Category: lockdown

My wellbeing journey – The tree is no more…

And that brings that to an end…

About a year ago I decided to leave my Xmas tree up and decorate it with other things throughout the year and that I would only take it down when the world got back to normal.

The tree is down, but I realise that this is not the normal we left behind…

I just felt the tree thing had ran its course and it was time to move onto something else. A few folk have already remarked that they miss seeing the tree, and it is a little bare in here, but I am deciding still on what to do next. Watch this space I guess.

It certainly proved a talking point on the millions of zoom calls I had to endure the last year, and it was fun coming up with new ideas so yes, I will miss it.

God I should have left it up shouldn’t I…hmmm

Oh well…onwards and upwards!

If you’re curious, these are the trees:

Valentines Tree

Easter Tree

Star Wars Tree

Celebration tree

Summer tree

Halloween

50th tree

Xmas tree

My wellbeing journey – My xmas Tree Edition

So a year after I first put the tree up its back to christmas. I kept it sparse as only really wanted lights and tinsel.

So think thats 7 or 8 different trees this year…

I haven’t decided if ill continue yet. We shall see. Been a lot of fun though that’s for sure.

Oh and there Is a picture of the main tree. There are also trees in theIoffice and kitchen too. We like trees i guess 🙂

If you’re curious, these are the other trees:

Valentines Tree

Easter Tree

Star Wars Tree

Celebration tree

Summer tree

Halloween

50th tree

My wellbeing journey – The Summer Tree Edition

May the fourth be with you

Time for another tree. It’s summer, and it was the summer solstice yesterday – so let’s have something a little summery and celebratory of all things bright and beautiful shall we! Fiesta time baby!

If you’re curious, these are the other trees:

Valentines Tree

Easter Tree

Star Wars Tree

My wellbeing journey – The Star Wars Tree Edition

May the fourth be with you

You can read about the start of the tree journey here. If you cannot be bothered then long story short, we have left a Christmas tree up and will decorate it seasonally all year long because why the hell not. 🙂

Might be odd to some but hey, makes me happy!

To celebrate Star Wars Day on May the Fourth (- be with you …And also with you) I picked up some red and blue tinsel and proceeded to 3D print X wing fighters, tie fighters, a D wing fighter, a Millennium Falcon, a Baby yoda snowflake or two, a couple of death stars and the sprayed them gold. I then topped it all off with a Kylo-Ren light sabre teddy.

If you’re curious, these are the other trees:

Valentines Tree

Easter Tree

Corona Lock down Diaries – 3D Printing – Christmas thingymajig.

We isolate now so that when we gather again no one is missing…

Okay so I’m not technically locked down. Well not like I was before. That said I might be I really have no idea and find it all rather confusing most days so choose for the most part to remain at home where there are snacks and internet and things that don’t try to kill you.

Now I’ve probably not been printing as much as I ought to have and am putting that right presently but I thought I would share with you a little something I printed just today.

Now this is our Christmas tree.

It is a bit random and uncoordinated but that is because almost every bauble and trinket is something special collected over 20 year or so. There are things from before Mrs Afterwards and I were married, various unrecognisable ‘things’ the boys brought home at some point and a wide assortment of pretties we picked up on numerous travels. All lovely memories.

Today I printed this one for 2020. I will paint it gold I think and pop it on the tree tonight…

Screw you 2020!

Corona Lock down Diaries – 3D Printing.

Getting our print on!

At Christmas I tried to convince my 11 year old that a 3D printer would be a great idea. At the time, however, he had his heart set on a particular pair of trainers so it never happened. In April I suggested it would be a good idea to have one for his 12th birthday, and given that I had been telling him about them for a few months he was admittedly interested, but not enough to not ask for a Nintendo Switch.

I knew it would be good for him as he has quite the enquiring mind, would provide him a wonderful creative outlet, would let him explore…oh who am I kidding. at this point it felt like I was never getting a 3D printer.

6 weeks into Covid, with the stresses of isolation weighing on the family (I am trying to keep a straight face here) I suggested it would be a good idea to get one as it would allow him to do something different as he was not able to play rugby or cricket and school was already a distant memory.

At this juncture Mrs Afterwards suggested that if I want one I should get one and stop pretending it was for Tom. Tom though was now super interested and following a little research our Flashforge Guider 2 was winging its way to us. It is freaking huge, weighing in at about 30KG and about the size of an old style television. It pings and dings and lights up quite wonderfully too…

For those not familiar with them they mostly print things from plastic extruded through a hot nozzle using files you can make or download from the internet. Now that the remodelling is done we have been able to unpack it and have spent the weekend in the cellar printing cool stuff.

So far we’ve printed a couple of badges from 2000AD, a Totoro, a buffed up bulbasaur, some covid door hooks and even a couple of rings. It is such good fun! I even let him have a turn 🙂

Corona Lock down Diaries – Building work

5 months later…

Ok so 5 months ago we started a building project. Then the world closed because of the Corona Virus and for most of 2020 we lived in a building site. Up until this weekend. The builders packed their stuff last week and departed and at last we have our house back.

Now I haven’t posted or really been near my blog for the last week as I have been painting walls and doors and pretty much anything that looked like it would benefit from a lick of paint and after a long week of late nights the place was ready to move into and over the last week we spent many an hour trying to get the rooms set up, the home gym assembled and things mostly in place (though there is still a lot to do).

I now have somewhere to get some exercise as I really don’t like going outside and at last have a lovely space to work and write.

Now I just need to paint the other 3 floors of the house!

Before and after of the coal cellar. I had never actually been right into it in 16 years as it was too terrifying…

Before and after of what is now storage/home Gym/3D printer room/Games machine room. I even managed to sort out all of my tools and that made me feel particularly manly and I may have stood, hands on hips and legs akimbo following a particularly methodical organising of my drill bits.

And then lastly the living room/office thingy. It has a fridge and bar area dedicated solely to alcohol which is odd as I don’t actually really drink though I think perhaps I might try and get into wine because I am of an age where I feel I ought to know more about wine than I do. I lit the fire for effect, and while it looked lovely it was bloody boiling. I also put on the underfloor heating which added to the generally unpleasant temperature and made me sweat in all of my creases…not nice at all.

So now mostly for the rest of forever this is where I intend to be 🙂

Well worth the 5 months of filth and building work! So right that desk is where I am sat.

Really looking forward to getting back to normality, if anything about this new world can be thought of as normal!

Corona Lock down Diaries – Intermittent fasting and calorie deficit.

The ongoing saga of the right old state our doors were in…

I know were not still strictly locked down but I figured I’d carry on with this anyway. Last post I wrote on this is here if you want to catch up first.

So after 2 months I about 16kg/35 Lbs down. Roughly back where I was when I last did the Whole30 thing, so whilst a real boost it is rather annoying that I have just lost weight I already lost previously and then put back on. But if you’ve ever been overweight then you will be familiar with this cycle. Losing it can be easy but maintaining it often seems to be the difficult part.

This time round I have tried calorie deficit combined with intermittent fasting. I really like cooking, and I love eating and I just don’t think it is possible for me to not enjoy the things I love to eat so I have endeavoured to simply have what I want – just less of it. Looking at a calorie deficit of around 500 and you’ll lose about one pound a week, but I have probably ran a little more than that and I do tend to lose weight really fast when I start getting things under control. Apart from the last week where I have pretty much maintained my weight because I could not stop eating bourbon biscuits and jammy dodgers! I have a real problem with them…

So in addition to the calorie deficit I started intermittent fasting and broadly eat in a 5 hour window between noon and 5pm. This really helps me to focus and helps me with the discipline I usually do not have. I know there are all sorts of actual benefits of intermittent fasting and there are great sites out there that will extoll those but for me – it mostly stops me eating about 11 meals a day at all hours. Simple really.

To help me keep track of what I am doing I use two apps each day. Fastic helps me to track my fasting hours and I use MyFitnessPal to track my calorie intake. The former does have the ability to track calories but I prefer the latter as it has all the foods from most stores in its database so I can be more accurate with it.

There have been hiccups and blips along the way, and I have struggled at times like you do when youre trying to fix something that has been a problem your whole life but this time I do feel different about what I am trying to achieve. Perhaps it is because I am 50 next year and know I cannot carry on like I have been. That pending sense of mortality can be a real awakener.

Oh there is one more thing I have been doing. Drinking a lot of water. I have a glass that takes 500ML and drink about 6 of these a day. There are studies out there that show drinking more water helps with weight loss and it does seem to have helped me – perhaps I just feel fuller I don’t know -there will be science to it. Mostly though it just feels like a useful part of the routine I am developing.

The one thing I haven’t really done yet is exercise. I’ve barely been out during the last 4 months and my step counter on my watch struggles to get to 5000 most days. I will be remedying that though over the next few weeks when our building project completes. We’ve put in a small home gym and I will have a cross trainer, static bike, treadmill and rowing machine.

So there you go, you’re up to speed with what I have been doing on that front. Here’s my head 2 months apart and some of the food I have been making…

Corona Lock down Diaries – Day Meh – Haircut

Snip snip buzz

Okay so strictly speaking we aren’t exactly locked down anymore. We have commenced with an experiment to see how many pub goers we can kill off which seemed to commence without too much drama at the weekend. London saw some dumbfuckery in particular and there were pockets of shenanigans country wide so now we wait to see what the impact of it will be.

Hairdressers and barbers also opened and against my better judgement me and the boys managed to get a slot at our local barber this afternoon. Asim moved into the area a few years ago and is a top chap and the boys have always enjoyed what he does to their hair so off we went.

During lockdown the eldest seems to have somehow grown a fringe that when brushed out goes below his chin. The youngest was looking like Boris Johnson on one of his particularly bad days. Not that the twat has good days, but hair wise imagine him at his blondest and most boufont…

Oh me you ask? Well I have half a Mohican (given I don’t have to go into the office any more) which I have been doing with an old beard trimmer so mostly look like a fat extra from a shit fan film version of Mad Max.

So a few hours and a couple of quid later (he has rightly put up the prices – now we know who the crucial people actually are in society) we are all shaven, coiffed, tidied and presentable. Mostly.

I decided to actually keep the Mohican and get him to do it properly. Looks a bit mental and like I have a dead animal on my head but meh, there’s a bloody apocalypse going on – it actually seems more appropriate than ever…Mrs Afterwards didn’t mind as much as I thought she would. Maybe that’s because we don’t really leave the house anymore…

Happy apocolypse! Stay Safe!

Corona Lock down Diaries – Day Twelvtytwo – Renovations

I’ve got a house full of manly men…

About 3 weeks before lockdown we started a cellar renovations project that we had been planning since we moved into this house 15 years ago. The cellar compromises 3 rooms which we have used for storage and a play room for the kids when they were younger. We had a big screen and a projector down there for a few years which was pretty cool too.

It was never a really clean and tidy space though and had damp in places and lots of exposed pipework and wiring. So, after a few years of saving it was time to get the builder in and see what he could do. It was going to take a few months but we figured we could live with the mess for a short while and proceeded to box everything up we wanted to keep (and trash everything we didn’t).

Then we went into lockdown and everything stopped for a few months…

Whilst they are back now, and there isn’t long to go, it has certainly been an experience. We have patiently waited as they have done a great job in truly transforming the space and…even as I write this I am struggling to concentrate because someone is fucking drilling so loud in the room below me that I could just…Bloody hell get done already, you’ve been here since March!! Our living room barely has enough room to fit the four of us in, I cant actually even see the TV screen in a lot of the room because things are piled 5 foot high! And stop drinking chuffing cups of tea…build something damn it, anything. Hammer, cut, saw, plaster, shovel…I don’t care just do it. Do it NOW! Finish my fucking house you bloody buggering bastards!

Ahem…Anyway, here are a few progress photos of one of the rooms. Lots more to follow somewhen but it’s getting close to being done.

I think they just put the frigging Kettle on again! Twats!

Only kidding…I actually really do like them 🙂