squirmelia | What I did in September 2016

One evening, I went to the Interesting conference and tasted wine and listened to talks on subjects such as the Sierra Leone National Railway Museum and found out that Freetown is twinned with Hull and has cream phone boxes just like Hull! I also listened to talks on why watching TV is important, calendars, Tampon Club, flyknit, and a number of other topics. My attempt at drawing smoky eyes on the Good Wife seemed to involve tentacles and smoke and a man turning into a flower.

One evening,

deathboy and I went to the crisp sandwich cafe, which was hidden behind some shelves of crisps in a newsagents called "Chris Peter's". I ate a crisp sandwich (cream cheese, cucumber and salad cream flavoured crisps, with cheese and cucumber) and climbed inside a giant crisp sandwich, and had my photo taken inside a packet of crisps!

In September, London Open House Weekend happened! I went to:
Dawson Heights (Great views, interesting architecture)
Tottenham Court Road Crossrail (half finished escalators and new platforms and seats that were still covered up and big tunnels!)
Old Ford Water Recycling Centre (Interesting to see how they clean water, and they have water research centre there also)
Three Mills Lock
Kingsley Hall (A place with a lot of history - started by two women to help the community. Ghandi stayed there).
Caledonian Park Clocktower (Great views, and I stopped time!)
Victorian Waterpoint
St Pancras Chambers and Clocktower (Wyverns! Interesting to see how the detail in the hotel changes as you go up the floors)
West India Dock Impounding Station (controls the water level in the docks.. Canary Wharf may flood without it!)
Thames River Police (Old photos of river police, and random objects)
Sands Film Studios & Rotherhithe Picture Research Library (Surprising amount of Loch Ness Monster pictures)
Brunel Museum

obandsoller and I visited the National Portrait Gallery and stared at some pictures of people, but the pictures I liked best mostly contained roads, and then after that, we ate dinner at the Woodlands Restaurant.

I visited Nottingham, but just for a day.

I waved goodbye to

shermarama who I hope is now having an excellent time on the other side of the world. It was also lovely to see people who I hadn't seen for far too long.

I visited the London Gateway Port in Stanford-le-Hope in Essex, and learnt about containerisation, and saw a gigantic ship, and robots moving containers around, and it was all quite interesting.

grandedgemaster and I visited Southend-on-Sea and ate ice-cream sundaes, walked up the pier, and saw a disco turtle! We also visited the sea nymphs in Twickenham.

One evening, I saw Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) talking about making ballpits, and there was a lot I could relate to, and I laughed a lot that evening.

Ingress:

September was the month of the Lux Adventure in Ingress, where the aim was to visit at least 300 portals that you had never visited before.

On the evening of the first of September, I wandered from London Bridge to Tower Bridge and around St Katharine Docks, and then again in the same area, with my mum on the Sunday, and I completed the A Bridge Too Far Ingress banner.

(For non-Ingress players, banners basically give you a route to walk around different locations and then you get a pretty picture on your profile once you have walked to all of those locations and pressed some buttons on your phone on the way.)

One evening,

grandedgemaster and I wandered around the squares around the British Museum and completed the Chessmen banner. Another evening, we ate nitro ice-cream from Chin Chin Labs (beetroot ice-cream and dill and chocolate cake for

grandedgemaster and cherry and ricotta swirl for me) and wandered around Camden and completed the Amy Winehouse legend banner. We wandered around Brentford one rainy morning, and then around Kew Bridge. We wandered around Brompton Cemetery one Sunday.

One evening I walked around Teddington and completed an Orb banner, and other evenings I went to rolls in Notting Hill and Manchester Square, wandered around central London, did the Breakfast at Tiffany's banner. I also went busgressing and sat on buses for hours with other Ingress players, tapping away at our phones.

September 8th was very exciting, as a van parked near to a pub! It was a moveable Ingress portal! People from both factions met there and were delighted with the van.

I visited Cambridge one Sunday and captured the Reality Checkpoint, and did the Lord of the Rings banner.

8 years ago, I wrote on LiveJournal about an OpenStreetMap mapping party that I went to: Open Street Mapping Party in South-East London, and wrote "I was approached by a cute long-haired guy on a bike and wondered whether I was dreaming, but he was mapping too."

Then, at the beginning of September, we met again, at an Ingress meet, and eventually figured out where they knew my username from, and that was funny and I was embarrassed.

Later that night, we ended up dancing, at the 8th Birthday Punk Rock Prom at the Scala, to Nirvana and the Pokémon theme, and other songs, that I don't remember now.

Then later still, we played on the swing outside King's Cross St Pancras, and I got the night tube for the first time, and it was 6AM when I eventually got home.