A few weekends ago I took a trip to Hull to visit Gav in his new halls of residence.  Ordinarily this sort of visit would be very alcohol heavy, but I was determined not to drink.  I arrived on the Friday and got a quick shower, making Gav sit on the toilet while I was in there to entertain me.  He wasn’t as comfortable with that as I was.  We quickly went out to a bar to meet some of his housemates, which was a lot of fun although after work and driving for three hours, I was pretty nackered.

We hung out with them for most of the Saturday, and on the evening Martyn, Ally and Matty came down from Middlesbrough for a night out with us.  I cooked the most onion-ridden dish I’ve ever had whilst teaching Gav how to cook pasta.  It wasn’t the best, I misjudged the ingredients with cooking for five people for the first time.  Never mind.  We went to a student-ey rock club called Spiders on the Saturday evening.  I took to smoking for the evening to keep my mind alcohol-free, and got told off by my mates.  I didn’t care - I got through the weekend without touching booze and had a toss load of fun.

On the Sunday, I drove to Birmingham to go karting with work mates.  I spent a bit too long pussying around the gas pedal and got lapped by everyone, but when I learned that there was no way I was getting tipped out I got my speed on and scraped back to 7th before the end of the race.   An awesome new experience, and I’ll be going back again to rightfully claim first place.

My lunch hour is running out so I’m going to wrap this up.  I had another awesome weekend in Birmingham with Tony - rendering me 24 days sober, and went to Twycross Zoo with my parents.  I’m flat hunting in Birmingham at the mo, and I’m going to Amsterdam on Thursday for an interesting dare.  More on that later.

I can’t believe I forgot to write about this in my birthday weekend post.

I got credited on my first game!  Viva Pinata 2 came out last Friday, and in the credits in the game and the game book it says simply “Dave Hill”.  Somebody told me there’s other words as well, but I don’t know.

The complimentary copies were dished out at work the day after my birthday, so it was like a little birthday bonus for being 23 and I feel great.

It’s a pretty good game too - buy it if you want to.

The title here refers to my alcohol free week, not the weather.  The weather was the opposite of dry; wet.

Yesterday (Saturday) was the first time I was near alcohol and I held up well, resisting even the free-est of beers.  I went to the Rare garden party, and met up with some work mates on the evening.  I stayed over at Tony and Rich’s house in Birmingham so I could go to the guitar shop the next morning.

Today (Sunday) has been awesome.  I bought a nice guitar and ate a 26oz steak.

26oz.  Have a little think about how much meat that is.

I went back to Middlesbrough for the last weekend in August for my birthday.  It was a mass three-day piss up and that’s about all I remember, except for coming out the other side vowing never to drink again.  It was nice to be out in my favourite club (Thursdays at The Crown) on my actual birthday for the first time ever, even if the turn out was pretty poor.

Friday was good - I won some money off a few mates playing poker before we hit the town, where I spent the winnings.  My favourite thing about this night out was coming up with the name C-Monster for Castle (aka Cassmonster, aka C-monster).  By the time we’d chanted “WHO’S IN THA HOUSE?… C-MONSTER! WHO’S IN THA HOUSE? C-MONSTER! One… two… three… BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM” about a hundred times, we were probably beginning to grind people’s tits.

The Saturday night was a lot of fun.  Laura’s birthday was the day after mine and had arranged for everyone to go out dressed as pirates at the weekend.  It was relayed to me in a bit of a casual fashion though, so I thought nobody would bother, and turned up in a crowd of close to 20 pirates being the non-pirate.  Like a twat. 

I got ridiculously drunk that night and I remember little more than harassing people I vaguely, or imaginarily recognised.  I felt pretty remorseful for it the next day and promised myself no booze for a while, at least ’til the end of September.  I’ve no doubt that’ll be the main subject of my posts for the next month.

It was awesome to see everyone, and I got my tickets booked for belated birthday celebrations in Amsterdam at the end of the month.  It’s nice to have another big event to look forward to, I was afraid Leeds was to mark the end of the Summer!