Summertime! An actual real one...

...Always the way isn't it. You can read a news article two or three times the night before, and when you actually try to find the bloody thing, it's nowhere to be found.

(BING, Formula one is just finishing, 14:43 GMT. No prizes for guessing who wins).

Ah, here it is :-).

Yep, the weather, while not great, has at least avoided being downright crappy recently. Yesterday was actually quite nice, but today, wow. I went outside (as I am wont do do when not interfaced with my computer), and wow, would you believe it, it's one of those "get in the shade because you'll get sunburned otherwise and by the way don't touch anything made of metal or else you'll burn yourself" days.

However I need to adjust the (presently non-existent) brakes on my mountain bike so that isn't really an option for me.

However, on a completely unrelated note, I have found all 219 (including spares) of my ickle magnets that I did get for my brifday, a short while ago. So that's also good.

So yeah, what have I been up to in the past week? Well, not a whole lot.
Working, eating, sleeping, college, running out of money, drinking almost-but-not-quite ice cold cider (difficult when our fridge has stopped working), and lots of 3d stuff.

My level 2 college course has officially finished, which is a relief in one way and a shame in another as I can't really pillage the parts bin for free processors and stuff anymore :P. But hey.

Later this summer I'm hoping to upgrade my computer quite nicely, replacing the motherboard, cpu and ram at the same time. Bizarrely, DDR2 ram seems more expensive than DDR3, which is quite annoying.

But yeah, that's about it really, not a whole lot to report after a week, but I figured the weather was worth commenting on :-).

Here are some shiny shots of my 3d stuff that I've been messing around with. It's been a weird one this one because I've been spending loads of time messing around with textures - probably just as much as I've been spending on the modelling.

But yeah, there we go. I'm off to tighten the brakes on my bike :-).

EPILOGUE: 27th June

Well, it's official, it's summer. How can I tell? Well, the air has that traditional summer smell (a combination of garden fire smoke and the it's-about-to-rain smell). Apparently we're due for some thunder, and it has been trying to rain for the past hour or so.

One part of summer is getting moths flying into my room, attracted by the light. One such creature came in yesterday, and had to be released outside :-). I mention it because it's the biggest moth I've ever seen, and quite an attractive creature it was, too :-).

Apparently, Swallowtailed Moths are quite common, but somehow, they're only seen rarely. I suppose I should feel priveliged that one decided to fly into this very room, hehe.
Anyway, here are the pickatures :-).

Much Ado about Nothing...

Yes, for someone who tends to lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, I seem to spend a lot of it worrying that I'm running out of time to do things.

My level 2 college course has just about come to an end, and while half of my portfolio work has been marked as accomplishing about 85% of what is needed to pass the course, The other half (that I'm confident will accomplish the other 15% quite handsomely) hasn't yet been marked. So I'm dangling around a little.

Work seems to be picking up too, and the tips are stacking up reasonably well. You can imagine how it is; some nights you make £10, other nights you make nothing whatsoever. There's no way to predict how you'll do, and the weather (including severe snow) seems to have no bearing on it whatsoever.

Earlier this month, my mum decided that we were going to Ripon again. Well we've been there before, but this time we sort of went without the intention of actually going anywhere, which was a bit strange.

As with last time, where we went to Fountains Abbey, we once again popped into the Warehouse for an awesome salad. Now of this salad I remember writing last time:

"This thing was fantastic - I didn't wanna take a photo cos people would have looked at me weird, but it was easily the best salad I've ever had".

Well I took a photo this time :P. I had a quiche salad with a cheese and tomato quiche, and lots of fresh TEGH, with lemon which was quite nice (I bought a lemon when I got back, but it made my tea taste like lemsip), and the meal was fantastic.

Besides the only other family in the place had one guy that was taking photos out of the window and stuff.

So yeah. After wandering aimlessly around Ripon for a while, we went down to Knaresborough, for a quick wander round. I had to giggle because it seemed at the time that the town centers of both towns look pretty similar.

Knaresborough was a pretty nice place too though, nice and scenic and lots of hills and suchlike. They even had a beer and spirits type place near (go to the knaresborough street view and pan left. The place is "Beer Ritz" next to Blind Jack's) the town center that sold mead. Now I've always wanted to try mead, because apparently it was quite popular back in the day, but for some reason the smallest bottle you can get it about the size of a large bottle of wine, and sells for about £13.

Now at the moment, £13 is a little too much to spend on something I may or may not like, so I'll stick to beer for the time being.

But yeah. That's about it for now. I've got work at 5:15 and I'm sure I'll have a whale of a time zooming here there and everywhere, but hey you never know, I might think of something to write about when I get back.

Before I go for now however, this guy's "Pachelbel Rant" has been doing the rounds recently. Now I suspect I'm probably the last out of 100 million squillion to come across it, but if you've not already seen it, have a look. It made me giggle :-).