Time to move house again. This time is always a little bit strange: no-one ever warns you that starting university actually commits you to moving more or less every year, seemingly inexplicably, for the foreseeable future. Maybe most people avoid this and my friends are the exception, but it seems that the majority of my friends (myself included) can't stick in one house for more than a year. Renovations cause us to be evicted, people leave, people join, requirements change, and we remain nomads.
2 years is the longest I've ever lived in a house since I left my family home, and I don't really remember one of those due to my workload and a healthy dosage of white Russians made with Finlandia. Since I went to university, I've called around 45 different beds around the world mine, and as such, I find myself in a weird state: on one hand, I never quite feel settled, but on the other hand, the sofa I'm curled up on now feels as much like my own bed as any other has ever been. I am in our lounge, wrapped in my duvet with my laptop, surrounded by boxes and bags of all the things I've grown used to having around over the past year, and I'm more than a little bit nostalgic. It's been an amazing year, Oxford is beautiful, my friends are awesome, and the next year promises to be even more exciting. I do love moving house. There's something about the chance to begin anew that I am utterly addicted to.
I am watching Spaced again. It never, ever gets old. I thought I was bored with it, but it turns out that I'd just forgotten how brilliant it is.
This weekend was a lazy one. There were tons of things available to do but Kristy and I both decided to write it off and do as little as possible for a change. In Winter, I worried that I wasn't doing enough, but now it seems that I can't find a quiet weekend! I guess I am back to my old ways. Can't complain!
I did get to see the latest Harry Potter movie. I confess to being a bit of a Potter fanboy, so I was always going to like it, but I was very impressed. It's a well put together film with impressive effects and, as always with the Potter movies, the casting is spot on. I haven't read the book in a while and this one didn't really stick in my mind so I can't vouch for its faithfulness (something that people seem to be complaining about) but it's certainly a good addition to the series. I'm not looking forward to the final film - the book was a bit of a departure from what I enjoyed about the series and got a bit too serious.
I am currently in the middle of packing to move house. I hate this stuff - putting my life into boxes is something that I would very much like to be rid of. Sigh. At least the new house is nice. Can't wait to get it over with!
Last weekend I headed back to Southampton, the city of my university days, for a housewarming. It was awesome to see everyone again and see Sina and Al's new flat, which is super sexy (I am most jealous), but it was very odd to see Southampton again.
When I was in Soton, I knew a lot of people, and chances were good that I'd recognise most of the faces I'd see walking down the road. the student areas where pretty small places, y'see. 3 years have passed since I was there, so people have started and finished their degrees in the time that I've been away. What really grates is that the people still essentially look the same - students never change - the crowds look the same, but all of the people are different. It's unnerving.
Seeing my friends was the same as it's always been though, which is wonderful. I live in fear of meeting up with old friends and finding that what brought us together has faded but our bunch always seems to hang together. We're all doing different things and we'll often go months without seeing each other but when we do it's always awesome. I have massive love for all those folks for not changing too much and keeping it all together.
I also bought some running shoes last weekend. Let the getting fit commence. Maybe.
I've played World of Warcraft, the life-sucking wonderful massively multiplayer game, for almost 4 years now. I've racked up about 150 days of played time (which is extremely low for that amount of time, as it happens, but huge for the average human being) and I've had an awful lot of fun and made an awful lot of friends. It's a fantastic game, and I love it, but it's very time consuming. My guild requires me to play for at least 2 evenings a week, and as someone who has about 4 evenings free before social events happen, that's a huge chunk of my time.
I was never very good at keeping my attendance up while I was at uni, but my guild are lovely and merciful and let me play with them all the same. They even let me come back after I left for a year to travel. Bless 'em! The sad fact is, though, that I have become increasingly busy as this last year has gone on, and as Summer hits it seems that my free time is hard to plan out, so I just can't commit to playing for the same 2 days a week. Therefore, I've dropped out of raiding for now.
It's very, very strange to be free of a repeating appointment that I've had for 3 years. The people that I played with are very close friends now: it's hard to avoid getting close to someone you talk to for at least 10 hours a week. I met lots of them in real life and I even attended the wedding of a guy I met through WoW a while back, so I'm sure you can imagine that it's very odd to leave, but it's also very nice. The feeling that I'm not booked up is wonderful.
Christ only knows what I'm going to do with the free time.
People have often said to me that if they didn't have a job they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That's something that I've never understood. I heard, a few years back, that the total hours of film released in the cinema now exceeds the average human lifespan, and I'm quite sure that you couldn't get close to reading even half of the books ever written in one lifetime, so that's me busied up for life right there, and I haven't even started on videogames.
I hear some people even get bored on holiday. That's definitely not me. I'd be on holiday all the time if I had the chance! I swear I could lie on a beach all day and I'd never get bored of it. This holiday we couldn't afford to get anywhere hot so we decided to stay at home and pretend, and mercifully Britain decided to play too and gave us 29 degree sunny days for most of the week. Hooray for that! I didn't get round to getting much of a tan though, we were too busy doing other things: mostly eating. Can't complain!
I am pleasantly surprised, however, to find that I'm looking forward to getting back to work. As much as I love the time off, I do like having problems to solve and I can't wait to get back to that. I feel refreshed and productive again. It was really nice to think like a human instead of a computer for a week though: I wish I could do more of that.
