Alas, I am back from my Easter break, university's final exams beckon me whilst Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet spur me on. My 12,000 word directed reading assignment is almost past me, after submitting it I plan to put it up here and pass it around the net a bit. I have spent too much time on it to have only two parties read it. In fact I'll probably put up PDFs of all my uni work once I am done here. It seems a waste to have many hours of work read and marked by only one person.
Anyway, two Saturdays ago I left in the evening by car from this here Redfern accommodation; leaving my neighbourly rabbits, robins and squirrels for town and terraces. It was the weekend before Easter and I was to watch my local team, Bristol Rovers FC, perform in their first cup final for a long time (the Johnstons Paint trophy) at Cardiff's millennium stadium – the last cup final to be played there. We were against Doncaster; our support turned out 40,000 strong and this was the scene:
After watching the under-teams play their big games and a team warm-up and pyrotechnics display the game started. After 5 minutes we were 2-0 down and out. It stayed that way until half time; with a penalty and fine shot we took it to 2-2 extra time. Sadly our league 2 stamina lead to a mishap and we ended up losing 3-2. Yet it was a most enjoyable day out and the fivelive consensus agreed that Rovers had performed well – the fans were happy. A three hour traffic jam on the way back was however not so fun.
When asked on Monday what we should do I promptly replied, "Absolutely nothing". And that's what I enjoyed doing – I caught the most atrocious 80s super-hero movie on Sky Movies – "Howard the Duck" with Marty's mother from Back to the Future. We played multi-player super monkey ball on the Wii and lay about in the sun reading our novels – I'm still making my way though Kerouac's "On the road". In the evening we turned geeks and played 4 player Lord of the Rings RISK – the incomplete mordor-less version. I take great pride in winning, given my terrible starting position.
On Tuesday we went to Bath for the day, it just so happened that the sunshine went away for a day, much to our disgust. Though walking about the lovely sandstone spa was interesting – if any of you readers should come across the fudge-packer in the fudge shop, please berate him for taunting me with chocolate goodies whilst I was still under the self-inflicted restraints of lent. That night we declared a RISK rematch wherein I came first or second, depending on which rules we used. On this night Liverpool also beat PSV away from home 3-0 – a fine showing.
Sam left for Surrey, and later Kent, on Wednesday morning without her coat. Left with family, cats, book and Wii I made myself at home, spending a couple of hours on some website code and a couple here and there on coursework assignments. The footie that night was not so great; both United and Chelsea had poor champions league showings. Thursday through week was much of the same, sun tanning, book reading, film watching, work writing, cat petting. I cut grass in gardens front and back and watched others plant peas and spray fences with protective brown sludge.
Thursday brought about the Masters Golf tournament at Augusta – what a tough year that proved to be. Not a single player made a 4-day par over the x amount of holes. As I have already said, I was supporting Justin Rose, right up until hole 17 on Sunday – what an unlucky break that was – it's a shame but in the end I was quite happy for Zach Johnson to take away the prize, his second to last shot on the 18th was a beauty. This spur in golf interest led to a number of Wii golf rounds on Wii sports – I made a personal best of 7 under par playing with my Johnny Depp Mii and making a few very nice eagles. I got taught a couple of nice new tricks too, such as using an iron out of the bunker and driver when faced with trees.
Thursday evening also took me for a meal at Chiquito's to celebrate my sister's 20th. Those lazy boy rib quesadillas are truly scrumptious. As was the New York baked cheesecake.
On Easter Sunday I welcomed back the taste of chocolate with Thornton's, KitKat and Cadbury's Crème eggs. Now my teeth are rotten. I'm also eating croissants again much to my delight. After a lovely beef roast cooked by my sister I spent the day with my grandparents, watching England lose to Australia in the cricket, studying Chinese and eating delicious home made trifle.
Monday and Tuesday it was back to the garden for more fun filled outside laptop based essay writing. Tuesday evening was graced by Manchester United's 7-1 stomping of Roma, truly an incredible performance. It's hard enough to put seven past a lower league team let alone coming from behind against second-place Serie A Roma that were unbeaten in their previous 20 matches and had conceded only 5 goals in the champions' league tournament. Just wow. Now 3 teams out of 4 left in the competition are English, the top three sides in the Premiership no doubt. There could be a messy Chelsea-United showdown come May – fighting for the league title, playing each other in the FA cup and Champion's League finals.
I don't know if there's much else to talk about – I spent the afternoon with my Grampy on Wednesday talking of the future and the past et al and I came back to Warwick yesterday via the M5 and Tesco. Now I am back home with this as my view:
Making posts with images is now much easier after I created my sweet little small and thumbnail generation script.
