I think I scared a few people on Saturday.
We went karting …
I’m involved on and off in 2 of the big online games, Eve Online and World of Warcraft. I’ve hopefully kicked the World of Warcraft addiction now but the Eve people keep drawing me back in to that game. An online game is made far better if there’s good people around and I’ve been lucky to have been involved in a few of the better groups. Warcraft had the Mercs while that lasted and then later the Violence Reborn people :-). Eve has the Volition Cult people, with the Volition Cult being an alliance in that game that’s now lasted 3 years.
The karting was part of our 3rd anniversary meet up :-). We went to a place called M4 Karting, not too far away from where most of the UK part of the alliance is based and indeed only 30 minutes from where it was born. Good track this one, housed in what used to be a hardened aircraft shelter attached to the nearby airfield. The circuit itself was twisty and nicely technical, with a good consistent surface. Some karting tracks suffer from bumps, grooves or even things like wooden floors instead of smoothed tarmac … I had great fun powersliding round all the fast corners 🙂
Oh – this track also had a She Who Must Be Obeyed running the show. Most definitely In Charge, although they had one or two techie hitches with the timing gear. Will certainly go back there, we had a lot of fun at that track with plenty of stuff going on to keep us bantering on the Volt forums afterwards.
Will have to check out Radio Control cars some more too as this place had a shop selling them, which is getting rarer and rarer nowadays. It helps to know what you’re looking at when thinking about buying things though, especially if it’s a specialist market …
I don’t think I scared people on the karting track though, I’m a bit too heavy still for that. The scary was on the trip to the pub afterwards :-). The satnav I use tends to be a little “aggressive” on the roads it chooses … Let’s just say that you wouldn’t want to take a lorry down the same routes. And I got to the pub about 10 minutes before anyone else 🙂
I’m looking forward to next week at the moment, it’ll let me get recharged on “Calm” after a week that I’m still detoxing from 🙂
Wednesday – 13 hour day trippin’ down to Portsmouth for some performance testing. Cue the “testing diet” … aka strong black coffee + biscuits. Keeps you awake but the caffeine does weird things to you.
Thursday – coming back from Portsmouth and hoping that Orange Light Of Impending Engine Doom goes off … Yep, had another scare from that one starting on Wednesday. Also watched the film Creation after having pizza with the Crazies 🙂
Friday – easy night (needed it!)
Saturday – karting with the Volt boys, followed by trying to munch a pub dinner with hands that were insisting on cramping up …
(ow)
I’ve been needing a bit of chill out time anyway and I reckon that as that gets closer, you slow down and feel the tiredness even more. So come Monday, I’ll be looking to think as little as possible of work although I’ll be missing having the chance to natter with and tease a few of the people I work with.
There’s a few people who make where I work far more entertaining than it could be, from the ever wonderful Snow Queen, The Boss with her empathy, Wild Thing teasing me about the Little Canteen Girl, Ms Sunshine’s continual readiness to burst out with a room illuminating smile and cheerful laughter and the diminutive Miss M who’s been taking advantage of my techie talents lately (while being bemused by my efforts to have my way with a devious plan for the file system).
We’re also blessed with fun people in our finance section (an area I deal with a fair bit lately). We keep an eye on what the project is spending, which means painstaking attention to detail on admin. But that’s made into fun by our Finance Girls 🙂 They’ve been recruiting too, with someone recently arriving who’s shadow betrays her invisible Angel’s wings. I also get on very healthily with my actual boss, although healthy in that respect also includes us setting each other off in the mornings when one of us gives in to Munchie Cravings. There’s also El Diablo, a fellow gamer and sci fi nut who is the one who pointed me towards the Jack Campbell books. And we have more too that I’d mention except imagination failure means I don’t have Blog-Safe codenames for them.
Great bunch of people, I’ll miss them next week while I’m off work 🙂 But after putting this refresher week off for a few, I’m really feeling the need for it now.
Right – I’ve nattered for far too long … so long my feet have started to freeze. Time to sign off and shut those curtains for the first time this year …