Christopher Hamilton

Usually once a year I decide to forgo alcohol for a month and try to live a little healthier. Normally I take an absolute stance with the detox and completely refuse to have anything with alcohol in it, this year I think I’m going to be a little more relaxed about the whole thing.

I’m going to stay of the booze all of May, and the last few days of April, but if I feel like a glass of wine with a meal, or a beer while watching the footy I’m not going to stress about it. My intention for this month of detox, is to cut down my alcohol intake, lose a little weight, and just generally get healthier before I head of on my holidays in June.

This time around I’ve picked a month that isn’t in the middle of a busy social schedule, and in fact has a target. Last year it was January, and well I think I lasted about three weeks. The year before was April. I managed that entire month without any alcohol at all. That includes my birthday in the middle of the month. It was a testament to how focused I was about it that year.

I may add another piece to the puzzle this year, and drop my coffee consumption, and replace it with some green tea. Or something similar. I’m a little undecided on that one just now, but there are a few Chinese supermarkets nearby, so I may have a look around them in the next few days.

Does anyone have recommendations on what I can substitute for coffee?

Technorati Tags: Alcohol-Free, Detox, Health, Weightloss

Over the last few weeks it seems that I have a mountain of tasks to complete, and yet I barely seem to get anything done. I think it could stem from the fact that I have so many things going on at the same time, I struggle to find a place to begin and because of that I find myself procrastinating in spectacular fashion.

Take this weekend for example. I have my list of things that I wanted to get done, or at least started, and spent some time Saturday afternoon carrying a few of them out. Then, decided I should take a little break while I ate lunch. I made the decision to take an hour to eat, and relax before getting back into my tasks for the day. Except things didn’t quite work out like that.

I found myself eating lunch, and then playing a little guitar hero. Several hours later when I realised my plans for the day were totally shot, I finished a couple of little things from my task list and decided to carry on with the rest of them on Sunday.

Sunday was a complete write-off. I somehow managed to sleep through the alarm I’d set, and not wake up till late morning. Already being behind for the day didn’t exactly fill me with joy, but I managed to get stuck into a few of the easier tasks and get them out of the way. Once I’d those were done, I decided to start one of the larger tasks before having a late lunch in the hope that I’d make sure I’d come back to it. It wasn’t to be. I barely got going, and just seemed to zone out completely when I tried to put any thought into it.

Whatever happened to me at that point seemed to kick in for the rest of the day and I completely lost all my motivation. I ended up sitting in my room watching the first series of The Shield. Not just an episode or two… the entire series. Now it’s a great show, but that was just madness.

I’m at a loss where this lack of motivation is coming from. It could be because I seem to have far too much on my plate at the moment, or it could be that as some of it is techie related, and I spend all day Monday to Friday dealing with those kind of issues, I simply switch off through any real lack of interest. It may not be either, but if it’s the latter it’s particularly annoying since the techie tasks are pretty important.

I have no idea, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure how to rectify the issue. I may start with throwing out my current task list and writing up two new shorter ones. One for techie tasks, and one for everything else. That way I can maybe set aside one day to get all the techie stuff out of the way, and take my time to do everything else.

It seems like a decent place to start but if anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.

I’ve gotta say, that was some weekend.

When I consider it’s taken me three days to recover, you have to figure it’s been a fun time. It was my birthday on Friday, and the day started with breakfast in bed, while I read some West Wing Scripts. After a few hours of lounging around, Anna took me to the Grain Store for lunch.

I had the Beetroot and Rocket Risotto for starter, and I have to say it was one of the best risottos I think I’ve ever had. That was followed by half a bottle of wine, and a main course of rocket, mushroom, and sun dried tomato pasta.

Again, it was fantastic.

The Friday evening was great. People that I wasn’t expecting to come along to my little celebration turned up, and my friends kept me well lubricated throughout the evening. Anna and I were two of the last people to leave, which meant I got to say goodnight, and thank pretty much everyone who came along. I did end up drinking Southern Comfort, which is a pretty accurate sign I’m completely smashed.

To my amazement I woke up very early on Saturday, and now this is the crazy part… WITHOUT A HANGOVER!

I know, it’s a shock.

Anna had to buy some birthday presents for her friends… she’s a woman… it’s what they do.

Anyway, since she had to go shopping, I took advantage of the free time and played Guitar Hero III until it felt like my hands were bleeding.

It. Was. Great.

The rest of my Saturday involved a meal for two of Anna’s friends. One who shares my birthday, and one who has a birthday four days later. Then later that evening I went round to a friends place to watch the Calzaghe -vs- Hopkins fight. I was pretty nervous about the fight all the way through, and I was relieved and delighted Calzaghe pulled out the win.

Sunday was pretty much written off. I woke up very late, and spent the rest of my day watching DVD’s and playing Guitar Hero, and then Pro evolution Soccer with a few beers.

I had Monday off work, and spent that hanging out with my flatmates, playing more guitar hero, and drinking a ridiculous amount of beer and wine. Since the late night on Saturday, the earliest I had made it to bed was 4am. Monday was no exception to that. Getting up in time for work wasn’t at the forefront of my mind at that point, but I still managed to drag myself to work on time.

My body has been playing catchup ever since. I have quite a few things to do this weekend, but I think a very large part of those two days is going to involve sleep, sleep, and more sleep.

29 has been a hell of a party so far.

Today is the last day of my working week. With it being my birthday tomorrow I decided to take a few days off, giving myself a long weekend to relax and indulge in a spot of boozery. As it stands I have plans for tomorrow and Saturday, leaving Sunday and Monday for kicking back and easing into being a 29 year old.

Tomorrow I’m off to see the Ansel Adams exhibition that ends this weekend, and then I’m being taken out for a fancy lunch, before descending into a high drunkery.

The week is over and I’m off to have some fun.

I had intended on building a new Wordpress theme for this site from scratch. Doing that would give me a much better understanding of how the Wordpress code all works, and would give me no excuses for being annoyed with the design.

That was the plan until earlier today.

The current design has started to grow on me. I’ve had to make a few changes here and there, and tweak various points that did annoy me, but overall I’m growing happier with this simple, clean layout by the day.

It’s by no means perfect, and there will still be various tweaks and changes I’m going to find myself doing over the next few weeks. However, I think the important thing is for me to find something I like that can be easily customised to suit my needs, and more importantly somewhere I want to create content for.

I’m probably going to take the same approach to SSDC for a while. Get the site running with a theme I quite like, customise it, and get some content up there.

So in the near future I’m just going to tweak this layout. If anything breaks without me noticing, please leave me a comment to let me know.