h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, given that it has been 9 months since I last wrote a Journal Entry, I'm not at all surprised that things have changed somewhat ... the only problem I've got is trying to remember it all!

I may as well start with my love life again: about a month after my last Journal Entry, Adam decided to call it a day with me ... not because he was no longer in love with me, but because he still was and yet he couldn't move from London and I couldn't move from Manchester. However, we're still talking to each other and (after a while) I finally managed to move on ... although I wouldn't rule out getting back together with him if the circumstances were right sometime in the future.

However, as I've already said, I've moved on - I saw a guy called Iain who's studying Music at Salford Uni for about six weeks (give or take) this Spring and while he was a nice enough guy, I didn't feel nearly as intense about him as I did for Adam and he called it off anyway due to him feeling the pressure of getting his Masters dissertation written. After another few short weeks of being single, however, I finally met another Adam ... this one's based in Stoke-on-Trent (which is quite convenient for me - more on that in a bit), he works at a solicitor's dealing with mortgages and the like (can't remember the exact term offhand ) and he's absolutely adorable! In the past few weeks we've been seeing each other, we've been going to the cinema lots to watch new films (like Shrek the Third, The Simpsons Movie and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), going out for dinner and spending lots of time in my flat watching DVDs, drinking the odd glass of and cuddling up together. Although we originally thought his own living arrangements were a bit complicated - he lives with an ex-b/f who he was dating for some 4 years, who has been known to be possessive of Adam even now he's single and doesn't often let him bring people back - it turns out that it isn't really a problem (his ex Steve asked to meet me and we seem to get on quite well). Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic ... let's hope things continue to go well.

Apart from love, work has also been going fairly well in spite of a shaky patch - near the end of last year, I discovered that my supervisor was leaving Manchester Uni to go to Manchester Met (presumably for financial benefits), so I had to find yet another one! Fortunately, there was a lecturer who belongs to a computer modelling group in my school and who I'd met when I presented some work to the group a while back - and he agreed to become my new supervisor. Apart from being more proactive than my previous one, he also had contacts with a group at Sheffield Hallum University who are doing some modelling work which is similar to what I want to do, so he arranged a meeting ... and as a result, they've allowed me to use some program code in exchange for me writing a couple of journal papers. That's not to say I haven't made any progress by myself - I managed to do something which I originally thought was very difficult but turned out to be much easier after a bit of rethinking, and produced some really interesting results which'll definitely end up in my thesis! My new supervisor also managed to help me get a six month extension on the time I have to complete my calculations, write up my thesis and submit it ... so whereas before I would be panicking right about now, I'm now not (quite as much, anyway!). So I now have until the end of March 2008 to finish ... certainly doable.

My music life has also been pretty productive over the past nine months. One of a few major highlights was being invited to join the Northern Baroque Orchestra, a good-quality amateur string orchestra that performs predominately Baroque music: after quite a good concert last December, I was invited back for the following one in July! (Even better, the feedback I heard about the second concert was that it was "sparkling" - a good compliment for a baroque orchestra!) It also gave me some extra musical contacts - apart from doing my second production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, I also played at the first concert of the Saddleworth Music Festival (whose programme included Orff's Carmina Burana - a great piece if long and repetitious). For various reasons I also got to play in the orchestras for two productions in Heywood a few weeks' apart - Anything Goes for one local group and The Arcadians for the other rival one. The last few concerts for Oldham Symphony Orchestra have also been fantastic - especially the all-Russian one in July. The uni orchestra also had two fantastic concerts: one in February with Debussy's La Mer and Beethoven's 7th symphony, and the other in May with Elgar's Cello Concerto and Sibelius' 5th symphony ... some of the best music I've ever played! Even Congleton Youth Orchestra has been doing very well - since I'd turned 26 in January, I was therefore too old to be a proper member, but the orchestra decided to keep me on by making me Assistant String Tutor. Apart from that, we had our first European tour to Germany (the Rheinland, in fact) in early April and in spite of the MD having been diagnosed with some form of cancer and needing treatment (which hopefully will mean he'll be back to full health by September), our summer concert was also very well received.

There has also been some stuff going on with Esperanto, but since I've a feeling this entry's a bit long, I'll leave it for the next one (which I might post immediately after this one!).