Scavenger hunt time

Towards the latter end of last year my family and I decided that we wanted to come up with an idea for something fun and slightly different to do during the weekend. After brainstorming a load if random ideas we finally settled on a city wide scavenger hunt based in London.

We ended up going into quite a bit of detail when planning it, coming up with about 26 different locations, a number of various side quests that we had to complete, and a number of rules that we had to stick by. After several weeks of planning we finally got around to doing this scavenger hunt with the result being me and my brother getting all of the locations and getting back on time, eventually winning with the most points.

The reason I bring this up again is because several weeks ago, a few friends and I were talking about coming up with something new to do around London, and event idea for this group that we are a part of, and we settled on the idea of creating our own scavenger hunt, but this time round with a lot more clues and interactivity. 

Earlier this week, over a very nice meal at Honest burger, our little Scavenger hunt trio sat down and hashed out all of our ideas and came up with what should be a very fun day out.

Now that all we have left to do is wait a few weeks to when we've scheduled it, write up all the clues, get them all printed out and get everyone to arrive on time. As I said it should be really fun, and hopefully if all goes well then there could potentially be another one of these down the line.

2015 General Election

This week has been a very political orientated week, as if you were unaware it was the week of the 2015 General Election. Due to this things it seems have been temporarily thrown off kilter.

Within my family and the circle of people I know, the topic of politics isn't really one that comes up that often,and most times that it does it'll be to talk about something relevant in the news at that time. This is why I feel as though this week has been slightly different, as politics is now the topic to talk about. This week has also been the week where you find out just how much or little you yourself actually know and understand politics.

As much as politics may be considered, by some a boring subject, and how complicated it can be, it has actually been really nice to have conversations and at times debates surrounding this subject. Even better when you are able to have these debates, without starting a family war or breaking up friendships, because they understand talking about these things is necessary and not everyone's going to agree.

If anything this week has felt like I'd gone back to university again, doing all if this research, talking in-depth and debating with people about this subject, leading up to this big end date that felt somewhat like an exam. "Did I do enough preparation? Did I tick the right box? Could I have done more?"

Having said all of this, about how nice it has been to have such an important subject brought up and talked about so much, I do have a feeling that come next week things will be back to normal once again, until another election comes around or most likely someone does something wrong and people start to get upset. Ever the optimist though, perhaps this won't happen and people will stay engaged for longer. We'll just have to see I guess

It has finally arrived!

For a few years now I have been backing projects on the website KickStarter. For anyone unaware of KickStarter, it is a website where mainly individuals and small businesses can go and basically pitch business ideas to the public and ask people to help fund their ideas. In return for peoples donations the businesses offer perks such as a thank you email, a copy of the finish product or exclusive extras created just for the KickStarter backers.

Ever since I found KickStarter, I've backed a good handful of campaigns, the majority being games being created by small indie studios where for offering to donate I will receive a digital copy of the games once they have been completed.

Not last summer but the summer before however I donated to a small business who were attempting to create a product which would essentially act as a personal cloud drive called Lima. You would plug in the Lima device to your modem and then plug as many hard drive as you'd like into the Lima device and then through the use of an app on your PC you'd be able to access all of the files stored centrally in those hard drives.

This product sounded like an amazing idea and very innovative hence why I decided to donate about $70 or so in order to get a copy if the final physical product.

After just over a year and a half, my Lima device this week finally arrived. Due to signing up to be a beta tester there are still a few little things that need to be tweaked but its amazing to finally get my hands on it and test it out. So much new tech to play around with, can't wait until all the little bugs are ironed out and everything is working as the creators hoped.

Soo many trailers!

Over the last couple of years there has been a new sort of trend emerging when it comes to teasing new movies. Companies now seem to want to release trailers months and moths ahead of the films release in order to create hype around the film as early as possible.

The problem in companies doing this is that in order to sustain the hype and anticipation for the film they have to keep periodically releasing new teasers, meaning that when the film does finally come out, it could have had 4/5 trailers out, TV spots and a hand full of movie posters.

I had been noticing this trend for a while now,but what really brought this to the forefront of my mind was a stat I heard about the new Avengers: Age of Ultron film. Supposedly before the new Avengers film hit cinemas, about 20 minutes of original film had been displayed to the public in the form of trailers and such.
For a film that is probably about two hours long, or 120 minutes, showing off 20 minutes, or a sixth of the film before its even cone out is a bit over kill I feel, and could potentially ruin things before you've seen the whole thing.

As with video games and TV series, I do like to know a bit about what it is and the premise beforehand, and so it is nice to see a trailer or two in advance, but not a year before the film is released so I have to wait ages, and not enough footage that I can figure out the basic storyline pretty easily.

It may be the case now, that in order to avoid getting caught up in film hype or from potentially spoiling films, that I will have to just not watch trailers and avoid forums that I know will be actively talking about these films. We'll see how long that takes, miss just walking into a cinema or putting on a film, knowing nothing about it and being really pleasantly surprised.

Having somewhat of a social life

Looking back over the past few years, and even during my time at sixth form and secondary school, I was never really that person who went out much or got invited to loads of things, it just spontaneously hung out much (this many due to my friends living about 20 miles away).

Remembering back at all this it has become very clear that at this moment in time I probably now have the most social life I've ever had. I'm still not the mist popular person or get up to the most wacky plans and such but I now have so many more opportunities then I've had before.

Somehow this social life has continued even due to the fact that I am living 45 minutes or so by train outside of London, and yesterday reached a new kind if high that as I quickly mentioned and that is this spontaneous making if plans.

Yesterday I had no plans at all, I was going to be at home all day, do some little tasks that I had to complete and just look forward to the weekend. In the middle if the afternoon however one of my friends that I was talking with just popped out the idea if getting some food and a drink after work as it finally the weekend.

This kind if stuff usually doesn't happen, and often when it does, I can't make it as I'm so far out and don't have enough time to make it in, so it was a really nice change. Unfortunately I am a little but wiped of money at the moment due to the cost of trains in to the city, but this should just be a little blip.

Out of everything I could talk about I know this us a slightly weird subject to talk about, but as you can probably see from a lit if my posts this year, I'm quite enjoying writing down new things that are happening as a form sort of new record.

Quiet week - bored??

As you can probably tell from the title if this post, this week has been quite a quiet week, the first in quite a long time where I have not gone into London at some point or meet up with some friends.

Due to this I've had quite a bit of time at home once again, and my main concern during this time was what yo do to till it. Obviously part if this time is spent sifting through job sites, and rewriting cover letter and such to apply for jobs, but the rest is open to do what I want really.

Now I've heard it said quite a bit, "do you not get bored?" or "do you not get cabin fever stuck in the house all day?". Its quite easy to see why people would say this as I guess others would, but one thing I've rediscovered about myself is that I don't really get that bored, I really don't mind spending time with myself essentially, and if I'm able to do what I like I can always find something to do.

With regards to this, a lot of this week has consisted on catching up on TV programmes, meaning sitting down and marathoning episodes for a while. Now once again there are probably quite a few people out there who'd say that's boring and that they wouldn't be able to sit round and do that, but once again I don't in anyway find stuff like that boring, and these are programmes I want to watch so better to catch up now whilst I have time then slowly catching up in-between the times that I'll be pretty busy.

So thus week may have been quite quiet, especially when compared to other weeks, however once again I find myself hanging in there pretty easily, I get stuff done, I catch up on things, and I also occasionally find some new things to try out during this spare.

After a nice long Easter weekend, this week actually came at quite a nice time. Saying this I am looking forward to the couple if things I have planned down in London next week. Hopefully things won't get to hectic anytime soon.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons

Since the moment it was created Dungeons and Dragons has been a staple of geeky/nerdy culture, it is the classic game that people us when stereotyping nerds and it is a game that I have wanting to get into for ages, but never had a group of people who were also interested in playing it.

This however changed a few weeks ago when some friends of mine decided to create a small D&D group to finally be able to play this game. Today is the second time that we will be playing this game, continuing our quest from our first session.

Due to the rules being slightly complicated, especially when you have never played before, a lot of our first session was spent figuring things out, deciding how we were going to play and just basically testing the waters and easing into the campaign. With that starter session out the way however this session should really allow us to knuckle down and let us get really immersed into the game. That is the plan anyway, there may still be the odd rule check, what does this do question.

Know that I kind of know what I am doing, with a character I finally decided upon a name for, and have the jist of how I want to play this character, I also hope to get a bit more involved. By this I mean to not just go for the obvious actions but think if different ways to do things, and to expand upon things by creating some back story or provide added details. All in all just make use of the ability to create more story.

Plans to move

Earlier this week I discovered that my sister and her boyfriend were progressing with their plans to get their own house/place of some sort, and went for a meeting this week about seeing if they'd be able to get some kind of mortgage in the near future.

If they were to move out pretty soon it would skew things up somewhat as I would be put into the position of covering what she and I both contribute currently. However if she were to move out sometime after the summer, when my brother has finished university and is back home again, then it would just be like a swap with one coming and the other going.

With this conversation coming up, it made me think once again about what I have planned, and my intention to eventually move out into my own place. This has been reinforced significantly today after having spent the evening out last night, staying over at a friends and going out with friends all day today.

Even though Letchworth isn't that bad a place to live, or too far away from London, time wise, getting to and from the city does cost quite a bit I'd money, and seems to make me feel as though I'm leaving things behind when I return home. Being in Letchworth also means that you are pretty inaccessible to anyone who wants to spontaneously do some thing in their free time.

Its gotten to the point now where when it comes time to head back to Kings Cross station and grab a train out of there, there is a strong sense that I shouldn't be leaving, and instead would love to be able to catch a tube back to my own flat  instead of being made to pay more to get home via a train
.
We'll see how things go I guess and hopefully I'll get another option about when to move out.

The last tube...

For some reason my posts over the last couple of months seem to be all about new things, firsts and new experiences. This isn't a bad thing, if anything its really positive, just something I noticed and thought that id write down. With this in mind, let me tell you about another new experience I had yesterday (or really early this morning, however you want to look at it)

Yesterday evening I was invited to a small dinner party type event at my friends flat down in London. An event that even though I was slightly apprehensive about due to my anxiety worries actually turned out to be an amazing night. The experience unfortunately came after this when I left a little bit later then I expected and ended up getting to the tube station about 3 minutes after the last tube had gone through.

Having walked that way with a friend, they suggested I could grab a night bus, however upon checking the times, each bus would get me back to Kings Cross station after the last train had left from there. This was the very new, slightly scary and quite worrying experience. I had missed the last tube and subsequently would miss the last train out of the city back home. Thank fully my friend Annie, who I'd walked up to the station with kindly offered me her sofa to sleep on for the evening.

Being the normally quite organised person that I am, especially when it comes to train times, this event came as quite a shock and took me back quite a bit. Needless to say that Annie's offer was amazingly generous, and I'd have been pretty lost about what to do otherwise.

Thankfully, upon getting back home this morning, it seems as though everything ended up turning out alright, even with this little hiccup. Next time though I feel I'll be keeping a closer eye on the time and perhaps even leave just a little bit earlier to air on the side of caution. As worrying as this experience was though, it was also quite  exhilarating (think that's the best way to describe it) being able to have this big problem, overcoming it and doing something cool and new in the process.

Going to a Christening

Today I took part in quite a weird experience, or at least weird from my perspective, very unweird from others. I have been to other christenings before in my life, but I can barely remember them as I was young, and so today would be the first christening I've been to in my adult life, and as I've just mentioned it was kind of a new weird experience.

Let me quickly preface things by saying I am absolutely comfortable with different religions, how people practice these and with anyone having whatever belief they would like. Personally I am an atheist, this is for a number of reasons, mainly just because of my nature and how logical and evidence based I am.

Going to a christening today I got to properly witness how the ceremony goes, what is involved and what is asked of of the child and of their parents. Having seen all if this, personally I left feeling kind if weirded out (not the most technical term but it aptly describes how I felt).

Thinking on this for a short while afterwards I came to the conclusion that it was due to the somewhat forceful nature of the whole ceremony. For example, everyone who was invited was meant to, it seemed, take part in the reading of responses to the vicar when he read out particular phrases during the ceremony. There was one question the vicar asked where the response was basically “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, my Lord, and my saviour". Now I'm not making a big thing of anything, if anything i'm coming at this from more of a scientific/sociological perspective, but if anyone in the room was say a Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist.....then no one was told that this was what you would have to say, there was instruction to what part people had to play then, "please read the bold parts of the script".

Obviously you can just do what I did and not say anything during this point, but I kind if felt like I was being rude as I wasn't taking part in the thing I was invited to take part in.

Again I'm in no way saying this is wrong or that people shouldn't do it, etc...it was just very different to how I thought the ceremony would go, and how involved the audience were made to be through these readings and the whole singing of hymns and such. It was a intriguing experience and also somewhat enlightening to have gone through at the same time. 

Rediscovering music

Now a days there is so much music out there to discover. Personally I find most of mine through film soundtracks, YouTube videos, and shazaming TV adverts. When you find these great new songs it feels awesome, you'll often have these songs on repeat for days trying to soak it in. What's even better then discover new songs though, is rediscovering old ones.

This week during my daily job board searching I decided to hit shuffle on my media player and let it go through my entire library, and to my delight it uncover a whole host of songs that I haven't heard in years. Songs I remember listening to on the bus to school, or that I remember from old films I had seen, loads drawing up memories of times before which I'd forgotten about. I was also recommended a few songs by a friend this week to look up again, which were also songs that I had heard before and completely forgotten.

Its safe today that since rediscovery these songs, a number of them have been repeated numerous times over the last few days. However I'm also still trying to allow time to keep going through my library to find even more forgotten songs to rediscover.

The only problem I have now is that with all of this music I want to listen too, I unfortunately have to once again go through my MP3 player and take off a load if tracks to free up space. As I am still running an old school player that only holds 4gb of music.
This ultimately means that there will be some songs that I have to sacrifice and they become the forgotten songs. Upside to this though is that hopefully in a couple of years I will click shuffle library and stumble upon them and start this process all over again.

Just quickly thinking it over, this does also present one other problem, and that is that it kind of messes up my top favourite songs list that I do ever year. I do say within those lists that I am almost 100% sure that I've missed songs out, but it still throws a spanner in the works a bit.

Celebrity deaths

I'm sure by now most people will have heard that on Friday Leonard Nimoy passed away, aged 83.  Even if you don't really know of any of the characters he played or know that much about him as a person, I'm sure you'll have heard of him at some point.

As with all actors/celebrities of this stature, who have been present on TV/film for many years, their passing not only affects family and close friends but significant amounts of normal everyday people too. These people are present in peoples lives through various mediums, and people come to know of them, and so it is understandable that when they unfortunately die, it affects them too. I never know what too feel in these instances however.

I've known of Leonard Nimoy for many years due to his role as Spock in Star Trek, as many others do, and from what I knew of him, he seemed like an amazing person. There in lies the problem however. My perception of this person is for the most part based on a fictitious person that he played, not reflecting himself, and from  a handful of public appearances such as chat shows or film premieres.

This in no way hinders my view of him, from what I saw and read and knew about him, he was a brilliant person, I just don't really feel as though I have the right to grieve for him in anyway. I didn't know him personally, or ever even have any form of contact with him, I just viewed him through a screen, and so that connection doesn't really feel as genuine.

This isn't just in the case of Leonard Nimoy, last year when Robin Williams passed away, millions of people spoke out saying how he was a huge part of their lives, especially their childhood due to his roles in films during the 80's/90's.

I in no way want to say that people can't feel this way, or even that these people don't deserve to have people mourn their deaths, I just never quite know how to react. This could possibly be due to the fact that so far I am lucky enough to not have experienced a death of someone I know closely, and so just haven't yet found out how to act.

Whatever the reason, it is very sad to always hear of these people passing away and it will be strange to not hear about them or watch/read about them anymore. At least with these kinds of people however, we do still have a collection of their works to revisit and remember them through.

And another two buses

I wrote something similar to this not to long ago but the idea seems to be somewhat more prevalent now. I described it in a post about a month ago as two buses arriving at once after waiting for ages.

Last week as I mentioned I unfortunately lost my position at work, along with the other guys I worked along side and that's okay, it couldn't be changed. Last week my grandmother also had quite a bad accident, which involved her breaking both of her wrists and leaving her unable to do very much.

I've heard the notion of thinking positive thoughts and this will affect your outcome in a positive way. This I feel is true to a certain extend, if your happy you let certain negative things slide and notice more of the good things, however these aren't things that were really in either of our control, and they weren't outcomes that could have been affected by wanting a better outcome. Its all merely coincidence, and bad timing but as with the things before they seemed to just cone at once. 

Perhaps, putting a positive spin on things, its actually quite good that these things seem to be happening together. It gets them out the way and things aren't drawn out.

Not entirely sure why I've decided to write about this again. Its just one of the thoughts whizzing round in my head again. Hopefully come next week I'll be back into the swing of job hunting again.

Friday the 13th indeed

This week has not been the best week with regards to receiving news. There have been a number of family things going on around me since earlier on this week, and yesterday it was my turn to have something happen, to receive my own bad news.

It is quite a long complicated story and I'm not quite sure what I details I should actually reveal so I'm going to keep things brief.

Yesterday, after what seemed to be a very good day, a day that was flying by, everyone at work was looking forward to the weekend and things were all going as normal. However at about 3ish o'clock our bosses return from some meetings and told us to head on over to the bar place across the road where we'd all had lunch together the week before.

Here's the point where I skip over a lot of the complicated details. After going over a number of things we found out that due to some dodgy investors withholding money the company, as of yesterday would officially stop trading as they no longer had money to cover anyone's salaries. This as you'd guess took everyone by surprise.

Weirdly, due to me currently just interning at the company and not yet having a full blown salary, I didn't feel as affected as I knew the others were. It was devastating to see the guys I work with during this chat as absolutely no one expected thus to happen. We were even making jokes on the way over to the bar saying "Oh were probably all getting fired", with no idea that that was actually what was kind of happening. Obviously we weren't being fired, and it wasn't our bosses fault it was due to these dodgy investor but the end result is still the same.

The weirdest part of all of this though, is that because it was not our bosses fault and because today we were meant to be launching a game, a game that everyone has been working on for a couple of months now, some if us are actually going to go back into work on Monday. This in the full knowledge that we will not be getting paid. Again as I said I technically don't get a wage anyway, just some expenses but it's still work people are volunteering to do, because of the effort they have put into making this game and because of the attachment they have to the other people there.

Unfortunately this came at the time in the month where my monthly ticket is just about to run out and where I should have gotten money through again to renew it. If I had gotten this money I would happily renew my ticket and continue to work there for another month helping where I could. As I said though, unfortunately come the middle if next week, it runs out, and I don't have the money to buy more tickets to go down there to just volunteer.

With all of this being said then, as it stands I am currently going back to the situation I was in last summer, updating my resume and back on the job hunt. I will however be going back to help these guys out until my ticket runs out, and if I can will try to work from home until some things else comes along, until the company decides to close up altogether or in the slimmest chance the company starts to come back together again.

Not how any of us imagined Friday to go, especially after the majority of the day went 100% like normal with no warning signs. In this year of firsts though its something I guess I can add to the list, plus my never been fired record still stands technically, so silver lining there. Let's just hope this round of job searching goes better then the last.

That time of year again - My birthday

I've never really been that much of an out going kind of person, or a person who likes to be in the spotlight that much. Due to this, this time of year, specifically my birthday has always been quite strange to me and something, that most of the time I feel like I should just go about things as normal and avoid.

This year however things were slightly different. Not in a big way, but a way that now seems quite significant looking back on it.

Going into work on Friday, everything stayed the same, as I don't think anyone there actually knew it was my birthday, as it has never come up, and I didn't do anything to rectify this. This to me was not a bad thing, as I've said I don't like too much attention on me and as there weren't that many of us in that day I just thought I'd stick to normal everyday work.

That morning before work was also pretty similar to this. My family know I'm not the biggest birthday person, and so apart from saying happy birthday and opening a few cards, it was my typical Friday morning. Again, thus wasn't bad as its the way I generally would like to go about birthday stuff. The main difference this year came on Friday evening.

About a week or two ago, I decided that I would do things a bit differently this year and actually try mark my birthday somehow rather then just letting it pass by. And so I arranged to meet up with a few friends and have a couple of drinks to celebrate. In the end, although I did get a bit cringy when they started singing happy birthday, the rest of the evening was actually pretty awesome.

I don't really know how I came to have this view about birthdays, as I say its probably just down to the whole having the spotlight on you effect birthdays have. But doing this one little thing was actually quite a nice difference. I definitely haven't been out or done anything for atleast the last few years, but next year I think I'll definitely try organising something again, perhaps with a bit more effort too.

One year Nerdfighter group anniversary

This time last year, I was invited to join a newly created group for Nerdfighters based in London. One year on I found myself standing in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, with about 30ish other Nerdfighters celebrating the groups one year anniversary.

Its very strange to think that when I joined this group a year ago, on the first day there was about 20 odd people in the group and as of yesterday there are now 700! For the first few months the group held small monthly gatherings at the museum and that was about it, and now there are two monthly gatherings, a monthly book club, and often another one or two other member organised events each month.

This once small obscure group that was hidden away in a small part of the internet now has new members joining everyday, awesome people commenting, sharing things, and chatting away all the time, and has become a place where us internet people can go, to find other like minded people and have somewhat of a safe haven to just do what we want to do.

Personally as I have been part of the group from its inception way back last year, I have been lucky enough to see all of these fantastic changes occur throughout this year. Furthermore as I have also been hugely lucky to have been an admin of this group, I have also been able to see all of the behind the scenes type decisions that have further helped to grow and shape the group.

The most important thing about this group, and why we are so pleased that it is still a thing is because of how much it seems to have helped people and still does. I know first hand how much I have changed due to being a part of it and we want to keep growing and improving so we can continue to do that for others too.

Now that we have reached this landmark, we immediately began to think about the future, we should do next and what year two of the group will bring. Its changed so much more then we could have ever imagined, so its even harder to imagine what it'll be like at the end of its second year.

Hopefully come this time next year I will be here writing another post (hopefully in a more eloquently and coherent way) about how the group has grown even more and about all the new things we have done since.

Nothing, and then two buses turn up at once

I really do seem to be getting quite creative with these blog post titles as of late. I don't know why but let's press on.

This week, kind of as the title suggests I have discovered something else about myself that I did not know about which has popped out of nowhere, following a few other things that I also discovered in recent years. That may all sound very vague but I'll explain more now.

Throughout my life, I have thankfully been a pretty healthy person. I have never broken any bones, I have only once had to go to A&E and that was only for something minor, the only noteworthy issue was some asthma. Apart from that though, nothing else, no illnesses, allergies, or other problems.

Within the last few years however that seems to have changed quite a bit. I discovered that I had a somewhat of a lazy eye and should have been wearing glasses, my asthma has somewhat resurfaced, there is one or two other things that I'm still not 100% sure about and then this week something else to add to the list.

For a while now I have been feeling quite dodgy in the morning and by that I mean my stomach has felt quite weird. Once I was up and busy though it seemed to go away though. Recently this feeling has been getting worse though and more prolonged, and so after however long its been, I finally decided to go to the doctors.

I went along to the doctors, passed along all of my very vague symptoms and descriptions about how I've been feeling, and was told that I could potentially be a coeliac, as my sister also has the same condition. I was also told to come back the following day for blood tests, to help try and confirm this diagnosis.

Since then however I have done some experimenting on myself and now feel that i am probably not a coeliac or gluten intolerant, but instead lactose intolerant. I'm probably about 95% sure about this, even though I have yet to have any official tests or diagnosis, but it seems to fit and it makes sense.

Whichever I am though, I thought it was still pretty strange how the phrase, "I waited forever and then two buses came along at once" strangely fit not only with regards to my health but with quite a few other things I've experienced lately.
Maybe its just a case of, if you're thinking about it you're likely to notice other similar things happening.

Hopefully once the blood test results come back this week, I'll have a clearer picture of what it actually is that's causing me problems.

Life choice made

I know I'm one for over exaggerating when it cones to blog posts but this week I did make quite a big life choice, thats how it felt anyway, and as always I thought I'd talk about it here quickly.

As I have mentioned in previous posts I was doing an three month long internship at a company on London. Well the Thursday just gone was my last day of that internship, and the day before that was one of the most worrying days I've had in a while because that was the day we talked about whether I would stay on or not.

After talking all of the possible outcomes through with family, I actually felt quite positive about what would happen. The guys at work would ask to see me, they'd say yes we'd like you to stay and offer me a figure that would be a decent enough salary for someone like me, and I'd properly be out in the big world pulling my weight. That wasn't quite how it worked out though.

From the first instance where we couldn't find an empty conference room to talk in, I felt as though things were not going to go as planned, and sods law they didn't.

I don't feel like I should go into too much detail about the specifics of what we decided. I will just say that I luckily do still have a job, even though I am still sort of interning for another three months rather than being fully employed. Having this job and gaining this experience should hopefully all pay off in the end though. Three months of less pay, for decent experience at a job I like, we'll see whether it was worth it or not I guess.

Would have been very weird if Thursday was my last day, quite like having a job again and being where I am in London.

A slightly uncomfortable week

This week has been a particularly uncomfortable week when it comes to work, partly due to the fact that I technically have only four days left as an intern and I still don't officially know whether I'll be staying on but mostly because of the work I've had to do.

I knew from the get go that going in to PR and marketing would totally push me out of my comfort zone, and that there would be instances, probably quite a few where this would make me feel uncomfortable and out of my depth. This week one of the main tasks I was given was to go through various Facebook pages and groups and contact people to see whether they would be interested in posting about our new game when it comes out.

Firstly, I felt a little bit weird doing this, as even though I don't have a whole lot of marketing experience, I do know social media pretty well and there is often a very thin line between advertising tastefully and coming across as spamming. A line some people seemed to think I'd crossed from their response to my one and only polite message.

Where I was most uncomfortable however was that due to the way the messaging system works on Facebook, you cannot initiate a message conversation as your business page, meaning that I had to use my own personal account to send out all these messages. Even though I triple checked my privacy settings, I really didn't like the idea that these people could potentially see some of my photos or details and such, and that they could report me for something in all honestly, I didn't feel was the right way to do things.

Although I am still slightly reluctant about this method, things haven't gone as bad as I believed they would so far, so at the moment I'm going to just reserve judgement and wait till all the posts start going out to see how worthwhile all thus work was.

I'm hoping that this time next week my post will be slightly more positive, hopefully due to the fact that I will at that point be in full time paid employment and not back to being unemployed and trawling through job sites sending out tonnes of cv's again.

Yeah, so fingers crossed for the better outcome. I'm sure everything will work out alright.

Squash

As with a lot of my recent posts, I can't quite remember if I have previously mentioned this, but as of late I have really taken a like to playing Squash.

This isn't the biggest announcement in the world, it really doesn't rank that highly on the scale of things that's just happened to me in the past few months but it is something that I haven't really done or had in quite a while.

I was never too into doing sports, I enjoyed doing games and p.e at school, but never really did any after school sports, the only exception being Orienteering, which I used to love doing and did for quite a few years.

And so the fact that I have discovered this new sport and have taking a liking to it, to the point that I now have my own squash rachet and have been up to the gym to play it more time then I've been up to the gym in the past several more this is saying something.

The next step however is to stop using my families memberships to book the courts and to get my own membership, to really solidify the fact that I should go up there more. Not only to play for the enjoyment of it but also to help get myself fitter.

Hopefully this can be another thing that O can add to my list of newly tried things,and is something that I continue to do well into the future, as I feel like I'm already getting pretty good at it.

With work starting back up again soon, my time at the gym may fall a little bit but I look forward to delving further into the world of squash.