Not Working

A lot of the time I'm supposed to be working, but instead I find myself playing video games where you get to turn guns into hats. Other times I frustrate my cat and wish it loved me more. Also I watch breaking bad. Or at least I did, until I finished it earlier today. What did we learn from breaking bad? Here's a list:

• Human beings are nasty pieces of work
• When I say "Yes, I love you too," to a cat who is meowing disdainfully and trying to escape my clutch, I am bit like Walter White.
• Everybody is a bit like Walter White
• Hmmmm...

It's a series I thoroughly recommend. Claire Lovell, on the other hand, recommends that I do some work. Or at least something more wholesome that pretending to shoot people, watching people pretend to shoot people and antagonising God's innocent creatures. So here we are, indulging in the ageless pleasure of the written word.

I tried to update my blog like a week ago, but it just ended up being like a two page account of a train journey into London. I spent around an hour and a half writing it, but for your sake I have condensed it into a bullet pointed summary:

• I was trying to catch the 7:30 train to Doncaster
• I had to run for the bus
• I missed my stop
• I ran to the station. My hat fell off
• I had to renew my railcard. A very slow old lady was doing it. I took a free mince pie.
• I only just got my train. There was a funny bit with a lift.
• I realised I should actually have been rushing for the 7:00 to Doncaster, which meant that all my rushing had been pointless
• I ate the mince pie in Doncaster
• I started to freak out, then stopped after I realised that I had two bank accounts
• I missed a train because I was on the wrong side of the platform. My train stopped directly behind me and I turned around just in time to see it leave.
• I spent a while lamenting over how inept I was.
• I got on a very late train. The conductor wished me a merry Christmas and let me get on with the wrong ticket.

Hooray!

A couple of weeks ago I became the proud owner of a 'Hungry Hummer' kazoo, made by the wonderful Doc Kazoo himself.

Doc Kazoo is basically the king of wooden kazoos and customer service. The whole process was wonderfully personalised and the kazoo is definitely the best I have every played.

I like the kazoo so much that I worry about it. Sometimes I feel like I'm playing it really well and that it is the greatest instrument of all time. Other times I'll be playing it not so well and I'll begin to worry that it was never as good as I imagined, and that kazoos can never be good instruments. There's this tiny fissure (like barely visible) along the grain of the wood that seems to have been caused by the screw. It's probably fine, but I have this horrible image of the kazoo just breaking in half one day. I'm always noticing tiny imperfections on its surface, which I know I've caused, but I'm not sure how. It's like every time I touch it, I make it less perfect and bring it closer to falling apart entirely.

I'm in a similar position with my new hat. Today I picked it up and felt like the brim had bent out of shape a little bit. It definitely hasn't.

Christmas was way fun and hanging out with my family is way cool, but I'm actually feeling increasingly eager to get back to my friends at university. I feel like hat wearing and kazoo playing is met with most enthusiasm amongst my friends in Sheffield, and I long for them to share in my materialistic joy. Sometimes I wish that all the people I love could live in some kind of colony, so that all my friends could be friends. I guess that would also make me the most popular person there, so I would have to be in charge.

Sometimes I think about writing things other than just this blog, but enjoying writing and even being good at it are different things from being able to write anything worth reading. Constructing a narrative is an entirely different skill to simply expressing things that are already in your brain. If I was going to write something, it would be a story about a hard boiled detective who was also a duck. This would pass the time and satisfy Claire Lovell's demands that I invest my time more wisely, but would it be any good? Who even knows. I guess good writing is the product of the mistakes learned from bad writing. Speaking of bad writing, does anybody know if bullet-points need full stops? They seem somehow exempt in my book, but I can't really justify this at all. I tend, as you may have noticed, to punctuate some and not others.

For a while I found myself putting large, square full stops at the end of my sentences, but that was an unusual period.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Goings On

This whole last week I've been off my game. I've been a little bit under the weather, like super bunged up in the mornings and super lethargic in the evenings. It kind of disappears in the afternoon, which I'm grateful for, but the half hour just after I've woken up is a sorry time of the day. If you'd like to pray for me, I won't try and stop you or anything. Illness, however, isn't actually the area in which my game is most off. Regrettably, I've used these slight symptoms as a measly excuse for my own lack of discipline. Work shyness has overtaken me a little lately, and there are some assignments due over the next couple of days that will testify to my poor diligence if I don't resolve to spend my time more wisely in future.

Still, plenty of stuff is going very well. Let me tell you about how I am very clever:
My group built and programmed an electronic lock before anybody else. We are the best.

I found that business pretty enjoyable. Learning to write in C (or C++ or something), soldering junk and thinking critically to create a program - those were all pretty engaging and enjoyable things. Apparently next year the course I'm on allows you to choose very freely from a wide variety of modules, so hopefully I can do some more stuff like that in future. Regardless, it seems inevitable that the future will house a plenitude of differential equations which gradually increase in order and demand to be solved.

I need to get the new Beautiful Eulogy album.

I mean, chaes. I wrote a haiku about it:

In the library
The silence of regretting
I have no headphones

Haikus are the next big thing. They're like poems but much easier. I read a good one about a pigeon, but now I cant find it.

I'm off to flyer for the carol service now. The carol service is on Wednesday and you should all come with your friends and aunts and uncles. This said, I'm suspicious that both of my Facebook friends who live in Sheffield will already know this.

My flatmate just called me, he says he arrived at our flat a minute ago to find that the doors were open and everything was gone.

I don't really know what to say. I mean, who would do that to somebody else's advent calendar?

HA HA HA

The speaker at C.U told that joke yesterday, and it was totally brilliant. He was one of the most jovial chaps I've ever met. He had a ridiculous amount of books and some very vivid eschatological ideas. It was interesting to hear his opinions and entertaining to hear his jokes. I can't remember his name.

Hey it's tomorrow now and I've been working hard watching videos about transfer functions. Good job. I brought paper and headphones into university today, which means I can write things and listen to tutorial videos.

Well, that's about it. Nothing super interesting is really going down, but I'll keep you posted. Also I'm feeling a lot better from ill today. Good.

Good.

Good.

Yes.

Doughnut Brunch

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because you get to have cereal. Lunch is the second most important meal because it is closest to breakfast and if you are at home you can have cereal again. At the minute, however, I'm out of milk, out of cereal and out of the house. This means that I didn't get any breakfast, and so I have had to conjoin both the most important meals of the day into one super important meal, which is a doughnut brunch. A doughnut brunch is when you have doughnuts for brunch so you don't get hungry. John also gave me some animal biscuits, and I shared some of my doughnuts with him. That way we are both getting a balanced diet.

I've got ten hats. The latest arrival to the hat family is a sick up Navy Peruvian beanie from our friends at Jaxon hats. It arrived shortly before C.U house party, which is good because Isaac Stovell said that he would try to bring more hats than me, and the addition of the aforementioned beanie to the ranks of my more portable and packable hats was the only thing that enabled me to beat his respectable count of five. More about house party later.

Another bonus of beanie ownership is that it is a winter hat which protects me from the cold, which is just as well because it has been snowing. Yes for real, snowing. I've probably said some stupid things about the North of England before in a tactless attempt to be funny, and I would like to publicly renounce all those things now. The North can be my friend. It snows here and it is where I live. Admittedly the snow lasted all of an hour or so, but in that time it managed to settle on what had been wet ground, so I have high hopes for things to come.

Hey who wants to hear a funny story? Everyone? Good.

The other morning as I staggered, half dressed and half awake, from my bedroom to the shower, I thought I saw an old lady in the kitchen talking to my flat mate. Needless to say, I scurried away rather hastily and hid myself in the bathroom. Whilst showering, I reflected on this unusual ordeal and said to myself, "There can't be an old lady in my kitchen, it's half past seven in the morning. I've only been awake for five minutes and I probably just imagined it."

Such was my confidence in this theory that upon exiting the shower I thought nothing of strolling across the hallway in nothing but a towel. This was, after all, a flat populated entirely by men, in which old ladies would have no business at such an hour. Passing the kitchen on the way back, I glanced again through the internal window. My senses had not deceived me, she was definitely there.

I decided that it would be a good time to put some clothes on. I got dressed and wandered cautiously towards the kitchen to investigate. Upon opening the door, my trust in my senses dissipated once again. There were now, it seemed, at least six ladies between the ages of 45 and 60 crammed into the kitchen, smiling politely and wishing me a good morning. My flatmate stood somewhere in the middle of them, looking sheepish and disorientated.

After a few moments of stunned yet friendly silence, one of the women revealed that she and her companions were cleaning ladies, and that if it was all right they would like to use our kitchen for breaks. "It'll only be three days a fortnight." said one. Her manner was so dear and her face so kindly that I agreed wholeheartedly without really realising that three days a fortnight is actually quite a lot of days.

"Just do whatever it is you normally do love, don't let us get in the way." said one of the cleaners. I'm not really sure what she thought I normally used the kitchen for, but it's not really physically possible to do most of them with more than seven people between you and the sink.

Well, that was a pretty long winded account of a mostly trivial affair. Then again, what were you expecting? In the spirit of distributing words inversely to the importance of their subject, here's a short hand summary of a weightier event:
C.U house party was a sick jam. Praying, singing, fellowshiping, bonfiring, japery and the like. The gospel is exciting business, and it's not getting any less good. I met a high class fiend by the name of Lindsay Brown. Just for the record, he's not really a fiend I use that term expressively to denote admiration and respect. I didn't know at the time, but it turns out he's an old friend of my parents. He's back at events week (WOOP), so I'll say hi to him then.

Aight good. Text-a-toastie is being hosted in my flat tonight, which is exciting because there will be a lot of people in my kitchen. Like more than when those cleaning ladies were there. Many more. If there's a fire, we'll all just fall over each other and die. Pray that nobody dies and that a lot of people have fun, hear the gospel and have misconceptions dealt with. Good job, have fun!

Maximum Activities

I get to do so many activities and have lots of fun 24/7. It's the flippin' prime time of my life. Sure the work load is picking up a little, but that basically just means that I get to learn interesting things. Did you know that there's this alternate dimension where differential equations are like ten times easier to manipulate? It's called Laplaceland. You can drag difficult equations, kicking and screaming, to this alternate plane where you can rearrange them any how you like, and then magic their limp bodies back into the real world of actual maths, at which point they agree to stop being so difficult. It means that systems engineers can tell you about car seats if you tell them about all the stuff underneath the car seats like suspension and tyres.

Let me tell you about activities that I get to do. Yesterday was Monday, which means C.U, which means maximum fun with my Christ loving home boys/girls. Some guy was trying to tell me that Jesus is like a snake on a pole. Also that I had died and was hidden in him. Crazy. Directly after the meeting was CITY WIDE TEXT-A-TOASTIE, a truly all-caps worthy event. In case you don't know, text-a-toastie is where anyone can text in with a question about Christianity and stuff and get a free toastie with their answer. It is really fun and very exciting, you meet all kinds of people and clear up all kinds of misconceptions. Word is that people have been going to church with flat mates and reading through gospels following these events. That is my jam. Have you read any gospels? You should, you dingus.

Friday is a good day, because there's usually gospel choir, followed by a roughly 50% of ceilidh. Probably one of the things I love the most about living here is that there is a ceilidh about five minutes from my house around once a fortnight. I love it. Gospel choir facilitates similar levels of fun. We getting ready for Christmas with bad boys such as this, and next week I'm taking the warm up, during which everybody is going to learn how to sing Daft Punk's 'Lose Yourself to Dance'. Gospel choir is fun because nothing gives me kick like singing songs that have different parts in them. It sounds very nice. Apparently Bach thought that harmonies and melodies and stuff are beautiful because they reflect the perfectly united and multifaceted beauty of God in his triune form. I have been reading a very interesting short book called 'The Good God' by Michael Reeves. It is all about how the trinity is not like an egg or a three leafed clover, but is a lot like a God who does not need anything because he overflows, and has created and loves human beings because his very nature is to radiate goodness, creativity and love. Basically the doctrine which we so often avoid because it is confusing gives us a fundamentally better understanding of God. I don't want to keep going on about it, but I totally want to keep going on about it. Good book, better God.

I want to start a hat society, but you can't be a society by yourself. I've met a few people with a growing interest in head wear, and I feel like in due time perhaps the dream could become a reality, but it's probably best not to rush. My friend Joe is interested in starting a Kazoo Orchestra, which of course I am also interested in. Both of these prospective societies excite me, and hopefully they excite other people also, because then they will become a reality. I would like them to both happen on the same day. If there was one day of the week where I sang and danced and another day where I wore hats and played the kazoo, my life would be even better than it is now. I guess the best thing about these activities is that I can do all of them every day, which will probably be the case once I found a shop in Sheffield that sells kazoos. Still, organised kazoo playing and hat wearing is good.

Hey, know what else I'm doing this week? I'm going home to London! If you are cool and live in London, we may soon be reunited. If you are Ruth Lovell, then I especially look forward to seeing you.

Hat summary:
I lost my flat cap whilst having fun in museums with my boy Tim Rothon, but I can buy another one from any old charity shop. Also, Claire Lovell has been busy accumulating lost hats for me in London, and it pleases me to announce that upon my return to Sheffield next week, I will be donning / carrying my Fez and Tim Platt Cowboy hat. This will bring my hat collection up to nine hats, assuming I replace the flat cap any time soon. Tantalisingly close to double digits. I'll have to make a cake when that happens.

Wizards only, keep it tight.

Things I am Eating

Mostly I'm just eating cereal and watching Breaking Bad. Just currently my entire cereal stash is Granola, because it is exciting and has little fruity bits in, but is relatively cheap. One of the high points of my Saturday last week was buying two packs of Jordan's Raisin and Almond Crunchy Oat Granola, which has a wonderful texture but lacks the banana chip bonus of its Tesco value counterpart. It was on offer, which made them both about the same price. The offer wasn't a two for one or anything, I'd just convinced myself that one packet wasn't enough. To be fair, it probably wasn't - I've gotten through a quarter of my entire supply in less than 48 hours.

Hey, guess what else was on offer. You can't. It was Cravendale. In case you don't know, Cravendale is like regular milk, but filtered to make it super pure and good. My flatmate who grew up on a dairy farm says he doesn't think it's anything special, but how would he know? I don't normally buy it because I have more sense than money, but a couple of days ago it was reduced to the point of being cheaper than regular milk. With two kilograms of high quality granola and four litres of Cravendale in his inventory, it's hard for a man to limit himself to just one breakfast per day.

You probably expect this whole post to be about things I've consumed in the last couple of days, and why disappoint? Yesterday evening I made a prizza. Like the dough and everything. It's pretty easy really. I had to borrow some cheese from my flatmate yesterday, and today I traded him a calzone for some more. I'm basically becoming a pizza master.

What else stuff am I eating? Nothing, really, unless you count ceilidhs. You shouldn't count them though, because they are a dance, and not a food. You cannot eat them. However, you can attend them, which is what I have been doing as often as possible. Sheffield University has a ceilidh (Kay-lee) society, and they run them about once a fortnight. The last one was on Friday, and it was super wild. I had to help my friend John ask for a partner (the trick is to be speedy and needy). Don't tell my mum, but I did like five dances with the same girl. That isn't really what you're supposed to do, and nor is it something that I wanted to do. Normally at the end of a dance there's this mutual understanding that you'll both go your separate ways and find other partners. Most of the fun of ceilidhs is the excitement of avoiding being left on your lonesome whilst everyone scrambles past each other looking for partners. This young lady didn't really seem to know about that, but fortunately John came to my aid and swapped partners with me, thus restoring balance to the ceilidhverse. Probably the weirdest part of the evening was towards the end. A crazy dance was about to start, and I was without a partner. Ladies without partners were in short supply. It looked as if I would have to sit this one out.

Suddenly, a girl across the room caught my eye. She was wearing a black dress with white polka dots and sipping elegantly on a glass of red wine. "Are you sitting this one out?" I asked cautiously.
She smiled warmly and said, "Not necessarily". She seemed friendly and yet, a little introverted. Her hair was red and her voice was soft and deep. Decorating her jaw was an uncanny spread of short stubble. It took me about twenty seconds to realise that I had just enthusiastically offered to dance with a man who was dressed as a woman. There was no polite way to back down, and so dance we did. The particular dance we were doing, as it turned out, involved a move called the 'Gypsy Twist' (or something similar), which involved circling your partner and gazing intently into their eyes. I think my partner understood the irony of this, and laughed away most of my discomfort. The whole thing was more unusual than uncomfortable, although both feelings were present.

Hey my parents love me very much. They bought me a kick board and then sent it to me via courier. They are swell, and so is the kick board. It has like a bendy wooden base and adjustable tension on the steering mechanism and everything. It doesn't fold up because it is somehow jammed. I have not told my mother because I am going to fix it so nobody has to worry. She probably knows now because of her finding out skills.

Okay have fun and be good!

Learning Things

I'm whole time learning all kinds of things. This one guy's teaching me about resistors in parallel or series, which I already knew about. He's also teaching me (as an extension of the prior) all about drinking straws in parallel and series. We never covered drinking straws at GCSE, but I did some further reading after the lecture and now I feel pretty confident.

We have this funny polling software we use in class to answer questions, and during the aforementioned lecture there was a bug which meant that the answers you could choose from were all related to drinking straws, even if the question was about blocks of metal or resistors. This amused me and my friends greatly, and we took it upon ourselves to select option A, 'A short straw', every time. I made a lot of puns about us having 'pulled the short straw' when it became apparent that our answer was incorrect. The whole thing was immensely witty.

I am also learning about soul music, and how it is good for my ears. My friend John is helping me.

You know what's funny? Saturday is usually my most boring day. All the other days are full of learning, conversing, gospel choiring, Christian Unioning and doing whatever I please. Saturday is mostly all about waking up super late to find my house and calendar totally absent of activity. Yesterday I spent a pretty large segment of time playing Skyrim, which served nicely as a warm up for my early evening quest to the local , Sainsburys, which I looted into oblivion. I guess it was just the right time of day, because the reduced section had discarded its inhibition and gone all out reduced. I remember having to put back some pizzas because I knew that I only had room for so many in my fridge. When I got home I ate pizza and watched Adventure Time whilst wearing my new hat, which was probably the best part of my day.

You're probably curious about that new hat I mentioned just a second ago right? If we want to explore that (and we do) then we'll have to go back in time to Friday. Friday was a good day. It stared good because it was the first full day of wearing my other new hat, a replacement French Pith that I had purchased from village hats in a sale. During the day I learnt some whack facts about systems. Check this: a light switch is a dynamic system because the input gives a different output depending on the state of the system. Anyway, the real fun was on the commute between university and my accommodation, during which I purchased three items, all from charity shops. One was a hat (the aforementioned 'new hat), a black and grey flat cap. The other two were books. One 'Ultimate Spiderman Volume 9' and the other was 'The Human Christ', which I gather is a non-theistic look at the historical account of Jesus' life. The copy is both copious and tiny, but the blurb says that it's kind of funny in places. I like this quote from the back:

'Ever since science swept away superstition and the age of reason dawned, anxious thinkers and scholars have been rationalizing Christ's life, yet the more it has been explained the more inexplicable it has become. Whether recast as dissident rabbi, revolutionary nationalist, or even, in some cases, well-meaning lunatic, Christ steadfastly refuses to make sense, the task of fitting theory to scriptural 'fact' entailing feats of intellectual agility which make miracles appear mundane.'

I haven't started reading it because I'm reading Michael Reeves' 'The Good God', which is an eye opening look at the beauty of the trinity and how it is the backbone of the fundamental nature of God. It is very good and easy to read and y'all should read it. I am telling you about books that I am reading so you know about how clever I am.

Well done for getting to the end of this one. I feel it lacked the coherency and overall 'flow' of the previous entry. I like to keep you on your toes.

Being a Big Boy

I am eating tinned peaches. I used to be told when I was going to eat tinned peaches, but now I can eat them whenever I like because I am an independent young man. I am living with four other independent young men, all of whom took gap years of their own. They are all pretty good lads. This one guy likes climbing, and this other guy likes war games and other stuff.

I thought freshers would week would be super lame and stupid. I gathered from other people's experiences that it was basically just a festival of intoxication, where school children revel in their new found independence, embracing all of its freedoms and few of its responsibilities. It seemed that there were two possibilities on fresher's week: waking up with no recollection of where you had been the previous evening, or waking up with a firm recollection of locking yourself in your room the night before. Whilst that may be the case for some universities, my experience in Sheffield has left me feeling that such concerns were needless and uninformed. Let me tell you all about the fun I've been having, because that is why you are here.

A couple of nights ago was the fresher's frat party. I found out that 'frat' is short for 'fraternity', which is basically some mega-silly American idea. It cost a whole fiver, which was a worryingly high percentage of my finances at the time. I decided no to go, and instead went to a Jazz Night at The Interlude bar/cafe with my flatmate John. We acted super classy and clapped all the jazz. John thought it was funny that I didn't want to talk to girls, I thought it was funny that he didn't want to dance with them. There's a right way of dancing to jazz, and I don't know it. All swingy like. Still, I was up on the floor doing jazz hands, because they are from jazz.

The internet in my accommodation is wired, so I can't play my top jamz when I'm hotting things up in the kitchen. Speaking of top jamz, I met a guy today at the CU picnic who calls himself Dave the Rave and loves Shai Linne. That is funny because David Glover matches that description, but this guy was a different guy from David Glover. He complimented my hat, we started talking and within twenty minutes or so we were on the ground, confusing onlookers as we engaged in a finger joust (they have a website, apparently), which I won. Everybody had already seen me rescue a Frisbee from the roof of the bandstand, so now they all know I'm super cool and you shouldn't mess with you. I also met a Christian guy who's on my course. I'd been praying that I meet some Christian friends, and now they're basically falling out of my ears. Tha's what happens.

The whole independent study thing is treating me well. I didn't actually get the grades I need for my course, and I'm finding my position of academic underdog pretty motivating. Also the fact that I don't want to be wasting nine grand and then some a year. Talkin' bout calender's on my wall, calendars on the internet, online to do lists, and bare other organisational tricks. I'm going to study hard and win my course, so y'all better watch out.

Today's lesson was robots. I'm studying Robotic and Mechatronic engineering, so nearly all of the lessons are robots. We were making LEGO mindstorm guys compete in an obstacle course. There was a point during the session when our contestant seemed pretty adequately equipped with an impressive algorithmic repertoire. Little dude was following lines, turning at walls and picking up balls, and I felt like I had played a significant role in the whole development process. Trouble is, we spend the whole time optimising things while we were still programming, and some of the optimisations weren't so optimal. It was looking doubtful, but then a few flustered tweaks on my part in the last thirty seconds plunged the situation into downright dire. Our robot went forward in half centimetre jolts for about ten seconds, before devoting itself entirely to to doing backwards doughnuts with all the pointless resolve that a machine can muster. The antics of about eighty percent of the other participants were similar to that of our own, but it was still a little gutting that nobody got to see anything that we'd achieved. If anything was gained from the experience, it is that I have learnt the truth of that timeless engineering aphorism: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

I'm having lots of fun. Thanks for choosing to spend some of your time reading this consequenceless claptrap. General Norman and the boys will play you out.