Wednesday! Not to mention it ended in a 22 hour shift on the Friday. I haven’t had time to catch up on sleep yet and given it’s now 1:30am and I have to be up for work in six hours and still have loads of work to do first it doesn’t look like that will be happening any time soon.

In terms of attendance we probably hit the same numbers as last year, the weather was great which was really nice in terms of keeping us warm and be able to setup and take down in nice sunny conditions but probably didn’t do us any favours in terms of attendance.

Unfortunately the week was tinged with an ugly side as members of Leeds Islamic Society mounted a campaign of hate, violence and attacks against us but beyond that the week passed by with no major problems.

I will probably blog more about the various events we ran throughout the week but for the moment I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped out during the week to make it just a fantastic week!

With the final Tuesday of the Easter holidays seeing the union closed, we headed off to The Library for the final RW planning meeting. In the end we got a rather good turnout, something like a dozen people or more eventually showed their face including the long awaited introduction of Zoltan’s girlfriend. She looks quite mature for a 15 year old.

Continuing the ongoing efforts to get the technical set ready for Rationalist Week I’m currently busy installing software and configuring the computers that will be used during the week. As such they now have matching wallpaper so they look nice and pretty 😀 .

Speaking of Rationalist Week preparations, our lounge is now home to a large selection of food products, as per the picture below. Interesting this is just one of several big piles of stuff which is now ready for the week though I think both I, and my housemates, will be glad to get out of the way next week.

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.

Our traditional final round of planning meetings for Rationalist Week which take place over the Easter holidays kicked off last Tuesday. We managed to keep the meeting under two and a half hours which isn’t bad going for this time of year.

Zoltan’s train had been delayed but he finally arrived back from his jailbreak and joined us in The Terrace around 10:45 for a well earned drink. He managed 150 miles in the end though by road that is actually 260 miles travelled which is pretty damn impressive.

This morning (well probably yesterday morning now) at the ungodly time of 6:15am myself and Sophie turned up to see Zoltan off on his way for his jailbreak to raise money for Rationalist Week. Armed with only £10 and his wits he had to get as far away from Leeds as possible, the more miles he got, the more money he earns.

Afterwards I headed over to Kirstall to get some breakfast and found myself outside of work by 6:45. Knowing Gaz wouldn’t be there until 8:20ish to open up I decided to stretch out along the back seat and grab some much needed kip. I can confirm that the back seat of a 2001 Astra LS is rather comfortable 😉 .

Last week was No Vices Week which was a week (well, 5 days lol) in which we avoided takeaway and alcohol and donated the money we saved to Rationalist Week. There wasn’t a huge uptake but some of us actually managed most of it.

It almost killed me to be honest. Day after day I was like “aww, I can just get McDonald’s on the way home” and then remembering I couldn’t. I drove Norm to work on Tuesday morning thinking I could just go for breakfast to fill the gap before I started work and then realised I couldn’t so I headed for “non-takeaway” breakfast – which was closed! Needless to say, I was not amused.

The other worry of course was that with me and Lil not eating McDonald’s we would put on a lot of weight (we are of course living proof that McDonald’s keeps you thin). Luckily Lil came up with the answer in us just sugaring our bread and eating a loaf a day. Seems to have worked.

Last Friday saw the first planning meeting for Rationalist Week 2009. While the event is still over two months away things are finally starting to fall into place and we’re about half way through our fundraising drive for it so we need to keep the momentum going on.

The first meeting was really just to throw around ideas but the week is starting to take shape now, at least as outlining the events we want to do. Exciting stuff!

Well guys, we did it again :D.

Rationalist Week 2008 was not only another fantastic success for the society but also by far the biggest event we have ever pulled off. With a total of 22 events, 13 talks, 12 speakers, 7 days, 6 screenings, 5 guest speakers, 4 socials, 3 debates and 2 round table discussions as the back of my hoodie conveniently tells me it was another week that I will never, ever forget.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped out with the week. I was really worried in the planning stages that my presidency was going to end on a low note but with the traditional A-Soc nothing is going to beat us, nothing is going to get us down attitude we pulled off a week which I don’t think disappointed anybody.

I want to do a full post on Rationalist Week 2008 and no doubt will when I need to prevent my brain from exploding. But for now I just want to mention that the week was fantastic, we talked to hundreds of people throughout it and signed up loads of new members as well. Oh, and I’m far more alive than my lack of blogging would indicate.