Year: 2015
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A Surge in My Sleep
Well, I’ve finally become one of those people who irritate me. Actually, a lot of people irritate me, so let me narrow that down. I’ve become one of those irritating people who’re constantly mumbling about keeping their step-count up, and comparing their calorie ‘burn rate’ with their friends. (Although to be fair I don’t do much of the latter as I don’t have many friends. By design, I might add….). This is due to me buying in to the Fitbit ‘craze’. Fitbit: it’s like Crossfit but without all the hard work – people just never f’ing shut up about it.… Read more
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New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Last week, my live-in lover became my live-out lover. After six wonderful months, followed by a couple of distinctly variable ones, we decided that all of us (me, her, my three kids) living together wasn’t in the best interests of our mental health and serenity, so we rolled back to the ‘last working version’, and started living apart again. Traumatic as this was, it did have one bright spot: I got the opportunity to put together a multi-room speaker system for her new house, which is a project I’ve always wanted to undertake (at least until I discovered Sonos and… Read more
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…Bullshit Walks
Last Wednesday was apparently National Walking Day (in America). At my work they’ve been championing personal health and wellness for a while now (having apparently all but eradicated accidents (save the idiot who tripped over a marginally raised flagstone a couple of weeks ago, resetting the “586 days without an accident” counter back to zero…)) so they were all over this. Participation was entirely ‘optional’, but you’d never know it by the seemingly endless stream of emails, calendar invites, and reminders that were sent out in the weeks leading up to National Walking Day. It also doesn’t help that my… Read more
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The Continued Americanization of Dirk
Call me a nationalist, but I’ve long held the belief that if you set up residence in a country, you should do your best to assimilate yourself into that country’s culture. Last time I lived in Belgium, even though I knew it probably wasn’t forever, I went to night school to study Flemish (Nog nu kann ik een beetje Vlaams spreken.); when I lived in Singapore I ate nothing but local food for three years and adopted Buddhism. So it only seems right that now I have given up all notion of ever returning to England and have officially settled… Read more
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Deck of C(ar)Ds
Last year I once again stuck to my ‘One-CD-a-Week’ campaign, regularly buying one album of (new) music each week of the year. This is my third year of doing this, and although I have picked up 52 new albums (actually, a little more as I didn’t count the handful (armful?) of CDs I picked up in second hand record stores), this year I seem to have purchased less ‘new’ (2014) releases – only 34 of the 52 were ‘new’ this year, although mitigating this, a further 5 were old albums that were reissued in 2014. It’s been noted elsewhere that… Read more