Etherproof E•ther•proof | adjective: impervious to; or designed to resist the penetration of, ether.

Bloody socks!

Last Sunday's hike didn't go as planned. The bus driver refused to drive to Wensleydale due to the snowy roads, so we ended up in Ingleton somewhere in the Northern Yorkshire Dales. It was a good hike with moderately high intensity and a decent ascent of some 6-700 metres. My feet verily agreed and bled accordingly in an expression of excitement:

It does look a bit messier than it was, but I have some amendments to make for the next adventure. First of all, I went to an outdoors store today and bought a CamelBak® and a 108 dB safety whistle (the latter subject to testing next time the tw**s in the flat below choose to party at 4 am.)

Secondly, I'm buying some thin upper mid-layer clothing, preferably Gore-Tex® or a similar breathable fabric.

Thirdly, I'm not bringing 1.5 Kg of food and 1 Kg of peanuts. In fact, there are a lot of items I'm not bringing on next hike. I am, however, bringing 6 L of water instead.

Next trip will be to the Lake District, and I'm quite looking forward to the scenery.

More hiking madness

The few of you that are still stalking me on facebook are likely to know that I went on a spontaneous hiking trip to Snowdonia in Wales a few weeks ago. I'll let pictures tell the tale on flickr.

I'll also depart on my next trip in some three hours, joining the UoM Hiking Club to the Yorkshire Dales, and once again I'm bringing my camera for my dear readers to partake in the venture. Stay tuned for updates.

All Quiet on the Western Front

It's been quiet on the blog recently. Lots of 'stuff' going on in real life. Yes, like 'secret stuff'. Yes, life exists outside the blogosphere.

More blog posts are to be expected. Meanwhile, I'm feeding you with Salad and Coffee.

Salad. Green stuff found on a lawn. A citrus fruit from a faraway land. An embryo, stolen from an unwitting bird. And some traditional British mayonnaise.

Coffee. A brew derived from roasted and ground seeds of the Coffea plant. Requires multiple levels of processing before palatable, the above image showing the final step where the coffee is integrated with water. The machine to the left could be a secret roasting machine used in the process, or it could be a rice cooker.

Enjoy!

Mancunian Adventures

I spent the Saturday at the Accidents & Emergency on the Royal Infirmary after a tiny misjudgment leading to me cruching an IKEA drinking glass with my bare foot. I had to go through triage a couple of times since the first x-ray failed to reveal a shard of glass still stuck in my foot. I even looked at the first x-ray myself and it seemed allright, but after walking a few hundred metres from the hospital I started limping like a one-legged pirate.

I thus pirate-walked my way around Manchester all day until I finally cut my stubborness and paid a second visit to the A&E in order to comandeer a pair of crutches. They sent me through triage a second time, despite my plea for shortcutting to the crutch storage and grabbing a pair on my own. Luckily though there was a shift change in personnel, why I had to describe the issue to a new nurse, and while doing this I felt for the wound and discovered a 2 mm long piece of glass still stuck in the foot. After removing it I could magically walk normally again.

All's well that ends well.

Summer brings change

I've made my way to Sweden, where I'll spend the rest of my summer.

I'm on vacation. One definition of vacation is "the action of leaving something one previously occupied".

Thus, I've decided to switch over to casual blogging in Swedish. I'd recommend non-Swedish or otherwise uninterested readers to check back in September.

You'll find my summer blog over at sonnie.se

Cheers!

Up Up & Away

I'm on easter break. The only difference between easter break and regular university routine, is that I don't attend lectures - something I'm notoriously bad at anyway, essentially due to the rudimentary nature of first year psychology.

Most first year students have left Manchester to spend time with family and friends at home. Campus is derelict, the overly apparent silence eerily proving itself to remaining tenants (cf. 28 days later). On Wednesday the 1st of April (ha!) comrade A of Lancaster and I decided that we can't sit by ourselves and fold paper planes all easter break. That evening, we bought a couple of tickets to Tenerife - as far south we could go in the European Union. (I had some, erm, passport troubles, ruling out the possibility of travelling outside the EU.)

The trip was great! Sun. Great weather. More sun. Great beaches. Cheap restaurants. Cheap beer. Nightlife. Women.

Upon returning, Manchester was cloudy, wet and approaching a nightly darkness, the mere result of thick clouds covering the sky above. But it was still charming. I must have acclimatised properly to this city by now.

Next on the to-do-list: an essay investigating the link between obesity and major depression. More about this later.

I’ll summarise it with a song

A visitor to my flat was utterly captivated by the filth and misery, and wanted to check into a hotel after a night. The Russian 19th century writer and physician Anton Chekhov is famous for his poetic accounts of the city Tomsk:

Tomsk is a very dull town. To judge from the drunkards whose acquaintance I have made, and from the intellectual people who have come to the hotel to pay their respects to me, the inhabitants are very dull too.

Likewise, the anonymous visitor wittingly chose a song to depict the environment he witnessed: Pulp - Mile End (from the film Trainspotting). Here's the song, and the lyrics:

We didn't have nowhere to live,
we didn't have nowhere to go
til someone said
"I know this place off Burdett Road."
It was on the fifteenth floor,
it had a board across the door.
It took an hour
to prise it off and get inside.
It smelt as if someone had died;
the living room was full of flies,
the kitchen sink was blocked,
the bathroom sink not there at all.

Ooh, it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

And now we're living in the sky
I never thought I'd live so high,
just like Heaven,
if it didn't look like Hell.
The lift is always full of piss,
the fifth floor landing smells of fish
not just on Friday,
every single other day.
Below the kids come out at night,
they kick a ball and have a fight
and maybe shoot somebody if they lose at pool.

Ooh,
it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

Nobody wants to be your friend
cos you're not from round here, ooh
As if that was something to be proud about.
The pearly king of the Isle of Dogs
feels up children in the bogs.
Down by the playing fields, someone sets a car on fire
I guess you have to go right down
before you understand just how,
how low,
how low a human being can go.

Ooh,
it's a mess alright,
yes it's
Mile End.

Just random

This week has been somewhat intense. I've had a very social period; in fact, I would call it manic if I didn't have such a laid back personality ;)

It all started with Monday. I went to flatmate C's room and asked if he would be going to any social events (those euphemisms, huh?) in the evening. I was granted ten minutes to prepare for take-off; and indeed, including all those two or three hair products I recently added to my stash.

Next thing I know, I was talking to Swedish girls on the bus - it's really nice to talk Swedish every once in a while. And then I got to Tiger Tiger, where the queue was even longer than a certain lecturer's not-so-eloquent-examples. Luckily though, the VIP wristband I had gotten my hands on earlier was actually real - I originally thought the 'VIP' text was just there to reinforce my status as Alpha male :lol:

It was a quite good night. My bank account suffered; but not as much as with Swedish alcohol monopoly pricing - evil socialism...

The following days were of slightly less quality, and slightly more wine. *censored*