For a while Craig and I have been discussing buying some golden syrup and seeing which of us could drink a whole bottle the fastest. Much like a scene in Super Troopers (although I only noticed the similarity when Leo mentioned it). Today was the day we tried it.

Craig and I were in Asda before we went into town and so we bought two bottles of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. A tasty treat when served in small doses with something.

Anyway, after hanging around town and meeting up with David (who brought his camera along) we came back to my house and watched some TV for a bit. Then we decided to go ahead with the competition. David decided to film the entire event. I shall now direct you to the video! Go on and watch it 😀 You know you want to. David also took a few promotional pictures for the event. And yes, that’s the first link to my gallery. Take a look around if you’ve got a few hours to spare. It’s not finished yet, there’s a fair bit of work to be done. Let me know what you think I should do with it. Leave me a comment or something 😀

Oh yeah, Craig threw up afterwards. There’s a video of that too, but I have to rotate it and upload it first 😉

Smith Code Jaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz.

The judge in the Dan Brown plagiarism case, Justice Peter Smith, italicised certain characters in his report that spell out the line above. I’m going to spend some time finding out what the code means today 🙂

It’s not rot13 encoded, and I have yet to test atbash on it, but that seems quite likely based on the whole linking with the Da Vinci Code story 😉

Actually, scratch that, I just tried atbashing it and that’s not right either. I’ll work on it after lunch I suppose.

Edit (13:41)
Well, the code was cracked today by the lawyer (below) who noticed the italicised characters in the first place. The key to the thing is the fibonacci sequence, which is great. The “secret” message reads: “Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought” according to this Reuters article.

So there ends another exciting adventure for the day.

Yup.

“I put my key in the door and spent a few seconds trying to unlock it before I realised that the door was already unlocked. Quite probably it had been unlocked all night. Potentially it had been open all night and my bike has been stolen… I do not know.”

So, I was pretty much right. The guy who walked my mum home helped himself to my bike on his way out of the house last night. He left the door unlocked and apparently my mum was in the house all night. She doesn’t know the guy’s name, or where he lives. She might know where he works though, so maybe something will work out.

I’ll cal lthe police and they;ll tell me that, y’know, they can’t be seen to be solving some crime because then it means they have to try to solve more. I have no faith in the police or the system any more. It’s got to the point where I’d rather find the guy myself. I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands if the police would take it into theirs!

Another stark reminder that I need to get out of Mansfield. Can today get worse? I shouldn’t tempt it.

Last night I went to watch a football match and do the quiz at the Cockle with Craig, his brothers, and a workmate of Glenn’s named Tim. The match was a lightly entertaining nil nil draw. The quiz was alright, but a bit boring really… not that interesting anyways.

The more interesting part was the quizmaster/DJ calling Glenn “Flower Power” because of his white shirt with pink flowers on it. In the end he brought overa black bin-liner, cut a head hole in it and Glenn had to wear it. He tried to ditch it later in the night but Craig, Shaun, and I made sure that didn’t happen.

At one point during the quiz we were naming some random people just being silly with the answer to some question. I said “Jessica Simpson… Mandy Moore…” and then at the exact same time Shaun and I both said “Michael Barrymoore.” It was hilarious for both of us for quite a long time.

The rest of the night out consisted of a car chase, a trip to Asda in Sutton, and messing with Craig’s car and stuff.

WhenI was at home I noticed my mum was out. When she got back (between 2 and 3) she didn’t bother taking off her shoes, so all I could hear was her walking around downstairs. That was until she turned the upstairs landing light on and walked upstairs. she made a bunch of noise upstairs, and then went back down without turning the light off. I decided, stupidly, to go downstairs and (honestly not lying here) politely ask her to keep it down a bit because I had to be up at 7. She said something ridiculously inconsiderate about it being her house and so I walked off ignoring her.

She was just in the process of turning on the stereo too, so that was nice. After a while of listening to the music I managed to drift off, probably about 4 in the morning by then. This morning I went downstairs and discovered she wasn’t in the house. She did come back with James, so I figured she went there somehow. Then when I went into the hallway I noticed my bike was gone. I walked up to the front door figuring she just took it to James’s house for some reason. I put my key in the door and spent a few seconds trying to unlock it before I realised that the door was already unlocked. Quite probably it had been unlocked all night. Potentially it had been open all night and my bike has been stolen… I do not know.

Today at work has been one long printer-fixing-fest too, I’m sick of the printers. No more paper allowed!

Oh well, almost done now, I suppose.

I got home about 20 minutes later than usual tonight because I wasn’t thinking. It was 17:17 when my co-worker asked me what time I was leaving. I told him 17:30. He asked why. Then it dawned on me that I leave at 17:00.

Needless to say (yet I continue typing) I got my stuff together quickly and left 🙂

Anyway, off to the pub soon, got a football match to watch. Over half way through the week already ^_^

I’m sitting at work right now listening to my music 😀 At first I thought I couldn’t be bothered with setting up gnump3d, but then I realised I’d be stupid not to 😉 I’m so glad I did it.

There’s absolutely nobody in the entire place and I would normally just be sitting here in silence, but no more! I’ll be doing a late shift tomorrow too. Adam wanted to swap with me, so I said yes. It does mean I will have worked a few less hours, so I’ll get less pay, but it won’t make too much of a difference. I’m sure Adam appreciates it and he’ll help me out if I need him to in the future 🙂

Well, I suppose I’m going to go and get my drink now, then find something else to do for 2 hours while I listen to my music 😀

Back to the regular shift patterns tomorrow. It occured to me as I was typing that first sentence that that means I don’t start until tomorrow afternoon 😀 Hooray for late shifts 😀

I’ve enjoyed the last two weeks quite a lot. I haven’t had much to do, and I’ve set up a bunch of useful stuff at home so I can do whatever I like at college, within reason of course. I think I’ll set up gnump3d or something at some point. Then I can listen to my music on the late shifts without using my iPod battery. Could be nice. Not much use during the rest of the week though because I can’t be seen to be listening to music in headphones when people need my help.

Tomorrow will also mean that there’s only 2 weeks left until Sandra arrives. So in 2 weeks I’ll be off for another 2 weeks 😀 Surely not long after that it’ll be the summer holidays and then I’ll be back to doing just as little as I did during Easter. I’m looking forward to a few things then 🙂

Google Maps says it’ll take just short of 2 hours to get to Manchester from my house. I need to be there at 20:00 so Craig and I will need to leave at around 18:00 or so. We could leave earlier, but we probably wouldn’t get very far because it’d still be rush hour. Although we would be heading against the main flow of traffic if we’re heading towards Nottingham for the first leg of the journey. Ah well, whatever. We’ll need about 2 hours to get there. Sandra will doubtlessly be stuck in customs and baggage collection until at least 20:30 and then it’s another 2 hours back from the airport.

I imagine, all told, we’ll get back for about 23:00. I’m looking forward to that day a lot 🙂

Last night I went to the quiz at the Sir John Cockle with Craig and his brothers as usual. We watched the football first, which is why everyone but me actually goes there, I think. There was a squirrel on the pitch in the first half of the match, which was interesting.

David walked into the bar (ouch) after a little while too. His friends all left to go to some pub in Kirkby or something, so he stayed around. Craig’s brothers left, but Shaun’s friend Baxter hung around with us for a while longer.

We answered a bunch of the quiz questions, but I don’t really think we payed that much attention to the quiz, really… But it turned out we got the highest score, along with three other groups of people. So we would have won 8 beer vouchers, but they got split 4 ways. It was quite good, but different to how it usually happens.

After the quiz Craig, David, and I went for a little drive around. I forget why, but we went to a few parks in the area. David suggested doing some “le parkhour” and after we dropped david off I pointed out to Craig that we’d actually done “le park tour.” Apologies for that 😉

Anyway, I went home and spoke to Sandra a bit, and then I was falling asleep, so I hung up. Less than three weeks until she arrives here now. I’m looking forward to it a lot.

This morning I woke up at 06:44, 16 minutes before my alarm, so I went back to sleep for a while. I turned my first alarm off at 07:00, and then I pressed snooze on the second alarm at 07:35. I must have turned the entire thing off completely when it went off again at 07:44 and so I woke up, finally, at 08:55. 25 minutes late for work already. I managed to get here by 09:15, so that’s not too bad. I walked straight into my boss as soon as I got here and told him I’d overlaid and stuff. He didn’t seem to mind too much, but obviously now I can’t put that I was working on my hour sheet, so the agency won’t pay me for that hour. Oh well.

I filled out a shedload of forms over the last 24 hours and I handed them in at Human Resources today, so in the next few days I should get an employee ID, email address, and Windows Domain account. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference to me now though, because I have the administrator password for all of the computers ^_^

My mum just swore at me and stormed out my bedroom because I apparently pissed her off.

She came in, watched me pause the thing I was watching and then started talking to me about god only know what… She sat there and I told her I was catching up on the episodes of stuff that I have to watch and she ignored my hint.

She said “I didn’t bother buying you an egg because money’s a bit tight at the moment” and I said “Oh, I don’t care about that, it’s just Easter, I couldn’t care less. Don’t worry about it.” I already told her, two days ago not to bother with anything for Easter because it means nothing to me.

She said to me “I thought you would have gone to see your dad.” I usually see him on a Sunday if I go, so I said “I was paintballing, so I couldn’t go.” She said “It’s Bank Holiday Monday though, so he’ll be off.” So I said “Yeah, but I have episodes that I want to catch up on.” She still didn’t take the hint. So I opened up some pictures to show her from Rock City and she said “Where was that taken?” I told her it was at Rock City and pointed out that yesterday I’d told her that the only place we’d been to was Rock City and we wouldn’t have got in anywhere else. She asked if the pictures were taken with David’s camera and I said that they were.

I showed her another picture, this one with Emma, Rachel, and Tom in it and she said “They weren’t at rock city were they?” So I sat there for a second and said “How could they not have been there? I just told you that we only went to Rock City, you know these were taken with David’s camera… How could those pictures have possibly been taken anywhere but Rock City?

That’s when she swore at me and stormed out of my room. Leaving me in peace to watch more episodes for (hopefully) the rest of the evening 🙂

Yikes, I’ve done a hell of a lot since I last posted here…

I went back to finish off the painting with David. Before too long it was obvious we weren’t going to have enough paint. David and I walked to B&Q to buy some more paint. When we were on our way out we realised it would be very heavy to carry all that way, so David borrowed a B&Q trolley and pushed it 95% of the way home before abandoning it.

Craig arrived a little bit later and we finished off the room in less than an hour (I think). I had expected it to take a lot longer to be finished and so I’d told Emma that I wouldn’t be going to Rock City, but David wanted to go and Craig was feeling like going as well. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but David decided, while listening to Kanye West, that “it’d be a good idea if I just did this” and painted on his jeans.

So after a few seconds all three of us had begun painting on our clothes. I now have my name written in magnolia on the bottom of my black jeans. I had intended to wear them to go paintballing anyway, so I’m not bothered. Craig put hand prints on his jeans… In an obvious place 🙂

We put dust sheets down in Craig’s car and he drove us to Nottingham so we could meet up with Emma, her boyfriend Tom, and her friend Rachel. We’d been in Rock City for quite a long time before we actually met up with those three though. Long enough to notice that Batman, Robin, Captain America, Superman, Iron Man, Hulk, Wolverine, and some other super-heroes were present. o_O

A bunch of David’s friends were there, unsurprisingly, so I sort of said hello to a few of those a little bit but mostly hung around with Craig. That is until him and Rachel found a suitable corner and went off by themselves for a long time.

Anyway, before they went off we noticed that the superheroes had left their masks on the end of the bar… So I was dared to go over and get the Wolverine mask… So I did. It’s beside me right now 🙂 Later on in the night we noticed that Captain America had pretty much fallen asleep propped up against the bar holding his shield in his hands. I was dared, again, to go and retrieve it… I walked up with 9 pence in my hands to put in his shield (he was holding it like a beggar). I dropped the money in but he didn’t stir. So I just took the shield out of his hands. We had a few pictures taken and then a midget version of Iron Man was getting annoyed, so I took the shield back over and gave it to Captain America again 🙂 He was thankful. I was glad that Iron Man didn’t notice Wolverine’s mask in my pocket, or Wolverine’s claws in Craig’s. 🙂

After a little longer Emma, Tom, and Rachel had to go to catch the last bus back to Mansfield. We walked out and Craig walked Rachel to the bus (Emma and Tom had gone on ahead), while David and I went to secure some food by skipping ahead of an entire queue in a kebab shop 🙂 I had an almost entirely processed cheeseburger that wasn’t actually bad at all, and we walked down to the bus.

We said goodbye to people through the window of the bus. Emma looked upset about something, but I still don’t know what it was. I’ll have to ask her at some point, or see if she reads this and just tells me. I guess it’s more likely that JonP will ask her and then she’ll say something 😉

The three of us walked up to a pizza place near Craig’s house so Craig could get a couple of pizzas. When we got back to the flat we all just sat down and didn’t really move again. We were watching a bit of poker on television and I was actually getting excited about the hands being dealt. I remember I raised my hands into the air in glee when someone got three aces or something. Poker is cool, I need to play again. I ate some fo craig’s pizza on top of the cheeseburger, and then Craig went to bed. David and I had already established ourselves on sofas and we turned the light off and got ready to sleep.

Just before we were asleep Danny walked in to say he was back. He brought in a girl named Claire who was completely off her head. She was carrying toothepaste for some reason that escapes me. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was carrying it either. On her way out of the room she walked over to me and stood there for a few seconds… I couldn’t work out what was wrong, but she kept looking at me. Eventually she looked down at my sleeping bag and asked if it was her coat. I pointed out that it obviously wasn’t and she agreed and left the room. David and I finally went to sleep.

Somewhere between 3 and 4 hours later Craig came in to wake us up so we’d be ready to go paintballing. I got ready as much as I could be bothered, which was just having a wash and brushing my teeth without a brush and came back upstairs and went to sleep for another half an hour or so until people were ready.

Craig drove us all over to his mum’s house back in Mansfield where we were meeting the people we were paintballing with. Glenn, Shaun (Craig’s brothers), Lorraine (Glenn’s friend), and Keith (Lorraine’s stepdad) met us there. Craig and I got into Lorraine’s car with her and Keith and everyone else was in Glenn’s car. Glenn went to pick up another one of his friends, Aide or Aidie, or Aidy or however it’s spelled and then we al met up at the paintballing place, Delta Force. Glenn was the last person to arrive. There must have been about 50 other people there, if not more so we weren’t sure how it would work.

We signed forms saying that if we die o got injured it was our own stupid faults and got dressed and stuff. We had full-head helmets with goggles, boiler suits covering our entire bodies, bought some £7 gloves with plastic over the knuckles, and we also had some velcro things around our waists for carrying spare ammo and such.

After a little chat about rules and stuff like that we bought paintballs and got completely ready for the first match. The first match basically involved two teams with a general on each team who couldn’t leave the team-base. Each team had to protect their general while also going forth to shoot the opposing general. I can’t remember if we won the first one or not, but I’m sure I did get shot. It didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected. I noticed afterwards that the paintball had hit me in the chest, but failed to burst… So I technically wasn’t out. I was still feeling new and stuff though, so I just left 😡

The second round of the first game was the same, but with the teams in opposite bases. This time I was a lot more active. Previously I’d just hung around the base protecting the general. This time I ran up the left hand side with Craig and we pushed forwards constantly. It ended up with me directly in front of the base behind a blockade and Craig behind a blockade on the left with the general and a sniper in the base. I drew the fire from the base and Craig managed to get a perfect shot from his side-angle and got their general 😀 It was awesome!

After that I’ve already started to forget the order of the rounds and stuff… So it’ll be a much quicker round-up of the main events.

A guy turned up dressed in his own camoflauge stuff, wearing a red beret on his head, carrying his own gun… Everybody thought he was probably in the army or something like that… I shot him in the arm in one of the rounds, but the paintball didn’t burst, so he turned around and shot the three I hid behind about a million times. Every time I turned around he fired a few more shots at it. I was pretty much trapped completely. A guy snook around on the other side of me and shot my leg. I stood up with my hands in the air to leave the area and as soon as I turned back on the army guy walking out of the place he shot me in the shoulder, 4 times. What an ass. He’d also shot me right in the middle of the goggles I was wearing previously, but headshots don’t count (for some reason). I’m glad that was the final round in that area because I couldn’t see anything from that point anyway.

< br />Later on there was a capture the flag challenge. In the first round David was doing really damn well. He was creeping up on the right forwards and forwards. I can’t remember how he got shot, but he was pretty much in their base when it happened.

In the second round Craig and I had decided to go for a suicide run. Shaun and david said they’d cover us. I don’t know what happened to Shaun and David, I think they just did their own thing really… I ran the entire length of the battle area and got by everyone on their team and got my hand on the flag without being shot. Unfortunately I was wearing gloves, so I missed picking the flag up when I grabbed at it, and I had to turn back to get it. So I got shot in the leg when I was going back 🙁 I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t been wearing gloves I would have made it back to base without being shot… the guns aren’t very accurate at the ebst of times. I found that you pretty much can’t shoot anyone when you’re moving, and it’s pretty damn tough if they’re moving too… I think I could have dodged enough to get all the way back. I’ll never know though. All I can say is that if I’m ever in that situation there again I will be doing the exact same thing, but without wearing a glove on my empty hand.

There were soe other rounds, ut I can’t really remember the order, and nothing really remarkable happened that I can recall, so I’m skipping a couple of hours of events really. People can post about them in the comments if they remember something I forgot 😉

There was a castle area for the final match. There was a breifcase-type-object that one team had to protect while the other team was split in two teams who had to attack to capture the object. In the first round I was killed by a grenade, which was the only time that happened. In the second round we were doing the attacking to retrieve the case. I got shot, but it didn’t burst again. This time I got all the way to the dead-zone before I realised, so I ran back in. My gun jammed before long so every time I fired the balls exploded in the gun and paint just splattered out a couple of metres. I switched guns with one of the marshals and that was doing the same sort of thing, so I think it was actually the loading thing that was jammed somehow. Either way I got fed up fo sitting under fire for 4 minutes, so I stood up and absolutely sprinted flat out down trenches, through the branches of trees and leaves and stuff straight towards the case we had to capture. I got all the way into the base without being shot, but there were about 5 people in there. I got shot pretty damn quickly in the base area and I just gave up and fell over. I was shot about another 6 times while I was on the floor… All of them were by Glenn, so far as I can tell.

It was an excellent final round and ended a good solid day of shooting people 🙂 On the way out we took off our safeties and shot each other at ridiculously close range a few times. I say a few, in my case… David shot Glenn about 20 times in the ass. It was funny. We didn’t even get in trouble because we asked the marshal if we could do it first, and he agreed 🙂

We all got our stuff sorted out and drove back to Craig’s mum’s house. It was a brilliant half of a day 🙂 Craig dropped me and David off at our houses and we all went to have showers or baths or whatever to get a bit refreshed. I checked out a few red marks, which are now turning into bruises, and then got ready for them to come over to pick me up.

We went out to get pizza and then Craig drove us up to Newstead Abbey and we parked after we’d driven through the grounds. After a little while of listening to the radio and eating food Craig drove on and we came back via Newstead train station. We came into my house for a little while and that lead to me falling asleep on the sofa. I don’t know if either of them fell asleep or not, but I woke up when they were going to leave to say goodbye and lock the doors and stuff. I went to bed and fell asleep pretty much instantly.

I woke up about an hour ago from now and pretty much all I’ve done is type this, speak to Sandra a little, and copied some pictures for David.

I’m fairly damn certain that this is the absolute longest blog entry EVER on my site.