Fuckign raging, here. Again.

Some piece of shit has kicked off one of the sections of our fence, and stolen the For Sale sign from up the road before throwing it into our garden.

Fucking lucky I wasn't in.

Scum.

Shit like that need fucking put down.

"But there's nothing for them to do, it's not their fault, they just need to be loved.."
FUCK YOU!
Say that when it's your life they keep picking away at, ruining bit after bit after bit...

Sheer fucking filth, and I'll happily lump anyone that defends them in WITH them.
Sick of this shit. Sick and tired to the fucking bone of having to have OUR lives constantly made worse by scum that couldn't care less.
I WAS having a great night, too.

On The Ready Line # 2.1

What else happened on Saturday, then?

Well, my worries that I might miss Harry, Al Matthews' and Terry English's Q&A due to being needed elsewhere proved unfounded.
We were asked to provide an honour guard, and march them in.
Woo!

Of course, my left knee chose the very moment I entered the room to go "Nuh uh!" and fail to support me.
Leaving the marine who was meant to be walking in formation with me ( Mantroon or Bazfish, I forget which. Will check the video later ;) ) to wonder where the hell I;d gone!
Caught up not too badly, and got into position against the wall.

Had a few moments of Fraz saying "Take a seat!" and me attempting to silently convey the message "My knee's goosed!".
I knew if I could bend my knee sharply, and "crack" it, it'd feel fine.
Not gonna happen when you're wearing leg armour!

The stories told during the Q&A were hilarious - I'll put them in seperate entries.
Here's the photo we got at the end of the Saturday session...

On The Ready Line # 2

Revielle.
*Grin*

"Christ, you guys better hope there are no shipping lanes nearby!"
Must have been the chinese food the night before.

Up, showered, and down to the restaurant for breakfast.
Scrambled eggs alá tabasco sauce, bacon, sausage, mushrooms.
That'll do me!

Then off to the Space Centre for Day One of the actual event.

We arrived pretty early - We weren't going to be part of the actual Encounter on Saturday anyway, but still wanted to make a good impression.
Got in, and the greenroom was already quite busy.




It's something of a bizarre sight to see a room full of half-dressed predators, marines trying to find a way to shuck into their armour and get that pesky strap to hang where it should and still keep some dignity. ( Bloody motion tracker sling! :( ).

We found Terry English moving his stuff inside, so helped him fetch and carry, before Fraz and I went off to get into our gear.

Sandy hung out and helped Terry set up his stall - Ended up getting some free prints as a thank you, and I think we all made a friend of Mr English that day.


Appropriately suited and booted ( Note : When you're gonna be standing around for ~10 hours, with the odd bout of running, canon be damned, Magnums are COMFY! I'll be keeping my cheapo replica jungle boots for the mannequin, I think. Just gotta find me a mannequin is all. ) Fraz and I headed in to get our weapons checked.

"Yeah, I'm checking weapons" says Kev... "It's not just an excuse to play with everyone's toys at all!" :)

Our duties for the day were pretty much "Wander around, stay in character as much as possible, and pose for photos".
Easy :)

I was somewhat nervous at first - For a start, the only folk who I knew there were Fraz and Sandy.
But the other marines seemed very cool - Approachable and friendly to a man, and many feeling the same way as I was, it later transpired.

One person I'd been looking forward to meeting was Harry Harris, of the Harry Harris Aliens Archive.
This man has a quite frankly stunning collection of original props, and is one of the nicest and friendliest folk I've had the pleasure to meet.
Here's his "modest collection":


I apologise in advance if I get any events mixed up - The whole weekend kinda ran into one, as we stayed up so late on Saturday night and were up again so early on Sunday.
Don't bother correcting me if any of you read this and something at the Space Centre happened on the other day to when I say :p

Publishing now, so this is less of a gargantuan post...

On The Ready Line # 1.5

I forgot to mention a few things in my previous post:


1. I hate cashpoints, and idiot hotel staff.

I forgot to get money from the free cashpoint at the Space Centre, so had to use the one in the hotel lobby.
£1.75 the bugger wanted for a withdrawal! And took about 5 minutes to actually process it!
Bit of a cockup there, as I'd managed to get two lads playing Aliens confused. One had offered to let us bunk with him, and when the Marine we ended up sharing with mentioned on the way down that "Bugz" had pulled out, I thought he meant "Pug".
Only after I'd checked in did I get a text from Pug asking if we were still sharing a room with him.
Oops :| Sorry dude!

Next up, the deposits. Turned out Darren had been misinformed as to what needed paying when, so we needed to stup up the entire weekend's funds up front.
Not TOO bad - £24 per night I think it worked out at. Ish.

Fraz ponied up for me, and I sorted him out later on.
It's handy to be able to trade free games and ammo for such things as petrol and hotel rooms ;)


I hadn't registered the fact that the room only had 2 double beds, either... And much as Darren's a big sexy Ben Affleck lookalike, I was still quite pleased that I ended up getting a cot bed sent to the room.
Right next to the aircon - And by christ did we need it!

Tough choice - Noisy aircon or quiet oven?
I woke up around 4am, actually COLD, so turned it off.

Then went back to sleep.
Mmm. Sleep.

On the ready line!

Apologies in advance for the length of this entry - It's gonna be a big one, as this weekend was one in a million.

United Kingdom Colonial Marine Corps
Combat Drop : Leicester, 2006.


We've been preparing for this event for months now.
Ever since word came down the pipe that a Colonial Marine presence would be required to deal with a xenomorph infest ation at the National Space Centre's Sci Fi weekend in June, marines all over the UK have been rushing to complete work on their armour and armaments.
Myself included.

Myself, Fraz ( Jedifraz ) and Sandy ( Bmused ) hooked up early on Friday morning for the ~6hr drive to Leicester.
A quick stop at the quartermaster's stores ( Lidl ) for some rations, and we were on our way.
Express elevator to hell. Goin down!

The journey down wasn't bad - Nice weather, good tunes... We made it to the dropzone by around 5:30pm.
Helped a little with the setup, and met the other grunts.

9pmish, and we checked in at the hotel before descending en masse upon a local noodle bar - Where we sampled the delights of Foo Kin Fried Rice.
No corn bread, sadly.

The shit was already being well and truly shot by this point - "Hey, Bishop - Do the thing with the spoon/chopstick/fork" games possibly making the staff wince at the potential for damage to their tables.
All hands refrained from engaging fully, however.

I turned round midway through my meal to see who'd just nudged me as they sat down.

The Sarge had arrived.
Al Matthews - Real life marine, and in all honesty one of the most entertaining people I've met in my life.
He also happened to play Sgt Apone in "Aliens", therefore was our guest of honour for the weekend.

I didn't really get a chance to speak to him on Friday night, but even in the noodle bar, the atmosphere was becoming less like a bunch of geeks playing dress-up with folk they barely know by the minute.
Folk were realising that, unlike Star Wars events where your character is your costume... This time, the characters were us.

I think for most of us, the "Me" dial got turned up to 11. Loud guys got louder, funny guys got funnier.
The camaraderie was real.

Back to the hotel for drinks, before the actual first day of the event, and it was announced that this was the inaugural combat drop of the United Kingdom Colonial Marine Corps... Therefore we all needed our rank patches.
Everyone got a private chevron - Except Harry Harris of the Harry Harris Aliens Collection.
As the man with the single biggest collection of screen-used props and costumes in the UK ( More on that later ;) ), he was duly promoted to be our 4-star General.


Al : "Excuse me. Excuse ME! How the fuck do you outrank ME?"

And a hush fell across the room.

Bruce / Bazfish exhibited balls of steel when he looked the Sarge in the eye, and told him:

"How the fuck do you outrank me... /sir/?"

And he said it, too.
Taking due care and attention to pronounce the word "sir" correctly, and in the voice of a little girl.


More later...

Ooyah!

Airsofting at Drymen today.

I've probably said this before, but I feel so sorry for the poor buggers out in Iraq!
If one nice day in a sandpit in Scotland can leave this tired, sore and burnt... They must be in hell.

Good day's play, though, and I joined in at the end for a few games.


Pissed off right now, though, as Kat has been waiting in town for a bus now for over half an hour.

Apparently she was waiting at Edwards pub from just after 8pm, and has now moved down to Union Street.
It's currently 8:38pm, and I'm told that no bus has shown up yet.


There should be TWO services running right now, roughly every 15 minutes ( Three if you count the 20, which takes a while to get here so we usually ignore ).
Sick to the back teeth of this happening whenever Kat's out in town.
Firstbus are arseholes, who really need a good kick up the arse. Specially since they're withdrawing the through-the-week nightbus services soon, too...

Uuuuuuupdates.

Well, HOPEFULLy the problem with the neighbours is resolved.
Or at least swept under the carpet.

The day after the incident, I saw my neighbour in the lane.
Asked if I could have a word - HE started having a go at ME for having the audacity to ask him to turn down his loud music at close to midnight.

His reasoning was that he can't choose what nghts he has off, and if he wants to have a party, he will.

I explained again that I didn't really care what he did early in the evening, but after about 11 at night, loud music was keeping my kids awake and therefore not really on, if he didn't mind.

A few more rants at me later, he finally seemed to accept that turning his bass down would be a good thing.

Hopefully it's forgotten, and the next time he has a party, he'll have some maturity and keep the music down when it gets late.



That aside, it's been weird of late.
Grandma and Grandad were meant to be going on a cruise with Mum and David.
Sadly, Grandad developed a blood clot in his leg JUST before they were due to fly down to Palma to meet the boat.
So he's currently under observation in the Southern General.
My sister got taken into hospital herself, with a stomach infection. She's OK now, but that was a worry - as SHE'S due to fly out to (eventually)Australia next week.

There has been some good news!

I told my mate Gofur that I couldn't attend his and Gemma's wedding, as I'd already RSVP'd to Marri and Zaz that I'd go to theirs on the same day ( Yestrday. 666 - Geddit? :) )


So Kat and I got to Park Circus just about on time - 15 minutes before the booking.
There was already a crowd outside, so we figured it might be Z&M's lot about to go in ( Don't know any of either family, aside from a mother and a cousin ).

Nuht.

Turned out it was Gofur and Gemma's wedding coming OUT!
The look on Gofe's face when he clocked me - "You made it after all!" Then when I had to shrug apologetically as I headed upstairs - "No man, sorry. I didn't."

Managed to catch them outside after Z&M's ceremony though, so t'was all good.


Marri looked great... Gemma looked great... And Kat looked great.
Verily, t'was a veritable swatch-fest.
I'd only bought undies for one of the three ladies mentioned above, though.

Which was fun - it was ROASTING the other day when I went down to the centre.
no air in the main mall at all.
The bank was as stuffy as ever...
So when I got to La Senza, out of breath, and sweating... "Can I have a bra and some stockings, please?"

I thought security were about to make an appearance!

So after the ceremonies, we headed down to Malmaison for the reception.
Small room, but I know how Zaz and Marri WANTED the wedding to be. It could have been smaller.

Lovely buffet, NO FUCKING CIDER AT THE BAR though.
And overall, incident free.

Zaz's mum was making the odd bitchy comment aimed at Marri, as well as coming out with "At the end of the day, they did things the way THEY wanted."

Which Marri was kinda pissed off about when she heard, as they bloody well did not.
The original intention was for it to be FAR smaller, but certain parties insisted and pressurised and interfered to make it as big as it was.

As I say though, it WAS fun, and I think Z&M were OK with the eventual compromise, knowing that the alternative was all-out war.

Headed back over to their place once we FINALLY got rid of the mother of the groom, and hung out eating chinese.

Met a fluffy cat, a pee-ey cat, and a snake.
Woo.

Came home, found Kat's mum in slightly better humour than we'd left her ( Her nose was out of joint because my sister - Who's leaving for A FEW YEARS soon - had looked after Morgan, and "It's just wrong that she's over there so much... She'll be thinking it's her house".
Aye, baws. She's there once a week. fuck off. )

And there's probably an assload I've missed out, but meh... Kat just gave me carrot cake.

Mm.

Mnfgl, mnchng ck bk ltr.