short week

Well, it's the end of the week already.

I've actually got a strong of short weeks at the moment, as I'm taking Thursday and Friday off next week for my birthday.  So my weeks will go:

• 4 day week (last week)
• 4 day week (this week)
• 3 day week (next week)
• 4 day week (week after)

Which is nice.

I'm going to clean the flat this weekend, though I'm intending to do a spring clean over the 5 day weekend I've got next week.  I always do a big clean at Christmas, but I like to do a spring clean as well.  In particular, I need to clean and defrost the fridge freezer.  I didn't do this at Christmas as I knackered myself doing the other cleaning and it's pretty thick with ice.  The fridge is also rather dirty.

It's a big pain defrosting the freezer, as it's a really old, knackered unit, so it gets really thick ice.  Ice also often forms in the door as it has a hole in it, so it takes ages to all melt and is pretty messy, dripping everywhere.

The other reason I didn't defrost it at Christmas was I ended up with quite a bit of food in the freezer.  I've got a small "beer can" fridge thing I use to keep some stuff cold, but it is obviously a lot smaller than the freezer compartment, so I have to be sure to empty it before defrosting it.  I've done well here, as I've literally only some frozen peas, a few pints of milk and some random slices of bread, which I'll probably either finish off for the weekend or will easily fit in the small fridge.

Anyway, I'll give the flat a bit of clean this weekend - I may try to do a few things I would normally leave to the spring clean so that it's less of a chore, but odds are I'll probably spend time playing Civ 5 that I shouldn't :/.

Easter was a bit of a let down if I'm honest - or rather, I let myself down.  I did the full back up, whcih took bloody ages, as usual, but other than that, I kinda failed to do much of anything.  as I say, I did go out drinking, so it was kinda nice to let off steam in that regard, but then that completely destroyed Sunday, when I was hung over, and Monday when I still felt knackered.

Indeed, I did so little across Sunday and Monday that I actually struggled to sleep on Monday night, as I just wasn't tired at all.  I've noticed this problem before - I seem to do enough regular walking nowadays that if I then don't walk for any reason I don't feel tired at night.

spoilt for choice

Wellp, the new season of anime is upon us and I have to confess I'm struggling a bit.

Just recently I've been doing my best to tackle crunchyroll, and last season was the first ever where I've kept track with all the shows that interested me as they came out.  I've not extended this beyond crunchyroll, but found the shows on there to be just about doable.

Now, every year there are a chunk of shows that crunchyroll gets, but the licence excludes us in the UK (this may be just us that's excluded, or it may also be everywhere outside of North America).  Generally, these shows are picked up by other distributors (funimation & sentai, mainly), so I download two episodes of fansubs in order to sample them and then perhaps look to buy them if I really like them (I've actually been belt-tightening, so this is quite rare recently).

Sometimes they're not picked up in this way or I can't access them a tall or nobody picks them up, in which case I will download the complete series as fansub, with the possible intention of sampling them or watching the lot.

Crunchyroll also has a few of the long-term shows like Bleach and Naruto, but I don't generally go in for those, and of course there are a few shows that are "double season" so they keep going and I may or may not be watching them.

However, this season there seems to have been a bit of a shift towards almost everything being accessible on crunchyroll.  I think it's partly because, being the new FY, there are more new starting anime, but it also seems like there are fewer region restrictions this time around as well.

All this is a very round-about way of saying I'm rather struggling to keep up.  Indeed, there are quite a few shows I've not checked out at all, where this time last season I'd at least taken a look at all of them.

I think I may need to be a bit harsher with my pruning.  Certainly much of what I've watched so far has been "okay" so I'm, tempted to put it on a bit of a back-burner.

The other option is I try to use some of the time of I've got to watch stuff on crunchyroll.  The problem is that I'm struggling to watch regular TV shows as I've been playing Civ 5 rather obsessively for a while now.

chinese grand prix

The Chinese Grand Prix was a bit of a let-down, to be honest.

China is usually good - it has a hairpin bend that's very wide that usually lends itself to lots of overtaking, but this time there was very little.  I mean, it wasn't a bad race, it's just compared to Bahrain it wasn't all that much.

Of course, that's the problem when you have an amazing race - it raises your expectations quite a lot, so it makes the next race seem worse, even if you'd have been happy with it normally.

It's looking like Mercedes may be unstoppable this year, though.  Speaking of which, I saw that they tipped up to the Red Bull appeal against the fuel flow thing and tried to get them banned for 3 races.

I found it quite amusing, tbh - proper F1 style kick them while they're on the floor stuff.  In that regard ti was kinda surprising that it came from Mercedes, rather than Ferrari, as that's the sort of thing they would generally engage in.

It is quite odd when you think of it - Red Bull appealed against a punishment that had already been applied, and Mercedes were basically going "Actually, that punishment was way too light."

They apparently submitted a 95 page document in support and had a QC there arguing their case.  The tribunal basically ignored them and simply upheld the existing punishment, which was fair enough.  I do sort of take Red Bull's point if they think the sensor wasn't working properly, but if you're told to do something by the race director you should comply and then make a case afterwards.

Especially when it's the first race of the season - I think they'd have been more likely to make some concession or do something for the rest of the season if they'd taken that approach.  By disobeying you've undermined any point you may then want to make.

wowser

So I weighed in on Monday, and it was not good news.

I'd gained five pounds... taking me up to 20 stone 13 pounds.

It was not a good weekend, generally.  I wasn't too bad with my old problem of buying too much food, but I certainly wasn't lacking stuff to eat.  Well, I say that - I'd actually had a couple of curries during the week (with the training course I felt the need).  However, there were two big problems.

The first was a lack of exercise - on the Friday I was short on walking and on Sunday and Monday I basically did nothing.  There was sort of a reason for this in that I've been having some trouble with my right heel, but really this was a combination of laziness (I played a lot of Civ 5) and a hangover.

And that was the second issue - I went out for a "few drinks" on the Saturday and actually got wasted.  In total I had 8 cans of lager, a half of a small bottle of vodka with 2 cans of Dr Peppers as mixers and two thirds of a bottle of red wine.

I also ate a load of junk - both on the Saturday and then on the Sunday.  Indeed, I even cleaned out the limited supply of junk type stuff I keep at home when I got back, so it really was pretty bad.

I'm therefore not surprised I gained weight, though I have to say the scale was surprising.  I'm slightly suspicious that some of it may be temporary effects, but still, it's a significant gain and completely wipes out the little I had lost since resolving to lose weight for Canada.

I really need to get serious here - I'm getting close to when I need to buy new clothes for the trip and I therefore need to know what sizes I should buy.