Friday 27th February - Last Friday night we went out to the Assembly (a nice big late bar in town) and played lots of expensive pool (£1.00 a game - harsh). True to form, I lost each and every time, even when playing with the legend of pool that is JJ. Just to confirm my loser status, I then knocked my almost full pint all over my lap. I was more upset about not being able to drink the beer than being soaking wet and smelly. Anyway, G's sister was staying with us most of last week (she's a teacher and it was half term) and I ended up having a really good chat with her. We got back, started on the wine, and I passed out watching friends at stupid o'clock and woke up in my clothes the next morning. Saturday night was fairly similar...
John Salks and Dave had invited us round for a curry/film/beer night, so I went to town and Morrisons with Tara to buy the ingredients for a cake she was cooking for dessert. I helped her make it, then we went swimming with JJ. The curry itself was delicious - thanks guys. We watched "Black Ball" - the one about bowls - not bad but completely unbelievable. We were all drinking but I was really knocking the beers back. That coupled with already being tired, I kept passing out and being woken up by everyone slapping in turn, hard! I eventually left at about 4:30am, having made a fool of my self by talking crap, as usual, but amplified by the beer.
Sunday I did absolutely nothing whatsoever. Tuesday night we went bowling and I wasn't able to get anywhere near my last score of 111, Wednesday night we went round to Tara's to watch the Green Mile, and last night we went to the pub quiz where I got about 1 right answer. Gemma gets back from the USA this weekend, I'm going to Manchester tomorrow. Apart from that, I'm now going to see Pete in Aberystwyth on 12th-14th March (the day he hands in his dissertation), and then I'll be straight off to Munich on 17th-23rd March to go skiing with Matt and Mike (can't wait!!).
Thursday 19th February - Thought it was about time I updated the rant... Congratulations to my brother Robert for passing his driving test first time, and with 4 less minors than me! I'm just trying to remember what I did at the weekend, I think Friday night was beers pizza and videos round at John Salks and Dave's house. Saturday was valentines day and I sent and received a few nice texts - thanks for those. Saturday night - we went down to Southport for Jon's 21st, starting with drinks and really nice food at his house, and then touring the fine late night bars of the town! Jon for the first time in his uni life drunk enough to actually get drunk (i.e. enough to put any one of us in a coma for a year!). He redecordated his toilet in style throughout most of the night so I'm told! G, Dave and Tara were a main feature of the night, getting progressively more and more drunk! G and Tara were sick in the 4th bar, and that was more or less the end of the night, Tara doesn't even remember there was a 4th bar!! It was a really good night though, and I'm looking forward to going back. The photos are online so check them out. Gemma flew to San Fransisco on Monday for a well deserved 2 week holiday. She seems to be having a really good time.
This week I've been mainly saving money and staying in, doing the massively boring but semi productive job of transferring all the photos on my website from the old "hand made" photo galleries, to the new "fully automatic" one. The benefits of doing this are numerous and boring, but basically all the galleries are consistent and better than they were before, and it saves me loads of time and effort in the future. There is also a search engine on all the photo gallery now, but it will only ever be truly effective if I can ever be bothered to go through and caption all the photos. I think work is the only place I'd be bored enough to do that though! You may also notice that I have moved several pages onto the gallery area because they are much neater and easier to update there.
Plans for the next few weekends:
Tuesday 10th February - I spent the first 3 days of last week in a hotel conference room learning about "Engineering Life Cycle Management". It was actually not a bad course, and I learnt a fair bit and ate well for free! Went into work on Thursday but might as well not have bothered cos I stupidly clicked "No" when it asked if I wanted to save my work. Darn. Anyway, I took Friday off and Dwayne gave me, Salks and Tara a lift down to Loughborough.
I had lunch on Friday with Becky, then went to see Scotty in his house, then went to hall to see the hall people. We went to FND but left at 1 cos it was a bit crap. Saturday I saw Jo and Helen, before going round to Matt's and having a subway with him (there's now a subway in Loughborough - footlong baby yeah!). After that I popped round to see Bhav and Rus in their house, and then went back to hall. We went out to the union again cos it's cheap, and "The one and only" Chesney Hawkes was performing. That's the second time I've seen him at Loughborough! JK was there working as the stage manager. On Sunday I went to see Ledge Kim and Sarah in their house, and got back to hall to see Emma and Steve who had been away for the weekend. Liam made it back just in time too, so I was able to catch up with him quickly! I saw loads more people out and about, but still not everyone!
The journey from Loughborough back to Preston was quite interesting... Dwayne's car runs on Lead Replacement Petrol (4 star) and he couldn't find it in any petrol station anywhere. He ran out of fuel about 8 miles away from Stoke and we waited in a layby on the A50 for over an hour for the recovery man. He towed the car to the nearest petrol station and informed Dwayne that he can use unleaded, he just has to put LRP in every few tanks to keep it healthy! We also had to be jump started to get going. Back in Preston, a police car was following us for a while, and me and Salks were in the back looking behind us seeing what it was doing. It pulled us over not 20 metres from my house, in my road, and started asking Dwayne all sorts of questions about where the car was registered to. After Dwayne was able to proove everything he needed to we were sent on our way! Random as.
I am moving all the photos from the old site over to the new one, into that fancy new gallery I am now using. This will take a while but it will all be nice and organised when I'm done. You will even be able to search for photos of yourself or anyone else and it will find all the ones with you in it! Bear with me while I move the photos across, it doesn't take that long but there are just so many of them! Captioning all of them will take the time... The old galleries will still be there until I'm ready to take them down.
Monday 2nd February - This is the first moment since last Thursday that I've had the time to sit down for more than 5 mins! Here is a "brief" account of the scrambling trip in the Lake District yesterday, which I did on about 4 hours sleep...
Glenn picked me, Dave, Evan and Phil up in his dad's Land Rover Discovery (nice) at 8am. We chose the harder scramble of the 2 Phil suggested, and got there at about 10am. The hill was called Blencathra in the North Lakes, and the route we went for was called 'Sharp Edge' - see the photos to see why! As we parked up we saw our target and the snow all over it! Off we went, walking up a fairly steep hill to start with. Phil had his GPS toy which got us slightly lost, but we found our way to the bottom of the route and got to the bottom of the rocks at 11:15. There was a nice "warm up" scramble to get us going, then a short walk to the bottom of the main ascent to the top. It was cold and windy, but these were pleasant conditions compared with what was to come!
We started the main route at 12:10, and made slow progress - mainly because I am a bit scared of heights when there's nothing holding me to the side of a slippery ice and snow covered rock apart from my freezing fingers and dodgy foot holds! I wasn't taking any chances, cos a fall meant an unstoppable drop down or either side, which is not got for your health. I got up with a mixture of rock hugging, crawling on all 4s where it was flat(ish), and Phil guiding me. The higher we went, the more ice and snow was on the rocks, and the wind was harder and colder. We finally got to the top of the climb at 1:00, and kept going to the summit where we arrived 20 mins later inside the clouds.
After a haribo break, we started the descent. It was nice and slippery and this wasn't helped by it starting to rain. Evan took the wrong path down, which led us the harder way down as opposed to a nice smooth descent. We had to do a bit of scrambling down, but it was very easy stuff. The problems came when we got off the rocks and out of the clouds, gale force winds just came out of no-where, blowing hail at great speeds into out faces. We were not liking this too much, and I have never run down a mountain faster! As Phil described it, it was wind you can lean against! As we approached the bottom, there was another steep grassy bit, which we all slipped down more than once! It was a bit like a water slide so no-one got hurt. Glenn slipped and fell into Phil, and the highlight of the day was Evan hurtling towards me on his arse so fast I had to dive out of the way, then hitting a small rock and going head over heals, flying down the hill on his belly. He must've covered about 30m in a couple of seconds, but we were all wetting ourselves laughing, him the most!
Anyway, we finally got back to the car at about 2:30, which was miles away thanks to the wrong turning, soaked through and muddy and smelly, and as Dave said, with "blisters on blisters". It was a great day though. At Phil's request, we took a detour to Ambleside where he spent £250 in a climbing shop, then we finally got to have the compulsory beers and made good our amazing idea that we had on the rocks - a nice curry! We finally got home at about 8:30. Good day!
Anyway, today I have been on a "core engineering competency" training course in a hotel near Preston, where we mainly made paper aeroplanes. I had a nice carvery lunch, but noticed on the menu an £11 cheeseburger! I hope they're serving it tomorrow cos I really want to know what an £11 cheeseburger tastes like! Thank goodness the company is paying for the 3 day course :-) I have been aching all over today, but I didn't let that stop the now weekly Monday night football. I'm gonna sleep well tonight!
I'm only in work on Thursday, I'll be in Loughborough from lunch time on Friday, so I'll see you Loughborough lot soon!