I actually have had a great few days. I cashed my cheque from Beech, found a new place for a good price, sorted out my Uni classes, the group project is almost done, I've made some awesome new friends and I saw Neil Gaiman AND Jonathan Coulton live!

It's been tough but things are finally coming together. Tomorrow I'm planning on telling the letting agency I want the place I viewed yesterday. I'm not gonna get my hopes up again, though. That was a mistake. It's Reading Week next week, which is sort of our half term, but we get essays and probably more work than usual. Hopefully the week without travel will help me get the rest of my life sorted. I can finalise things with the flat, sort out my lecture notes and catch up, see Weez and Craig and maybe finally use the PS2 and crapload of games I bought.

I've been spending more time on IRC lately, which has been nice. I've missed having an active channel to go to. I found out one of the ops was a CS student in my year. He's called Jack. We're in some of the same classes together so we've been hanging out IRL AND on t'Interwebs. There's also Mark and a couple of others from the channel who all went to the Jonathan Coulton gig with me.

Let me tell you about that night of pure awesome and win.

I met Mike at the station. He'd had an interview and didn't seem to happy about how it went. He looked super smart in his suit, though! We went to the Phoenix and met Wod, Close, Galio, Iain, Vik, Jack and Mark. After a couple of drinks Mike and I went to the Neil Gaiman reading which was surprisingly quick. Jonathan Coulton played a few songs before Neil read (I think they agreed to special-guest-attack each others' show). Neil read, answered questions, then did some signing. I didn't stay for the signing because I realised I had plenty of time to go to the gig with the other guys. Mike went home and I got a ticket from a vendor outside. It was pretty easy to find them in the not-so-large crowd.

Paul and Storm (the supporting act) were playing when I came in. They were freakin' amazing too. I'm going to buy all their albums. They did this great bit where we all did different types of piratey "Arr"s. Sad Arr, Happy Arr, Sexy Arr... this went on for like 10 minutes about and it was hilarious.

Coulton came on and third song in he sang Still Alive. Everyone sang along and waved their arms in the air. It was brilliant. He sang Code Monkey and I got to hear SkullCrusher Mountain TWICE (he sang that at the reading). I had to leave when he was playing "Re: Your brains" to catch the last train, which sucked. Apparently after that he rickrolled everyone AND got Neil Gaiman to come on stage and read some of his book during a song for extra spooky effect. Gutted I missed out on that. The sooner I'm back in Manchester the better.

All in all it was one of the best performances I've ever been to. I had such a good time and was in great company! I feel as though I've finally found home with this bunch of nerdy losers.