geeks

I went for dinner with Anita, Geoff, Hamish and Liz tonight (Thursday - we got home late) Phil joined us later on but before he did something came up in conversation that was mightily geeky... I can't now remember what it was (partly because it's well past my bedtime) but everyone "got it" because we're just that kind of crowd. It prompted Geoff to mention a geek quiz he'd been doing at work, and so of course I made him email me because the idea of quantifying our collective geekyness filled me with a very geeky glee.

So anyway...



... 'parently.

Happy Birthday to me...

... well OK it was yesterday but I was busy celebrating it then.

I'm now 28 and it feels very much like 27 did really, only a bit fuller somehow. I spent yesterday with my friends, Justin and Liz and I hung out here at home on Friday night into Saturday morning, and I cheated by opening Liz's prezzies about an hour and a half early - she bought me cool stuff from my amazon wishlist, and some very yummy chocolate. Justin having given his best ideas to other people is waiting to see what else I get next weekend before deciding on a present. I like extended birthdays!

Saturday I opened cards and presents which came in the post and one left behind by Anita who had to visit her family this weekend, I think I have more things to open next weekend when I visit my family... like I said extended birthdays are good. Then in the evening Liz and I drove into Edinburgh to meet up with Hamish, Geoff, Dave and Phil, my friends proceeded to get me squiffy on cocktails (mostly something involving Rum and crushed ice) before we went out clubbing. I got home about half an hour ago having had a very good extended birthday bash. Now I'm going to eat some food and then go to bed.

Yes. A very happy birthday indeed.

"I really missed this place..."

Through one of the universe's stranger coincidences, myself and my friend Pip lived in Aberdeen at the same time for four years, but never actually knew each other until we both lived in a much larger city and happened to each meet the same canadian. Between us we must have said a million times how we had to go back to the Silver City for a visit, yet somehow it's taken another four years for us both to get organised and actually go. In the meantime while Phil and I've been boring Hame ridgid with stories of our lives in the frozen North, we've also all three met Liz who lived in Aberdeen for the first few years of her life and so also has fond memories of the place (albeit rather different ones!) So this weekend the four of us travelled north for an adventure.

Hame and Pip went on ahead on Friday while Liz and myself had things to do, following on behind on Sunday morning. The others all took pictures which Hamish and Liz have posted here and here respectively. Liz's match my weekend the closest since she and I hung out the whole time.

Somehow in the short time we were there I managed to touch base with most of the different aspects of Aberdeen that I've missed, Sunday night the four of us spent on the town visiting some old haunts (anyone who was at Aberdeen with me will be pleased to hear that Estaminet is pretty much just as we left it) as well as exploring some new ones from the godawful gay club that's squatting in what used to be Oh Henry's to the first rate church conversion bar Soul up at the top end of Union Street...

On Monday Liz and I met back up with Hame and Pip inside my graduation photos, we wandered around Old Aberdeen in the implausibly good weather trying to figure out where we were going to go for lunch* having discovered our intended destination nolonger existed. When Liz's Dad arrived to meet us we all settled on a location chnage to the sea front where we had an excellent lunch and ate ice creams on the Esplanade.

Liz and I spent the afternoon playing on the beach, she bought a very cool kite and then nearly brained me with it. We wrote inscrutable things in the sand and walked until the Haar came in, at which point we decided it was home time and headed back to the car along the river. I'm really lucky with my friends and the more we do this sort of thing the more I find how great they are to travel with. Especially seeing how little we spent weekend road trips might become a more regular thing.

*It's gratifying to note that visitscotland's information on King's College Visitor Centre's "excellent coffee shop" is as out of date as my own: the University's gone and closed it :(

shiny city!

Yesterday I went to Aberdeen with my friends and stayed there until this afternoon, it was brilliant but I am very tired now so I'll write about it after I've slept

shines and spoulders

I hurt my thumb today. It was in a very good cause though: the island unit in my kitchen is now (finally) properly mounted to the floor. It would have been years ago but for someone else's over enthusiastic helpfulness which resulted in an island unit I hadn't had to fit, but which spilled peoples' drinks when sneezed at. I've been waiting for a day where I had a helper and the right sort of energy, Justin was off today and it was energisingly sunny but neither of us really felt like doing anything outdoors. So instead we engineered all day with big bits of wood and bracketey things and powertools.

Yay for productive fun!

(the thumb hurting came near the end when I hit my thumb with a hammer in a cartoon-esque manner. It hasn't swolen to four times its size though, happily.

"People...

... are bloody ignorant apes"

I say that all the time (mostly because it's just so true, but also because it's always good to quote Beckett) just now it's being prompted by the news that three quarters of UK motorists don't understand how numberplates work.

Pah!

Am I the only one who's amazed by their stupidity?

growing up? growing old? (II)

Other things than next door's potential future ASBO have set me musing about my age and where I am recently... hardly surprising when you stop and think. In three weeks I'll turn 28, I'm unemployed (albeit by choice), single, dogless and almost directionless... of course all that could just be put down to a delayed mid-youth crisis* if I believed in such guff. Instead I'm prompted to look for goals, examine where I am in relation to where I want to be, and think about how I want to go about continuing being a grown-up.

I'm starting to feel like I could do without some of the grown-up trappings I've accumulated. The car springs to mind. Summer is money-haemorrhaging season for my car (MOT, Tax, Insurance) and while I love it to bits, I'm really missing the freedom of not owning one. The house is another area of rethink: I'm still undecided on exactly what should happen next beyond wanting very much to live in the city again... renting seems like a possibility though, and a year ago I'd have dismissed that out of hand having 'moved on' to ownership.

Relationships are another thing altogether: in some ways I've yet to manage being a grown-up there. I have great friends and a wonderful family, in both areas very adult and grown-up relationships on the whole but romantic relationships have never yet worked for me. Maybe having to figure out a non-standard sexuality's slowed me down there? I don't mean in terms of identity: I'm very comfortable with who I am, and have been for a long time. Thinking about it though I missed out on all that 'figuring out' time my straight peers got in school and at college. I didn't date, instyead having (mostly secret and hidden) trysts. That might have been a lot of fun but it's useless as experience for fathoming how to be with someone... and yet to a degree it's set the tone: The other night I was out clubbing with some friends, chatting up a friendly and very attractive Canadian tourist** I was getting on really well with him, but when he went to the bar and I had the obligatory "so, how's it going?" conversation with my friends... and the answer was nowhere which is OK but makes you wonder a bit the day after.

Looking at it this way my mid twenties have been a late adolesence for my romantic development... maybe not but either way I feel ready for something a bit more grown up in that department.

Which brings us to work. I had a steady 9-5 job for four years but I've not yet had anything you could call a career... do we have careers these days? or is that line of reasoning just a cop-out for being directionless? No I'm not directionless, I'm just having some trouble finding a good route for my direction, there's progress there too though.

*The term is just one I heard used on TV a while back, I used it 'cus it seemed kind of funny, but that so many people have bothered to define it is almost worrying. As far as I'm concerned life by nature is full of change, uncertainty and (all too often) a vague sense of disatisfaction, (which seems like what's being described there) I've always just thought that's what drove us to grow and change. Perhaps the difference is that I do a lot of navel gazing am more prone than most to reflection, and so I'm aware of it all the time rather than just at decimally convenient chronological mile stones?

** I have no idea whty, but Canadians keep appearing in my world, more often than not completely independently of each other, do you think the universe is trying to tell me something? Or are