Aidan’s blog

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Gel A1 by Aidan Farnan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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Sample 1 by Aidan Farnan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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Author, but archaeologist comes a very close second, and provides by far the best student experience in existence. 

sorry for the abominably long hiatus, i'm trying to finish my masters degree dissertation so my online activity had railed right of, i now only use the internet for work, webcomics and TV tropes: you know, the esentials. De back soon..

What's your favorite midnight snack?

 

That depends on three factors, sobriety, need to get up the next morning, and what i have in the house. If I'm sober and have no need to get up early, Twiglets or Bovril on toast or something similarity savory and salty (and if you live in a nation that doesn't get Twiglets or Bovril then my heart goes out to you). If I'm drunk then either Pizza or a chicken burger covered in so much chill sauce it burns. However, if i need to get up the next morning chamomile and valerian tea with plantain added to take down my asthma, and a lettuce sandwich. really severe insomnia gets hot chocolate mit rum, and if i have any, rum infused with valerian and poppy. Sweet dreams!

Disclaimer: making herbal tinctures from scratch can be dangerous as some plants really do contain powerful drugs and can interact with prescription medication in unforeseeable ways, side efects of valerian and run tincture can include lingering and sometimes unpleasant earthy taste (if you put to much valerian in), drowsiness (duh), night terrors in those unusually sensitive to psychoactive plants, and diuretic affects. Not for under fives or those driving or operating heavy machinery (it's got rum in it!). Your results may vary.

I now have a mobile wireless dongle, which considering my new flat lacks internet is really quite good.

let me explain.

The new flat is good. so sure, the back door didn't lock for the first two months because it had been incorrectly installed, and we live in a crime hot-spot were two other houses got robed via back doors, but its beg. very big, and eight bed for the four of us for only 200 a month, which is more than worth putting up with a few of its quirks for. and it's a happy house, I’m getting on better with my flatmates than ever. Apparently having a living room (den, for those needing a translation from British English) large enough to get everyone in DOES actually help group bonding. so things are great, and now I have the interweb life is complete again, so here what you voxers missed whilst I was stuck with no web.

My friend Joe's band won the battle of the bands at Cardiff Uni, which was nice. he wasn’t there for the heats and semi-finals as he was digging at Tel al Armana in Egypt, something of which i am deeply envious. so he came home from Egypt from the best job ever just in time to grab his bass and leap on stage for the finals, which his band Tidal won so toughly it was a forgone conclusion; they played last which is always good as it confers a statistical advantage in battle of the band voting, but it didn’t matter; it took the organisers five minuets to clam the crowd down and restore order after tidal finished, and as they did a voice yelled out from the back of the room "Tidal would like to thank their support acts!" to general amusements. They’ll now be playing the Cardiff Uni summer ball, and maybe Gowerfest, the Swansea and south Wales summer metal and alternative rock festival, so that’s nice.

Oh yes, and we went to Cornwall to get a university funded educational road trip in to say goodbye to M, our American Archaeology MA student who will be sourly missed. You're a good guy M.

So i think i'll end today’s blog with some music and get back to designing my aDNA extraction protocol because I’ve been carrying Bronze-age red deer bones around with me for a week waiting for the lad to become free, so I may as well finish planning my improved protocol so I can finally take a look at their mtDNA.

I'm moving house tomorrow. I only found this out yesterday, and by text. But given the surprise, I'm not that stressed.

Let me explain:

Our current house has some issues. The boiler only works when it wants to, the shower leaks, ect. so the two girls i live with raised, in passing, the possibility that the land lord would move us to one of his other houses, a better one, at no change to the rent. I was nonplussed as was the other male hosemate. fast-forward a few weeks, in which time I had fallen out with the two female housemates and only just got things back to normal when i decided to take reading week off and go home to see my family. Yesterday, n the train back from this week at home I received a text. it's exact content was "were movin out on weds and bills are 55.25 each." Given that at any amount of notice I don't particularly want to move out of this house at all until the lease runs out in September, i found having to move out at less than 48 hours notice at the bequest of my flatmates unfair. I like this house. If it was the landlord trying to move me i would have told him were to stick it, but given i don't want to sabotage the current state of friendly neutrality in the flat seeing how hard i had to work to me on even vaguely friendly terms following the reasonable epic arguments that occurred, and given the my flatmates have already signed and arranged things with the landlord so that even if i did complain it wouldn't achieve anything as the landlord has already, at my flatmates' bequest arranged to have builders coming in a gut the house, i may as well make the best of it. It's too late for me to stop this, and so rather than compiling and end up living in a strange house with two people who actively hate me for trying to stop them moving, i may as well see this as a wonderful chance to start afresh with my house-mates. And start looking for a new flat so i can move in with somone else the second my shared rent arrangement with the girls ends, because if you don't have a back up plan things can go south quickly.

Yep chaps, reading kids books and listening to thrash metal very loud are good ways to get rid of exam and coursework related stresses, but they can play havoc with your subconscious. I'm used to books and music getting into my dreams, but I've been listing to Metallica a lot lately because I got S&M for Christmas. I think somewhere in my subconscious, possibly at a nice little id bistro, Metallica, the San Francisco symphony and the characters in the Old Kingdom books met for lunch and decided to attack what’s left of my overstretched super-ego whilst I was looking elsewhere (possibly distracted by "Thing That Should Not Be" waving its metaphorical arms (tentacles? polyps?) and yelling "Hey! Look at me, I'm an obvious diversion!" whilst the rest of them stormed that barricades and that Quisling my Ego gave in before my super-ego could organise La Résistance) Not as bad as when the cast of Redwall got together with Rage Against the Machine, got roaring drunk and then, aided by chronic-backstabbing-disorder Aidan "Starscream" Ego, and took over my higher brain functions for three days on the trot, and then left the door open behind them letting all the Cosmic Horrors and Cthuloid repressed childhood memories that live in my id wander in, traipsing mud all over the carpet, poking my stuff and gibbering about how they liked what I had done with the curtains since they were last there (to be honest I suspect they took some of the furniture when they left) . So not the worst music/fiction incursion in recent years but still a distraction when I am meant to be writing about early Islamic glass from Sabra, Tunisia.

So there you go. Have a very obvious song.

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/random.php?i0=1454&p0=3&i1=1425&p1=2&i2=1576&p2=2&i3=1739&p3=3

makes more sense if you know just how much archaeologists tend to drink in the digging season, and how much effort and cost they will got to to get booze if there is no pub near the site. The best i could do with random commic pannels provided.

Now if you'll excuse me, i must use PowerPoint to calculate the prevalence of gnawing, burning and butchery on animal bones from the contexts of medieval Cosmeston!

Firstly, i hope you all had a great Christmas and a happy new year.

Secondly; I just saw a woman walking along in full Muslim dress with a veil, with a brightly coloured wool bobble hat over the top, and fluffy mittens. I have never been happier or more proud to live in such a vibrant and multicultural city as Cardiff. People of Cardiff; this one goes out to you! Emperor Pendragon, this is for your loudly sung Jamaican public evangelism outside Weatherspoons. This is to all the street musicians, especially random guy who plays the viola whilst walking a slack rope tied between two tree, guy who hit all the bins in the city centre with drumsticks until they were tuned and could be played like a drum (I am sorry to say I failed to buy your CD last time I saw you selling it), and drunken 3 AM busker who sung along with me as we worked our way through the Best of The Eagles. Thank you all.

Thank you Random Scary Goth Girl. Thank you paranoid pilled up guy who stole our poker chips in the first year of University. Thank you Big Issue seller who wandered around shouting "magic beans! Two pounds fifty! Magic beans! Git you're genuine magic beans here!" Thank you stoned French rugby fans who tried to stroke the police horses. Thank you sympathetic police men who didn’t bat an eyelid as we carried a bay tree though the centre of town three years ago. Thank you Suns of Thunder, Bomb the Sun and Licking Chocolate Jesus for showing me that South Wales is the best place in the world for someone whose taste in music is frankly imposable to describe. Thank you Jesus; You know why. Thank you the staff of Merto's especially R who let me help flyer in fresher’s week by lying though my teeth about what the flyers were for and let me tell people that if they didn’t take a flyer somewhere a kitten would die. Thank you welsh rugby fans for adopting me into your mist on the day you one the 6 nations grand slam. Thank you D+T for showing me that "Sanity's overrated boyo!" Thank you Bt for teaching me how to ask for a cup of tea, pint of beer, and how to swear in welsh. Thank you Gj, for being all I had hoped for in the random drunken Cornish flatmate department, Gd for being geeky enough to put up with me, and Bn for stopping the rest of us driving each other mad. Thank you all the archaeologist; I know you can dig it. And thank you W. You know why as well.