Tuesday, June 28, 2011

She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain

It’s on it’s way… I’m just a bit pre-occupied with this moving house, travelling around Switzerland and Italy, birthday party, and boating malarkey.

But not to worry, I’m only off to Scotland on Thursday, back off to Switzerland next Monday and then in Sheffield the following weekend… And then I move into my NEW house :)

So, yea, just ambling around…

switzerland

^ Switzerland

italy

^ Italy

father

^ Father

mother

^ Mother

boating

^ Boating

  • Happiness. 9 out of 10
  • Tiredness. 5 out of 5
  • Free Time. 0 out of 5
  • Last Meal. Tuna pasta
  • Song of the day. Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson – Gangster of Love
  • Thought for the day. …it’s beating twice as strong
  • What I’m Doing Now. Packing. The story of my life.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Free Cat Food

A whole week in the country! And I've spent all that time in Guildford! Since getting back from Switzerland a week on Friday life seems to have slowed down a little bit. Two lazy weekends barely leaving the house, just catching up on sleep and sorting out a few things.

Sophizzle and I

Then a week in the office getting plenty outstanding things done and starting to realise that I only have two months of this job left. And God knows they will fly by as quickly as the last 11.

Last Saturday was a bit of a laugh since I met up with Katherine for some breakfast at 1pm (what? I said it was a lazy weekend, and besides, I don't have any food in the house...). We went to Gourmet Burger Kitchen for a massive burger and even bigger Oreo milkshake! A couple hours later we left, noticeably larger than when we arrived. Then we went and opened a joint account, as you do, for the house next year. Then I was offered some free cat food and Katherine got 40% off rugs. What more could you possibly want? Well, some bread, milk and mayonnaise to get me through the week... Literally that's all I needed.

Today I'm off to Switzerland again for another 2 weeks, lots and lots of work to do! A few cool pictures will need to be taken too... this never gets old :)

My new hotel room view

  • Happiness. 8 out of 10 (leaving some room for later in the week)
  • Tiredness. 3 out of 5 (still haven't got used to this early start on Monday)
  • Free Time. 1 out of 5 (and loving every minute!)
  • Last Meal. Giraffe breakfast at the airport
  • Song of the day. Jason Wade – You Belong To Me
  • Thought for the day. You make my heart beat faster, and skip a beat somehow
  • What I’m Doing Now. On the LX317, listening to some guy whistling "loving you" by Minnie Ripperton... now that's going to be in my head for the rest of the day! Grrr..... I hate not having an MP3 player.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Special Post #49: Accommodation Series #19: Mind The Gap

and they all lived happily ever after. Except Charles who had one small problem to contend with...

#11: Mind The Gap

I have to move our of my current house on the 30th June, but the contract doesn't start in Imhotep until the 15th July. So I'm homeless for 2 weeks. Luckily, my first port of call was just the ticket.

Anne and Viv, who I lived with last year, are living together in a posh apartment in Guildford, about 20 minutes walk from my current house. I asked them if I could be so cheeky as to pinch a spot on their floor for 2 weeks and they did one better. Since Anne was actually not going to be in Guildford at all for those weeks, I could stay in her room! There is a little bit of you scratch my back here since they both lived with me for a week in my current house while they found somewhere to live... So it's a little like returning the favour :)

Anne & Viv

So the stage is set. All that worry's me now is the amount of time I might be in Switzerland in the coming weeks while I'm trying to move all my things around and live in several places. There's also several weekend trips that all add to the kerfuffle, including a long weekend in Scotland, if nothing else the next 6 weeks of my life are going to be eventful!

win

Friday, June 3, 2011

Special Post #48: Accommodation Series #18: Imhotep Is Born

part five of the nearly completed accommodation mini-series about my trials and tribulations to find a house for final year…

#9: Imhotep Is Born

We now have 6 people, a house and a contract. Operation house-for-final-year was nearing completion. The last piece of the puzzle for me was to meet the one housemate I didn't know... Simon.

simon

Simon, like Katherine and Liz, is a Mathematician going into his final year of study. He seems like a really nice guy and I finally got to meet him just a week after the deposit gubbins when it was Liz's turn to get a year older.

We all met at a local pub and ended up having a really good evening. if Katherine had been there we'd have had a full house, but it was still a great chance to chill out as a collective for the first time.

liz

There's just one small detail left in order to call the mission accomplished: a name. Every good house needs a name. Being a house of geeks, which is what we essentially are, we all love a little show called Look Around You. Produced by the BBC last decade, it's a spoof educational series that mocks those videos you used to watch in school when you had a substitute teacher. If you haven't watched any, and you like Monty Python, Blackadder, or Brass Eye, then I highly recommend it.

look around you

Our favourite episode is Maths. And since half the house are studying maths next year, it seems very appropriate. Skip to 2:46 if you just want the reference, but our new house name is IMHOTEP.

#10: Boat Bondage

To get to know everyone a bit better, and get a taster of how easy it was for us to live together, I suggested we go on a boat trip. And that's exactly what we did at the start of April. A week-long excursion from Swiss life to live up the Birmingham countryside... It seems a bit backwards to take a holiday from Switzerland in Birmingham, but I had a great time!

welcome

We all got on like a house on fire, so to speak. It's really made me look forward to living with them all! But the trip made me realise that something like that is what was missing from my house this year. I just turned up one day and started living there. No big hello, no trips, no parties... And that's maybe why our house has never felt, to me, like a home. We all go off and do our own thing, rarely around enough to wear the carpets down. While this year has been great, I'm now itching to move in with my new housemates.

Imhotep

Coming soon “Mind The Gap”

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Special Post #47: Accommodation Series #17: Don’t Panic

part four of the very long awaited (and highly anticipated) blog post telling the remarkable tale of one man’s search for Final Year university accommodation…

#8: Don’t Panic

So, quite excited with the girls find, we all convened over breakfast to discuss our next move. Breakfast being several varieties of cake of course… We all loved the house, the rooms were big and there's bucket loads of communal space. We spent a bit of time looking at who'd have each room (since there was a much bigger room and a small room to sort out) before calling the landlord and tell him we were interested.

For a few days it was quite exciting to think I had a house, and then it came time to pay the deposit. Sadly, it also came time for one of the girls to back out...

Charlotte had been unsure of where she was going to live next year, and paying a deposit on a house she wasn't sure she wanted did seem a bit crazy. So she left the group and left us with a bit of a situation: we still had a deposit to pay to secure the house...

Who you gonna call? The one person I knew who needed a room: Julie of course!

julie's face

I still felt bad about abandoning Julie just days after Soph did the same thing to both of us (yep, I'm still rubbing that wound :p), so this was the perfect chance to help her out! The room we had going was the smallest, whose rent we'd reduced to make it fairer. But Julie, being the dancer that she is, didn't really fancy a smaller room all that much... and the communal space in the house is apparently no place to be practicing your ballet moves (although I did mention I had no problems with scantily-dressed girls in the living room). So Julie gracefully declined. But that still left us with a space to fill…

“Will received a text from Charlotte early in the day, and so made plans to head into Guildford to talk with Charlotte face-to-face, and talk with his remaining IMHOTEPians about a plan of action. When he arrived at Guildford station (from Chobham) he happened to see a guy called Simon having a cuppa tea whilst waiting for his train. Katherine and Liz know Simon from their course (as he is a fellow Mathematician). A more superstitious man would cite fate for this most chance of meetings... So Will put forward the situation to Simon in about 3 minutes flat, with a promise to contact him if Charlotte was really backing out…” (Will’s personal account)

and the rest, as they say, is history. 72 hours later the deed was done and the deposit was paid. Imhotep, was born…

coming soon: part nine “Imhotep Is Born”

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Special Post #46: Accommodation Series #16: Proposition 101

part three of the longest awaited post in the history of this blog. So what are we waiting for, let’s do it…

#6: Proposition 101

They say what goes around comes around... Well several weeks after helping Katherine and her housemates pair up with Mike Frazer (of Mike Frazer fame), I got a phone call...

Mike Frazer, before he was famous

Will (one of my old housemates from last year) called me up and asked what my plans were for final year housing. I explained to him about Julie and how it wasn't exactly going to plan. Will on the other hand had paired up with Katherine and Mike, making their cohort a nice round 5, which is a good number for a student house in Guildford, hence why my last 2 houses have had 5 people. But they had a problem, Katherine and her housemates (who will be given names I promise) had been looking at a lot of 6 person student houses and wondered if I would join them...

5 people

Since this was only a week after Sophie had dropped out of our plans it was hard for me to decide to leave Julie too, since what kind of friend would I be kicking her while she's down. But after a looooooong conversation with Julie, she understood that it made sense and she'd just have to find another house to live with.

unsure Julie

So I called Will back up and signed myself in to the group:

Katherine - Mathematician, does Madtv
Charlotte - ex-mathematician, now a waitress
Liz - Mathematician, ginger :p
Mike - Civil engineer, founder of Madtv
Will - Chemist, ex-housemate, also ginger
And Me - Electronic engineer, does Madtv, not ginger

All this happened the weekend back in January that i went to Cardiff, and the following weekend was our first house viewing!

#7: If the hat fits…

Ok, so i say it was our first viewing, technically the girls had looked at a few others already. But this was the first one we all looked at together.

I had my reservations right away when I found out how far away from uni it was, but I persevered. Unlike other 6-bedroom houses, this house had a very reasonably sized living room, and dining room for that matter. A modern kitchen, 2 bathrooms, a veranda… A VERANDA! We have to get this house!! So we did.

coming soon: part 8 “Don’t panic”