YSA Christmas party photos part 2

For some the excitment was all too much
hoish der u meen? I swore air wash nly shoer in dat gass
Ysa attacked by swarm of angry bubbles. News at 11!

but I don't understand, why does everyone keep calling me a witch? said simon

I'm a ysa get me outta here!

Please sir i want some more!
Not quite what she had in mind when she said, lean on me!
cordeila appeared to be far from impressed with his limpet impression


Here are the rest of the photos a little later then promised but anyway :-) If anyone can come up with captions for the photos with no caption or better ones for those with captions let me know, and I'll update the pictures.

Yes sports fans. The caption competition is back!

later!

random photos from Cordelias 21st Birthday party

XMAS Loot

a MP3 player,
Superman Returns DVD,
Pirates of the Carribean 2
Derren Brown : Trick of the mind (book)
a 'huge' bar of dairy milk,
a nice new top,
some posh aftershave sets
a laser pointer (don't ask)
some nice aftershave from next,
House season 1 DVD boxset
Angel Season 1 DVD boxset,
A memo keyring,
A 'tumble' alarm clock,
£10 gift card for woolworths,
A clockwork torch and finally a clockwork radio! (I do like my gadgets. )

YSA Christmas Party

Well these ladies

cooked the meal for us. Which looked like this;

We also had a secret santa. This is what all the prezzies looked like together;

This was the present I got from my secret santa;

and this is what was inside it;

Fun was had by all;

Especially by those who recieved a bubble machine from their secret Santa;

and by those who didn't but just like playing with bubbles anyway

there's more pics tomorrow, so stay tuned! As it were. Also please feel free to caption any photos you want!

where's he been then?

Wow, what a interesting blog. Shame it hasn't been updated in so long. I wonder why the writer hasn't updated it in so long. What a absolute twit not to.... Oh wait this is my blog. D'oohh

Yes, yes sport fans. After a long absence I is back. and me angalish ist at gud ad eather.

All joking aside, things have just been insanely, insanely busy and to be perfectly honest the writing of the old blog has been one of those 'should do' tasks that has been pushed further and further down the list. Despite Banana reminding me.

I did read a report in the newspaper today that blogging is supposed to be extremely therapeutic, as long as you limit yourself to twenty minutes writing per post and the effect is better you don't post every day. So as I haven't posted in a Month in theory by writing this blog I should become practically Zen like.

With having a Christmas YSA party/meal tonight and with every expense spared we're going to be holding it at..... The stake centre. Not too exciting I know but hey it's cheap. Like me :-) We're also doing a secret Santa as well. I'm getting a present for..... Well that would be telling and against the spirit of things wouldn't it. Suffice to say it's a girl. But considering the male to female ratio in the Leicester YSA class it's not that much of a help is it? However with the usual YSA planning a text message was only sent out today with details one of which was asking us to bring a bottle of drink such as sholer with us to the party. Now for most of the YSA that would be fine as they have copious amounts of free time and can go off down the shops. However for the small minority of the YSA who work and will only have enough time to get home, change then head straight out again, it's not a lot of use. And I can't even moan about whoever sent the text message at the last minute because they didn't put their name on the message and their number isn't stored on my phone. Arggghhhhhhh!!!

I picked up our Christmas cards from church this week and our family had the grand total of... wait for it... 3. One addressed to me from the W's, one addressed to Mum, and one for Mum and J together. J didn't get anymore cards asides from this one, which as it turns out was from a family who had lived in Loughborough and moved back to the states. So as she put it " That sums it up doesn't it, we get one xmas card from a family on the other side of the world and none from the rest of the ward who live 10 minutes up the road". Which I suppose in a way is a very good point in itself. I was a little worried that someone might do something immensely stupid by sending a card to Brother D to him and his wife, but fortunately no one did. The other funny thing was that one member of the bishopric did come and ask me for Mum's correct phone number as the one he had wasn't working. I asked if it was the latest one or the one I gave him just after she had moved out and was living in J's old place, before moving into her new place. His response ? " She's moved out of J's house, when?". Yes only FOUR MONTHS AGO!! and people wonder sometimes why it' so hard to get inactive people back out to church or why some people feel let down by their leaders. Hmmm, can't imagine why.

Well I was eagerly awaiting this week's episode of torchwood as it had two very nice actresses in it. However the whole thing was ruined by a exceptionally gratuitousness scene of two characters.. well I think you can guess. It was totally, totally unnecessary to the plot and could have been toned down loads! Well I immediately flipped the channel and waited a few minutes before cautiously flipping back again. Fortunately the rest of the episode was good, but it was just the gratuitousness spoiled the whole episode. Why is it so many TV and film makers seem to have forgotten the old adage " Less is more" I.e it's what you don't see that's scary. For example, Alien. You don't see the 'bad guy' as it were for ages, which makes it that much scary when it does turn up. Okay I'll leave that there before I go on another huge rant!

Well grumpy seems to be warming up to the idea of Christmas. Finally!!!!!!! Taken him long enough. Even though I did still end up having to decorate the whole house myself as he didn't want to. He did manage to do something special the other day though which was highly amusing. He was pulled some cereal out of the cupboard when he managed to catch the new bottle of ketchup which prompletely fell out. He made a grab for it and missed, the bottle meanwhile hit the middle shelve of the cupboard, then the bottom edge of the cupboard, before hitting the edge of the worktop, rebounding across the kitchen, hitting the edge of the cooker, before then rebounding and hitting near enough the dead centre of the kitchen floor when one whole side of the bottle along the seam broke, sending ketchup all over the kitchen. and to add to the fun it was the largest bottle size, so there was a loootttt of ketchup to clean up. So there you go Ladies and gentleman, Grumpy the only man who's able to break a plastic bottle to such a good degree.


Well I'll try and be better at keeping up with writing this thing over Christmas. I know, I know. It's likely that I won't keep to that, but at least I'm starting out with good intentions.
But then again you know what they say about good intentions :-)



later!

p:s: should have some pics tomorrow.

nothing really, really interesting happened last Friday

Nothing, really, really interesting happened last friday at all. nothing at all, nada, zero, zilch. amazing how many non interesting Fridays I'm having at the moment isn't it?

Making my head hurt

We were having a random conversation today in the office, as we do on a fairly regular basis. Trust me if you worked here you would understand, maybe it's the high setting on the central heating or the fact that we're in a new year old building which most people still insist on referring to as 'the new building'. When the talk got to blogging and someone said " Isn't it just a high tech version of talking to yourself? as you can't be sure that anyone will read it. Now trust me if you think about that statement too much you will proceed to drive yourself loopy. trust me! Or I suppose in my case loopier.

I saw the greatest case of irony ever! Last night. The cost of the 2012 Olympic games is already 900 million pounds over budget. But the best part of this is that 400 million of this overspend is going to a group of companies whose job it is to make sure the games stay on budget. Now is it just me or is it actually pointless giving them that money because by accepting the money they have in fact already failed at there job?

Well it's institute tonight and as always I'll be playing taxi and I'm sure traveler will be pestering me for details on the absolutely in way interesting evening I had last Friday. As I said nothing interesting happened at all. Nothing zero, nada, move along now.

Nemesis seems to think that I'm hiding something. I have no idea what she means? *innocent grin*

later!

Nothing interesting happened last Friday

Nothing interested happened last Friday . Absolutely nothing interesting, nothing at all, zip, zero, nil. Honest! Move along now nothing to see here. Honest!

Fair!

Well I'm back.... Again. Although not as long a break as last time between posts. I know, I know, I suck. Well it's that time of year again, where the traffic gets very bad around loughborough for three days and people sit in huge traffic jams generally cursing about how much quicker their journey usually is and it's wasn't this bad this year. What causes this chaos? A alien invasion? No! road works? No but good guess seeing as it's the usual cause. Give up? Don't actually care why I'm speaking in questions? etc? Yes the Loughborough fair was once again in town. I thought I'd share some pics with you that I'd took when I went to the fair with my nephew j and my mum on the Saturday morning. Before you ask, there was no official YSA activity as as some point the process of delegation to decide who was organizing it, delegated the task to a non existent person. Not very useful at all! I'm sure you can agree.

Still here

For those of you who might be
wondering, I'm still here and I haven't unaccountably disappeared into the vast greatness of the all encompassing depths of the voids ( gee! Could I have used many more big words in that sentence?)

I've been off work for a week on Holiday, yes, yes I know I have so much time off at the moment. Life's tough init? :-) as per usual I managed to get very little of anything vaguely constructive done, especially last Wednesday. As I said in the post below this one, nothing interesting happened last Wednesday afternoon. Nothing interesting at all. honest :-)

To be honest for most of the time I just let what little remains of my mind be sucked away by the evils of daytime TV, especially on the digital channels. Anyway moving on before I start to go on about that yet again, I didn't post anything because I didn't really feel the urge to. Of course this means that you'll likely have to put up with some very big blog posts in the coming days as I've started to feel the urge again to ramble on about nothing in particular.

You have been warned!

He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,

later!

Nothing interesting happened last wednesday

Nothing interesting at all happened last wednesday. Nothing at all. Nada, zero, zip . Move on, nothing to see here, don't give it a second thought :-)

Chineween

No I've not finally gone crazy and started to make up totally random words. I thought I would share some photos that I took at our YSA activity on Friday, which was imaginatively titled Chineween by our YSA reps Smooth and bosslady. It was a combination halloween and some Chinese holiday/event party.

and before anyone askes I have no idea whats happened with Bosslady's eyes, it's either the flash or maybe the photograph, *cue dramatic drumroll* reveals her true nature :-) You decide!

and well I don't think that there's anything more I can say about this picture then the picture says itself :-)

Hopefully tthey'll like these two pictures better then the last two I posted that featured them.

benn playing with my photo editing software!

The pumpkin our team carved. Don't ask!

and a couple of random photos to finish!

later!

It’s really is paranoia if no ones out to get you

Well they say that things are sent to try us and that we’ve never given any test that we can’t overcome, etc, etc any other cliché you can think of, and so on. The trouble is knowing these things and accepting them is a whole other matter. Things are slowly but surely getting worse again and I don’t know if I can keep doing this anymore.

Well as I’m sure the ones of you who’ve visited before and can actually understand my inane ramblings we’ll probably guess in about, oh two seconds who’s involved in this and you will be right. To add to the fun Mum appears to have developed a healthy case of paranoia as she rang on Saturday night twice. The first was to check that 141 worked and her number wasn’t registered. She then called back again and wanted to check I was alone before asking me if grumpy had been driving around the town trying to find her house, because she still hasn’t told him where she lives, despite saying she will. So when I asked what she meant, she said she was checking as grumpy had driven past her just as was leaving her car and she was walking into her house. Which if she lived in a cul de sac might be suspicious, but her road is the same road as the entrance to our local co-op, grumpy was just going down to get some batteries and that was all. It was just a coincidence as he had been sleeping all afternoon, that was all. She asked again twice more before she seemed to accept it, and saying “ oh I must be, a bit paranoid”. So that’s where it was left.

So imagine my surprise when Grumpy mentioned the next day that Mum had told him that she had called and claimed it was to ask if he wanted to go for a drink and a talk about things. This absolutely left me flummoxed for a good few seconds and I had absolutely no idea what to say, and finally managed to stammer out an extremely lame sounding “dodging” of the question. So I have no idea why she told him she had rung, unless she’s suddenly decided that I would go and tell grumpy if she calls and what she says. Now I don’t know why she would think that, and quite frankly I’m rather annoyed over it. I don’t want to lie to either of them. There, it’s that simple and I wish that neither of them would put me in that situation yet mum has put me smack bang into the middle of that situation yet again! I’m fed up of having to continually watch what I say in case I screw up and say something I shouldn’t, I don’t know why she just can’t be straight with him as I’m sick to death of being in the middle and it feels like I’m loosing my mind.

It’s like no one feels grasps what it’s like to be being pulled in several different directions at once and trying desperately not to take one side over the others and at the end of the day everyone else in the family ‘has someone’ I they need to talk or at least get a hug. Who do I currently have to get a hug from when I need one, like now ? No one, nadda, zip, not a soul.

I’m still getting zero offers of help from church leaders, in fact I’m starting to worry that grumpy might of scared the home teachers off as we haven’t see them in weeks. I mentioned this frustration to T and apparently J’s response was, well they wouldn’t as it’s all a secret. What is????? What’s a darn secret??? Even if there was the slightest possibility that this was the reason, it would actually be a much situation as the church leaders had all failed to notice that Mum hadn’t come to church in over half a year! Don’t get me wrong though, the YSA are great, their fantastic, it’s me whose sorta the problem at the moment, I still have this deep lingering fear sometimes that maybe the concern isn’t genuine and that it’s just ‘pleasantries’ , now it’s stupid I know, really stupid, but I just can’t seem to shake it and I think that’s probably not helping things at the moment, as I all I can seem to do is laugh and tell people what’s going on in a very joking and matter of fact way, when all I desperately want to do more then anything is to allow myself to break down, to let it out and cry on some one’s shoulder

Everything’s coming to a head now and I don’t know how to do this. I just don’t know, but I hope I can use the small shred of smarts I have and figure it out before I go raving mad.
Later!

Stop the world I wanna get off.

Well I experienced a new kind of rain while driving to institute last night. Not the super mega death rain, I've previously described, this was the annoying persistent rain. Yes it had been raining slowly but steadily all day, so the amount of water on the road surface was horrendous. It didn't help that the vast majority of people seemed completely oblivious to this fact and the reduced visibility, so they kept their speed up. This kicked so much water up into the air, I wasn't sure if it was water or just misty out. How there weren't more accidents, last night I'll never know.

The food at the W's was as nice as ever. It's so good to have a nice home cooked/prepared meal rather then Grumpys usual way of making dinner. Grabbing something from the freezer and shove that in the oven and cook some frozen veg or sumthing. Anyway, SW came to institute as well because as it's half term, there was no seminary for her to teach. So I took J and G and traveler and J's friend went with SW. ( why can't I think of good codenames for them?). Unsurpringly she beat us there, now I don't mean that in a really sarky way, but it's just with heavy rain or bad driving conditions I don't like to push things while driving, due to me flipping my first car over and it being written off. Sw is a more confident driver and can handle those conditions better

Institute was as great as always. Bro H his usual great selves at teaching the lesson. I have to admit I think I would find the lessons a lot more boring if he wasn't there. Although in one part of the lesson we had to talk to the person sitting next to us and we had to tell them what we were glad about and for some reason I had a complete mental blank and could only think of being glad for having a home cooked dinner that night. I was sitting next to MM, who is either one of these people who always see's the positive in everything or was on something. either way I was jealous :-)

Banana was also there as well and it was very nice to see her. It's not been the same since she stopped coming regularly. There was also a card for A ( I think Nemesis calls her goldilocks or sumthing) as she's leaving soon. So the lesson was good, it was afterwards I displayed my innate ability to act like a pillock at the worst of times. G was going to go home with H, which meant that there would have been a spare place in SW's car, so I thought that meant I could go straight home rather then having to wait for the activity to finish. but when I asked SW she seemed a bit taken back ( just to emphasis this is how I interpreted it and with my powers of utter pillockness I'm fairly certain I got it wrong) and said that she was going right then as she needed to get home as she was receiving a phone call at 10pm. So I may, no wait there was no may about it, snapped at her that it was fine and I would just wait for J to finish. now why I snapped I have no idea, and I really wished I did because I know I shouldn't have and I certainly had no right too. So I waited round for a few more minutes and then the activity seemed to be winding up by itself, so SW said she would take him and I could go. I double checked and she said it was fine, although again to me she seemed ticked off, which after me snapping at her she had every right to be. So there you have it folks, it seems like I've upset SW over a very, very trivial thing. Could I be anymore of a pillock??
(rhetorical question by the way)

I don't know what's up with me at the minute, my get up and go has seemed to have got up and gone. Or maybe it's just because it seems like I'm getting slammed from several different directions at the moment. I just can't seem to get myself going to do anything.

I dunno,

Later.

My get up and go has got up and gone

Well Winter is here. How can I tell this? Well we've started to switch the central heating on in the house. Mind you it's not that effective because grumpy keeps turning the whole system off for some strange and mysterious reason which I'm sure almost makes sense in his head. So by keeping switching the system off, it's starting to get very cold when I get up in the mornings. It always reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, where his mind is frantically trying to get Calvin out of bed, it's pouring with rain outside, and Calvin's wrapped his covers around himself tightly declaring that " I'm not getting up until it's as warm out there as it is in here. If only I could do that :-) Something tells me work would not accept that as a excuse, he, he, he, :-)

We're in the middle of a office move around at work, so I'll be getting a bright new shiny desk shortly. We're also going to be going away for a couple of days to do a 'Team building' exercise thingies. You know the sort. We've just had to fill in one of those personality test thingies as well. The ones where you have a choice of two words and pick which one appeals to you more, there's two statements pick which one you agree with, etc, etc, etc. Although the only thing I could think of the entire time, was that Simpson's episode where homer has to fill one of these things out and gets Bart to do it instead, which leads to homer getting committed to a insane asylum. I'm sure there not going to find me crazy, I'm sure * Starts looking around nervously for men in white coats *

Well it's institute again, and time for me to play Taxi again. Seriously though it's very nice to know that I can get out of the house at least one night a week. I've got a containers to take back to the W's as Traveler made me some extremely nice cookies last week. They were great and as they had sugar and smarties in them I didn't have to share them with Grumpy. Hey a weak justification I know, but it's mine and I'm sticking to it :-) Last week institute got onto marriage just like the fireside. So a class and a fireside on marriage both in the same week. Hmmmmm, Maybe somebody is trying to tell us something??

I saw the new doctor who spin off at the weekend. Torchwood, it's very, very good and I'm really happy we've now got digital so I can watch it on BBC 3, rather then having to struggle to set the video timer to record it when it's shown on BBC2 while i'm at institute. I think it's one of these programmes though that church people will either like or stay as far away as possible from it, as it is a lot more adult then Doctor who.

The wedding over the weekend was good. It was different as well, because it's the first wedding I've been too in years which hasn't actually taken place at one of our churches. It was initially in a registry office out in March, and I now have a extremely healthy respect for the distance that the members of March branch have to travel to get to the stake centre in Leicester. We then moved onto a hotel for the wedding reception and the disco in the evening. It was a very good day.

well that's all I can think of today.

later!

Rogue's gallery

So in case any of you were wondering who exactly this lot are, these pics are of the 'active memebers' of the ward YSA, minus one or possibily two people who didin't turn up to the fireside. Click on the pics to see large versions of them!