It's an Exciting World

I continued the RS1 singing trend from Saturday Karaoke and Sunday Mercato to go to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday rehearsals for choir. It was great, and the last few weeks of the session are my favorite, because we mostly sing through the whole repertoire. I love doing the full songs with all the parts, but recognise we do need to do the note bashing at the start.

I also spent as much time outdoors as was reasonable. I ended up taking the camping folding chair and finding nice places in different parks or by the canal to sit and work, tethering off my phone for internet. It worked amazingly well, and I plan to continue the trend on nice days.

Tuesday before choir I went by some museums. The garden museum was ok, not great. But the Imperial War Museum was interesting and had sections on WWI WWII and wars of the Empire. It was surprisingly open about all the wars the UK fought for the Empire, although it focussed on many of the smaller less known ones.

On Thursday I played a game with RS1 people at Jamie and Liz’s place. It was about politics and having a kingdom decide who will next rule it. We played two rounds. The people made it fun, but the game itself was somewhat limited in scope and interest. Not many decisions, and the ones we made weren’t clear or didn’t have much consequence.

Saturday I went to a RS1 birthday party that was 101 Dalmations themed, and it was fun. They had karaoke going in the basement of a pub that was pretty close to our place. I didn’t stay long, but had fun while I was there.

Sunday was Zaheer’s birthday, and I joined at his place for the party. He was ambitious with wanting his computer to run XBox and Switch games, with different controllers connecting. It somewhat worked and we played a few rounds of Halo. Then we did some karaoke and had a few shots.

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After getting back from Budapest, I had a relaxing week of the London spring. It was amazing to see all the cherry trees blossom. They take about a week each, and stagger for a little over a month. There are two streets nearby our place where one blooms at the start of march and the other at the start of April. I think the one that blooms earlier gets more sun, and the one that blooms later has older larger trees as well. Some of them are a vibrant pink, while most are white. Their petals create small drifts along the street that I love to see and sometimes I’ll grab a handful of petals and toss them in the air.

Monday was rehearsal with RS1, and we learned the last song for the term.

Tuesday I went to Moulin Rouge with the TodayTix last minute tickets. It was pretty good, and they did a really good job with the Jukebox musical style in the same vein as the movie. They had a lot more songs they sprinkled in that worked really well with the story telling.

Wednesday I did a gear check on all my dry suit equipment, since I finally got all the different parts I needed together. It worked really well, and I just need to get a bit more lead weights to have everything I need all together, although I only need the lead if we do lots of dives without having ready access to a dive center. It was also nice to hang out with the dive club after the pool session.

I stayed in Thursday and Friday, but on Saturday I had people over for Karaoke. It was a good mix of people with some from dive club and some from RS1 choir. I need to work on my queueing system for next time, but I still think the youtube system is the way to go.

Sunday was a Mercato Mayfair performance, and it was nice. We did a bit of learning new songs for the Star Trek late at the science museum. The “I’m the X” song is nice, but I don’t really care for the Klingon Warrior Anthem. I don’t think it is meant to be something that is liked anyway.

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Steph was gone to Zurich most of this week.

I got out of the house for some amazing weather. Monday was nice enough to walk to and from choir. Then on Thursday I walked along the canal to Regents Park, then walked down to Hyde Park. Some of the cherry trees were in bloom, and it was gorgeous to see the hyacinths and daffodils.

Friday morning I headed to Budapest.

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This Monday, Steph and I went to Yonder to work together and do some climbing. I had a great time climbing with her, and it is nice having the walls mostly open during the day. We came home early so I could try my hand baking some cheddar and marmite rolls, which turned out really well. I took them to the triple choir workshop, and they were a great hit. The workshop was interesting, as we worked on hearing the harmonies of the other people around us. It was a lot of fun, but didn’t seem particularly well structured, or at least the structure and goals could have been explained more. We went for drinks afterwards in the basement of a pub nearby.

Tuesday was a boring slow day, but I tried my hand at cooking pancakes for pancake day. Steph had a recipe from Fallow she wanted to try, so I gave it a go. It was ok, but more of an egg dish than pancakes.

Wednesday we went back for the last time to the Slomo sauna in Kings Cross. It has been a great experience in the sauna, and I look forward to doing it more next year.

Thursday, Steph headed to Mexico for a cave diving course. I helped her get her bags to the Thameslink train.

Saturday I hosted some people from choir at my place for board games. It was a great time and we played codenames, mysterium, a quiz game, and a mantis shrimp themed matching game. I served some drinks and pizza, and it was a lovely time.

Sunday was a Mercato Mayfair day for RS1, and I had a great time performing. I love doing those Mercato performances because we get to sing so much together. Afterwards we had a book club discussion of the first book in the Murderbot series, All Systems Red. It was a great discussion and I think I’ll join for book club going forwards.

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I had a great week, with a normal Monday choir and then we stayed in the larger room at the pub afterwards which had much better acoustics.

Tuesday evening I organised some games at a place called Boom Battle Bar, which was a ton of fun. We started off with Shuffleboard, then grabbed some drinks. Then we tried our hand at axe throwing. I did really well at the axe throwing, but the scores were all still quite close. Zaheer even hit the tiny extra points target.

Then we played one of the most unique mini golf courses I’ve ever done. They had a series of unique holes that each had special rules. They included a tilt maze race, a hole where you could block the person’s ball with some foosball players, a slingshot at targets hole, and a hole that had conveyor belts. All in all it was a really fun night.

Thursday we did the sauna again, and then that evening I had a StartX CTO neighbourhood meeting.

Friday was the RS1 Ceilidh, which is Scottish line dancing. It was amazingly fun and I can’t wait for another one. I met a lot of the other RS1 groups and got to dance with some amazing people like Petra, Morgan, Raiad, Maggie, and Madeline. The dancing was hard to learn, but once I was in the groove of it a ton of fun. My feet and legs were sore for days afterwards.

Saturday, Steph and I went to the Cirque show Ovo. It was really well done and a great visual display. The costumes were so interesting and the performances were impressive. It felt more coherent than many of the other Cirque shows I’ve seen. Afterwards we went to Akira at Japan House for afternoon tea. We happened to see Petra and Morgan there, who I had really just met the night before at the dance.

Sunday I met Stacie at Light Room for the Dinosaurs exhibit. As expected there were a ton of kinds running around, but it was still really interesting to see. My favourite part was when they did the real scale display, and some of the dinosaurs were taller than the room, which was already 12m tall. We walked around Coal Drop Yards afterwards and got some amazing cookies at one of the shops there.

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Monday’s Choir rehearsal was hard, and I went straight home after as I wasn’t feeling up to sitting in the loud bar afterwards.

Tuesday afternoon Steph and I did another sauna session, and then in the evening Steph and I did ClueQuest on the fourth mission of theirs that we’ve done. It was a really fun mission and we did well, escaping with just the two of us and not getting any hints. I thought they did some of the puzzles really well.

I mainly worked the rest of the week.

On Saturday I went to the V&A and walked around the keys area and then tried to find the corners I hadn’t been to before. Then I met Zaheer at the Power Up exhibit at the Science Museum. It was an interesting hall of all sorts of video games. We played some Wii Super Smash, N64 Mario Kart, Golden Eye, and then some Halo. I still have the magic with Mario Kart and Golden Eye, as I played way to much of those growing up. We were some of the few lone adults there, as most of it was families with kids. It was also pretty much packed, and after we couldn’t find a good open game we headed out.

Sunday I went to Anthony’s place to play a social deduction game called Blood on the Clocktower. It is like Werewolf or Mafia, but with a lot more control and roles and scenarios. We played some really fun sessions, but with so many rules and roles it was hard for me to bluff anything. I ended up doing decently well, and I had a great time. I look forward to playing again and I’ll read up more before the next session now that I know the format.

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This week I went to choir, but otherwise worked. Steph was away for the week in Zurich, so it was just me with the kitties.

Friday evening I went to board games at Giulio’s place near Stratford. It was a great time and I showed off some of my real time video streaming as well. We played an async information coop game about diffusing bombs. We started off really badly, but quickly picked up how it should be played.

Over the weekend Steph and I visited some of the new bib gourmand restaurants of 2026. We went to Kricket on Saturday, which was a tasty Indian place. Then we got pasta at Bancone on Sunday. Sunday evening was book club for Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which is an amazing and interesting book.

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