January is probably my least favourite month of the year. It’s usually around six weeks from being paid in December, until pay day in January. There are countless social events because of the number of birthdays of friends and family, (normally a good thing, unless you’re really stretching the monthly salary), and to top it all off I’m busier than normal at work. There seems to be a yearly occurence at work in January that I’m not going to talk about, but I am getting pretty sick and tired of having to do.

For the last few years I’ve been quietly saying that my New Year begins in February. January is such a struggle that it strips the soul, and makes doing anything for the sheer enjoyment of it very difficult. The brutality of this month is one of the other reasons I almost never concern myself with the standard concept of New Years Resolutions. I know I’ll never stick to them, because of the weeks ahead. Thankfully I’ve managed to write every day, though I haven’t wanted to half the time.

However, in under two short weeks this hellish month will be over and sanity will be restored. Febuary is a month filled with hopes and dreams; laughter and fun; productivity and achievements. It is a month where I can actually relax and work towards my long term goals without the extra stress that comes with the first month of the year. It has historically been one of my more productive periods of the year, and now that I have specific goals and milestones set for this year I’m expecting that productivity to be greatly increased.

This seems like a completely irrational thing to be talking about, but I honestly cannot remember the last January I’ve had where I wasn’t completely stressed out, and praying for the month to end… no wait, I do remember. It was in 2002 and I was backpacking up the Australian east coast. That was a fun January! It’s the only one I remember in my adult life though.

I think I’ve achieved about a quarter of the personal projects I wanted to this month, and that’s purely because I’m getting home exhausted and stressed almost every day, and my weekends have either involved working, or recovering. There hasn’t been a useful weekend yet this year.

So please hurry up and get here, February. January is evil, and must be stopped!

I found this video by Ki’une last week and it had a profound effect on my mood. It’s been years since I’ve heard this song, and coupled with this video it managed to lift me out of a day of drudgery and irritation.

So if you need a little inspirational pick me up, I can’t recommend this video enough.

This is the time of year where most people create New Year Resolutions, and promptly give up on them after a few weeks. Resolutions and goals made at this time of year are always doomed to fail because they tend to be generated by guilt from the holidays, usually aren’t particularly well thought out, or something that people tend to stick with for the long haul.

My preference is to work on already established goals then review and revise them as the year goes on. At the moment I have a list of goals I created throughout the last couple of years that I’m trying to progress towards their next milestones, and at the end of January I’ll sit down and review them all to see which ones I need to do more work on. My take on the specific “New Year Resolution” is to take something from my list of long term goals and give it a little extra focus. For example, this year I’m going to focus on writing every single day. Not necessarily on the site, but to write something each and every day this year. It’s something I should already be doing, and is in fact a major item on my list of goals, but last year I had points where I knew I should have been writing, but did something else instead. I don’t want that to happen this year, and if I’m to reach the milestone I’ve set for six months into this year, writing every day is a must.

The list of goals I created throughout last year contain items from the many facets of my life, and are categorised under various heading such as “Career”, “Health”, “Finances”, etc. I currently have one of two items under each category, and then break those items down to various milestones that make sense for each of them. Those milestones cover six months, a year, three years, and one or two have a five year milestone. Even though I’ve set these goals out in detail, it doesn’t mean I won’t change them as the year goes on. The key, I’ve found, to successfully working with long term goals, is to write them down, and then review them every month or two. That lets you know how far away from your target you are, and whether you need to revise any specific goal for whatever reason. You need to have a solid overview, but also stay flexible with a lot of the details and willing to change them to make others work. In the past there have been goals I’ve completely changed, and others that were completely removed because they were no longer in the direction I wanted to go. It’s all about balance and knowing what you want from life.

I decided to refocus on writing every day, because writing is very important to me but at some point throughout last year other things began intruding into that part of my life. I picked up a few new hobbies, I got a promotion in my day job, and I had a lot of other things going on all at the same time. I stretched myself a little too thin and spent a lot of time last year feeling completely over run and burnt out. I lost my focus and because of that I missed several milestones I had set for the end of the year, and had to rework them. When I reviewed my goals at the end of the year and saw how many targets I had missed, I have to admit it bothered me.

2010 is the year I increase my productivity by working smarter, and make sure I get to exactly where I want to be in my life.

After a month long absence from our weekly 5-a-side footy match I was finally given an opportunity to take one of the newly available spots. I responded to the email announcing a place in matter of seconds, and only had to wait five more minutes to be told that I was going to be one of the ten players that make up the game. When you have to drop out of the weekly game it can take months to get back in, and when you’re in, no-one wants to drop out. We have around twenty five people, all trying to get one of the ten available spots, which keeps everything very competitive.

The one worry I had however, was that over the last month my exercising habit has fallen apart. It was due to a combination of illness, the dramatically colder weather, and the fact that I’ve just been a little lazy. I’ve been out for the odd run, but not enough to counter the evenings in the pub, or the lack of a decent diet. I realised over the weekend exactly how lazy I’d been and forced myself out for a five mile run, which I’ve just realised I still haven’t uploaded to Nike+. It wasn’t the easiest of runs but it wasn’t terrible either, which simply meant I had caught my laziness before it had gotten too far. I had planned on going for another run tonight until I received the option to play footy, which more than covers what I would have done due to the intense hour long game, in a very hot gym hall.

After being out for a month or so I wasn’t expecting to be able to play to anything like the standard I would like, but I was surprised with how well I managed. My finishing was pretty decent once I got going, there were a few bad misses, but I scored enough to make up for them. My passing was sharp and I setup a decent portion of my teams goals. When I had to take my turn in goal I played… well actually lets not talk about that too much. Let’s just say I was a disaster in goal, and that may have contributed to the fact that we lost the game. By a single goal. In the last minute. When I was outfield though we dominated long stretches of the game. So I’ll take the positives from tonight and try and forget about the goalkeeping.

It felt good to get a run out again, and I didn’t realise how much I’d missed playing over the last month until we actually started the game. I setup our first goal with a nice little flick with the outside of my right foot, and it got me excited for the rest of the hour. With the exception of the two terrible spells in goals, I thoroughly enjoyed myself tonight

It wasn’t my best performance by a long way. My touch was a little dodgy at points, and it took me a while to get my scoring boots on, but it was a satisfying performance that had a lot of positives, plus I wasn’t as rusty as I expected to be. Now I’m really looking forward to next Tuesday and you can bet I’m going to be going all out to win after losing the way we did tonight.

Usually when you get a group of people together to indulge in a little gaming session, the initial expectation is that this is going to happen on a gaming console like the Wii, or the Xbox 360. It’s rare these days that people get together to play a board game, or card game other than poker. My friends and I like to challenge that trend and frequently get together with a few bottles of wine and play a board game from our youth. This year there have been games of Risk, Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs, The Settlers of Catan, Scrabble and many, many others.

This weekend we decided to try out a new game that none of us have ever played before, but one that I’d heard great things about. I ordered it from Amazon a few weeks ago in preparation of this weekend, and so early on Saturday evening we found ourselves sitting around a table, with beers and wine flowing, and played our very first game of Munchkin.

From the Munchkin website:

“This award-winning card game, designed by Steve Jackson, captures the essence of the dungeon experience… with none of that stupid roleplaying stuff. You and your friends compete to kill monsters and grab magic items. And what magic items! Don the Horny Helmet and the Boots of Butt-Kicking. Wield the Staff of Napalm… or maybe the Chainsaw of Bloody Dismemberment. Start by slaughtering the Potted Plant and the Drooling Slime, and work your way up to the Plutonium Dragon…”

In our group there are only a couple of geeks who were really excited to play the game, myself included, but we have a few people who are not exactly keen to get involved in anything that remotely sounds like an RPG. We had to be very convincing to get them to give the game a chance, and we only managed that by making them agree to play one game, and if they didn’t enjoy themselves we wouldn’t play it again. In the end they relented and agreed to play it once.

Thankfully, my friends that were sceptical of Munchkin ended up having a fantastic time, and actively asking to play a second game that night. Our first game took a little longer than it probably should have as we figured everything out and got to grips with the game dynamic. As the game progressed and we all got more comfortable with the style, and general principles of the game, we all started having a great time, and especially one of my friends who was the most sceptical going into that evening. I think it helped that she was completely destroying everyone, and no matter what we did to stop her winning, we couldn’t. At one point two of the guys threw everything they could at her to stop her winning, and she casually took a card from her hand, turned it to show me with a grin on her face.

“I don’t think I’ll fight this monster, I think Rob will.” She said before placing the “Transferral” card face up on the table.

That card basically let her nominate anyone else to fight the monster in her place, and after the guys used half their own cards to make the thing unbeatable, were now in a position where one of them had to take on their own creation. I couldn’t help but applaud her style, and it was at that point I knew she was completely sold on the game.

I think Munchkin has now officially been added to our rota of games, and from the conversations we’ve had since, it’s going to be a game we play frequently from now on. I may even have to look at buying a few of the expansions to make things interesting.

If you haven’t played Munchkin before, I advise you to buy it, and then sit down with a few of your open minded friends and give it a go. I can’t see how you wouldn’t have fun!

It’s been a long time since I’ve even considered playing poker online. There was a while there I was having the worst kind of luck, on a regular basis, that I just stopped having any fun at all. I was having a better time playing live and had become really irritated by the manner I was having to play online to try to gain anything from the experience.

As such my live game developed a lot in the last year, and my online game crawled to a standstill.

A while ago I had my PokerStars Affiliate link in the footer of the site, and some very nice person decided to sign up to PokerStars using it. Normally when it’s there no-one ever signs up with it, and so I never really think about it anymore. Except the other day I received the monthly email from the affiliate scheme, but this one informed me that a sign up had reached a milestone, and that $75 was being deposited into my account.

Yay for free money!

Since I didn’t have to deposit any money back into my account I’ve started playing online again as of this evening. However, instead of my normal single table sit-and-goes, or multi-table tournaments where my ROI is terrible,  I’ve decided to venture into the world of the No-Limit Micro Cash games. It’s a lot slower paced, and it allows me to find my feet in the online poker world again without going crazy and losing all this free cash in a blaze of glory.

I ended my session in profit, mainly due to a wonderful moment where I rivered my full house, just as my opponent rivered his straight. Beautiful!

I don’t really expect to talk too much about poker here, and in fact this might be the last poker related post you see unless something major happens. If you are interested though, a few guys I play with in our little Edinburgh Homegame Circuit have started a blog called The Poker Agency and from now on I’ll be sharing my virtual and live poker stories over there.

Tonight’s session was a short one to find my feet again, but I fully expect to be clocking up a lot more time on the tables, and turning a profit at the same time. At least that’s the plan!

Day three of my London trip was Alice in Chains Day.

Chloe and I were both feeling the effects of the last two days, and in order to make the gig that evening we needed to fuel up with a big lunch. So as a thanks for giving me a place to stay for a few days I took Chloe out to a pub nearby that she said did really good food. I ordered a burger, that was HUGE and came with the largest chips/fries I think I’ve ever seen. It was as if they’d taken a potato, chopped it into four or five strips, and decided that was enough prep. Chloe went with the Chicken Burger that included these giant chips too. We took the chance on a drink to start our day off nice and slowly, because when you are hungover the first is a struggle, and it’s not until after your third beer that you feel human again. Chloe went down the cider route, and stuck with that option until we were actually at the gig that evening. Me, I went with a pint.

It was almost a really bad decision on my part. I had to grab a glass of coke to drink at the same time and I think that was probably the smartest move I made that weekend. We slowly ate our food, while chatting and generally letting the world roll by. Neither one of us could finish lunch, but without a doubt it ensured we were both going to be fighting fit by the time the gig came around.

With our stomachs full, and our first drink of the day out of the way, we casually made our way into Camden to have a walk around Camden Market. I never get a chance do do anything like this when I’m in London normally because I’m always working, so we made a point of not rushing anywhere and just spent an hour or so wandering around. It was in Camden that Chloe took me to the craziest shop I’ve ever seen. Simply because it was the craziest shop she’d ever seen, and had to show someone else. I can’t remember what it was called, but there were two giant robot statues outside the door, techno music blasted out from the store, and everything inside was neon. It sold some of the nuttiest clothing I’ve seen, and there were a couple of things that came straight from the Jetsons Cartoon. I think if I had to spend any decent amount of time in that place I would have gone a little insane.

After that experience, we made our way to the venue for the evenings gig because we weren’t entirely sure where it was. Thankfully the wonder of the iPhone and Google Maps got us there without any trouble. We were a little early so we found the closest pub and attempted our second drink of the day to see how the rest of our evening was going to pan out. Chloe stuck with her cider drinking, and it seemed to perk her up a little more, I went with a beer, and because I’d finally digested the giant burger, and had been walking around for a few hours, my hangover was gone and I was feeling really good again.

Once the doors to the venue opened we decided to join the ever growing queue, and after about fifteen minutes found ourselves in the venue, at the bar. There was one support act at this gig, and they were a band from Oxford, who had a drummer, a keyboard player, and a very, very energetic female singer/guitarist. Chloe and I both fluctuated between really liking them, and thinking they were a little meh. I think in the end the energy from the singer won us over and we found ourselves getting into them.

It took a little while to get all the gear ready for Alice in Chains, but the wait was worth it. The gig was pretty heavy throughout, although they did drop into a little acoustic set in the middle of the evening. We found ourselves as close to the stage as we could get and were singing along and really getting into the whole thing, and at various points there were shouts for them to play “Rooster”. They kept everyone waiting and finally played it as the last song of the evening. As soon as they started the song, the place went crazy. It really was worth the wait.

After the gig Chloe and I grabbed the tube back to the flat, catching the very last train that stopped at her local stop saving us a fortune in taxi fares. We sat around having a couple of beers and talking about the gig for a few hours before both deciding to call it a night. Chloe had to do some work in the morning, and I had to make sure I caught my train home.

The following morning was going pretty smoothly. We had ome breakfast, and I had a few mugs of coffee to make me feel human again. Chloe was doing some illustration work for one of her clients as I sat in the living room watching TV, and using the last twenty minutes of battery power in my laptop. I had a 1pm train and so just before midday we made our way to the train station, so I could catch the LDR and then the tube to Kings Cross. I caught the train and then the tube to Kings Cross without any issue, and should have arrived at the station with enough time to grab a coffee and relax before the train as due to leave. Of course that’s not what happened.

A few stops before Kings Cross we were informed someone had gone on the line just after Kings Cross, and as such the train would stop at Angel, and then bypass Kings Cross completely. That’s not what I wanted to here. I jumped off at Angel, fired up Google Maps on my iPhone to see exactly how far away I was from Kings Cross station. It was just under a mile to the station, and I had 15 minutes to get there before my train left. If I’d been able to catch a cab it would have been fine, except for those 15 minutes there must have been a cab strike because I didn’t see a single taxi anywhere. In London. No cabs anywhere! I couldn’t believe my luck. So in the end I had to run just under a mile, with two bags, one of which had my laptop, my D70s and a couple of books. It wasn’t a streamlined run.

I got to the station, found the correct platform, and I made it onto the train. I cut it so close that the train began pulling out of the station as I was sitting down in my seat. My relaxed trip to the station had become a stressful, moments away from disaster, mess. Luckily I had four and a half hours to get over the only negative thing in my entire London trip.

I’ve spent years complaining about having to go down to London, and in four days that entire argument was blown out of the water. I had a great time hanging out in a good city, which can be contributed to two things: Not having to work, and A Great Friend.

The sun was shining and there was hardly a cloud in the sky, in great contrast from the day before, so we decided to take a walk into Greenwich. We wandered around the Greenwich Market and grabbed a fantastic fancy hotdog from one of the vendors, and then sat by the Thames in the sunshine eating. It was a very relaxed beginning to the day and one that I desperately needed after the few weeks I’d had.

I had my camera with me, so we took a wander into Greenwich Park to get some shots, especially one from the top of the hill where you can see the massive London skyline. It was such a nice day though that we didn’t really rush around, and ended up just wandering in the general direction of the hill. We had nowhere in particular to be so we tried to explore as much of the park as we could. At one point we spotted a sign for a deer enclosure, but unfortunately we couldn’t find it anywhere. It turns out it was at the very far corner of the park, and we never got anywhere near it.

After a few hours of wandering around, with me taking photos of almost everything, the sun started to set and we made the decision to head back to the flat, via a pub for a quick beer to ease us into our evening. We sat in their beer garden, chatting away until it had gone completely dark, and then headed back to the flat for a lovely roast lamb dinner.

After dinner, and most of a bottle of wine, Chloe, her flatmates, and I headed back to their local pub, for a few beers and a game or two of darts against the other locals. I’d been in the pub two minutes when the good natured mocking from the owner started again. I think I managed to give as good as I got this time though, and if not at least it was a better attempt than the day before. I managed to hold my own at the darts too, and won a little more than I lost.

Last orders were called, and the evenings festivities began to wind down, so we drank up, said our goodbyes, then left to head back to the flat. As with the evening before we sat having a few more drinks, and Chloe subjected me to the torture that is xfactor again. I could have gone to bed, but apart from the horror emanating from the tv in the corner, I was having fun relaxing and chatting with Chloe over a few beers.

We sat up until the wee hours of the morning chatting before finally calling it a night and going to sleep. The Alice in Chains gig was only a day away, and we wanted to be well rested so we could really enjoy ourselves. It had been a nice lazy Sunday, and a distinct change of pace from the type of day Chloe and I usually have when we hang out together.