Crawling
Posted: Sat 26 March, 2016 Filed under: BurgerCrawl, Day Trips, Domestic, Food, Single Life, Travel Leave a comment »Today I’m off down to London with a couple of friends, doing another Burger Crawl.
It’s been organised by one of the others, so I’ve no idea what the full plan/route is yet, but it should be fun.
No 10k
Posted: Wed 23 March, 2016 Filed under: Charitable, Day Trips, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Health, Thoughts, Travel, Weigh Less, Weight Loss Leave a comment »Over the last couple of years, I’ve been getting involved in doing some small fundraising for Marie Curie Cancer Trust, mainly through doing their 10km walks, the “Walk to Remember”, and raising some cash through that. (At the same time, being a fat bloke who can walk 10k in less than 100 mins is something that makes me happy)
It’s a fun event, involving walking round a planned route at a stately home on a Summer evening – it’s been thoroughly enjoyable as a way to spend a couple of hours, plus travelling etc. and meant I raised an amount of money that’s not epic by their standards, but was pretty good by mine – and better than nothing, or doing sod all.
They’re emphatically non-competitive, you don’t get issued with numbers etc., you don’t get timed (you can, of course, time yourself) and it’s aimed at being a walk rather than a run/job – which also suits me just fine. I’m built for comfort, not speed (although again, I can do fast-moving fat bloke pretty damn well!) but I do cover the route at speed, while enjoying it.
Having looked this weekend, it turns out that they’re not doing these walks this year at all. That is, to say the least, a bit disappointing. I’m not sure yet whether to look at doing something else – well, I will definitely be doing longer walks and so on anyway, but it was nice to be fundraising at the same time – or what this year.
Time will tell. But it’s a bit of a bugger that this one won’t be being done.
Ridiculously Organised
Posted: Fri 19 February, 2016 Filed under: Cinema, Day Trips, Domestic, Films, Geeky, Getting Organised, London, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »So far, this year has been pretty non-stop with travel, visits, concerts and idiot day-trips (mainly to see concerts) and I’ve kept on saying that I must calm things down a bit, build in some time for myself and so on.
And I’m trying to, I really am.
But then cool stuff comes up that I want to go to – which means I now have plans all the way through this year. Not every weekend, or anything similar – but there’s already stuff planned right the way through to December.
The latest one, last night, was finding out that the Royal Albert Hall is doing a showing of Aliens – with the soundtrack performed by a full orchestra, as a celebration of the 30th anniversary of its release. Even more fortuitously, it’s on the weekend of my birthday. Oh, I am so there.
And so yes, tickets are booked for it. I’d already got stuff booked in for December as well, so as it turns out, November was the only month this year without something already booked in.
Now my main challenge will be to not book up the rest of the year, and suddenly realise I’ve had ridiculously few ‘downtime’ weekends. Again.
150,000
Posted: Thu 18 February, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Driving, Travel Leave a comment »Last night, during another daft day-trip drive, the Saab went over the 150,000 mile mark, just over three years since I bought it.
At that time, it had 74,000 miles on it, so I’ve doubled its mileage in three years. And one full year of that has been on much shorter commutes than usual, so it’s quite impressive all round.
Of course, I’ve been doing more daft long journeys and day-trips, which helps add the mileage on.
As I’ve written before, it’s been more annoying and a bit less reliable over the last six weeks or so (and how the hell are we only six weeks into 2016? I’ve done so much, I can’t believe it’s fitted into six weeks!) but hopefully all is now back to normal.
The problems have all been related – from the look of it, at least – to the turbo, and thus to the replacement turbo I had last year. I suspect that having a new and fully-working fresh turbo has perhaps added more pressure than the old (original) pipes and hoses can handle, so they’ve split or leaked, which has led to the issues.
Anyway, that’s another milestone achieved by the Saab. I hope we’ll get to the next one, whatever that may be…
Blistered
Posted: Fri 12 February, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Food, Health, Single Life, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »This week, I went to a restaurant that insisted on a certain level of dress-code. Nothing too epic, thankfully, but it turned out my standard footwear (Cat boots) wouldn’t have been allowed in, so I needed to buy some new dress shoes, or at least thin-soled ‘smart’ shoes.
It was semi-short notice, so I didn’t have the chance to wear them in properly – and I knew it would cause issues.
I managed to plan most of it so I didn’t have to walk as far as I normally would’ve done (had I been allowed to wear my normal, comfortable shoes) and I’m glad I did, because I still ended up with a sod-load of blisters along the way.
Weirdly, both my little toes ended up blistered, and I’m really not sure how that happened. The worst one is on one heel, about the size of a 50p piece. On that one, thank God for Compeed – their blister plasters are creepy as chuff, but bloody hell, do they work.
I know they’ll all heal up this week – it’s just a massive pain in the tits while they’re around. Such is life.
(And no, the meal wasn’t really worth the hassle of new shoes and blistered feet. Sad, but true – it was good, but not brilliant, which is galling when it’s a place that’s so highly rated all round)
Stars
Posted: Fri 12 February, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Driving, Food, Geeky, Getting Organised, Single Life, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last year, I started a project to get used to going out for restaurant meals on my own – something that had always been a bit of a “thing” in my mind. Some people don’t like going to the cinema alone, or to pubs.
Part of it became a plan to do more “high-end” eating – if I’m going to eat solo, I might as well make it decent stuff – as well as the usual things, and as a result I ended up eating in a few Michelin-starred places which I really enjoyed. (Far more than I did my previous experience with Michelin-starred places)
I’m keeping up that aim this year, with a vague plan of trying a wide range over the year, and aiming to ‘collect’ a star a month. (Not necessarily at a place each month, but at least averaging it out to one star per month)
So far this year I’ve eaten in a one-star place and a three – with a two lined up for the coming month. From there, I’ve got a couple of others booked up already, and we’ll see how things go from there.
I don’t only eat in Michelin places, by any stretch of the imagination. My tastes are varied – I’m still amused by the Scotland trip I did last year, where I ate in a Michelin-starred place on the Saturday, and a daggy little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on the Sunday – and I never want to end up the kind of up-myself twerd who’ll only eat at high-end places. This is just a silly side-project that’s also a lot of fun, and is eminently doable. I get to experience a lot of new stuff, seeing what’s good and what isn’t.
I can’t deny, I’m fascinated by the whole thing – the levels of food, the differences (or lack thereof) between places with one, two and three stars, the differences between places with stars and those that haven’t, and the whole experience of the thing. But mainly, it’s fun – and if I’m going to have a ‘sin’, a money-drain or whatever, it’s going to be this one.