An expensive weekend

Spent yesterday playing Spore until it was time to go down to Andy's for the Denbigh Beer festival, along with Rob, Em, Will, Vicky and Rob and Caroline. They had about 40 varieties of beer for everyone to try out. It was good fun although the entire point of the day was wasted on me as I can't stand beer. I did try some which to everyone else smelled and tasted of strawberry but not to me. At one point the hunger pangs became too much and we all got loads of pizza, cake and chocolate, which seemed to get us a lot of attention from the other drinkers who hadn't thought that far ahead. That evening after everyone dispersed I got a Chinese from a new place called the Happy House. It was pretty decent too.

Today was spent playing more Spore before heading down to Andy's house to finally book the flights to America next year to see Steve and Kara. We got a reasonable deal from Manchester to Boston via Heathrow, but it was still rather a daunting experience to write out a cheque. For some reason Em said it was like giving birth. But it's great to have it finally booked after talking about it for at least a year and it's nice to have something to look forward to. We went to Boston last time in 2005  for a day and it was pretty cool, so it'll be nice to get to know it a bit better and it'll be great to see Steve and Kara again.

Spent the afternoon messing with guitars, playing yet Spore and watching Red Dwarf in roughly equal quantities. I found a spare set of bass strings and put them on the Monstrosity 2. It took a bit of fiddling but I did get it tuned to normal EADG, and it was quite fun to play. However I decided that I was going to strip the sunburst finish off the body with Nitro-mors. I regretted this almost immediately as it's horrible stuff and it ran out before I got rid of the many layers of gunk on the body. So that's going to take another couple of goes. I'd like to leave it natural but since there's great chunks of wood missing around the neck, the plan is to repair those with wood filler and paint it a loud orange colour or something.

Finished the Civilisation stage in Spore with a combination of religious conversion and military might, meaning my history graph at that point wanders erratically back and forth. The Space stage is very interesting and has trading elements that reminds me strongly of Elite. Also the way you can seamlessly zoom from looking at the entire galaxy to someone standing in a city is extremely impressive. So far I'm really quite impressed with it.

Found this video of the Corinth Tower in Liverpool being demolished, which was where some of Infestation was filmed on the abandoned top floor. It was a bit of a dump but I remember we found a load of pictures of some of the people who had lived there and they called themselves the Corinthians. Also there was a hell of a view from the top floor.