Photos from my trip with Heather to North Wales for a long weekend break

The mail arrived before 8 o’clock this morning for the first time ever in my area. Could this be a new trend? Is this an indirect sympathy response to my Harry Potter post? Who knows. It certainly would help me if Royal Mail did get their act together and do early deliveries as then I’d get all my mail before work/uni and save myself the huge trek down to the sorting office, which considering their opening hours is no fun at all.

What I do know for sure though is that my Harry Potter book arrived this morning and I’m already reading it 😀

Many congratulations to Simon and Ester who got married yesterday at St. Georges church, Leeds. I wish them all the best for their future together.

My copy of the latest Harry Potter book didn’t arrive this morning when it was supposed to, even though I’d ordered it back in February from Amazon. A Royal Mail van turned up with a parcel but there was only one and it was for Kat (my old housemate).

I’m very disappointed in both Amazon and Royal Mail – if I’d known this was going to happen I would have queued outside a bookshop last night. Now I’m going to have to become a hermit just to avoid all the reviews and spoilers that are already abound in every kind of media imaginable, not to mention word of mouth. I almost didn’t dare read the papers this morning. This sucks 🙁

Its seems that every single house around us is being gutted at present and the noise is terrible! We live in a back to back terrace house and there is work going on in the two houses to the right, the house behind and two houses along to the left (although the two houses next to us on the left are thankfully quiet.

What makes the noise so noticable and thus so annoying is the fact that all the major house walls are connected, so bang on them with any great force (for example to rip out an old kitchen) and you can be heard down the whole street. When this is happening in a load of houses at once it makes you want to stay out of the house as much as possible. Thankfully because I’m working I can do that most of the time, but it doesn’t make a pleasant wake up call in the mornings.

I was speaking to Heather last night and she told me that she’d found a really cool website called 43 Things. I was amazed because I discovered 43 Things ages ago and just figured that everyone knew about it by now but actually it turns out very few people do.

For those not in the know, 43 Things is a site that allows you to set goals to achieve in your life, comment on them, share them with other people, find out who else has the same goal and get support from people who have acheived it. In the past I have found it to be a big inspiration and confidence boost. The funny thing was I hadn’t registered on the site myself and last night I realised I didn’t know why so this morning I remedied that and set up my account.

For those interested, here is a link to my profile on 43 Things. There’s not much on it yet but I’ve added a few things I saw on the site that I’d like to do and will add more soon. If you have a 43 Things profile, why not share it in comments.

I now have a new landline number. My old SkypeIn number, although convenient, no longer reflected my location and it was becoming tiresome having to use one of my computers to answer the phone and then not having the call quality that affords a proper landline phone. I rectified this today by getting a proper dedicated landline installed. You can see the number on my contact page. Please update your address books if you previously had my 020 number stored – while it is still active, when it comes up for renewal I intend to let it lapse.

You may have noticed my lack of blogging recently, and in fact my distinct lack of online activity. This has been due almost entirely to the amount of hours I have been putting into the X-Lab project. We’ve had a few tight deadlines lately for some of the project milestones and with the lead developer away on holiday I have been entirely responsible for the direction of everything this last week, which included a meeting with key IT people at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield. I’m very glad I took on the job though, my work with X-Lab has been stimulating and enjoyable, and its great to be so deep into a project so soon, even if it has been a steep learning curve.

When the weekend came around through it was time to really put the busy week behind me and we held another big house party on the Saturday. Amazingly the weather afforded us a dry afternoon for our BBQ which extended into a warm dry evening where the beer flowed freely and the music played loudly. Although a little more rowdy than our last party (due mainly to the attendance of a large proportion of the univerisity rock society) it was great fun and another huge success for us. I’d also invited Alannah Jones and James Flinders from York over for the festivities as well and it was great to see them after so long. They also seemed to have a great time as well.

As the saying goes; work hard, play hard. I certainly managed it last week!

The final party of the weekend of madness was Kat’s birthday party at Baraka’s. It was finally a chance to stop travelling and sit down for an all you can eat buffet dinner, wine and some good discussion with my friends from Leeds. Its a while since I’ve been to Baraka’s but I wasn’t disappointed. The smoking ban has dented customer numbers a little bit due to the lack of shisha but it was still a very enjoyable place to be, especially with an abundance of food, comfotable seating and accounts of weekend antics – mainly comments about Norm’s house party on the Friday which was one of the livliest parties for a while.

The amount the floor was shaking in Norm’s lounge was one of the hot topics of discussion and the number of inchs moved was disputed, but we were all agreed that it was one of the most floor moving experiences we had ever encountered. The prospect of Chris getting a set of speakers that would go louder still was a rather worrying revelation.

My weekend of partying was superb fun but with a week of work ahead of me its not something I’d do on a regular basis. Still, its nice to know that I can live up to the student “party animal” reputation when required 🙂

The second party of the weekend was Debi’s birthday party which also doubled as a reunion for some of my old friends from school. It was one of those evenings where you are not quite sure what to expect as I hadn’t seen everyone for ages but it was actually really cool and people were just like I’d always remembered them.

Sadly I was a little tired due to the previous evenings antics so I wasn’t quite at my best but I still managed to speak with most in attendance and find out what everyone had been up to. We also relived some of the classic school moments which was really good fun – once you are off at uni its easy to forget how much stupid stuff you got up to when at school and how much fun it really was.

Although I brought my camera along with me I didn’t manage to get any photos, mainly because there weren’t many opportunities but I did find a good one from facebook which I thought summed up the evening nicely. All in all it was great party planning by Debi and it was superb seeing everyone again. I most solemly resolve to keep in better touch than I have done these last few years!