bits 'n' pieces

So here's what's been happening recently.

I went down to Newbury a few weeks ago to meet up with some school friends. Good times (and the apparently near-mythical "cheese and potato" dish from the local curry house) were had. We finally made it to James' favourite end-of-night venue, Liquid (for the Durham people, think Rixies, but with southern prices). Accenture pays for James to stay in a very nice new flat complete with broadband and Sky.



I finally got a date for my viva which is the 9th February at 2pm. One way or another I'm going to be absolutely hammered by about 9pm that night and with a bit of luck I might actually be a doctor.

I finally got my hands on a Wii today. I'll put up some videos of me flailing around later. Originally the controls were a let down and after all the hype I was almost as disappointed as when I found out that the free bottle of wine from Pizza Perfect was in fact Lambrini (it's not wine!!!!!), but thankfully a few tweaks of the sensitivity setting and I'm getting respectable scores in Wii bowling and Wii golf.

To complete my list of 2006 films I received and watched Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend. It's absolutely fabulous and fully deserves its Oscar nominations that were announced today. See it as soon as you can - it's got the line "Get me some porn; get me something really nasty too; I don't want any of that airbrushed shit." from the families grandfather so how can it be bad?

The UK pound is on a rampage and is so close to reaching the fabled £1=$2 mark. Unfortunately even if it does I'm too poor to go on a spending spree (or any kind of spree for that matter) and it also means that the 30,000-odd yen I've still got (value at time of purchase £150) is now worth considerably less...

My parents have picked up a bit of steam in tidying the house (it still feels very topsy turvy to say that). They seem to think that an hour a week will do it and for most people this might be true. However, if I were to say that whilst cleaning out a kitchen cupboard I found an OPEN packet of naan bread mix with a best before date of 1983 (yes that should read eighty three) you can maybe see the problem.

Finally, I've started listening to the Unknown Quantity "best of" album The Blend again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. We played quite a few gigs and recorded 2 CDs - and in 1998 that was pretty good going. It still fills me with wonder that we managed to do and I think those CDs probably still stand s the achievement I'm most proud of - 1st class degree? so what - nobody cared but me, but people actually seemed to like the songs. I'll try and find some hosting to share the songs and dig out the old photos in the next few days. So I'll finish with my one contribution to the lyrics: if life came with a receipt, would you take it back?