July Jubilations

I do believe it is time for my pretty-much monthly mish-mash of thoughts about things. Now that’s a sentence that is difficult to say out loud!

I’m now in the early stages of my summer holiday. It feels a bit odd still having the same 6-week period to relax in at 23 as I did when I was 6. That’s the oddity of working in a school. In fact because I went straight from school to university and then straight onto working in a school I’ve only ever known that life where I have a long summer holiday. It’s pretty hard to imagine working through the summer.

I suspect must people would be thrilled to begin six weeks of not having to work. I am less so. It’s not because I love my job so much. I’m obviously pleased that I don’t have to work, it’s just that six weeks is a lot of time to fill. I will be doing a few shifts of my summer job but not many because I desperately need a break from working. But beyond that I have literally nothing to fill my time with. It’s Day 5 as I write this and actually I’ve not done too badly so far but there’s a considerably long time to go yet. I am not looking forward to the inevitable period of boredom.

One thing that has helped to ease said boredom is my new Wii U. I’ve had a year’s worth of wages now and have spent only a small portion of them so I thought I would buy myself a games console. Now if you know much about the gaming world you will probably know that the Wii U doesn’t have a very good reputation. It’s certainly far from the obvious console choice for most people. But I am not most people.

Now I could have bought an Xbox One or a PS4 but they don’t really have the same appeal to me. Gaming has descended into a world of dark games, many of which involve shooting things or strive for realism. But I don’t want realism from my games, I want fun and that was the main reason I’ve gone for a Wii U.

For those that don’t know, the Wii U has a controller which is a tablet with joysticks on the sides. For traditional games it is used like a normal controller. But the addition of a second screen allows for all sorts of interesting innovations so there are some games which require you to use both the gamepad screen and the TV screen.

So far I’ve enjoyed Mario Kart 8 immensely, which is just an upgrade on the usual Mario Kart games, and have enjoyed Splatoon and NintendoLand. I also loved playing golf on Wii Sports Club– you put the gamepad on the floor and it displays the golf ball and the surface it sits in. You then have to hit it like you would playing actual golf, only imagining the Wii remote in your hand is actually connected to the head that appears on the screen. It’s lots of fun and I’m pleased at my choice of console in the end.

This is not actually me, just in case you thought I wore horrible brown shoes. I don’t.

This morning I went to see Marvel’s latest film, Ant-Man, at the cinema. In turns out 10:40AM on a Monday morning is an excellent time to see a film as I had the screen all to myself. I always feel like a right loser going to the cinema alone but then again I’ve never really understood why they are considered a social event. It’s certainly not social to go and sit in a room and not talk to your friends for two hours.

It turned out Ant-Man was pretty good. Essentially it’s “Marvel does a heist movie” but it worked well. Paul Rudd was a decent Scott Lang but I thought Michael Douglas was excellent as Hank Pym. It kept itself fairly separate from the Marvel Universe which I liked- it has a team of great characters to get to know. I really liked that it didn’t take itself too seriously- Marvel know that the whole idea of superheroes is silly so they play on that.

I tend to share some Instagram photos in this round-up post so here’s the latest batch:

My latest shots of wildflowers. I love a wildflower.

Some interesting sky shots.

Some coastal shots. The first is of Bournemouth along the coast a bit and the second is the Needles and the Isle of Wight.

The caterpillar of the Cinnabar Moth- highly poisonous because they eat ragwort, a poisonous plant. I didn’t touch this!

A selection of the many birds we now get in our back garden. There’s two starlings (top), two goldfinches (left) and a House Sparrow (bottom).

And I don’t think I can end without mentioning Pluto. NASA’s New Horizons Probe sent back some stunning photos of the dwarf-planet after it’s recent fly-by. It’s astounding when you think about the vast distance that Pluto is away from Earth that we have managed to sent something there to take photos of it! With Rosetta also proving fairly successful it’s good to see space programs start to be more ambitious after years of not doing much of any significance. I wrote a whole post on why space exploration is so important last year and missions like this give me hope that we are starting to get back onto the right track with space exploration.

That’s all for today but I will be back soon with more nonsense!