bookmark_border10 weeks

The boot camp I recently signed up for includes a session on nutrition to make sure we are eating properly. The sessions is more about having energy to do the boot camp activities than to prescribe a diet, but I’m already thinking that I should also use it to hack my eating habits.

I don’t treat my body well and it no longer feels like it is indestructible, the myriad of little aches and pains I notice throughout the day a sure sign I need to be a bit smarter, both with what I do with my body and what I put in it (FNAR!).

Part of this is education. I’ve a reasonable grasp on the basics of good nutrition and a balanced diet, or at least that’s what I tell myself, no doubt I could stand to learn more.

Given that boot camp lasts for 10 weeks I’m wondering what other changes I could make to my diet and eating habits.

My initial thought was to omit alcohol but as I hardly have any (almost none) from one week to another as it is, it wouldn’t really be that much of a stretch.

Instead I’m thinking I’ll omit sugar, at least in its most obvious guises of chocolate and sweets. I’m terrible for grazing the never ending supply of sweets and biscuits that appear at work and I always seem to manage to squeeze in a dessert at the end of a meal. So, for the 10 weeks of boot camp, I will avoid such things!.

I retain the right to have a thin smear of jam on toast (or as part of a PBJ) but aside from that I’ll eschew all other forms of non-natural sugar (refined? is that the phrase I should be using? See, edumachashun is what I be needings).

I am mindful that boot camp isn’t a magic wand. It won’t fix everything I need to with my diet and exercise habits but the simple fact is that it’s (another) first step. Let’s see where I end up in 10 weeks time.

bookmark_borderLevengrove Park

Last Sunday I had to pop in to my parents place to pick something up and, as I was down that way, I decided to go for a drive. I had no destination in mind but had all afternoon to kill and made my decisions as they came to me. So it was I came to find myself at Levengrove Park, the memories flooded back as I parked the car…

… bumping over the low kerb onto the pavement, my hand poised on the seat belt release in anticipation. As the car eases to a stop, I push the latch to freedom. I reach over and do the same for my sister and we clamber out. Behind us, Sintra paces the back and forth, she knows where we are now and is excited to be released. She has only one thing on her mind.

It’s same every time we visit. The minute the hatchback is opened she’s off, leaping out, already turning towards the park before she lands, a blur of gold and elated doggy smiles. We run after her – leaving parents behind to gather up coats, a frisbee, and whatever else that adults think we might need – knowing where she’s going to be as she disappears off down the hill.

Four legs versus two is never fair and try as I might I can’t match her. I lag behind, stopping now and then to let my sister catch up, then taking off again in the vain hope that I’ve suddenly turned into Alan Wells. We run across the grass and down to the water.

By the time we arrive at the top of the steps she’s already waded out, up to her shoulders in the icy water. We call her back and she dutifully obeys, but only because she knows we have only just got started. We clamber down the worn stone steps and from the sandy shore we start lobbing stones out into the water beyond, the mighty River Clyde, and she gamefully tries to retrieve them, over and over again, snapping at the water in vain.

Eventually we tire, our arms are heavy, and after a final swim Sintra returns to us and a new game begins. We run away. Knowing she’ll only shake herself dry when she’s near us we deploy the usual tactic, head for Mum and Dad and hope Sintra stops there so we can run beyond them and remain dry. It rarely works of course, never underestimate an excited damp dog who wants to join in the fun.

The beach explored, we head up across the grass to the swings…

… the wrought iron roundabout is gone now, as is the old metal train and the big slide. There is no concrete to fall on, and everything looks safe and modern.

Beyond the swings are further memories, times spent in the park with friends, but as I walked around the ghosts gently followed me, calling out my childhood, and all the vivid recollections of sunny days, and snowy winters came flooding back. What a wonderful childhood I had, full of joy and happiness.

And a salty wet dog panting in my ear on the car ride back home.

bookmark_borderWeekend Reading

Still managing to, mostly, avoid Trump links here. Alas not completely but I’m doing my best to read more things outside of that horror show (whilst following along as best I can in the news).

  • Bird Man
    Noah Strycker spotted the first bird before I made it from the parked car to the edge of the marsh. “It’s a rough-legged hawk,” he said when I caught up to him, gesturing for me to peer through his long, 60-power Swarovski scope.
    I do love tales about dedication, no matter the field.
  • David Letterman on Life After TV, Late Night Today, and the Man He Calls Trumpy
    Since retiring after 33 years on the late night television, David Letterman has kept a low public profile — aided by the growth of a truly impressive beard. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been as fixated on politics as the rest of us.
    Letterman is fast becoming a Bill Murray-esque character, fascinating.
  • Change is Good
    “Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you’re going to be thrown off your feet by it.”
    Mostly posting this for myself, timely advice as I move home.
  • A school for grandmothers in India is fighting an invisible illiteracy problem
    India has not been a good mother to its girls—but one small village is trying to make amends to its grandmothers. The country has long been a hotbed for sex-selective abortion—specifically female foeticide. Fewer girls than boys are enrolled in school.
    More of this please
  • Chatbot that overturned 160,000 parking fines now helping refugees claim asylum
    The creator of a chatbot which overturned more than 160,000 parking fines and helped vulnerable people apply for emergency housing is now turning the bot to helping refugees claim asylum.
    More of this too!
  • I Have Traveled Here From the Present to Warn You About Global Warming
    Thank you for meeting me here. Excuse my tardiness, I’m still adjusting. Now, listen to me carefully.
    In light of recent news from the US on this topic, this is timely.
  • The People’s Princess
    Americans love their nostalgic cultural icons more than God and country. As our faith in every cherished institution from religion to the free press to science to democracy erodes before our eyes, our belief in The Force grows stronger by the day.
    Note to self: Read the Princess Diaries already
  • Maybe Monogamy Isn’t the Only Way to Love
    In the prologue to her new book, What Love Is and What It Could Be, philosopher Carrie Jenkins is walking through Vancouver, from her boyfriend’s apartment to the home she has with her husband.
    From personal experience, I’d remove the ‘maybe’.
  • IKEA is going to save your relationship with new furniture that simply snaps together
    Hands down, the most frustrating thing about IKEA’s flat pack furniture is the assembly. A mess of loose parts, bolts, screws, wayward allen wrenches and an infuriating manual stand between you and the picture in the catalogue.
    Anything that makes it easier to deconstruct/reconstruct furniture has to be a good thing.
  • The new authoritarians
    We might take the demonstrative demise of strongmen such as Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and – more recently and unobtrusively – Fidel Castro in Cuba to indicate that the day of the dictator has largely passed. Alas, authoritarianism is staging a comeback.
    Story of our time? God I hope not.
  • Nasty Women – the book: ‘Trump and Piers Morgan are top of the list to get a copy’
    A collection of essays on women’s lives published by 404Ink steals from the president for its title, and has been endorsed by Margaret Atwood The day Trump’s Muslim ban began in January, publisher Laura Jones was editing an essay by Zeba Talkhani about being a good Muslim.
    Bought this yesterday, looking forwarding to reading it.
  • Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens
    In a new book, “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked,” the social psychologist Adam Alter warns that many of us — youngsters, teenagers, adults — are addicted to modern digital products. Not figuratively, but literally addicted.
    So stop reading and … wait, not yet!!*
  • How the World’s Heaviest Man Lost It All
    Paul Mason used to weigh close to 1,000 pounds. Now that he’s shed almost all of it, freeing himself from his tomb of a body, he’s facing a question that’s heavy in its own right: How should he spend the rest of his life?
    Our physical and mental health is so strongly entwined, what happens if you unpick one but not the other?
  • Tarkovsky’s Flame
    When the world is brash, fast, and stupid, we must seek out what is quiet, slow, and intelligent to brace ourselves against the world’s madness.
    Yes yes yes. More quiet, more slow, take time to breathe.
  • The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.
    LET’S START WITH THE MOMENT I realized I was already a loser, which was just after I was more or less told that I was destined to become one. I’d been summoned to an editor’s office at the Globe Magazine with the old “We have a story we think you’d be perfect for.”
    Sometimes an article comes along that kinda smacks you upside the head. This is one (for me).
  • 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going
    A strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” — it had ethnicities.
    This is why Top of the Pops isn’t on anymore. Music is creating its own space.

* anyone remember the kids TV show, Why Don’t You? The theme tune included the line “why don’t you, switch off your television set and go do something less boring instead”, which always seemed like an odd thing for a TV show to suggest in the opening credits… *click*

bookmark_borderLove Thyself

Entry number 792 in the ongoing get fit and lose weight campaign

In this year of two thousand and seventeen I find myself, once again, looking to lose weight. I have pondered various options.

Option 1: Walk home from work

It’d take me about an hour to walk home. I have multiple podcasts to listen to and I enjoy walking. I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like to walk.

But it’s Scotland and whilst I don’t mind some weather, we get ALL the weather in January and February so my appetite for walking home at the end of the day is not helped by freezing gales and horizontal sleet.

BUT the weather is really just an excuse. I need to do this.

Option 2: Join a gym

Ugh, bleck, meh.

I do not enjoy gyms. I have been an irregular gym user for some time and it always ends up boring me. Regardless of what I try I end up doing the same things over and over. I do my best to game myself, to motivate myself and whilst tracking my progress helps (I enjoy challenging myself) it always fizzles out as the excuses roll in.

Option 3: Jog

I’d love to go jogging again but scar tissue under a kneecap prevents it (I CAN run but it’s painful during and for a few days afterwards). I loved jogScotland when I did it, and long term I have physio exercises to do which are helping, I just don’t do them often enough.

Option 4: Surgery

I carry my weight in my stomach. I’ll admit I have been tempted to just slice it all off, one quick hack with a sharp blade and goodbye beer belly! (well, technically it’s pizza and sweets belly but let’s not split hairs). Sure I should probably get it done by a surgeon but how hard can it be?!

I’m kidding of course, I have not considered surgery in any serious way. But as a quick fix, how wonderful it could be! Decades of mistreating my body fixed with one ‘quick’ operation!!

Option 5: Boot Camp

And finally to the crux of this post. I have signed up to do a 10 week long ‘Boot Camp’. Two sessions a week of god knows what, every Wednesday evening and Saturday mornings (at 9am! UNGODLY!!).

But for me, importantly, it’s with a group of other people. I know that’s where I function best, where camaraderie and competition meet. It was the one thing that kept me going to along to jogScotland (well that or the hill sprints… not!).

I’m looking forward to it in a nervously excited way. I have already warned my coworkers that I may not be able to walk on a Thursday morning, but aside from that I’m hoping it’s the start of a better year fitness wise.

Why now?

I need to properly invest in my health. I’m 43, have a sore knee and ITB pain in my right hip. I spend far too long sitting down, don’t stretch often enough, and whilst meditiation and mindfulness are helping my brain, I need to give my own body some love.

And that’s the key to it I think. I need to love my body. I haven’t for a long time, and whilst I adorn it with tattoos, I realise that part of my reasoning is to distract from the parts of me I don’t like.

No-one else is going to fix this. I’ve done this to myself, and it’s me that needs to undo it as best I can. Turns out my new year resolution is to stop thinking about stuff and, in a nicely exercise related and trademarked slogan, Just Do It.

So Boot Camp it is, here’s hoping it’s the kick I need.

bookmark_borderThings in boxes

I am done with decluttering, done, I say!

Hmmm … perhaps that was a little strident. How about this; I’ve done enough that I can now start packing and move to my new flat. Yes, that seems more accurate.

At this juncture I should point out that I am, of course, using the word done in the more modern, eye rollingly teenage angsty way of being ‘so done’ with something. I’m, like, totally over it, yeah? (in my head that sounds way more Clueless than I’d realised. As if!).

I should also confess that I’m using the apparent difference in “being done” and “being finished” to put off making decisions about some of the more, well, frivolous items I own and whether or not to get rid of them.

I’ve decluttered my clothes, my crockery, my glassware, and my books. I’ve donated DVDs, sold some furniture, and cried my way through a couple of nights reading old letters from my Gran, browsing old photos and mementos, largely sorting through my emotions. Throughout this entire process this has been the hardest part, confronting my ghosts and myself. This Is My Life, minus the dulcet tones of Eamonn Andrews.

So with all of that done (there’s that word again) I’m left with said frivolous, un-useful, dust gathering items that I own because they make me happy – by now I’m keenly aware of the importance of tense, made is no longer part of the vocabulary, the past needs to stay there – things like my Film/Song/Book maps which I’m not sure I have the wall space for in the new place. Things like my Lego R2-D2 and Lego Space Shuttle, things like the three small busts my Uncle sculpted (three old men aptly named Hamish’s Hikers), things like the picture of my niece as a baby in a ‘favourite Uncle’ frame, things like the toy Hobbes that Kirsty gave me, or the wooden sculpture (The Thinker) that came from my (ex)in-laws.

The last few weeks have taught me a lot about myself and given me more of a desire to learn to look forward and not dwell on what is behind me. As a perennial over-the-shoulder-gazer this is not as easy as it sounds but I’m determined to learn from this. In a revelation that will be absolutely no surprise to anyone, I’ve (finally?) figured out that the decisions I’ve made may not always be the right ones but hindsight doesn’t change them, so I have to look forward and hope to make better decisions in the future, all the while knowing that I probably won’t but, hey, what’s the alternative? *

The coming weeks will see me box up my remaning belongings and start moving them to the new flat. By the end of the month I will be moved and can start adjusting my day to day to the new space; Where will I put my keys when I get home? Will the new sofa be as comfy as the old one? Why doesn’t the kitchen have at least one shelf that is cereal box height?

Such is the way of things, I’ve moved home often enough to know I’ll adjust and in a few weeks time I’ll have settled in. Just as I know that time will render this period a dull memory, and it will be the frivolous things I take with me that will burst through, puncturing the nothingness with their vivid emotions, the oil-slicked puddle in a shard of sunlight.

Where these things will fit in my new home I have no idea but they will go with me regardless. They are as much a part of me as I know, not by definition but extension. A hint at my past as I look forward with yet another new start, a fond nodding of the head, the gentle smile of melancholy.

Good or bad they will go with me. These frivolous things in their boxes.

* There is a construct in here built around perception and expectation, both things I’ve struggled with/against in the past. But life is too short, far far too short and I really need to stop these things rattling around in my head. And yes, as I grow older I have fewer fucks to give about the expectation and perception of how I live my life so I reserve the right to change my mind on all of this.

bookmark_borderWeekend Reading

  • We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment
    If that’s the case, it’s time Cortana’s team—along Siri’s, Alexa’s, and Google Home’s—step up.
    This is weird, or scary, or … something else entirely.
  • People Who Cry During Movies Are The Strongest People Of All
    I’ll admit it: I cry during movies… and books, music, and podcasts. Depending on how my hormone levels are, I might preemptively grab tissues and just watch the movie alone. Though a lot of people smirk when they see me watch movies in tears, I’m really fine with it.
    From a ‘big greet’ I couldn’t agree more.
  • Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
    With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network.
    tl;dr we are all fucked and big money will always win? Jesus H Christ…
  • Sarah Millican: Twitter was a pin to my excitable Bafta balloon
    I am a comedian. You may or may not find me funny, but the fact remains, that I am a comedian. This feels like a defensive start to a column but you will soon understand why. Last year, I was nominated for a Bafta. Me. The quiet girl at school. The awkward girl at college. The funny woman at work.
    I’m a fan of this lovely, silly, funny lady. This article is about more than that though. 
  • Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?
    The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015.
    Yup, it’s that A.I. thing again, I’m telling ya, it’s … something!
  • These bees successfully taught their friends to play bee soccer 99% of the time
    Not all athletes are born human.
    More proof that bees are cool af.
  • Transhumanism: More Nightmare Than Dream?
    On the eve of the 20th century, an obscure Russian man who had refused to publish any of his works began to finalize his ideas about resurrecting the dead and living forever.
    And the world just keeps on getting weirder…
  • Earth’s Orbiting Junkyard Threatens the Space Economy
    You never see it in those lovely NASA pictures of Earth, but the space surrounding our pale blue dot is a cosmic junkyard. Debris abounds, moving at ludicrous speeds and presenting plenty of hassles for satellite operators who do business in orbit.
    Figures. We’ve fucked up our planet, so let’s start with space. Great job guys!
  • Crazy They Call Me
    Well, you certainly don’t go out anyplace less than dressed, not these days. Can’t let anybody mistake you for that broken, misused little girl: Eleanora Fagan. No. Let there be no confusion.
    Brutal and honest, and well worth a read.
  • Financiers Fight Over the American Dream
    One day in the summer of 2011, Christine Richard arrived at the forty-second floor of a high-rise on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan to visit a hedge fund called Pershing Square Capital Management.
    Ohhh goody, more big money.
  • Why Pheasant Island Is Sometimes in France, Sometimes in Spain
    On maps, international borders are two-dimensional: they can be traced out on a flat sheet of paper with latitude and longitude.
    Anyone wanna go on the day they ‘handover’?
  • Exclusive interview: Max Martin
    ”Well, I can only say what I think. I think that a great pop song should be felt when you hear it. You can hear songs that are technically great, songs that tick all the boxes. But for a song to be felt, you need something else.
    Nope, I hadn’t heard of him either. But you know his songs, ohhh yes you do!
  • A girl and her glitter-shooting prosthetic: ‘You can do anything’
    Jordan Reeves’ face lights up when she talks about “Finding Nemo,” remembering how she met the cast of the musical at Disney World last year. “I wore a Nemo-looking dress,” said Jordan, age 11. “It looked like a clown fish, just like Nemo.
    Kick ass inspiration. HER ARM SHOOTS GLITTER!!
  • The Mystery of Mr. Grass
    Mr. Grass and I have just spent a few hours on his porch talking about the factual accuracy of the movie Sully and eating backyard peaches and watching rabbits thump thump across the lawn and taking in the warming Colorado morning, so I figure it’s probably time to get out of his hair.
    No YOU’VE spent hours on this kinda thing in the past…
  • Hidden Figures will become Lego figures to teach little girls everywhere that NASA would be nothing without women
    Forget Lego Batman. The best new minifigures of 2017 are female NASA heroes. On Tuesday (Feb. 28), Lego announced it would soon release a set of minifigures of five pioneering female scientists whose contribution to NASA has largely been underappreciated.
    HOORAY!!!!!
  • How to Bake Scientifically Accurate Cake Planets
    Offered in the hope that someone will make one for me? Any takers??