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.

Treme

So with the launch of Sky Atlantic and the general release of a number of new shows we have picked up watching Treme - which is the new show from the chap that created The Wire (David Simon).  We saved up a number of episodes and then watched them in one sitting.  In part - this was because both Rob and I were nervous about watching the show, in case it was not very good, but one the other hand it let us watch a number of shows to get a feeling of what was happening.

Treme is an interesting show for a number of reasons:

Dialect

Much like the Wire it is shot with locals which means it can take a while to 'get your ear in'.  They do not make an effort to clean up the dialogue and make it more intelligible for those that are not local. Interestingly enough by the start of the second episode you tend to find that you suddenly understand what everyone is saying.  I am not sure if this is due to watching other shows where there are strong local accents, but never the less it is a bit disconcerting.

The Wire was much the same in this respect.  In fact for the first couple of Episodes of that show I spent 90% of my time asking Rob whether he understood what anyone other than McNaulty was saying.  In that case about 4 episodes in I suddenly found that I understood what people were saying and the show became more enjoyable.

The Actors

A large number of the actors have been in other HBO shows, indeed many of them were in the Wire. This means that as a viewer, you have a level of comfort around what to expect.  On the plus side as a producer you have to think that some of your viewers may tune in because they like the actor.  On the down side it can mean that viewers are put off when the actor does not behave as per their last character.  I found personally that despite having seen the actors in other HBO shows within the first 5 minutes I was absorbed in their new roles and did not even consider their old roles, or relationships within those roles.

Interestingly enough as well as the well known actors there are a number of extra's the majority of whom are actually locals and, occasionally are well known musicians.  Despite this being the case there are a significant number of occasions when they are there as 'dressing' rather than as main characters.  

From my point of view this use of relatively famous people as additional characters is interesting on a number of levels.  Firstly these, relatively well known people seem to have limited ego and seem happy to appear in the show in this nature. Secondly as a viewer you accept this.

The only time that you suddenly think that some things are quite peculiar, not least of which has to be having Elvis Costello, turn up and be Elvis Costello in a number of episodes.  It takes a while for you to understand what he is there to show, and when you get the reason he is here you cannot help but smile as it is the equivalent of the gesture which means 'I've still got my fingers'

The Music

From the opening shot of Episode 1 you gain an understanding of just how important music will be throughout the show.  The opening act is all about the first second line following Katrina.  The music is catchy and has the definite blues/jazz influence as you would expect, but it is also used to tell a story and in this case that story is the history of New Orleans.

Quite why some of the songs were picked will be unclear unless you know about the musical history of the area.  If however you look up the tracks you hear you will get a bit more of why they are important, and why they are used in the way they are.

The Point

Now having watched a number of episodes of the show I have to say that I am not sure what the purpose of the show is, other than to show that following Katrina the people of New Orleans were left to deal with things themselves.  This being the case I am left wondering why I find the show entertaining, after after all there are a number of shows that I have stopped watching because they had no point, or they have lost the point.  

Perhaps it is because of the acting, or the simple humanity of the story, but in truth I have not got a clue why I like it but I do.

Dreaming of a White Christmas ..... I would settle for a non slushy one

So I am a winter bunny - I like the cols, I like being able to wear wooly sweaters without being too hot, and I like the darker evenings.  I am also rather partial to a bit of snow.  It's now been a week since the snow started and I fear that I may be fed up with it. 

It is not actually the snow that I dislike so much as the fact that the streets have not been cleared or gritted and public transport does not run.  I understand that as a country we cannot invest large sums of money into building an infrastructure for the couple of weeks a year where we get snow, but we have to be able to support communities in being able to live their lives when we do get it. Roads have been blocked and people have spent their nights in cars.  People cannot get to work because they cannot get their cars out of the drive and their is no reliable public transport.

Peoples inability to be able to safely get to work in anything approaching a timely manner as soon as the weather turns bad then has an impact, not only on them (in terms of them loosing pay/leave or being stressed) but also on the organisations that they work for.  Theses conditions will result in businesses loosing money and in the current climate this will result in businesses having to close their doors.

The harsh truth is that one of the side effects of Global Warming is that summers get warmer and damper and the winters get colder.  When we loose the effects of the Gulf Stream winters like we are seeing just now will be more common place and we need to know that everything does not have to grind to a halt.  

In part we all have to take a role in ensuring we have done what we can to ensure that we are prepared as individuals and communities, but so do our local government organisations.

With this in mind I have decided to make sure that we have the supplies that we need to ensure that we can function (this will also include a new pair of winter boots, though thats a different story)