I am back and installed at Ian‘s flat. This is Good News. No longer do I have the ~2 hour commute every morning. The extra lie-in on Monday was so good.
archive for the Me category
I’m feeling a bit nomad-like at the moment. I’m still without flat and for the last week have been staying at Kerry’s down in Selkirk. I’m staying there next week and then I think I’m back to Ians place for a wee while. Staying in Selkirk is a nice change from the city but the hour and a half+ bus ride in is a bit of a drag at times.
Also, I’m without internet when I’m not at work so if the blog/email is a bit quiet you know why.
Monday? Already? gah! Weekend was very busy and fun. Kerry and I got the train down to my parents on Friday night for my Mums birthday celebrations. We had a nice lazy Saturday morning with a huge array of food for brunch. In the early evening my sister and I got the barby going and cooked a great dinner. We had bacon steaks, huge burgers, thin beef steak, blackpudding….yum yum.
On Sunday we all piled into both cars and set off to Nenthead to show John and Kerry around the museum and site. The weather was gorgeous for the most part with some random light showers. Us kids went down the mine aswell about an hour after we got there. It was very cool and peaceful down there and we were absolutely ravenous when we got out. All in all a good day. I should really finish their website for them…
Well, that was not fun. I’m now installed (temporarily) at my very, very generous friend Ian’s flat. It took literally the whole weekend to get all my junk shifted. Plus, this wasn’t the junk-junk, I’d already weeded that out. On Saturday the other Ian brought his car to help me with the really big stuff, which was jolly nice. We thought that would leave a small amount of stuff to do on Sunday. It didn’t. I miscalculated the extent of my junk. Needless to say, when I move to the new place I’ll be hiring a van and/or some llamas.
Whilst the fabled flat move of doom is in progress it looks like I will have No Internet. Expect a slight lack of blogging and then an almighty splurge whenever I get somewhere with an IP address…
First pay of proper job! Woo! Plus its all the part-time I did last month and all of this months full-time. Cha-ching. I am in my overdraft no more.
I am now officially on the Ben flat hunt team. We have our max price, we know our room requirements. All that is left to do is view some flats. Wish me luck tomorrow morning on the phone…
I really, really need to get off my ass and find a flat. I’ve only got two and a bit weeks left here and I don’t want to be stuck in somewhere crappy.
Had a whole bunch of photos kicking around for ages. So, here they are:
Another fun packed week begins! Well, already Wednesday, somehow. Good times at scotweb with the boys, mainly smacking sandy down. I’ve linked the boys up over on the right there, should help their google rank a wee bit.
Have been organising myself for graduation aswell, got my white bow tie and a nice new white shirt. Booked a place for a meal on the evening, settled on The Grain Store after The Outsider was already booked up. The ceremony is on the morning of Wednesday next week, then its off the to the Informatics department reception at the Royal College of Surgeons in the afternoon and then the meal in the evening. Man, thats gonna be a kerazy day.
Its also Kerry’s birthday tomorrow, hope she likes what I got her. Alex and I have also got to find a new flat in amongst all the other stuff at the moment.
Just worked both Saturday and Sunday at waterstones. I’d forgotten how much of a killer that is, man I’ll be glad when I’m just Monday to Friday at scotweb.
Birthday meal on Friday night was good fun. Eight of us in the end went to Pancho Villas for a terrific feed. The plan was to go kerazy dancing at Evol afterwards but we were all far, far too full. Ended up mooching around to Opium (predictably) and then Frankensteins (which was uber cheese tastic).
This feels like the first time I’ve had time to relax since about last Tuesday. First I had the waiting and trauma of interview and then results on the same day. Then back to work, then straight off to Kerry’s parents. Then straight back to new job, all in between old job.
Waterstones have a ridiculously long notice period of four weeks, even for part-timers. While I work that off I’ve started at the mighty scotweb part-time 10-3 Monday to Friday. So, its scotweb for half the day then waterstones for the other half and then waterstones on Saturday and Sunday. Thankfully my shifts at the ‘stones go down to two evenings a week next week, which will make it a bit more manageable.
Scotweb is pretty cool, the day I arrived three brand new shiny emacs arrived. One of them is now mine, along with a brand new chair! woo! I spent today and yesterday installing all the software I need and getting to know their system. In a bizzare stroke of coincidence Alex who I work with there is the owner of this site which I blogged in the past as a ‘nice site’, curiouser and curiouser. Alex’s brother James also works at scotweb and has a blog here and was in the year above me at university, oh and then there’s sandy.
I got the job
\o/\o/\o/\o/
forgot to blog it in the pre-common riding chaos. More on that later…
Hey everybody,
To celebrate me hitting the big TWO-THREE I’m going to go for a feast of mexican fun at Pancho Villas.
This Friday (the 25th) at 8pm.
Hopefully with some dancing and shenanigans at Evol afterwards in the Liquid Rooms. Please email me to let me know if you’re coming to the dinner so we can book. Hope to see you all there.
Olly & Kerry
Off to Kerry’s parents in selkirk for the Selkirk Common Riding. Back on sunday. Laters!!
I also had a job interview today for ScotWeb. They’re a web design company that does some of their own e-commerce on the side. Very nice people and a very nice company. I should hear from them tomorrow at the earliest…. I want this job!
Kerry and I went through to Glasgow to see Horse Island a band that she knows a few of the guys from. We went through on the train where they have recently installed new “automatic” gates at Edinburgh and Glasgow stations. But surprise surprise the system is flawed. If you have the big style pre-booked tickets they don’t fit into the card reader….genius.
Anyway, when we got through we thought we’d walk it to stereo, the gig venue. We consulted multi-map on one of those BT internet-enabled phones and got a vague idea of the direction. Forty minutes later…..we’re still walking. Time to get in a taxi and leave pride behind. We did get there in time to hear the band. They were very good and had nice banjo and/or ukelele bits in most of their tunes. The venue was nice although I did bizarrely find a cigar wrapper thing in my pint of 80′. Needless to day I asked for a new one.
Kerry decided to take me on the ‘clockwork orange’ on the way back. It has to be the cutest underground system ever. The cars roar into the station and I thought I wasn’t going to fit in them. Thankfully they are deceptively small on the outside. We had a mad quick drink in McSleazy’s and then grabbed a steak pie supper in the Blue Lagoon (omg so cheap) before running to catch the 10pm train back. All in all, a great night.
I actually wore my shorts today, the first time this year. I wore them whilst sat in the computer lab for five hours, woooo. I though it was kind of like bringing the sunshine indoors. Or something…
The very, very nice people at blueyonder have given all their customers a free cable upgrade! We’ve not got 1.5Mbps (~190kb/s) down, which is a nice boost, especially for free. If only they’d increase our upstream (a measly 32kb/s), thats the one that gets clogged at the moment and kills any online gaming you want to do.
Went out with the cs boys on Tuesday night and got very, very drunk (hence the two-day blog gap). We had a couple straight after the exam, all went home for a breather and then started again at about 8pm. For some very strange reason we ended up in shag-tag. *groan* This is the lowest of the low student nights (ok, theres always subway…) but its cheap and we were all too sloshed by then to care about, well, anything much. Wednesday was spent mostly recovering from acute liver poisoning..
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I have a suit!
Yes, a real jacket and trousers and everything. Never owned a suit before, never really needed one I guess. But, what with graduation and job interviews (hahahhahahha) ever aproaching I thought it would be a good idea. Its nothing fancy, just a topman off the peg one but I like it. I did have my heart set on a dark blue one with a light pin-stripe but then Kerry pointed out (in her infinite wisdom) that it wasn’t very practical. I agreed in and went for the nice and stylish plain black. I can also now play reservoir dogs whenever I want to. |
Went ceilidh-ing last night with Kerry, Flinty and the gang from work. Was good, danced a few new ones and thoroughly messed them up. I still can’t believe how rubbish the staff are at pouring pints at the freakin Caledonian Brewery venue, oh the irony.
We piled off to Opium (one of Edinburgh’s few decent alternative clubs) after the ceilidh which was a nice contrasting venue. Me and Kerry rocked our stuff on the dancefloor and left just before they closed at 3am. Went to bed knackered, got up this morning and staggered off to work. It was actually a very pleasant day at work, I hadn’t drank that much last night and I was doing the new window displays. Which is nicer then being glued to the tillpoint with an “ask me dumb questions” sign gaffer-taped to my forehead. Which is what it sometimes feels like…
Well, me and Kerry had a very nice valentines weekend. We did the whole dinner thing last Tuesday as that was our six month aniversary. It really doesn’t seem like six months, I think thats a good thing 
.
We went to The Tower restaurant in the Royal Museum and had a pretty fantastic meal. I had leek and cheese tart on leaves to start and courgette linguine with pinenuts for main course. It wasn’t veggie intentionaly, just happened to end up that way. We relaxed in the nice atmosphere there for a couple of hours and then went to the Auld Hoose to do the pub quiz, which we won! yeee-haaaaa! A gallon of beer was the prize, which, in the real world mean 8 drinks from the bar. There was six in our team so we have one each and gave the bar staff the others. They love us now.
Anyway, getting back to this weekend. It was my mate Ian’s birthday dinner at some Tapas place in the Omni Centre, so we went along and stuffed ourselves with the very yummy morsels. I has some cheese thinf, a chicken thing and a sausage thing. I still hate olives, I want so much to like them.
We basically slummed around on Saturday morning and then Kerry cooked a superb and huge breakfast. Full works, she even made me coffee (she hates it). I joined this new 24 hour dvd rental place in the evening and we rented League Of Extraordianry Gentlemen, I’d seen it in Kansas in the summer but Kerry hadn’t. I have to say, its not as bad as I remember, quite good fun infact.
Sometime on Saturday I started feeling absolutely terrible, just totally full of cold. Had a very interrupted nights sleep on Saturday and then muddled through a day at work on Sunday. I slept better last night but I kept Kerry awake with all my wriggling around. I’ve decided to miss uni today on the grounds of still not feeling 100%. Got a handin for Wednesday aswell, wish me luck…
The kerazy changeable weather of late has meant that we often leave the heating on all the time in the flat, mainly due to sheer laziness. Therefore when we’re having a warm spell it can get quite warm in my room. I’d noticed my PC was bluescreening quite a lot lately, but only last night equated it with the temperature. My CPU was pushing 60, which is far, far too hot.
I dismantled my case and found a small world that would be heaven for any dust eating mite. My exhaust fan expelled a small rugs worth of dust when I tappped it out of the window. The CPU heatsink is full of dust aswell but getting rid of that would mean turning my PC off. Anyway, with the fans cleaned and the side of the case off it runs much more smoothly and idles around 45. Still far too hot I know, but hey, I’m gonna upgrade soon.
Last night we did the usual Drooth Neebors pub quiz. As usual we didn’t wein but this week we beat alex’s team by three points! huzzah! Last week they won, so this week was a nice come-upance.
hrm, this is a small update. Oh well, back to the project work.
Well, that was a lot of fun.
I’ve finally come down from the new year kerazy party madness. You may have heard that new year was bit of a wash-out in Edinburgh, not in our flat! I had decided to throw a party and then just go watch the fireworks at 12, then carry on the fun. TBH we didn’t miss the fireworks that much, and everyone was pretty sloshed by then anyway. About 25 or so people turned up, which was pretty fun and my room got very cosy at times. Big up thanks to John for lugging up his decks and mixer, top tunes mate and fun to mess with.
I went to bed at about 4:30 after the mass exodus of people at 4am. Turned up in the morning to clean up and found a monumental haul of booze, thanks to everyone. Kerry was then providing new years day dinner for loads of people (well, six) which was very enjoyable. Huge steak pie and veggies all round. Nicely stomach settling after the night befores excesses.
We then proceeded to play the Top Of The Pops board game which Kerry got for xmas. Oh boy, “ages 10+” it said in the box and it wasn’t joking. Some questions were ridiculously easy while others were about obscure, one hit wonder girl groups from the 90s. Very random at times. Of course, the highlight of the evening was Alex and Graeme’s rendition of “I’ve got you” by Sonny and Sher in the performance round. I loll-ed, mainly because me and Kerry missed the performance square for the entire game. Oh and they went on to win the game aswell, gah!
is rubbish.
Arrrrrrr, the xmas madness is coming to an end. I would have blogged yesterday but I could not move from the sofa due to the vast amounts of turkey, pork, ham, wine etc… It was all very tasty though, big up thanks to the cooks. I got some very nice presents: shiny headphone-ninja headphones, two towers dvd, lots of chocolate, many pairs of socks, a box of lush goodies, and so on.
We were tempted to brave the crowds today and try and shop, but we went for an extremely “brisk” walk on the beach. The wind was absolutely screaming in off the sea and we ended up getting a small exfoliation session and a mouthfull of sand by the end of it. It all helped to blow (exterminate) the cobwebs though.
Tomorrow we are getting up “early” to browse the sales, Dad wants us out the door at 9 am. ho ho ho, should be interesting.
Kerry finally made me get some new shoes. After going around a few places including they very swish (but expensive) office I settled on some Duff’s at Schuh and amazingly they had them in a 12! I did spot some very nice campers, which I’d never seen before. I really liked them but £95(!) was a little out of my price bracket. Anyhoo, these will do very nicely:
What does it spell? slack!
Yes, well, I’ve, erm, been busy….yeah, busy. Its the last week of term before xmas at uni and its deadline central. Last week we did out presentation for the SLIP module, which was bit ropey but ok. I also presented my inital project progress and ideas to our group on Friday, I was really nervous but it went well!
Now I’ve got an essay to write, a project report and a wireframe teapot to finish, all for Friday.
ho-hum
Went to the fantastic Monster Mash on Forest Road in Edinburgh the other night. Very friendly, good food and great value for money. Highly recommended.
Recently, I have mostly been painting Kerry’s new room. A fine shade of white, known as ‘pure white’. When I’d finished doing the ceiling it looked like I’d been sprayed with icing sugar, everywhere.
Well, I’ve finished my full-time stretch of work at waterstones, going back to doing Sundays only. It will be quite strange and I’ll have to make myself not go in every time I walk past the place. Its not a bad job really, much better than most retail jobs. Our job title is actually book seller, we get a generous discount and on the whole its a very laid back and friendly place to work.
Things are still going super-well with Kerry, which is nice, more than nice even . She recently got me a Beastie Boys tee for just one pound from a charity shop (bargain!) and some of this:
which is just as nice.
Went to my first wedding repeption on Friday, had a fun trip out to Stirling on the train. Ruth and Archie were the happy couple, Ruth being one of Kerry’s school friends. Here we are just before going out:
awwwwwww
wait…that shirt looks familiar
entry from May 11, 2003:
> I seem to have reached a point where I really think I need a girlfriend, a real one.
girlfriend? check!
I’ve just got through sorting my Kansas holiday snaps, here you go:
http://www.cyber-junky.co.uk/?page=gallery/index.php&mode=gallery&id=25
or if you really don’t fancy wading through 100+ snaps here is a condensed gallery with my favourites:
http://www.cyber-junky.co.uk/?page=gallery/index.php&mode=gallery&id=26
hey sportsfans,
I is back, back in the UK. Managed to sleep for 15 hours last night. Damn, I needed that. I didn’t manage to take any pictures of the kerazy hail, but found a pic on one of the local newspaper’s websites:
http://www.ljworld.com/section/bigger_photo/77798
booya
i.e. there is a Manhattan in Ottawa. A Reno county in Kansas. A California street in blah. I guess with such a big country you kinda run out of names for things and so end up repeating yourself and using 1st, 2nd, 3rd street etc.
Just spent the last three days on a road-trip through western Kansas, prime cowboy country. Spent a night in the infamous Dodge City, home of many a rootin-tootin mean gunslinger. Dodge managed to smell of processed cow the whole time, not a bad smell at first but it quickly becomes off-putting. Travelled along the Santa Fe trail, saw mock gunfights, went to a zoo, went to a Mall, ate food, then ate some more food.
Newest spotted lazy-American-invention: drive-through pay-phones.
Oh and new temperature high: 42°C (oh so hot). Also had a huge thunder storm with the biggest lightning I have ever seen. Damn impressive. Then while we were away there were hail-storms in Ottawa with golf ball sized hail. We came home to find trees shredded, almost every car pock-marked with craters and numerous windscreens smashed. We were glad we were out of town.
See You Cowboy
Local Time: 4:52pm
Well, we made it in one piece. I am currently sitting in the air-conditioned lovelyness of my Aunt’s basement in Ottawa, Kansas. No mid-air collisions or random mechanical failings. Total flying time of approximately 13 hours in three different planes means I was one tired bunny last night. Although bizzarely I woke up at 7am after going to bed after midnight. I’m thinking it might catch up with me soon.
So far we’ve eaten out twice and done some random shopping in Wallmart, and american is similar in some ways but then just bad-sh*t-kerazy insane in others.
Wallmart is a prime example, 5 litre buckets (literally) of ice cream, boxes of dozens of doughnuts. Plus the wallmart is about the size of two football pitches, sells everything under the sun and is open 24 hours a day
Oh and man, is it hot. You just just out of the air conditioned car and run to the air conditioned shop. It was pushing 35+ yesterday and it doesn’t really get any cooler at night. The heat is so bad, everything is made drive-through, so you don’t have to leave your car. Drive-through banks, post offices, movies. It’s mad.
I will report more soon.
I’m off to that small country called America a week tomorrow, visiting relatives in Kansas for the first time. The first time in Kansas mind, not the first time seeing the relatives. I’ve a feeling its going to be very strange, seeing them transplanted from surburban Harrogate-Yorkshire to Ottawa-Kansas, tornado alley. They have a storm cellar, I mean, yikes. So anyway, I get a train home on Thursday and I need to sort of some of that american money, and pack and buy shorts and suncream so I don’t burn like a muppet. All very boring things which you probably won’t care about in the slightest.
This will only be the second time in an aeroplane for me that I can remember (parents went to greece when i was ~1) so I’m looking forward to all the shenanigans, the waiting, the duty free, the waiting, the cancellation, etc.
I’ve no idea what to expect of Kansas though, everyone says its flat, and hot, and windy. I shall soon find out…
So I did go out last night, contrary to the previous post. Good night aswell, ended up Opium. Which was cool as it was £1 a drink all night.
Yes, its the day after the summer soltice and hence my birthday (whoah, check out the bold). I must be some kinda hippy wild child, or maybe not. Anyhoo, it was another eventful day at work in the post-potter frenzy. Much comedy was had though with other colleagues who were all in kkkkerazy-giddy-kipper moods. After doing five days in a row my feet are killing, so much so that I actually soaked them in the bath tonight. I thought ‘soaking your feet’ was something old women did after going to the bingo or something, it was quite nice really. I really feel I should do something to celebrate tonight but I was at Kev’s fantastico cutty party last night so, hrm.