The Man with No Time

The last couple of games of the first round of the NHL playoffs were completed last night, and what a first round it's been. No clean sweeps (which is great to see), two series that went to the full seven games, loads of tense overtime finishes, and some upsets as well.

Yesterday I travelled down to "Worlds at War" in Livingston (well, Craigshill to be precise) to take part in my first Warmachine tournament of the year. I was really looking forward to it; I hadn't managed to get any games in at all up to that point this year, so these were going to be my first 4 games of the year. I was also eager to play some new opponents, as there were several people on the entry list that I'd not met before at my previous two tournaments. The tournament was a standard 35pt Steamroller event. Two lists, with character restrictions in place and reinforcements required. We could play each list as many times as we liked, including not at all if we wanted to.  I was fairly sure about my first list - a tier 3 Deneghra1 list that was tweaked from a list that I'd used previously. But my second list gave me pause. I considered taking one of the warcasters that I'd not used much/at all; Skarre2 and Terminus both crossed my mind. But in the en...

This week has been a busy one so far for me. We're in the middle of the "On the Rocks" arts festival here in St Andrews, which means music, music, and more music! Monday lunchtime saw the St Andrews Bassoon Quartet's last formal concert of the year. We had a pretty intense rehearsal schedule for it, as the other three only arrived back from the Easter break a week prior to the concert, and I was away in Bath . We therefore had to resort to our first ever weekend rehearsal, but we still only had 3 & 1/2 hours of practise under our belts. Fortunately our theme this time around was film music, which allowed us to pull out a couple of pieces that we'd performed before and meant that we were all pretty familiar with the music we were playing. It also helped that we'd made the conscious decision to avoid long medleys; playing multiple shorter pieces definitely cut down on the time required to get them up to scratch. For interest's sake, he...

Last weekend was Easter, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I continued my tradition of not going home to see my family. This year, for a change, I didn’t spend it working at the JGT though. I was invited to my girlfriend’s cousin’s wedding on Easter Monday (seriously, who gets married on Easter Monday?), so the two of us went down to Bath for the weekend for a holiday beforehand. Bath is a beautiful city. I’d been there a month a so ago for the BULSCA Student Lifesaving Championships, but didn’t get to see much of the place as I spent most of my time at the pool or driving around trying to find somewhere to park, buy food, or fill up on petrol. Having the chance to actually do some sightseeing was a nice change (even if the weather didn't always play ball)! A view over Bath from the top of the abbey tower. (Credit: David Brown)

The NHL ice hockey playoffs started yesterday, and it looks like being a good year for the Stanley Cup. There are some familiar faces in there, but also some surprises.

The 8th and final part of the series introducing my plethora of hobbies will be a "bucket"post, encompassing the varied activities that I get up to that haven't already been covered. Mostly these are sports, which would be a shock to people that knew me at school!

Part 7 of the time-sinks series is here, and it's time to talk about something a bit more stereotypically 'boyish'. Yep, that's right, I'm going to talk about cars (and bikes) of all shapes, sizes and speeds. But mostly the really fast ones driven (and ridden) by professional racing drivers.

Myriad media are the subject of part 6 of my time-sinks series of posts. The main focus of this post will be on books, but I'll also touch on TV, films, magazines, music and podcasts as I ramble on.

Computer and board games will be the subject for part 5 of the opening post series on this blog. Two posts in a day! Can you tell it's the weekend and I've got nothing to do? Computer games, once the hobby of only geeks such as myself, have become something of a mainstream pastime in recent years. A greater and greater percentage of the population are playing board games, as the generation that grew up with them continues to play on the new generation of consoles (PC gaming is another story). In my opinion this is a good thing. Board games, on the other hand, have almost gone in the other direction. The old scene of families sitting down to board games of an evening or at the weekend is, in my experience, in steady decline. Traditional boardgames, such as Monotony (sorry, Monopoly) and Scrabble are being usurped by 'German-style' games, and becoming more geeky in the process. Or possibly that's just the sense that I get from people I know, although recent game...

Part 4 of my series on myriad time-sinks is here. This time I'll be focusing on something that's been a big part of my life for a very long time - music. I'm not talking about listening to music and going to gigs here, oh no. I'm talking about playing music. Sadly (from one point of view) I'm not in a band, and since I can't play the guitar I'm never likely to be. I play a different kind of instrument - the bassoon.