Spring '08

I've been neglecting this blog a little - the updates are spread further and further apart. Maybe that comes from having a new job that makes me work longer hours, or maybe Facebook updates make having a blog a little less needed.

Anyway, here are a few highlight of what I've been up to for the past few months:

Christmas was nice - visited home and spent a family christmas with my new niece and Jo's mum visited too. We watched the burning of the clocks on brighton beach again.






Omid Djali at the Brighton Dome - we'd been watching his TV show and seen his stand up on other shows, but his live show was a little meh.

My 30th Birthday - had a big meal at Iguanas (16 people on our table). I love that place, nice food, but especially their 2 for one coctails. Sumit did me an amazing picture for my present - online here.



Then I also had a mini celebration at home.



Always like to take some baby photos when I'm visiting my nieces. Grace has grown so much bigger already!




Mark Ronson at Brighton Dome was one of the best gigs I've ever been to - excellent guest vocalists, string section and horns.



Had to use up my year's holiday allocation and didn't have time or cash to do anything too fancy so we went to Devon. A highlight was a visit to Buckfast Butterflies and Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary.



Jo's colleague had a wedding up north - we combined that with a visit to Cotswolds & Oxford.




For Christmas, Jo had bought me a Raclette set - basically a hotplate that you can cook your food on while you eat. As an excuse to finally use it we had a Raclette Party, and it went really well - lots of nice food and melted cheese.



April brought snow to Brighton, loads of people built snowmen - and even the beach was coated in snow. I took som cool snow photos.



More recently we visited our friends Linda & Kris and their new baby, William. In a bizzare coincidence, Kris said a google search turned up my blog when he did a seach trying to find out the difference between tangarines and clementines.

And just this week we saw Havana Rakatan at the Brighton Dome for an evening of salsa dancing an music. They were very good and we had front row tickets - quite strange to be quite so close to the performers!

So, there we go, all up to date!

General likes at the moment:
TV: still Flight of the Conchords, Lost (the episode with Desmond is brilliant), Terminator

Films: Enchanted, Stardust, Shoot Em Up
Music: Best of Bootie, Mark Ronson, other cover versions, Regina Spektor

Radio: Russell Brand, Aneas Faversham

I got ham, but I'm not a Hamster

Just this week we saw Bill Bailey on his Tinselworm tour. The title of this post refers to his reworking of The Killer's lyric "I got soul, but I'm not a soldier".



Aaaaaanyway, traveling back in time to my previous post, the same night of our finance conference, my sister had her second baby, also my second Niece, Grace.





Other things of recent note:

I went for a visit to a powerstation up north with work. Quite interesting.

I cleared some scrubland for a volunteering day out with work. And burnt all the gauze on a nice big bonfire.

I saw my ex-radio partner Tom Davies on stage in Brighton performing Victorian flavoured sketch show "Aneas Faversham" with the Penny Dreadfuls. It was very funny stuff, reminding me a little of the early League of Gentlemen.

I saw the fantastic Slava's Snowshow at the Theatre Royal, Brighton - an incredible clowning performance, with lovely methods of interacting with the audience.



I got free tickets to see Comedian Shaun Hughes, who was performing as part of the Brighton comedy festival.

My friend Sumit had his 30th birthday in London at a pub in North London where I met some old school contempories who I've not seen in 11 years. I found out that another bloke in my year is in the England rugby squad. The next day I saw Transformers with Sumit at the Imax cinema. The fast moving kinetic pace of the film hurt my eyes, trying to take it all in on such a vast screen.

We stayed in on 5th November to watch the fireworks from Hove Cricket ground (the largest local display). We had great views and were able to enjoy them from the comfort of a nice warm comfy chair with nibbles! (Jo and Ben came to visit for that).

And last weekend I met up with Tom again, to see his girlfriend perform at the Komedia, as one half of the very funny Girl and Dean.


These are my current diversions:

TV: Flight of the Conchords
DVD: Deadwood season 3
Music: Nouvelle Vague

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, its someone who finds out that he has to present the ice-breaker activity at his work's annual conference in front of 120 ish people, with only half an hours notice.

I was on the organising committee, and had prepared this fun activity based on "Top Trumps" - on my powerpoint slide are photos of two members of the finance team with various categories underneath. The audience have to guess who has the highest score in a selected category, before it is revealed. The compere for the day was supposed to present all this, and had (apparently, though there is no evidence of this) been practicing his timing etc. Then on the morning of the conference he phones to say he was ill and won't be coming... So as the person who prepared the slides, I have to step up and present the slides...



With no practice of presenting the slides (apart from checking they didn't have any errors or anything) I hadn't practiced the timing, so I rushed through them a wee bit, but the audience seemed to enjoy it, and I got some nice feedback from people about it - attendees filled in a questionnaire for the day, and my activity got one of the highest ratings.

Then in the evening, we had a nice do - with a meal, a band and DJ, with Nintendo Wiis to play, and of course, fancy dress. The theme was "famous characters".


^
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Me with the rest of the Justice League

I even made up this card as part of my costume:

So that was the summer...

After we got back from our visit to Kenya (see previous post), we found out we'd passed our Strategic level exams. Hurrah!

We had a couple of visits - first from me mate Dave, who joins my other friends Will & Tom in thinking it would be a great idea to go off and live in Australia. Ironically, the only Australian friend I have, Jlo, thought it would be a great idea to come and live London.

The second visit was from Danny - on the Saturday night we go out in Brighton and meet up with some friends, all of whom are on Facebook. Jo gets jealous that she is being left out of this exclusive club, and promptly joins up the next day. The next day, as we're walking down the beach with Danny, we bump into the Brighton carnival (www.brightoncarnival.co.uk), a funny event, and an example of the kind of random thing you encounter on a regular basis down here.

A couple of weeks later, Lin & Krish had a BBQ at their new place, and combined it with a game of rounders in the park, and water-balloon fighting. I was envious of their George Forman outside grill.

The most exciting news of the summer though was our moving house (well, flat). We were moving up the property ladder, indeed up the property stairs too, to a bigger flat on a different floor of the same building that we've been living in since we moved down here. It's a lot bigger, and we now have space for visitors to stay, so they don't have to walk thru our bedroom if they want to use the loo in the middle of the night! It was fairly stressful sorting out all the paperwork, legal stuff etc, as these things invariably are, but all came together in the end. We moved most of the stuff ourselves, with the help of my brother and his girlfriend, and got in some removal people to help with the "big stuff". We thought the sofa bed would cause the biggest trouble, but in the end they just dismantled the bed part and stuck it in the elevator.

Of course, now we're in the place, there's loads to do, sorting out painting, light fittings, furniture and all the rest. Almost immediately after moving in we painted the hall, kitchen and toilet white, which really brightened up those rooms. Jo's mum came to visit for a few days, still in recovery from her broken wrist. She instructed Jo on how to wallpaper, and now our living room has some stylish wallpaper at both ends. Getting paint that matches however, has been problematic - B&Qs colour matching service gave a colour way too dark, and there are about 5 different colours from various tests dotted about the wall.

Just last weekend we had our first proper guests over for a moving in and saying goodbye party, as Karo & Robert are joining the ranks of our friends that have gone off travelling. They had just had vaccinations which meant they couldn't drink, leaving it up to me to make up for everyone else. They brought over their Nintendo Wii and we had fun playing with that - Jo taking to the boxing game a little too easily.

Now we've just got to do our TOPCIMA case study exam next week, the last of the exams we need to take before becoming qualified management accountant. Then no more studying - whoop de whoop. Just in time for Autumn.

Also, I've just made a website for University Radio Exeter alumni - http://www.geocities.com/urerewind/
The site aims to bring together all the various links, and materials relating to URE that are floating about on the internet, with a bit of a bias to the time i was there). If anyone wants anything added, let me know.
You can tell i'm supposed to be studying, I get distracted easily.