On Tuesday, I donated a pint of blood, for the first time.
It’s been something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I’m already an organ donor (I carry a card around which shows that I give consent for my organs to be used in transplants after my death), but until now I’ve never given blood.
I couldn’t donate throughout much of 2007 and 2008, as I had been on high-strength steroid tablets due to flare-ups with my asthma and my overnight stay in hospital in November 2007. But although I’ve been okay since then, I admit that I’ve simply never got around to it, even when there have been donation sessions at work.
My big worry was that it would hurt. And it did – a bit. For me the worst bit was the needle being inserted at the start; the pain was similar to when I’ve had vaccinations but lasted a little longer. However, once it was in, it was okay – a little uncomfortable, but not painful, and it was done after around 10-15 minutes. All in all, I was there for about an hour, due to me being a new donor and needing a slightly longer medical check first.
Afterwards, the site where the needle went in was a little tender for a few hours, but I didn’t receive any bruising and there was just a small red dot when I took the bandage off.
I’ve already booked another appointment, for mid-March next year, to donate my second pint. If you want to give blood, you can find details at blood.org.uk – the NHS needs a constant supply of blood and so if you are healthy and can spare the time I’d urge you to do it.
I’m back home now, after my various travels. As well as going to London last week, I spent the weekend with Christine and some friends from university in a bunk barn in the western Yorkshire Dales, near the Howgill Fells (a range of hills on the western border of the Yorkshire Dales National Park).
Thanks to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, we got not one, but two public holidays in a row, so yesterday was spent in the lovely town of Keswick (pictured above) and on Latrigg, a hill overlooking it. As for today, I was in York for RailFest 2012 at the National Railway Museum – and I’ll be blogging about that visit tomorrow.
Photos will be forthcoming, but I have quite a backlog of pictures to upload from earlier on in May – I’ve just put up the latest set from the May Day bank holiday weekend in York, which are mostly pictures of owls, as it happens. Hopefully the rest will appear there shortly – as I’ve mentioned, I took over 200 in London alone, and nearly another 100 since.
As I only get to do this once every four years, here’s the obligatory leap day post (see also posts from 2008 and 2004). I’ve not been able to any leaping today, or anything much at all actually as I’ve been ill with gastroenteritis since yesterday. I’m starting to feel better but almost all of yesterday was spent in bed.
The photo for this post is of a Steampunk recreation of K-9 from Doctor Who, called K-1909, currently on show as part of a Steampunk exhibition at the Bradford Industrial Museum. You should go – it’s free to get in, and runs until early May.
As with the pasttwo years, I’m going to take a few moments of your time to review the goings on of the past twelve months.
January and February
January started with a trip to Blackpool – despite going to Blackpool regularly in 2010, this would be our only trip now that Christine and I both live in Yorkshire – to see friends and visit Blackpool Zoo again. We also had a flat-warming party with friends, despite it being almost two months after we’d moved in. Blogging wise, January was a quiet month – I only posted twice: a quick guide to restarting frozen iOS apps and my ninth blogiversary.
March brought the first of our two short breaks – four nights in Edinburgh. This included visits to Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh Zoo (you may have noticed that we both like visiting zoos), Surgeon’s Hall Museum, Museum on the Mound, Museum of Scotland and some casual sightseeing and shopping. Back at home, we saw the musical Spamalot in Bradford, and I replaced the hard drive in Christine’s laptop after some worrying startup problems.
On the blog, I made the first major change to the content management system for this site in over 8 years, abandoning Movable Type for Melody, which was a community fork of MT. This turned out to be the first of two major changes. Content-wise I wrote about enabling hardware acceleration in Firefox, which remains one of the most popular posts on the blog, and the start of the 30 Day Song Challenge, which saw me post about a new song (almost) every day right into April.
April
April was quite a big month – we moved flats again, after encountering problems in the previous one. Thankfully we’ve had no such issues in this one and are still happy there 9 months on, which is good as moving twice in 5 months is not fun. Trust me. Especially when you have problems getting the phone line moved across, although to BT’s credit it’s working fine now and we have very good speeds, despite being in a small semi-rural town.
Naturally, as we had a new flat, we needed another flat warming party, which came in early May, shortly followed by a trip to Manchester to see Uncaged Monkeys at the O2 Apollo. May was also my birthday, which was celebrated with a trip to the Victoria Theatre in Halifax to see Ed Byrne (who was painfully funny). And the second of our two short breaks saw us in London for four nights, staying in a Premier Inn in Collier’s Wood to keep costs down. This time, our itinerary included being in the audience for a recording of Jo Brand’s Big Splash at the Hackney Empire (free tickets), Covent Garden, the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, watching Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre, shopping on Carnaby Street, Camden Lock Market, the Natural History Museum, V&A Museum and a trip out to Greenwich.
On the blog it was another month. March’s move to Melody had left me underwhelmed so I made a much bigger change and switched to WordPress. 7 months on and Melody has only had one minor update, whereas WordPress has had two point releases with new features, and overall I’m much happier with WordPress.
Despite having walked past a gym on the way to work every day since November, it wasn’t until July that Christine and I finally joined a gym. 5 months on and we’ve been generally going once or twice a week, although I’ve only been once this month (December) due to being either busy or unwell. It has improved my overall body tone, stamina and reduced my asthma symptoms, but hasn’t really shifted much of the excess fat around my waist. This Christmas’ excesses and lack of exercise will have only exacerbated that, so a new year’s resolution will be more time in the gym.
Also in July I started playing World of Warcraft again – well, I’ve been paying my subscription continually for five years but had lost interest – which included moving a couple of my characters to a new server. Whilst this has meant I’ve been able to play with more of my friends, unfortunately it happens to be one of the most popular EU servers with queues of up to 20 minutes to join at peak times. I also upgraded my Mac to Lion, WordPress 3.2 came out and I joined Google+. Offline, I went to the Yorkshire Show for the first time in a few years, and Christine and I went to Hebden Bridge to see Robin Ince do his Bad Book Club show, who we’d also seen in May at Uncaged Monkeys. I’d see him again in December too. Not that I’m obsessed or anything.
August
August, by comparison to the months that preceded it, was uneventful bar me being very busy at work, as usual for that time of year. We spent an afternoon at the Halifax Show, which was somewhat smaller than the Yorkshire Show but still good fun, and I went on a walk over the hills from Hebden Bridge to Marsden. In regular shoes, I might add – which led to some impressive blisters on my feet. This wasn’t deliberate – in the rush to leave I forgot to wear my hiking boots. I also started Geocaching, which I’m still finding fun although I’ve now found all of the caches in easy reach of Halifax, Sowerby Bridge and Bradford so future finds will have to be further afield.
September
As with last year, Christine and I started September by going to Bingley Music Live. This was the only major thing we did that month, as once again I was rather busy at work, although I managed a few further geocache finds. On the blog, I changed the theme to the one you see now. I’ll probably stick with it for now but may adjust the colour scheme sometime. On the job front, my contract at work was made permanent – and thus became the first permanent job I’ve ever had. After several years of uncertainty (see 2009), this is very welcome.
October
And then came October. By far the biggest news of the month, and indeed the year, was that Christine and I got engaged. We’ve been together as a couple for two years, and it was just the right time to do it. The wedding is likely to be in 2013, and although we have talked about it we haven’t yet sorted a venue or a date. Those are jobs for next year.
October also brought a trip to Saltaire and Salt’s Mill, and quite a bit of drinking in Huddersfield, on a pub crawl and subsequently an Oktoberfest beer festival. I also upgraded my iPhone, now over a year old, to iOS 5.
November
In November, I went to a live gig and three comedy shows. The gig was for the band Within Temptation – arguably my favourite band right now, and their show in Manchester was absolutely amazing. It was their first UK tour for several years and this was one of only four nights in the UK, so as you can imagine it sold out weeks in advance – we bought our tickets around 6 months in advance. Thankfully there’s a chance they’ll be back this way next year; if you like their music, please go and see them as they put on an excellent show. As for comedy, I saw comedians Sarah Millican, Chris Ramsey and Milton Jones, all of which were very good. Chris Ramsey has done many gigs at the university over the past three years and is finally getting his deserved share of the limelight – I’d recommend seeing him if you get the chance.
I also attempted Movember, although cheated a little by growing a goatee beard, rather than just a moustache. It lasted until the evening of November 30th, and I’m glad to see the back of it. Christine started blogging again, this time about her recipes.
Christmas, as usual, was spent in York. Christine went back to Sowerby Bridge today, as she’s working; I’m here for another couple of days.
So that’s 2011. It’s been a good year on the whole – we visited some nice places, saw some brilliant shows and took our relationship to the next level. Later on, I’ll write about what 2012 will have in store.
It’s now been a year since Christine and I moved in together in Sowerby Bridge. It’s also therefore a year since I moved out of Bradford, where I’d spent most of the previous 8 years. We like the town – it’s small, relatively quiet (apart from the main street) and full of interesting pubs and restaurants, of which some we still haven’t been to yet. It’s also an easy commute for both us to get to walk, and has good public transport links with regular trains and buses, so we haven’t felt isolated.
Although the first flat we moved into didn’t work out, we’ve had no problems with the second one that we moved into in April – and it ended up being cheaper, larger and generally nicer than the first one, all things considered. We’re hoping to stay in the flat for some time to come, after which we’ll probably look at buying a house rather than renting as we do at the moment.
This year has also seen us build upon our relationship, going from being 65 miles apart and generally only seeing each other at weekends, to living together and ultimately becoming engaged last month. Living together has worked well – Christine’s a great cook, and so whilst she does most of the meals I’m happy to do other bits of housework.
Since moving to Sowerby Bridge in November, we’ve been walking past a brand new gym and swimming pool which opened the weekend we moved in, with the full intention of signing up at some point. Unfortunately, that intention never progressed into an actual registration. Until now.
In about an hour’s time, Christine and I are off there for our induction. We both need to lose weight; when I lived in Bradford, my walk to work was half an hour each way, but with moving that’s been cut to around 15-20 minutes and consequently I’m getting quite a bit less exercise. Likewise, Christine is overweight and though she has dropped a couple of dress sizes in the time we’ve been dating she wants to go further.
At present, we’re not looking to formally join the gym, and instead pay each time; if we only go once a week it’s cheaper that way. Although I may join if I’m in a position to go 2-3 times a week, but primarily we want to go together and exercise as a couple, for moral support.
With a bit of luck, there’ll be new, slimmer Neil and Christine by the end of the year.
I’m back from my weekend away in the Wilderness – we stayed in a bunk barn in Dentdale, and out of the 10 of us no-one had a mobile signal for most of the time we were there. Considering it’s very, very sparsely populated this is not particularly surprising but slightly annoying when you briefly get enough signal to receive a text message saying you have a voicemail message but not enough to be able to access your messages to find out who called you…
Despite the not so brilliant weather, I managed to take a few pictures which will be uploaded to Flickr later this week. We didn’t get back until late last night, so I couldn’t do them then, and tonight I’m off to see Avenue Q at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford (which I saw in the West End in London in 2007). I haven’t even seen this week’s Doctor Who yet…
You will also have noticed that I’m now posting my Delicious links here in a weekly digest, on a Saturday. I’m trying to get more of my stuff on other sites available here without overloading the blog with endless posts consisting of single images from Flickr or links. I’ll see what I can do other the next few weeks.
As you may recall, Christine and I moved to Sowerby Bridge just over 4 months ago, at the end of November last year, and we settled into a nice flat in a mill conversion. Unfortunately, during our tenancy, some issues arose with the flat, and so we’ve now moved again.
We’re now in another flat in the other wing of the same mill, with the same landlord. The flat is quite a bit bigger, especially in the bedrooms, and features a balcony – we’re on the third floor so there’s a nice view right across the valley from there. It also has gas central heating, rather than electric, so although the rent is higher the lower energy costs will more than compensate, which should mean it is cheaper on the whole. And it means we get to stay in Sowerby Bridge, which we’ve really come to like since moving here – the picture at the top of this post is just one reason why we like living here.
Moving wasn’t exactly straightforward, even though we had planned it to be. The two wings are separate; there’s no link between them, which meant moving all of our possessions down to the ground floor, across and then up to the third floor. And the removal company that we had hired really let us down – despite us paying over £300 for them to move our belongings and furniture, they turned up almost 2 hours late, and then told us they had another job to go to in the afternoon and could only do around 2 hours work for us. Consequently, only the heavy and bulky furniture got moved, which meant us and a few of our friends were left to move everything else; we didn’t finish until 7:30pm the following day. I’ll be writing a letter of complaint about it.
Anyhow, we’re in the new flat, and due to surrender the old keys today. Other aspects of the move have gone better; our phone and broadband is being moved over at no extra cost, although it won’t be activated until Thursday and we have to renew the contract for 12 months. In the meantime, I’m taking advantage of the fact that 3 allow mobile data tethering at no extra cost and using my iPhone as a modem, although with a 1 GB monthly limit I’m being careful not to abuse it. Similarly, our home contents insurer, Endsleigh, charged a £20 administration fee but other than that have been really helpful, as have British Gas and Yorkshire Water. Moving at this time has also meant completing the Census twice – in full for our old flat, as we were there on the 27th, and again for the new flat to say that it was vacant, which thankfully is much quicker, although even then filling out the Census in full takes all of 10 minutes online.
We still have a lot of unpacking to do over the next couple of weeks, and while moving has been a faff, ultimately we’ve ended up with a nicer flat that better suits our needs.
