London: Surveying and skating in Jolly Old! Summer 2014: Day 5 5/14/14 (Writin’ content, surveying ourselves, visiting the Arboretum, buying 5L of water, and setting up an appointment at a salon)

Darn you 8:05 AM! Why do you feel so early? Oh yeah that’s because it’s like 3 AM at home. At any rate I rolled out of bed and decided not to take a shower. I had my stuffed blueberry toast jawns. Shoop showed up and we went over to the office. We then started writing more content for the Energize Worcester website. This morning we wrote on solid wall insulation, electrical/gas/fire safety and rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords. This took us until like 11 AM and then we had a short meeting with Katy before she went off to London. At 11:45 AM we decided to get some lunch. I went back to the flat and had peanut butter on toast with orange drank. It wasn’t as good without jam or jelly so I decided that later I had to go buy some jam. I also chilled for a bit before I headed back to the office to meet the rest of the team.

After getting back to the office we just chilled there for 20 minutes surfing the web, while I worked on getting more Tinder pictures ready. This was before 1 so we were on lunch. At around 1 PM we started working on the surveys again. We had already developed our surveys for the proposal and had them pretty good, although we wanted to incorporate some of the feedback from yesterday’s meeting with the council members (specifically that EPCs (Energy Performance Certificates (basically energy audits of the house with recommendations to improve efficiency (rating varies from A to G with G being the worst))) are not required for HMOs). This means that without an EPC the person looking to rent the house has no idea of the cost of living there! Crazy right? We also read today that the government is going to make all properties have at least an “E” rating before the year 2018. Tenants can officially call out landlords for not making steps toward sustainability by the year 2016 (without risk of being forced to move out as retaliation from the landlord). From yesterday we also wanted to know how many people in the Arboretum have taken advantage of the Green Deal, so we tossed in a few questions on that as well. We also tweaked the wording on several questions to avoid people lying to sound moralistic (E.g. we asked “Are you concerned about energy conservation?” to which most would answer yes to “On a scale of …. To …. How much does it matter”). Small changes really. We spent time back in ID2050 working on these so they weren’t too bad. We finished the surveys around like 2:25 PM (after I renamed the landlord survey from “lardlord” to landlord (minor spelling issue at first)) and we sent the demographics survey to Katy to look over before discussing tomorrow. We decided with nothing else to do that we would go the Arboretum by bicycle and check it out. So we biked over to the Arboretum and found the same spot where all the pictures of the Arboretum have been taken from (by this one green house). The Arboretum is really close to campus and will be mad easy to bike to. After chilling there and taking several selfies we headed back to campus. Stefan, Shoop and I decided to go get a haircut at a local place. So we biked there and it was a hair salon, so we decided to go into the Tesco station to buy groceries. I bought like $10 worth of stuff (pasta, tomatoes, carrots, apples and a 5L water bottle). The water bottle is actually pretty big (and was only £1.19)! After that Stefan asked if the salon cut guys’ hair as well and they said they would start at £10 to cut our hair. So we made an appointment for tomorrow at 5:30 PM and I will be getting a hair cut soon! L :D J K dunno what to think on that one. My seat had also some issues as the nut holding the seat from rotating up and down had become loose and the seat would flip vertically every time I went over a bump. So riding back on the bike I had to palm the 5L in one hand and try to steer the bike and not crash while avoiding cars and people etc. It was fun. After that back at the flat I put my skates on and had Shoop film me skating! I think I did alright. See for yourself below. The one British dude even sent a snapchat of me skating to his peeps! I also found a chick I am going to go outdoor roller skating with on Friday night! So stoked! I cooked dinner which was the rest of the penne (a lot quicker now by using a kettle to heat water!) and added corn from a can to it (which made the straight up pasta and corn dish really good). After that I chilled in the flat as Shoop had come up to make pasta for himself as his kitchen is grody. Also spoke to 4 of the chicks living in my flat! It was a good conversation as we bantered about the one of them failing at Tomb Raider for PS2. Now I’m getting a jump on the blog for today! Tomorrow should be interesting with a huge rager at the on campus pub! Later!