Some Assembly Required

Ok so making an effort, at least for today.  So we went to the pictures for the first time in a long time today.  We decided that we could brave the noise and series of adverts that you seem to have to sit through every time you pay to see something.  Today we were lucky and only had a few ad's to make our way through before the main feature - Captain America: The First Avenger.

As far as films about the Capt. go this one was about as good as it could be,  Personally I have never really liked the character and I found that his typical  villainous opponents were, frankly, a bit rubbish.  All this being the case we still went because I do like Super Hero films, especially those from Marvel.  Another thing weighing in it's favour was that I had not had high hopes for X-Men First Class, and it was really good.

The effects were good, and they made very effective use of the 3D technology throughout the film.  The actors did well and the Red Skull was the least rubbish he could be.  It is not at the same level as Iron Man, Thor or Wolverine, but it is quite watchable.

By far the highlight of the film (for me at least, probably because I am a little odd) was the extra wee clip they put at the end.  I will not spoil it for you but the title of the post features in it and, if you missed it you can see it here

Micro blogging by any other name

So it has been an epic fail again on my part to actually write something on this site regularly.  It continued to be difficult to find some inspiration about something to write about here.  I have spent a little while pondering why this could be the case, and in doing so I have looked at the other sites that I have been using on a regular basis.  Having looked over the variety of sites (which to be fair are not that varied) one thing has become apparent - actually spend a lot of time blogging, I just had not realised it.

Twitter

Most obviously - a few months ago I discussed the fact that I was going to give twitter a go.  Since I joined I have apparently posted 521 tweets, which is quite a lot. I enjoy using it, and have had some cracking conversations with friends real time, and more often than not, I can find something which I will find most entertaining.  The effort to post anything on Twitter is minimal and you have to consider what you will write due to the character limit, which has to be a good thing, but there is the danger that it just becomes a stream of consciousness, and that is not always a good thing.

Facebook

I also spend a while on Facebook - its  a nice way to keep in touch with friends, but in much the same way as Twitter, it can suck up time as you surf what people are doing.  It really is a bit of a substitute for celebrity gossip, but for people you know.  

Blip

I also seem to have put a lot of time into posting and looking around Blipfoto. Call it anything else that you like but, in essence, it is just an illustrated blog.  I am coming up on 50'ish posts there and it is a lot of fun. Much like Facebook and Twitter you can still follow people and see what they are posting as well as seeing who is following you. I also find that there is quite a bit of inspiration to be had in terms of the shots that other folks have taken, and working out how they did it.  I think, though I would not swear to it, that it is helping improve my photography (at least when I am not using my camera phone).  You can find me here if you are interested

So….

So my conclusion is that I am have just re-focused where I am writing rather than just putting it all here.  I shall try to work out a way to post something sensible here more often,  No guarantees but we will see what happens

Magic Cure?

So Rob and I made a decision a couple of months ago that we had to live more healthily - if not we were just storing up issues for the not to distant future.  Its not been easy (a lot of lunches out have had to go because there is not a lot that is healthy and reasonably priced) and there are a lot of days where it would be easy to fall back into old patterns, but we are working at it.

The side effect of this has been that we have both lost a fair bit of weight.  This has of course led to the question - what have we been doing?  The truth of the matter is that we have not done anything radical in terms of fancy diets, we have just cut out the cr*p and increased the amount of exercise that we do.

We are both exercising regularly with Ricky and gone are the crisps and sweets and in their place is fruit and low fat snacks.

I would love it if I could just take a tablet and loose all the weight I want, but thats not gonna happen.  I know that there are diets that could help us loose weight more quickly but what we wanted was something that we could do every day for the rest of our naturals and not hate it.  Yes I can drink a shake for every meal but I am not doing that for the rest of for ever.

It's not a magic cure - but it seems to work 

Scotrail fail again

So despite the fact that we are supposed to be entering summer the weather has taken a turn for the worse and that means that as always there are issues with public transport.

I am all for the government, or indeed any other organisation, choosing to  encourage the use of public  transport,  It should be more efficient and better, overall for the environment, which should make it all win.  The issue is though that if you want to have people make use of it, then you need to make sure that it is reliable - and quite frankly it is not.

I appreciate that the weather is unseasonably bad, and that this can cause some issues.  However there was a weather warning out and there could have been some preparation which would have meant that they did not need to cancel all the trains out of the station.  Even if they did need to cancel the trains then there should have been some thought as to how they would replace the service.   

Tonight all of the trains were cancelled from about 4pm.  There was no alternative service in place and the Scotrail website stated that the majority of the trains were running,  This it turns out was not the case, and the station was full of pissed passangers with no way to get home.  I was lucky - I had the cash to be able to get a taxi and I only had to wait for an hour in the rain.  There were others for whom that was not possible and they were stuck in town.  About 90% of those people would have already purchased their train tickets - a sum of money which is not insubstantial, they then needed to pay to get home by alternative means, knowing that there was no way of getting a refund.

It is in no way acceptable for people to be left stranded with no other option as to get home while announcing that the services are cancelled and they are sorry for any inconvenience caused.  

Inspiration.....Not so much

I just had a look and realised it has been a long time since I posted anything so I sat and had a think about it and realised that I just had no inspiration to do much writing at all.  Thinking about it a little further I figured that perhaps the best way to be motivated was just to start....so here goes.

So not an awful lot has been going on other than work, training and now the next stage of the photography course - though this time its a bit more advanced

Training has been going good - each week I am able to see a little bit more of an improvement and I feel motivated to go back.  Ricky is going to be starting a new 10 week fitness challenge (fit in the ciity) which I am going to sign up for, so hopefully things will come on a little further.  I remain hopeful

I am now really into my kindle - it rocks and I have a pike of books on it.. For simple ease of use and transport it is the best, though recently I have put it to one side as I have gone back to the Werewolf  RPG books which are not on Kindle and, to be honest would not work there.  I have had real issues with trying to work out how you GM a game when the actions of the players can change the path you are on.  It is something that just not come naturally to me.  When I write, I love the fact that I have some control over where the characters and the plot go and to loose that is, I guess, a little scary.  Never the less I shall endeavour and see what happens.  There are a couple of RPG's that only require a couple of players so I may try GM'ing one of those and see how I go with that - perhaps it will sink in.... though I remain unconvinced.

I have been making an attempt to make better use of Blip and post a few images from day to day stuff through to what I have been doing on the course - I continue to be impressed with the site and it is great get inspiration from others images too.