The Man with No Time

After a week off to rest their weary bodies, the rugby players of the home nations, Italy, and France were back in action this weekend for round 3 of the 2013 Six Nations. And what a weekend it was! (Credit: rbs6nations.com) (Warning - this is going to be a long post!)

Last night the St Andrews Lifesaving Club held its annual Pie-Off event. Sounds intriguing doesn’t it? It’s not a complicated event; everyone attending makes at least one pie of some kind (we have a fairly loose definition of ‘pie’) and brings it to the social’s location. We then all eat as much pie as we can, and vote on who made the best one. Mmmmm, pie. (Credit: David Brown)

Time for another lifesaving competition report. Except this time it's a little different - there's not road trip to talk about, because for once we didn't have to travel anywhere! The rest of the BULSCA clubs came to us, for the first ever St Andrews league competition. Now, this wasn't our first competition ever. Three years ago my friend Chris ran a competition and invited Scottish RLSS clubs. It was a small event, but fairly successful. Then last year I resurrected the idea of hosting a competition, and organised a slightly larger one. I didn't try for a league competition, as I wanted to check whether we could deal with the logistics, but invited the BULSCA clubs up anyway and was pleased when we actually got a really good turnout. Teams in isolation for the competition. Visible are teams from London,  Nottingham,  and Bristol. We had a decent turnout considering the distance teams travelled. (Credit: David Brown) But this year the club's Compet

It's time for part 3 of the post series chronicling my (possibly misguided) attempt at Lost Hemisphere's Most Epic Unloved Model Challenge 2013. My introduction post can be found here , and some musing on Venethrax and the options available to me can be found here . For this post I'm going to take a look at the lists that I've come up with. These are my initial ideas, and will probably change after some play experience, but in the end my options are limited somewhat by the restrictions of the theme force.

Week 2 of the 2013 6 nations is done! This won’t be a long post, as I didn’t see any of the games live. I did, however, watch the Scotland-Italy match on iPlayer, so I’ll focus on that. The team captains for this year's 6 nations. (Credit: rbs6nations.com)

It’s time for the next instalment of my Lost Hemisphere Challenge, and since this is going to be year-long series of posts I’ve decided to create new heading. It’s been a couple of weeks since I signed up to the challenge, and it may seem as though I’ve been slacking off. I’ve actually been rather busy doing some background research. I read Lamoron’s blog posts chronicling his experiement with Venethrax over at “The Overseer”, I read GentleBen’s post at “Bell of Lost Souls”, I watched several YouTube video battlereports featuring Venethrax, mostly from bitzandpiecesNL , and I re-listened to the Chain Attack podcast of Venethrax vs. Reznik . Today I want to share some of my thoughts and conclusions based on that research.

I’m feeling very silly today. In my ongoing quest for a job post-PhD I had my eye on a position at Warwick. It wasn’t strictly in my area, but was related enough that I was considering applying. It was attractive; an interesting sounding project, a University and department that I know already, and positions of either 3 or 5(!) years available. Sadly I really messed up. Somehow I’d put the closing date in my calendar as Monday 11 th of February, but when I rechecked today it was Monday 4 th of February. So that one’s down the pan now. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I’m having a hard enough time finding interesting postdoc positions in the UK without throwing them away like that. Pretty much how I fell right now. Stupid idiot! (Credit: knowyoutmeme.com)

The last entry for my mega sports weekend will be about the conclusion of the NFL season. That’s right, the biggest show in American sport is here. It’s the Superbowl! It’s been two weeks since the Championships games, and those weeks have been full of talking, talking, and more talking. Oh, and there was the Pro Bowl at some point, but that’s not really relevant. Last night the talking stopped, and it was finally time to see which brother came out on top in the Harbowl. I picked the 49ers to win, but was I going to be right?

This weekend is a big one for sport for me. Yesterday I competing at the Scottish Short Course Championships(link), and tonight I’ll be watching the climax of the NFL, the Superbowl. But this weekend has also been the opening weekend for the Rugby Union 6 Nations, a tournament that I look forward to every year. I love watching rugby union. I was forced to play it whilst at school, which I didn’t enjoy, but I have fond memories of sitting down to watch the odd match here and there on television during my teenage years. Watching any rugby on TV meant the 5 nations (as it was at the time), and I remember watching some of the great players and wishing that rugby was as fun to play as it was to watch. Being a Scotland fan recent years have been lean ones, and watching the national team play has often been a painful experience. But I still wouldn’t miss the 6 nations for anything. I can’t catch every match, but fortunately they’re all live on the BBC, which these days mean

I spent today taking part in a slightly different form of lifesaving sport. Rather than the SERC-based experience of BULSCA events, this was a speed lifesaving, which is a very different beast. The competitions are basically rather odd swimming galas, with individual and relay events in a range of disciplines. Rather than different strokes though, the events use different skills. The Scottish Short Course Speeds are run to the RLSS’s short course rules, and all of the events are therefore half-distance compared to their standard, long-course versions. This is good for me, as I’m definitely more of a sprinter than an endurance swimmer, but sadly there are no rope throw events. In the 2012 event I did well enough to earn two bronze medals and a silver medal.  This year, unfortunately, didn’t go quite so well.

This weekend out in Warwick, Rhode Island (somewhere in the USA), Templecon is taking place. There are only a handful of conventions on my bucket list, but Templecon is definitely one of them. I’ve heard so much about it through the podcasts and blogs that I listen to, and behind their own Lock ‘n’ Load convention seems to be the headline generator for all things Privateer Press. Over the years it’s become the location for their start of year keynote address. A sort of ‘state of the union’ if you will, looking at what’s coming up in the year ahead. Last year Colossals/Gargantuans. This year? Privateer Press sure know how to tease. (Credit: handcannononline.com)