Alex & Lizzy's (Travel) Blog

Two bits of news on the car front:

Firstly, I’m getting my “uninsured losses” money back – i.e. the money I spent on the hire car after my accident, and potentially a bit more. That’s £700 at least… would be nice if they give me lots for loss of use! maybe a few thousand pounds

Secondly, and even more excitingly, I have ordered a car! Yes, a mere 6 months and 5 days after my accident, I’m finally getting a new car! It’s probably going to be another 2 weeks until I get it, but here’s the spec:
2002(02) registration Ford Focus 1.8 TDi CL, Dark Green, 55k miles
(yes, that’s quite a lot of miles, but I had to go higher on that to get the newer model)
Can’t wait to have it… want to go join the cool boys racing round the Broadmarsh – I’ll easily beat them in that! YES! Hehe… a Nottingham joke that one, sorry for those that won’t understand – it’s your fault for not living in Nottingham (“The world’s best city”, according to our local radio station!).

Anyway, off work again today, cos feeling BLEURGH once more, also means delaying arrival at Crossfire – probably going across tomorrow morning now. Rob’s kindly giving me a lift, what a star.

I was off school the past few days with guess what? Yes, more gastritis – it appears the old lot didn’t go away and has come back to start causing me grief again. So I’m now back at school feeling OK, but still a little nauseus.

Today and tomorrow left – then I get a week off! Crossfire this weekend though, so that’ll be a busy start to it.

This is x3ja in Nottingham, for X3jblog, signing off.

Right, I figured I’d put my best man’s speech on here since I have it all written out. There’s photos from the wedding here too. Click “More…” to see the speech… It’s not exactly as it was when I did it – it’s how it was in the planning stages a few days before the real thing. I doubt anyone recorded it, so I dunno what I really said…
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My new measure of greatness is how many of the top 250 IMDb films you have seen. I make it to an average 87 out of 250. I get 45 out of the top 100, which is more impressive. Also, if you feel like it, you can rate yourself on the bad ones too – I get 15 out of 100 on the bottom 100. Leave me a comment with your ratings…

I propose we call this the C:FIS (Coolness: Films I’ve Seen) rating.

Well, you may know that I was being best man for a wedding at the weekend – the wedding of Laura and Nathan (photos to follow sometime soonish). Well I ended up getting married myself! I stole Nathan from Laura and was involved in the first gay marriage in the UK. Yes, it’s about time I came out. Mine and Nathan’s love for each other can no longer remain a secret.

Now, you think I’m joking, don’t you? And in part I am. The bit I’m not joking about is that my name is with Nathan’s in the married couple’s slot on the wedding certificate. The wedding ceremony still took place between Laura and Nathan, so I really don’t know where that leaves us. Nathan’s probably a bigamist or something, hehe!

Anyway, the rest of the weekend went really well, and I even enjoyed giving my speech, although the time leading up to it was terrifying and I didn’t eat much and needed a few trips to the loo. All in all it was a very good, if a bit long, day. Was great to spend time with Nathan’s brothers and his family, seeing guys from Nottingham and, of course, spending time with my rather lovely girlfriend Lizzy.

Then late on Saturday night, Lizzy and I got picked up by my sister and went to her and Nik’s house to stay the night. Then Nik cooked us a wonderfully lovely Sunday roast and we eventually set off back to Nottingham around 5.45pm. Enjoyed the drive back through Snake Pass and the like, but was a little tired at the start.

We didn’t get home in time for church, so we just chilled in front of the telly and stuff until Lizzy left about 11.30. Just enough time to catch up on a few emails, but not enough time to blog… but now there has been.

You might have noticed that although I’m married to Nathan, I’m still carrying on my relationship with Lizzy. We like our relationships “open”. Also Nathan went off with some woman for two weeks to Mexico, so I figured I was entitled to have someone back here…

Anyway, on with another week! This half term is over half gone! YAY! (Yes, that’s half a half of a third of a year).

(Oh, and I think I was meant to say “hi” to Janine and Jon, some of Lizzy’s friends that read this… scary! Leave a comment guys ) )

Yes, I have a job. I’ll be working at a school in a small town about 10 miles east of Nottingham. (Yes, not adding the name so it doesn’t turn up in Google!) I shall be starting in September, assuming I pass my PGCE!

Surely I wouldn’t write my blog from school? Well, shh… don’t tell anyone.

Just wanted to say that I’ve installed MT-Blacklist, to protect all the blogs on my site from spamming. Found lots and lots on its initial pass, so hopefully it should reduce what I have to deal with, and also the other people who get their blogs spammed here. You can look at my blacklist.txt if you’re interested, but it’s pretty much the same as the default with about 10 new ones.

And now for some work.

[Update: I've turned off the scanning when comments are posted, so will have to do things semi-manually now. It broke comment threading, which is super-handy, so I had to disable it. Thanks to James for the pointer]

Well, must be really brief as I have to get to bed for school tomorrow.

A few things of note:
– I had a really great weekend spent mostly with Lizzy, but also with other people at other times. A good 3 days, made the most of it I think.
– Church was “en plein air” on Sunday night, thanks to a power cut, so they ran a PA from someone’s car battery (I think) and had the service outside as there are very few windows in the church. Was fun, and it didn’t rain even though it looked very very threatening.
– For some reason, everyone’s become interested in a flash animation I copied onto my webspace some months back, I think it was John Partridge that gave it to me. If you’re linking to it, it’s probably best to use the original or something. It’s using quite a lot of bandwidth… so it’ll get deleted if this continues.
– And who is Frank?

Thanks, that’s all.