Category: Reasons to be Cheerful

More wondering what’s happened to winter this year!  Apologies if today’s list is a little short, I am suffering from a Kyocera-inflicted injury made washing up the knife during the making of  yesterday’s Malaysian chicken curry.  This has left me missing a (very small) chunk from the tip of the middle finger of my left hand – precisely the point that would impact on the keyboard.  As I touch-type (well, mostly), this is slowing me down.

So, this week’s reasons…

The beer is brewing!

I love home brewing.  It means I’ve got quite a lot of very good beer in the cupboard at any given time without the hassle of carrying it back from the supermarket.  It means I can experiment with adding herbs and spices (I’m fond of cinnamon) to the beers when bottling them and making my own unique brews.  One of the finest discoveries I’ve made in recent years is the Barkshack Gingermead – a brew made from honey, ginger and an assortment of fruit.  We’ve done raspberry and blueberry gingermeads so far, I plan to set off a rhubarb one this year (possibly rhubarb and apple, not sure).  We also “obtained” some apples during the Christmas break, so we’re making cider from them using some first-principles recipes found on the internet.  That’ll give us, by the end of March once the diet is onto “maintenance” rather than “loss”, best part of 100 pints of assorted lovely stuff to consume over the rest of the year.  Happy days!

The brewing process has some very unique smells, tied strongly into memories of place and time.  The wort, for instance, brings back memories of the wind blowing in a certain direction in Edinburgh, carrying with it the smells of the Scottish &  Newcastle brewery at Fountainbridge.  The hops (Goldings, in this case) brought memories of the pub in Kings Cross railway station, drinking Summer Lightning waiting for the train to take me north on a Friday evening.  Smells and memories are so tightly linked, aren’t they.

The Games People Play

I may have mentioned this before – we play a lot of games as a family.  Board games, card games, roleplaying games, computer games.  We expanded our Carcassonne set over Christmas, adding to the strategy in interesting ways.  Last night we taught the eldest 2 kids how to play Cribbage, stretching their maths skills with “Okay, so how many ways can you get this lot to add up to 15?”.  I also received my copy of a game called “Ashen Stars”, possibly one of the most beautiful RPGs I’ve had my hands on (about which more on Wednesday).  My wife and I are blasting our way through “Borderlands” on the PS3 at the moment and it’s proving detrimental to the amount of sleep we’re getting.  The mark of a good game!

Anyway, those are my reasons for this week!  They’re possibly not the best, but they’ll have to do.

Oh, and I dropped 4kg in the first week of my diet this year.  Sunday morning sees the next weigh-in, here’s hoping!

Apparently this is the year the world is going to end.  It could be from mutating neutrinos or as a mission of mercy from @DeathStarPR (they’re ready for the opening night of Twilight: The Musical, apparently the Mayans booked them) or from one of those little accidents with big toys like the Large Hadron Collider.  So let’s enjoy 2012 while we’ve got it!

Reason #1- 1 year of blogging.

Yep.  Although I’ve tried on-and-off to blog for a while, 2011 is the first year I’ve blogged pretty much consistently all year through.  This is largely thanks to linkys such as R2BC to inspire me and keep the juices flowing.  True, I’ve found it hard to get moving again since NaNoWriMo wrung over 50,000 words out of me in November, then Christmas got in the way.  The excuses are too easy to find and this year I’m going to have none of them!

Reason #2 – Back to school, back to work.

Christmas was fantastic.  An excellent break, a wonderful time catching up with the family we’ve got scattered across the UK.  You can read about it over at my wife’s blog – http://claytoninshetland.blogspot.com/.  The Dr Who Christmas special was better than usual, The Gruffalo’s Child was superb.  New Year was, as usual, quiet.  Stephen Fry’s top gadgets programme carried us nicely to midnight, we read a bit of the new Terry Pratchett book and went to sleep.

But now everything’s back to normality, back to the routine.  I got back to work to find that none of our servers had had issues over Christmas, the printers were all happy, everything just tickety-boo.  There was still enough going on to keep me rushing around yesterday like a blue-arsed fly running quests for the other college up here who weren’t so lucky.  And they all went back yesterday while I had a day relaxing…

Reason 3 – Speaking of Quests…

Aragorn’s Quest.  Borderlands.  De Blob 2.  I received these three excellent games for Christmas.  Can’t beat 2-player gaming, even – especially – if you’re both crap at it.  Borderlands had my wife and I sprinting through emotions – frustration, panic, shock, hysterical-roll-on-the-floor-crying laughter!  We’re getting better at it now, but not much!  Aragorn’s Quest is an excellent game – even if Sam Gamgee does have an annoying habit of embroidering the story as we know it just to make things more difficult, all the male characters would make excellent goalkeepers (Seriously!  Massive hands!), and we’ve now started sending the kids on “quests” rather than errands and “side-quests” if we think of something they can do while they’re in the area.  De Blob 2 is brain-off-the-hook fun. And it plays into my “must collect everything/complete all missions/get 100%” that I normally exercise playing Lego games on the PS3.

Reason #4 – Carcassonne.

Both the boardgame and the city.  One of the most enjoyable things about finishing the holidays and going back to work is planning the summer holiday.  And that’s where we’re going this year.  Can’t wait!

For more reasons to be cheerful, follow the linky and have fun!