Oookay, it’s been a while since the last blogtacular update but I have been kind of busy.
I managed to get all of my moving stuff sorted out and I am now (happily?) settling in at Leeds – both the city and the University. It’s kind of weird living by myself, but my flat is so hella-awesome that it makes up for it.
Quite a few things have happened over the past couple of months, some of them with pics (and videos) to go with them.
There was a SingStar extravaganza at Irina’s place before I left Manchester for good:
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| SingStar Party |
This was followed by the eventual move itself and all the stress involved with that:
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| The big move |
This left me with a couple of days of unpacking etc until actually starting at work. So far, there has been plenty to learn and lots of new people to meet. There seem to be SO MANY meetings that I have to go to but there was a very useful NGS face to face meeting in Leeds, which meant I got to meet almost everyone who is involved with the running of NGS.
I haven’t actually got to see much of Leeds itself – I have been good and not gone out on a “school night” and seem to have been sepnding my weekends elsewhere. Vijay came for a weekend visit, which was really an excuse to get some help from me with some course work. I introduced him to Doxygen, which apparently impressed a lot of people with its auto-generated PDF documentation for his source code. Cool-e-oh.
Nicki was over from US and A with her family, including the new addition, Blaney. I have to say, he is possibly the cutest baby I have ever seen… Well done Nicki 
I managed to find time to go to the Leeds Barenaked Ladies concert at the start of this month. Dragged Mitch along as well and, predictably, enjoyed it very much. BNL always put on a good show. I wish I had taken more pics, but I thought that they wouldn’t come out properly. Guess my phone is better than I thought.
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| Barenaked Ladies |
The Easter weekend was good. The university was closed from Thursday afternoon ’til Wednesday morning. I had Aradhna and her two (awesome) housemates, Janine and Sophia, round for basically a weekend of Wii/Gamecube/SingStar fun. Vijay turned up for some of it as well. Amazingly, we managed to get out of the flat at some point and even managed to make it (on foot!) to the local park where we managed to have fun on our improvised “obstacle course”. I didn’t take any pictures of this stuff for some reason, but Janine did. We then moved on the the skate park for our races, and ended up with injuries all round… happy days. I did take some “food porn” pictures though:
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| Steamed, Fried Dumplings |
Oh yeah… WOKMANIA in Leeds totally sucks. Never, ever, ever go there.
Last, but by no means least, I spent the last weekend in Blackpool. Kitu and Piku, as always, were brilliant. Seriously, the best kids I have ever known. Their little brother, Krish, is getting on as well. Approaching his 1st birthday and walking already. He can’t quite speak yet, but manages to voice his displeasure at my presence in his house quite clearly. Once we can have a sensible conversation, he’ll come round – bribery will save the day if nothing else. One of the highlights was the appearance of a quad bike for the weekend… I loved this thing. Some of the girls (i.e. Vijay and Piku) fell off, and to be fair I cam close a couple of times, but there was no permanent damage… just more bruises to add to the ones from playing around over Easter.
And that’s about it. A lot to cover in such a short space. I’ll try to keep up with things as they happen from now on. Should be easier now that I’m settled in.
One last thing. I stumbled across a site that asks you a bunch of stupid questions to tell you which Star Wars character you are. This is how it turned out for me:
While I’m not sure I identify with this too much, it did remind me of my realisation that R2 D2 is basically the same as Kenny in South Park. I’m convinced that he’s a foul mouthed little devil, but nobody (apart from C3PO) has any idea what he’s saying…. not too hard to fill in the obscenities though.
Click the link and see who you are. I know it’s stupid, but it’s kind of fun
