So today will almost certainly be my last blog entry for a good couple of weeks, as I'm going on holiday.
The plan is basically that tomorrow and Friday morning I'm going to do some room re-arrangement for when I'm away. While I'm gone my landlord will do the final bit of the decorating, so I'm going to more the furniture around and put some more stuff out in the shed so it's out of the way for him.
I'll also probably stick a bunch of stuff in the kitchen and in the bathroom as he won't be touching them. Well, as I understand it he won't be touching them - knowing how his plans change at the drop of hat anything could happen.
I'll also pack, which will be more complicated that you might imagine. See, my holiday proper is in two parts. The first bit I'm spending with my dad. It's his birthday and I've not really seen him much this year, so I'll be staying with him for a few days.
The second part of the holiday I'm basically booked into a hotel and I'm going to do two things - walk and watch DVDs. The first is pretty obvious - I can use the opportunity of not working to go on some reasonable sized walks and hopefully I won't lapse with the diet, so I'm kinda hoping to return a good few pounds lighter than I went.
The second part is to have a great big push of watching anime and other DVDs so that, upon my return, I can whack most, if not all of them on e-bay.
I then return home and there's the weekend and the Monday for me to catch up on all the domestic stuff before I'm back to work. I'm unsure at this stage whether I'll have the energy to re-arrange my room when I get back. I'm guessing probably not and I'll basically wait until the following weekend before I really start back with the sorting out.
There is also another potential problem there in that we'll be well into Autumn and the weather could start to play a big factor. My big fear is that we have another super-damp and cold autumn and winter and I get lazy and don't sell the stuff I need to. This is a fear because then there's a good chance of it getting wet and then going mouldy. And cold and damp is also not kind to electrical components, of which there are quite a few in the boxes currently out in the shed.
But anyway - I'll see you on the other side.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
harry potter and the half blood prince
I have to confess, I wasn't a particularly big fan of the last couple of harry potter films.
I liked the first couple, when they were (for want of a better phrase) "kid-focused", but the last couple were in some sort of weird half-way house between being kids films and something a bit more grown up. Also, there seemed to be something akin to "plot extension" going on.
By that, I mean that it felt like we were being drip-fed stuff at too slow a rate. So where the first couple of films had only small elements of the "Voldermort" stuff and that worked fine, because the focus was on Harry being a kid and learning magic, by the later films the tendency to only give us very small bits of information was becoming rather annoying.
Especially since what was happening as the main plots wasn't actually all that interesting. And to some extent that's also true in the half-blood prince. I mean, given the whole thing is called the half-blood prince, you'd think it would be a central point to the film. But it isn't - it's quite a small part.
However, this time, there's the first stirring of romantic feelings among Harry and his friends and that really helps to lift the films. Now that there are more interesting inter-personal relationships, there's more of a feel of reality and a grounding in character than in the last couple of films.
It feels like we've emerged from a sort of not-quite children, not-quite teenage wilderness.
And to help out further, this film really starts to tell us stuff about the bad guy, Voldermort. Where previously he was a fairly non-descript shadowy figure, we finally start to get some proper information on his background and past.
Also, tonally, the film feels darker and more desperate than the previous films. You really get a sense that Voldermort's return-proper is inevitable - that the bad guys now have the momentum and the eternally hinted at show-down is finally coming.
The only thing I'd again say is that the film is really very long. I understand that most of the books are pretty long and I'm sure that even this is trimmed down from them, but it does become a bit of a bum-acher when you're breezing past the two hour mark.
I liked the first couple, when they were (for want of a better phrase) "kid-focused", but the last couple were in some sort of weird half-way house between being kids films and something a bit more grown up. Also, there seemed to be something akin to "plot extension" going on.
By that, I mean that it felt like we were being drip-fed stuff at too slow a rate. So where the first couple of films had only small elements of the "Voldermort" stuff and that worked fine, because the focus was on Harry being a kid and learning magic, by the later films the tendency to only give us very small bits of information was becoming rather annoying.
Especially since what was happening as the main plots wasn't actually all that interesting. And to some extent that's also true in the half-blood prince. I mean, given the whole thing is called the half-blood prince, you'd think it would be a central point to the film. But it isn't - it's quite a small part.
However, this time, there's the first stirring of romantic feelings among Harry and his friends and that really helps to lift the films. Now that there are more interesting inter-personal relationships, there's more of a feel of reality and a grounding in character than in the last couple of films.
It feels like we've emerged from a sort of not-quite children, not-quite teenage wilderness.
And to help out further, this film really starts to tell us stuff about the bad guy, Voldermort. Where previously he was a fairly non-descript shadowy figure, we finally start to get some proper information on his background and past.
Also, tonally, the film feels darker and more desperate than the previous films. You really get a sense that Voldermort's return-proper is inevitable - that the bad guys now have the momentum and the eternally hinted at show-down is finally coming.
The only thing I'd again say is that the film is really very long. I understand that most of the books are pretty long and I'm sure that even this is trimmed down from them, but it does become a bit of a bum-acher when you're breezing past the two hour mark.
Monday, 27 September 2010
a bit much?
So the latest moment of truth was upon my this last Sunday for my final official weigh-in before my holiday.
And the news is almost scarily good, as I've apparently lost 6 pounds.
If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure what to make of that, because that's a lot of weight to shed in just a single week. I'm partly of the opinion that it's due to rounding errors - perhaps last week I lost, say, 1.4 pounds, which would only show up as 1 pound and then this week it's more like 5 pounds, but due to rounding on the scale it makes it look like 6 pounds.
But even then, 5 pounds is quite a bit to drop in one week. I mean, where last week I was unsurprised due to a bad week and this week I was pretty certain it was good week, there didn't seem to be that much difference between them.
Sure I did do a bit more walking, and I didn't have any blip days where I ate a bit much, but we're not talking miles and miles extra and it's not like last week I ate pie and chips every night.
But maybe I should calm down a bit. As I understand it it's actually not good for your heart to loose weight very rapidly. And I don't want to be one of those people who loose loads of weight suddenly and then have all this flabby extra skin.
And I have to confess that the whole walking thing is becoming a bit difficult. I've pretty much managed to keep going at the weekends. And even when I've had off days in terms of steps it's been because I've been shifting boxes around, which counts as quite good exercise is my opinion.
But now that the nights (or, more accurately, the mornings) are drawing in I'm finding the morning walks a real struggle. It's one thing to get up at 6:30am on a summer morning and go for a stroll in a t-shirt and shorts, it's quite another to get up on a dark, dingy and sometimes damp morning and trudge around togged up in tracky bottoms and a jumper with a coat and hat because it's so cold.
It doesn't help that I turn my heating off over night to save money, so first thing in the morning it's super-snuggly and warm under my nice thick duvet (I packed away the thin summer duvet and broke out the thick winter one a few weeks back) and freezing out from under it.
And again we come back to the real issue here - I need to go for a walk when I get back from work. I mean, if the evening walk was of a decent length, I might even be able to abandon my morning walk and still keep the steps at a reasonable level. But that has implications in terms of loosing the time I use to relax and watch telly or play games.
Plus, the way I've been dieting is that I've almost done away with the meal of dinner. I mean, I do still eat something in the evening, but it's ages since I had what you would recognise as a meal proper.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not bemoaning the loss of the food (I've been rather amazed actually that I'm not actually having any problems), but I am slightly worried that if I go for a long walk I'll return ravenous and it'll cause the diet to slip.
And the news is almost scarily good, as I've apparently lost 6 pounds.
If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure what to make of that, because that's a lot of weight to shed in just a single week. I'm partly of the opinion that it's due to rounding errors - perhaps last week I lost, say, 1.4 pounds, which would only show up as 1 pound and then this week it's more like 5 pounds, but due to rounding on the scale it makes it look like 6 pounds.
But even then, 5 pounds is quite a bit to drop in one week. I mean, where last week I was unsurprised due to a bad week and this week I was pretty certain it was good week, there didn't seem to be that much difference between them.
Sure I did do a bit more walking, and I didn't have any blip days where I ate a bit much, but we're not talking miles and miles extra and it's not like last week I ate pie and chips every night.
But maybe I should calm down a bit. As I understand it it's actually not good for your heart to loose weight very rapidly. And I don't want to be one of those people who loose loads of weight suddenly and then have all this flabby extra skin.
And I have to confess that the whole walking thing is becoming a bit difficult. I've pretty much managed to keep going at the weekends. And even when I've had off days in terms of steps it's been because I've been shifting boxes around, which counts as quite good exercise is my opinion.
But now that the nights (or, more accurately, the mornings) are drawing in I'm finding the morning walks a real struggle. It's one thing to get up at 6:30am on a summer morning and go for a stroll in a t-shirt and shorts, it's quite another to get up on a dark, dingy and sometimes damp morning and trudge around togged up in tracky bottoms and a jumper with a coat and hat because it's so cold.
It doesn't help that I turn my heating off over night to save money, so first thing in the morning it's super-snuggly and warm under my nice thick duvet (I packed away the thin summer duvet and broke out the thick winter one a few weeks back) and freezing out from under it.
And again we come back to the real issue here - I need to go for a walk when I get back from work. I mean, if the evening walk was of a decent length, I might even be able to abandon my morning walk and still keep the steps at a reasonable level. But that has implications in terms of loosing the time I use to relax and watch telly or play games.
Plus, the way I've been dieting is that I've almost done away with the meal of dinner. I mean, I do still eat something in the evening, but it's ages since I had what you would recognise as a meal proper.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not bemoaning the loss of the food (I've been rather amazed actually that I'm not actually having any problems), but I am slightly worried that if I go for a long walk I'll return ravenous and it'll cause the diet to slip.
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