Bass

I played bass today for the first time in ages. It went quite well, and i have blisters on my fingers now. Hopefully the music will go quite well on Saturday night.
Other news, was out at Colin's yesterday and today. Much work was done on the garden, and there shall be photos to follow soon, once I get them.
Had a chinese yesterday too. It was fun. Quite good too. According to the waitress Colin and I hadn't been in for two months. I'm not completely sure why she can remember that so well.
Also, the reason for the short sentences and stuff is that the blister on my finger is right on the end with the bit I use to type. Fun.
Anyway, bed calling.

A long week. And Christmas music.

Ok, so my last post was pretty short, and it was really quite a while ago now. 10 days I do believe. Well, the run of me updating a lot had to end sooner or later. And it was mainly due to exams.
That's right, since then I have had two more exams and that is me now finished. I have been smiling a lot since the end of my last exam at about quarter past three this afternoon when I finished early and left :-)
So here's a quick update on the last week if I can remember it all.

Sunday

Church in the morning, followed by much revision in the afternoon. There was also some Grand Prix and golf watching. It was good. Went to Relevant in the evening and won Frustration. Then got very frustrated when we played it again afterwards.

Monday

Mostly revision I think. I can't really remember. I just know I didn't really leave the house much until the evening. Was out at a prayer group in the evening with the baptists. Food was consumed, and it was good. Italian Chris style I do believe.

Tuesday

Had to head back up to Glasgow for the impending doom of the Design exam on Wednesday morning. So some quick revision in the morning, then got a lift to the station with my brother. Got the super exciting train up, which was actually on time. Got to Glasgow and attempted to do some more revision for the exam. Also got given a free can of Irn Bru 32 on Cathedral Street because they were standing giving it out for some reason. Still not drank it as it makes me too awake.

Wednesday

Probably should have drank the Irn Bru 32 as was pretty tired heading to the exam for a half nine start. A one hour exam, and I left after about forty five minutes or so, and headed back to el flat. Everything was already repacked for heading back south, so I just sat and watched awful TV for a while. Headed for yet another fun train, but this time my mp3 player battery had died, so the journey proved to be very, very, very boring. I have now vowed to always make sure it is fully charged before taking train journeys. Got back to Dumfries, had a drink and a cookie in Kings and then ended up in Costa with Sharon after she finished work. Got home and had a nice lazy evening before the start of more revision.

Thursday

Revision. And some more revision. And I went uptown and bought a birthday present for Chris. And then some more revision. Then wasted the evening. It was a pretty boring day.

Friday

More revision was the order of the day. Then at night out at Pizzeria Il Fiume in el grande Dock Park for Chris' birthday. He's got some Italian genetics or something. And we went to an Italian. Wow.
No, it wasn't a coincidence.
Headed to the Bruce for drinks afterwards, then headed home. All in all, a good night.

Saturday

Did some revision in the morning, but probably should have done more. Headed out to Colin's and finally got to fly my kite. It made me so happy you would hardly believe it. Didn't get any photos of it unfortunately, or else it would be appearing here.
Then did some work with Colin at the burn in his garden. We saw a deer too. And built a staircase in the side of a hill. Looks very professional, and I should probably have got a picture of it too.
Was out there in the evening too for the wonders of Eurovision!! It was pretty rocking this year, with the crazy Finnish bat people who used the word "a-rock-alypse", and the Lithuanians with their crazy football chants. Good night.

Sunday

Nearly there now. Did some revision in the morning, then had to get another train, (wooo), and arrived back in Glasgow. Should have done some revision, and I did. Then watched large amounts of TV in the evening, and laughed a lot at Top Gear. Not the single most exciting day in the history of the universe.

Today (Monday)

Got up and managed to do revision for most of the morning. Went to my exam, and the revision paid off. A two hour exam and I left after about an hour and a quarter having finished all the paper to satisfactory standards for me. So that left me the evening to waste, and I have managed to quite successfully. Chose some songs for CU tomorrow morning too, and that's the next thing on my agenda, followed by a train back to good ol' Dumfries tomorrow morning.

Well, that's the week that was. Hope you enjoyed it more than I did with all the revision in there. But now all the exams are finished so there should be a goodly amount of generally being a pie now :-)
Bye for now.

PS. I forgot to mention this, but as I'm having to fix this as I messed up and managed to underline the whole lot, I'm listening to Christmas Music. Wahey. The lesson to learn from this is that if you use HTML coding in the then make sure you use it properly! Hopefully it'll work now.

Scottish Cup Final

So today was the Scottish Cup Final and local team Gretna made it to the final. Pretty impressive seeing as they were in the Second Division this past year. They are in the first now though.
So it started well, but then Hearts got the first goal. Not good. But they came back with a penalty in the second half. But it wasn't to be as it went to a penalty shoot out and they lost.
"The end of a fairy-tale" many people are calling it. Personally I'm looking forward to next season and seeing what they can do in the First Division and the UEFA Cup. It might actually be the first time I've been excited about football in a long time.
Hope you all had a good, sunny Saturday.

The Aftermath

Thought I should probably let y'all know how the exam went. And the answer, surprisingly, is that it went quite well. It was a two hour paper, and I left after fifty minutes. Perhaps you think that is because it was going so badly I ran off crying or something, but no, it's because I was finished. Woooo!
So that went well, and my train back down this afternoon managed to be on time, and it wasn't to busy, and it was one of the trains that is slightly better than the one I got yesterday.
So now I get to spend the night relaxing before I start revising for my next exam. I also hope to get a chance to fly my kite sometime soon since I got it all fixed up. That would make me happy.
Anyway, that's all I have to say today.
Bye

Trains

Ok, so there aren't that many things that I actually hate. Some things I dislike, many you might say, but very few push me that bit further. One of the things I do hate is chemistry, but you probably already knew that, so we won't go into it again here. And once again as a note to any chemists, I only don't like it because I don't understand it, I have nothing against any of you.
Now the other thing I truely hate. Trains.
I went for my train today to come up for tomorrows exam, and everything was fine. Arrived at the station in plenty of time to go and get a ticket, get a seat on a bench and wait for the train. I go in to get a ticket, and the ticket office is closed.
Now I'm sure many/some/one of you are thinking "well that's not really enough to make me hate something", and I agree with you there. I just thought I would go and wait on the platform, and get a ticket on the train instead. So I get to the platform, and no sooner have I sat down than a First Scotrail worker comes over and informs me and the other passengers that the train will be 'about twenty minutes late.'
Great, another brilliant train journey for me. But wait, it gets better.
So twenty minutes isn't that long, I had my mp3 player so that would be fine. I even phoned Scott and arranged for him to keep me some food at CU since I would be late. Then someone else came over.
"I heard someone say that the train's going to be forty minutes late now."
Forty? FORTY!! That's double what we were told about five minutes earlier. Not even twenty minutes had passed, so how could it be another twenty minutes late? Unbelievable. Then, I hear the bing-bong of the PA system.
"We regret to inform you that the train is now running forty-five minutes late. That is four five minutes late. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Inconvenience? I'm sitting on an uncomfortable purple bench in Dumfries station with a bunch of randoms waiting for a train which is getting later with every minute that passes. I was not happy.
I was also not happy when the train finally arrived and it was one of the rubbish ones, not the semi-decent ones we occasionally get. But I had to get to Glasgow, so I got on and got a table seat, got the whole table to myself so I could stretch my legs out too. It looked like the journey was maybe going to get better.
And it did actually start to go alright. I listened to some music, pondered life, and did some revision for my exam tomorrow. We then arrived at Kilmarnock station.
Bing-bong.
Oh no.
"We regret to inform you that the train will be delayed by another fifteen minutes since the track ahead is not clear. We are once again sorry for the inconvenience."
The track's not clear? Well it would have been if you hadn't been so late getting to Dumfries. So I read notes for the time that we were sitting there, and admired Kilmarnock station too. The admiring bit took all of about ten seconds.
So eventually, at quarter to six, we left there, and headed on. After stopping and starting several times, due both to signals and places such as Dunlop and Stewarton, we finally arrived in Glasgow. At half six. That's right, a whole hour after we were meant to arrive. Me? Happy? Oh no.
So I went outside, where it had decided that it would make my day worse and start raining. So a taxi was entered, and it headed off, where I got charged £3.40 to get to the Chaplaincy. 60p of this occured while sitting at one set of traffic lights. Still not happy.
So the end of my journey finally came, at quarter to seven, several hours after leaving the house in Dumfries. I got my food that Scott had kept for me, and it was very good. There was even ice-cream for pudding. Then I headed back here and spent some time talking to the other Alastair in my flat about our exam tomorrow. He isn't looking forward to it either. Maybe it's something about our name.

But there you have it, a terrible journey, which made it a terrible afternoon. Hopefully the exam tomorrow won't be terrible.
Wish me luck, and I'll let you know how it goes soon.

Another post...

Another post in the same day, and this makes my 50th post. It's like a birthday, but I'm not going to have a party.
Instead I'm going to show you all a photo I took a while back of Colin. I feel this should embaress him suitably. Enjoy.

Here's to at least 50 more!

Sorry to offend many of you, but...

I dislike chemistry a lot again. I'm very sorry to all you chemistry people, but I just don't like it. Metal for instance. I don't care if it has a body centred cubic structure or face centred cubic structure. It's hard, it can be used to build stuff, and to hit people if that's your inclination, and that's all I really need to know about it. I don't care how it looks when you magnify it 2000 times, and why it stays bent when you bend it.
Unfortunately, this is all stuff that I have had to learn for my exam on friday. Think I shall be forgetting it again pronto as soon as the exam finishes, and I mean as soon as. But what am I to do? Just try and pass so I don't have to resit the exam and relearn everything.
Well, also today I did some major messing up of my ps2, and managed to lose large amounts of saved data going back like a year. This did not make me happy. I also got hayfever because loads of people were out cutting their grass. This also did not make me happy.
However, something that did make me happy was that I finally got round to fixing my rocking sports kite. I got broken like a year ago when it hit the ground very hard and one of the poles kept going instead of stopping, and ripped a massive hole in the fabric. But now it's mostly fixed, so hopefully I'll get it up and flying sometime soon out at Colin's or somewhere of the sort :-)
I head back up to Glasgow tomorrow, leaving here about quarter to four, and arriving in Glasgow just in time to go to CU for dinner. Sweet. I also can't wait for 11:30 on friday. Unfortunately though, that means I first have to get to 9:30 on friday morning which is the start exam. Oh well. Bring on the 23rd though, and the end of my first year of uni. The following few weeks are going to be muchos fun. Ariba.
So wish me luck and big me well for my exam. I'm well going to need it.
Update soon.

It's sunny, sun is good

So it's very sunny today. It always seems to be during the exam period, when all kids are stuck indoors studying (in theory). It's so nice and warm that I nearly went and studied outside, but I was using a computer, so I didn't.
So not much been going on today apart from the studying for brilliant chemistry. I'm actually managing to learn some stuff about metal and the like now. Today I was mostly learning about bonding of stuff, and that kind of stuff. My hatred of chemistry has actually relaxed slightly, as some of you may have noticed since my MSN name is no longer about me hating chemistry.
Oh yeah, I also made an attempt at re-arranging my room today. Didn't go to well, it just ended up looking really stupid, so after about five minutes I changed it back to what it was previously like. Fun times.
In other news, I hit 1500 texts today in my phone. Party.
Also, I worked out how o2 have managed to be stupid again. I signed up for their brilliant treat of 15 of free calls a month for three months. It's very good, and it saves me a lot of money. So it got to the end of the first month, and automatically re-started for the next month. However, when it re-started, it also re-started my free texts for another month. So it is now seven weeks since I topped up my phone, I'm still getting free texts and free phone calls, and I'm pretty sure I'll keep getting them free for another five or six weeks. Roughly £90 worth of free texts that comes to instead of £30. Nice.
Well, I would say I'm off to do revision or something, but I don't think that's all that likely to be honest. I'll probably just watch TV or try and find some cool pictures to put on my blog instead.
Tally-ho.

My phaser lives!

So I got my guitar and stuff out for a while yesterday afternoon, and decided to get my two pedals out too. Now the last time I tried to use my phaser pedal it didn't work, but it's working now!! Hoorah!!
So yeah, that made me happy and it makes really cool noises.
Was away in Dundee on Saturday for a CU leaders training day. Good time, even if we did have to get up at like half six in the morning to get a half seven bus. I personally think we should have rented a plane or helicopter and it would have been much quicker, and much cooler too. But maybe a bit more expensive than Megabus.
So this week, the main thing to do is revision. I have a super fun Engineering Materials exam on friday, which is basically chemistry. This would be great if I had ever done chemistry at school or ever even tried to enjoy it in first and second year. But I didn't, I just dislike chemistry.
Oh well, back to do more revision now. See all you Glasgow folks on Thursday evening.

Crazy Weather and Glasgow

Ok, so I went to CU this evening as planned, and ate as planned, saw people as planned, and then went to the union to play pool as was also planned. This is kind of where the stuff that was planned ends.
So we had been in the union since about seven o’clock, and it was probably about quarter past nine or so by this point. We thought it slightly odd that they put the lights out on one side of Gamezone, and moved everyone to our side. Then all of a sudden all the main lights came on all over the room, and several security guards appeared telling everyone that they had to leave immediately and university cards could be picked up at a later date. So we got all our stuff and went to leave, and it was at this point that we looked over and Jillian said “Look, the sprinkler system is on.”
Of course, at this point we didn’t know about all the rain. I did however notice that the water wasn’t coming out of the sprinklers, it was actually pouring out of the air conditioning ducts and from the lights.
So we left and walked down the stairs to leave, seeing as the rest of the union is pretty rubbish. It was only when we got to the door and saw the truly ridiculous amounts of rain that we worked out what had happened. We were also told that the rain was the lightest it had been in about an hour, and it was still pretty heavy.
So ran to the car, then we headed back here due to the rain still being so heavy. I made a video of it with my phone too, it looks pretty cool with all the sheet lightning. I shall show it to people sometime who may find that kind of thing interesting.
So, that pretty much describes my crazy last hour or so. The other thing that we worked out was that the union had ten levels or so. Three of these levels are directly above Gamezone. In order for water to make it down to Gamezone, we reckon that it must have caused ridiculous amounts of damage upstairs. Well, at least I do. Guess I’ll try to find out what happened tomorrow at some point in my free time.
Wish I could have got a photo of the lighting to put up here though, would have been pretty cool for looking at, you know.

Ok, so that’s all the thunder and rain stuff dealt with, now for the bits about the rest of the stuff that I did today. Did my packing, and got my stuff all into my cool new rucksack. Had a pretty uneventful train journey up, just sat and listened to music and read my paper. Also, this may not make much sense to most of you people out there, but my train came in at platform 1 today!! That has never happened to me before, I felt like royalty or something.
Apart from that, just walked back to my flat, and did a couple of things, chose my electives for next year, and then talked to my flatmate Dave for a while, watching Futurama throughout.
And after that, I headed to CU and caught up with many a person that I hadn’t seen for like a whole week. Was a good night. Thanks for the food Katie :-)
Anyway, that was all the stuff that led up to the visit to the union that is described above.

Well, hope you all sleep well through the thunder tonight

Another assignment finished in plenty time

Well, once again I have managed to complete an assignment in plenty of time. Finished it at about quarter to eight or so on Wednesday night, and it's not due in until Friday at midday. That makes me happy. So in honour of me managing to get this done, I thought I'd let y'all have a look at it before my tutor even sees it. So here it is.


Well, I hope you all enjoyed that. I think it's quite good if I may say so myself.
Today was my last full day in Dumfries for a fwe days, heading back up to Glasgow tomorrow to hand in said assignment, and then having a couple of days in Glasgow and a day in Dundee too. Should be a good weekend.
So for anyone in the general Glasgow area, I'll probably see you tomorrow evening at CU for food, and maybe some pool afterwards? Let me know if you guys are up for it. Anyone in Dumfries, I should be back down on Sunday afternoon sometime, and shall turn up at Relevant no doubt, where I plan to have many a chocolately drink :-)
Well, I'm off to waste an evening now.

A bit late, but, you know...

It was suggested to me a little over a month ago now that I should post a couple of pictures of a 5'3" snowball that was made when we had all that snow. So here are a couple as I should have posted a while ago.


Yeah, so that is the massive snowball, nearly as tall as Sharon, and with Ali sitting on it.
Also, I just realised this is the first time I have published two posts on the same day. To the best of my recollection anyway.
Well, hope everyones enjoying the rain :-(

Happy Tuesday!

Good morning and a happy Tuesday to you all. It is a merry day of being up early even though I am in Dumfries, and getting some work done. I get to do a presentation on cars. How distraught am I about having to do that?!?
Not at all is the answer to that question. I am actually quite enjoying doing the project, and it is going well. And it shall be finished in plenty of time for it's Friday hand in. Ooo, maybe I could even try and get it finished early like I did with my logbooks. Hoorah.
I get to go out for lunch today, and I'm sure that it shall be muchos enjoyable. And then back here to do some more work. Oh the fun of having to hand stuff in.
I bought a new game for my ps2 yesterday. Much enjoyable, and much destruction. Most of it mindless, but all the less it's still fun.
Well, I better be off and do more work now, pictures of cars can't stick themselves to a page.