It’s Over

It’s over to you:
I can’t find the answers when you’re gone.
And it’s over to you;
You can’t find the answers where you are.
I won’t tear you down!
I won’t tear you down,
To get into the world you wanted.
I’m kicking through the walls…
No-one can believe in the things that never change.

– “It’s Over”, The Goo Goo Dolls

I can’t sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day and I really oughta get some, and I’m knackered, but hey.

Tomorrow’s the first day of the Fresher’s Fayre. I’ll be selling hot dogs, alongside Kit and Paul, all day, in order to raise money for Nightline. Perhaps I just don’t feel like everything’s sorted yet. This last week I’ve spent most of my working hours at the office, and as a result the amount of planning and preparation that has gone into this three-day event has been a blur to me… perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel ‘finished’ – because as far as I’m concerned, it never really ‘started’. This project… I’ve not really been a part of.

The plan is to meet up early in the morning and collect the remainder of our supplies – fresh bread, bacon, and other perishables – then go and set up in the Sports Cage on Penglais Campus. Then, having set up all of our stuff, we’ll go and check that the Nightline stand itself has been set up and see if the Nightliners who’ll be running it want a breakfast bacon sandwich.

My Local Education Authority contacted me to tell me that while they’ll offer me my usual student loan for this, my final year in education, they won’t pay my tuition fees. This puts me in a moderately complicated situation, as I’m not able to pay them myself out of my current income. Instead, my current plan – should my appeal to them fail – is to find an unsecured loan I can take out to pay for my studies, and pay it off after my graduation. Hopefully, however, they can be persuaded to pay, and that won’t be necessary.

This town’s fascinating this time of year. So many students reappearing… look down any street and you’ll see two young people struggling to carry a TV into a house. A stark contrast to the two weeks previous, in which it’s been a ghost town, or the weeks before that, when we were infested with tourists.

Claire’s come down with the Freshers’ Flu early – characteristic illness of University towns at that time of year when people from all over the country bring their local illnesses to one place all at once. There should probably be some kind of quarantine process or something. Like out here during the Foot & Mouth outbreak.

I’m going to go fridgesurfing then write some more code to the sound of Goo.

Sleep well, sweet Aberystwyth;

Disneyporn

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Sian wrote:

Just got back from me favourite sleepy seaside town, missing it already. Dumped my brother in Penbryn, caught up with Strokey in the Blue Creek Cafe (which now has my fave Aber hot chocolate), learnt the wonders of googlewhacking and disneyporn with Dan and Claire, and saw Derry for the first time in ages (and got a Hollywood, yay!). It was so nice to wake up with someone again. Nice lazy Aber day today. I know I’ve done the right thing with having a year out – I’ve got loads more confidence and money – but I did feel jealous seeing all the ickle freshers arriving all nervous and excited.

My cousin, who’s in the TA, has just been called up to serve in Basra, which sucks. He’s just turned 18. Ok, so it’s his choice, I’m sure he’ll be fine, and he’ll get loads of money for it, unlike the Iraqi civilians who had no choice in the matter, but it still sucks for his family. Ach well, that’s war for you.

I don’t recall this particular incident of googlewhacks and disneyporn, but I can imagine the conversation, in retrospect. The former probably came up in respect to my experiments around that time into Google Search’s quirks and googlebombability; the latter perhaps an attempt to squick out “Strokey” Adam.