My Thirty Fifth Birthday Barbecue

A few weeks ago I was having a little crisis of self about turning thirty five and yet not having completed some of the things that were high up on my bucket list.

This Friday just gone was not only Easter Good Friday, but also my birthday and so as it marked the midpoint between being thirty and forty I decided it was reason enough to hold a party.

Being a lover of barbeques, I had planned and sent out invitations over a month ago inviting my nearest and dearest, mentioning that it would be a barbeque if the weather was good and a chilli con-carne if not.

Thankfully as the week progressed and Friday neared the weather forecast improved from dry and warm to clear and hot, the perfect conditions under which you should hold a barbecue.

Having ordered the food and drink online to be delivered a few hours before the party started, when Friday morning came all I had to do was clear up and clean a little, making sure that everything looked as nice as they possibly could.

The first guests arrived almost bang on time, being my eldest sister and her three young daughters, and we were soon joined by my friend Sue who is loud enough to be a party all by herself.

Within an hour the house and garden filled up, so much in fact that I doubted that my small garden would be big enough to accommodate them all, certainly I did not have this many garden chairs.

As per the Springate's custom, I was not expecting to receive any presents, having passed the age of twenty one many years ago, but I also knew that my mother would probably smuggle a little gift into the party anyway.

I had chosen to use round charcoal briquettes to cook with, as they last longer than wood or the black imitation wood splinters, but they do take a bit longer to get good and hot.

Another of my bright ideas was to get a few extra large burgers instead of a bargain bucket load of cheap smaller burgers, an idea which ended up being a bad one as although they were very tasty there was also not enough to go around and they took up so much of the barbeque that most of my guests had to wait quite some time before there was anything for them to eat.

Despite this minor hiccup a great time was had by all; there were no tears or crying and nothing got broken or damaged that I noticed, not even my bank balance.

By the early evening most of the guests had ate, wished me a happy birthday and left, yet Paola and Lendel were still due to arrive, having had to wait for Lendel to finish off his shift before they left.

As they had never visited Gillingham before I ensured that I met them at the train station and together we all walked back, remarking at how different Gillingham was compared with Central London.

Being a typical British party and a small house, it was quite different from the loud Latin parties that they were used to, but they still seemed to enjoy just chilling with me and a few friends till it was finally time for everyone to go home and catch their train home.

As is my own custom, I decided to delay the massive after party clearing up session until the morning, made myself a bacon sandwich and then spent the last few minutes of wakefulness watching the last few episodes of Boardwalk Empire before I retired to bed.

Constructive Critism

There is an old English saying that goes, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well" and though that may be, it doesn't exactly end the argument.

When I first set up my blog back in 2006 I spent hours and hours trying to get it to look just right, and I had done well.

Then a little over a month ago I decided to give it an overhaul after witnessing the new template and widgets that blogger had to offer, and again I spent hours and hours on it and again I did well.

Which brings us up to today, as I have spent much of the last two days rejigging my blog yet further, after a friend suggested that it now encompassed so many different elements that it had lost its direction, purpose and identity and was thus beginning to sink under the weight of its own content.

So what I did was to create several similar websites that all ran from the same main account, transfered across all the entries and comments, gave each website its own identity and feel and then linked them all together again, with an end result that I feel proud of and again I feel I have done well.

So getting back to my original point, at each stage I had done a worthy blog but as the software, my skills and my understanding increased between each effort I felt that I had to go back and redo a former good job that ended up looking old and not as polished as it once did.

Dickopaideia

Having recently had a run-in with a rather annoying bunch of Irkites, I have decided that rather than attempt to continue to shout down the masses, I will instead simply provide my own educational tidbits every now and again under the terms of my own encylopedic reference henceforth known as the Dickopaideia.

The first of my new words is of course, Irkite - [people who I personally find to be irksome - pronounced (Er-Kite)]

Another of my new words or phrases is alg - [alg, acronym for 'a little giggle', used in preference to the much overused and tired expression 'lol' meaning to 'laugh out loud']

Finally, as it seems clear that these particular bunch of Irkites are a waste of space I furthermore spent a few minutes playing about with my internet browsers and have now set up defaults to enable me to search the web without being swamped with their biased opinions and search hits.

Blog Formatting

Having decided that my blog was due an overhall I have been playing around with the formats and layouts during any my freetime in the hope of finding a perfect layout.

Not being a whizz at computer lingo anymore I had to resort to modifying a default blogging templates, but the problem with this is that there was no one type template that I liked the look of.

I have always been one for shading and curves, yet the template that had those in abundance also had some rather ugly bits stuck in as well, which took more than a few minutes to find out how to get around.

A lot of it was trial and error, and as such I am not even sure if I could do it all again if I tried, so I am very thankful that by the end of a weeks playing I had come up with a layout, design and colour scheme that I was happy with and didn't look too blocky.

It might not be everyone's ideal colour scheme, but it seemed just fine and dandy for me, and so hopefully I will not have any more sudden urges to muck around any more and I can get back to the serious matter of what sketches to stick up, my next poem or even - heaven forbid - cracking on with the second volume of my travelling escapades.

All I can say is that I am glad my blog's fans and friends have stuck around long enough for me to get back into the habit of regular postings and looking forward I intend on updating it with at least one picture, recipe, photograph or journal entry at least once a week.

Updating My Blog

Having volunteered to help my friend Paola create and set up a website/blogsite for her modelling, I had such a lot of fun playing around with all the new features and settings that the latest blog templates had on offer that afterwards I knew that I would have to give my own blogsite a bit of a facelift.

After a lot of playing about, changing and rechanging settings and a lot of fiddling about with creating backlinks and uploading images I finally had a new blog website that I was once again proud to own and use.

The old had served me well since it was first set up in 2006, but five years on and its simplicity and lack of features or menu's was something that I was very glad that I would now be able to correct. In fact the only tiny slight thing I was not entirely happy about was that I had to use someone elses stock photo for the background image as whenever I uploaded my own it didn't bleed out to the edges of the website and thus looked iffy.

A writer and published author

An old friend of mine once said, or possibly paraphrased, that in order to become a writer a person must only do one thing, write.

Well I today found out that assuming that such a person also wants to be paid for his craft, for an unknown writer to burst onto the scene they must either have money to burn, have contacts in high places or be very computer literate.

Following a throw away comment made by my youngest sister saying that 'I had better get a wriggle on' with my travel writing, I realised that I had been back from travelling now for almost two years and as yet there was still no sign of any book for anyone to read.

This comment was posted in reply to a FaceBook status update that I had posted, saying how far I was coming, but pondering it I then made the decision to break up my travelling into two volumes and push the first one out now instead of together later in the year, or even early next year.

About a week ago I finished the actual rewrite, and I thought that it would then be a doddle to get it self published as I had already done all the hard work.

Over the last weekend I laboured long into the night, almost missing my sisters engagement party, and with barely 10 hours sleep over 72 hours I pushed myself the entire time to get the draft, and the front and rear covers complete. Even this was not easy, as I had to root around and find several different art and publishing packages in order to get it all done.

Having to go to work Monday, I worked as usual on the train into and out of work and pausing only for a sandwich I remained up until gone 1am ensuring that I went through every section tweaking and refining it.

Setting my alarm for before 6am this morning I woke early in order to put the finishing touches on my book so that when I arrived at work this morning all I had to do was upload it onto the website and then set things in motion. If only!

First the website wanted a pdf, then it said that I hadn't embedded the fonts on the file - which I had to find out how to do. Once I did that it still do not accept it, so I had to wait to lunchtime to try again.

Over Lunch I edited it, resubmitted it and then had to rework and resubmit my cover designs as they were not in the chosen format either - despite having them saved in three different formats.

With a lot of huffing and puffing I finally got it to work and ordered myself a copy right away, and then as I was also going to try and sell it I had to create an on-line profile. Once that was done I then had to link in all the other profiles, which took up the remainder of my lunchtime - and this from a guy who has spent his entire adult life working with computers in one way or another.

I would hate to think what chance a less pc-savvy would be author would have upon getting their own book out there, as they would probably either give up or else have to pay a fortune for others to do all the fiddly bits.

Having done it once, I now know how and what to do, so the second volume should be that much easier to write, edit and produce, but still I feel that after all this I deserve a break from writing before I attempt the slightly longer return journey volume.

But back to what my friend originally said, I am not in disagreement about having to write in order to be a writer, but I now see that being a writer and being a published author are not necessarily the same thing.

Diet - February 2011

I stood on the scales and weighed a little under 14 stone (196 lbs) , 3.5 stone heavier than my normal and also at least 2.0 stone into a technical body mass index (BMI) rating of obese.

How I could possibly be considered obese was beyond me, but then I had been tucking into the chocolates and fizzy drinks over the Christmas period and was snacking on several biscuits a day while in my office at work.

Now I know its true that few people would call me a fatty, but for years I was around 10.5 stone, even before I went travelling, yet recently my trousers have been too tight to put on and it wasn't that they had shrunk in the wash.

I still walk to and from Victoria train station and my works office in Bond Street most days, so it was not that, thus I knew that something else has to be done.

So, a complete overhall was needed.

Firstly, for general health if nothing else, I started taking daily multivitamin tablets, as I had heard that when people try a diet their forget about the basics that a body needs on a daily basis and so fall ill and end up back where they started.

Secondly, despite there still being several bars of chocolates and packets of biscuits just lying around the place waiting to get eaten, I put them all in a tin and stuck them on a shelf - instead of thinking 'oh, I will start the diet just as soon as I have finished them!'.

All my fizzy drinks I switched for their zero or diet equivalent, which was a bit more expensive as not that many places stock Dr Pepper Zero, but as I like at least one can a day this wasn't really a choice but a requirement.

I bought ultra skimmed milk for home and bought two jars of candarel sugar substitute - one for home and one for the office - as I am also used to having about 6 cups of tea per day and with fatty milk and 2 sugars in each cup, it soon mounts up and eats into my daily allowance of both.

I threw out my chocolate spread, replaced my spreads/jams and margarine for fat/suger low substitutes and increased the amount of vegetables and fruit that I normally bought.

I drew up a detailed excel spreadsheet showing the complete nutritional breakdown of all my daily food and drinks, and studied it to work what was actually high fat or high sugar.

Having calculated what was a true low figure actually was, ( as opposed to being considered low only when compared to a non diet equivalent of the same item ) I was able to figure out what I could eat a little of, what I could eat a lot of and what I was going to have to cut out of my regular weekly diet completely.

I was surprised that some things were extremely high in one or the other, even in items branded as 'healthy' or 'diet' - and also pleasantly surprised that by substituting for alternative brands my grocery bills did not go up by that much.

So now, the specific calories/fat/sugar count I consume on a daily basis has dropped through the floor ( e.g. around 1250 calories compared to the 2000 as suggested for a normal adult or the 2750 that was actually what I was consuming pre-diet ) but you would never know it from just looking at the food I am still able to eat.

I still take a small packed lunch to work along with a can of drink, a yoghurt and a packet of crisps, but they are all slightly different from normal, ( e.g. instead of fatty potato crisps they might be of corn, wheat or rice.)

I was not expecting any overnight results, and in fact I didn't even bother to weigh myself for the first week as I wanted to give my body a chance to adjust and use up the fats / sugars already in my system before I even began to try and chart my progress.

As it is still winter over here, it is far too cold for me to do much running and a monthly gym membership is one expense too many, but at the moment I am losing 1 lb per day and not feeling any negative side affects.

In fact I feel fine and have discovered a whole range of foods I never thought to try before. True, some stuff tastes a little bland and I miss not eating cheese more than anything else, but so far so good.

I also am a non smoker and only a weekend alcohol drinker at best, so giving up a couple of cans of cider on a Friday night have not really been much of a hardship.

I did read up about a reverse diet that seemed to make some sense, ( reverse as in a big breakfast and a small dinner ) but as I already get up ridiculously early in the mornings I did not feel that I would be able to incorporate this into my daily routine without going to bed at 10pm!

Day 8 - weight 189 lbs

Day 11 - weight 186 lbs

I plan on keeping this up until I am able to start doing a fraction more exercise in the summer and once I am back to around 11 stone I will see if I want to get any slimmer and/or maybe think about reintroducing a few medium to high fatty / sugary treats once a week to see how it affects my weight then.