Month: March 2020

New Years Resolutions 2020

For the last few years I have been setting myself New Years Resolutions to start on the 1st of April to tie in with the start of the new financial year (basically it gives me an extra few months to work out what they are going to be).

This year is going to be slightly different as we are spending our lives in isolation. Before I get on to this year’s I’ll review last year’s resolutions:

2019 #1: Run 200 miles
This was reduced from 365 the year before which was pretty difficult. In 2018 I managed about 120 miles. In 2019 I only managed between 70 and 80 (there’s still a couple of days to go). Part of this is due to the mini human that we created taking up a fair amount of my time, and part of it is laziness.

2019 #2: Get to a weight the NHS thinks is healthy
I haven’t managed this. I’ve dropped somewhere between 1kg and 2kg but this still leaves me about 2-3kg higher than the “normal” weight for my height. Part of this is linked with 2019 #1. Most of this drop has been in the last month when I’ve had the time to exercise pretty much every day.

2019 #3: Go vegan
Veganism? Completed it, mate. This was easy, enjoyable and has made me feel physically better (my insides don’t like dairy it seems – which I’d been in denial about for many many years) and mentally better (not hurting the cute wee animals).

So, a mixed bag for 2019. I came up with some of these new resolutions for 2020 prior to the coronavirus. I have amended them slightly in light of this, although some may be easier now.

2020 #1: Run 240 miles
This is a larger number than my target last year, and much higher than I actually completed. The reason is that I reckon I can run most days (at least while we’re isolating) and so 20 miles a month should be an achieveable target. I generally run just over a mile a day, so it gives me around 10 rest days each month. I’d also hope that I can start to increase the distance slightly, although the issues I have with my feet might prevent that.

2020 #2: Paint all my Blood Bowl models
There is a joke within the Blood Bowl community (and I assume the wider wargaming community too) that every player has masses of unpainted models. I would like to paint all of mine. I’m not very good at painting models but I’d hope to get a bit better and YouTube as well as all this time at home should help. I did have a schedule of what I wanted to paint by certian tournaments but those tournaments are now most likely not happening. Since isolating, I have managed to build 2 teams (3 more to go) and then I will start painting them in due course.

2020 #3: Be able to juggle for 5 minutes
For my birthday last year, some friends clubbed together to get me a lot of things on my bucket list. One of those was to learn to juggle. I have been practicing for 5 minutes most days and I’m getting better. I want to be able to juggle 3 balls for those 5 minutes without dropping any. Ideally this would be by my birthday so I’ve managed to achieve it within a year but any time would be good.

2020 #4: Practice singing for at least 1 hour a week
After my 5 minutes of juggling, I have also been practicing singing. My employer contributes £250 towards any lessons of your choosing after 5 years service. I opted to go for singing lessons as it’s always annoyed me that I can’t sing. And I want to spend the time required getting better at it with two goals in mind: singing backing vocals on The Cool Kids version of Firestarter (when we’re actually allowed to meet again) and singing a duet with a muppet version of myself which is an item on my bucket list.

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 4: Have a baby

<<– Part Three – Get Married

Early last year Jo went on a rowing holiday. It was great – I didn’t have to hear anyone talk about rowing for a whole week (or so I thought – she phoned me mid-week to tell me all about it). When she returned she told me not to get excited but that she was a little late. So obviously I got quite excited. 

About a week later she took a pregnancy test.  She came downstairs excited and so I got excited, only for her to tell me that she was just excited that she’d taken the test and that she had to wait a few minutes for the result. A few minutes pass and she comes back down with the good news and we both got even more excited. 

One of the weird things about finding out you’re having a baby is being unable to tell people your exciting news for a while. I completely understand the reasons, but this is something you really want to share with people and it can be quite difficult keeping such an exciting secret. 

There was a weird rollercoaster of emotions that I went through after finding out we were having a baby. It started with excitement and then went through fear – about how our lives would change, whether I would be able to deal with the lack of sleep, if I’d be good at being a dad – and alternating between the two before settling very much on the side of excitement.

Like a wedding, having a baby requires a lot of planning. This was where I felt most comfortable and helped with controlling the fear and increasing the excitement. 

Nine months is a long time to wait for a baby. It can make you especially broody, well it made me especially broody at least. I have a total of 5 nephews and nieces who are awesome and have just made me want a mini human of my own even more. However even 9 months is not enough to make you mentally ready for the moment you get rushed into hospital. 

One of the things we did in preparation was a short hypnobirthing course. I had a vague idea of what it was as my sister-in-law had used it for her second child but I was very impressed by it and would recommend it for anyone who is due to give birth as it gives you a very positive attitude towards the experience, regardless of what route your birth takes. 

The birth itself went quite well. Not a textbook birth, but possibly as close as you could realistically expect. Having heard stories about other people’s birth experiences, we were very lucky in our experience. 

Everything went really quickly on the day. So quickly in fact that there was a point at which I thought I would have to catch our child but fortunately the midwife came back into the room at the vital moment.

And now we have a baby. She is called Imogen Scarlett Eileen Anderson. She is called Imogen as that was one of the few names we could agree on, Scarlett after her gran and Eileen after her great-gran who was born 99 years and 364 days before her. I’m sure I’ll tell you more about Imogen in the future.

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 3: Get married

<<– Part Two : Get Engaged

I’ve been meaning to write a blog about our wedding for quite some time. The problem that I’ve had before is that there’s so much I could write about, however most of it will be so detailed and personal that it will only be of interest to a very small group of people. So I’m going to try to just talk about the few most significant things about our big day.

Firstly, everyone says it’s the best day ever. I’m often reluctant to believe what everyone says about things. Everyone said that Napoleon Dynamite was great but that’s an hour and a half of my life that I’m not getting back. Everyone says that pineapple on pizza is wrong but it’s the best pizza topping by far. Everyone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. However in this instance, it turns out that everyone was actually correct.

The whole day was spent seeing our friends and family and they were all so happy for us (or just wanted a free meal). It’s just like having a massive birthday party for all of your birthdays at once. It truly is the best day ever. The main downside to this is that there is a limited time and if you’ve invited a large number of guests it won’t be possible to spend a lot of time with them all. It is important to not worry about this. Spend your day with who you want to spend it with – whether that is the people you see all the time, those that you don’t see because they live so far away or a combination of both of them. It is easy to get pulled in 100 different directions. One of the best bits of advice we got was to make sure we spent a bit of time together to enjoy the day. You could potentially spend most of the day barely seeing the person you’d just married so grab a moment or two together when you can.

Obviously the wedding day doesn’t just happen. The day involves a lot of build-up and preparation. I actually really enjoyed planning. I’m very much the planner. After the proposal Jo told me – “right, that’s my bit done. Now you need to plan it!”

In reality it was still shared. I came up with a couple of options and discussed with Jo who would then help to make a decision. One thing we were trying to do which I really recommend is to make it feel like your day. Make it feel as personal as possible. We had zombies, Lego, Jane Austen and rowing boats as these are the things that we enjoy (between us – please don’t take this as any endorsement of rowing on my part). 

We were slightly worried that it wouldn’t all go together but as soon as I got there and it all looked awesome I relaxed. Everything just felt right. Not that I expected it to feel wrong, but we’d arranged lots of different things as separate decisions and had no idea what it would all look like when it was put together. I know it will be different for other people but that was what really helped me to settle into the day. All of the planning came together and there was nothing for me to worry about any longer. Getting married seemed really easy after that! 

Another sign of the personalisation was the fact that ours was the only wedding I’ve been to where there was a mosh pit. We were very particular about the music. We had a DJ provided by the venue who had lots of suggestions about things he could do but we were very clear in our minds what we wanted. We gave him a playlist of songs that we knew our friends would dance to and let him improvise a little around that but we did have to reign him in a bit around other stuff. This is totally fine. Everyone realises that it’s your day and that it needs to be how you want it to be. 

The day itself was not as much of a blur as I expected it to be. I’ve got a good memory of a lot of things about it. 

Whilst I know the bride will be excited about getting ready and making themselves look amazing, they miss out on one of the bits that was most enjoyable for me, which was getting to greet everyone as they turned up. I also had to shout at some people for taking drinks into the wedding area. Apparently if that happens the wedding might get called off. I’d imagine that the official people don’t often follow through with that threat, but I wasn’t taking the chance.

Of all of the day, the ceremony is what I remember least about. That’s the only bit that seemed to go by really quickly, and that is possibly to do with it being the most important bit and me concentrating on doing all of our bits right. We had two friends pick awesome readings, which really suited the whole feeling of the day. We wrote our own vows. It seemed important to us that we told each other how we felt in front of a bunch of people. Public speaking is scary, but telling the person you love how you feel on your wedding day is surprisingly not so. We wrote our vows on a bit of card which I pulled out of my sporran to laughter. I’m not sure exactly where else I was supposed to have kept them. It was nice to later discover that a friend had filmed the whole thing on their phone which they sent to us and we were able to watch it through.

As I have written previously, we both changed our name upon marriage. As part of the signing process, we also signed deed poll forms.  A few weeks later, Jo had to re-sign them as I had told her to sign in the wrong place. Oops. That’s all sorted now and we both have a new name.

After the ceremony, the rest of the day is basically socialising, which is quite easy when everyone is there to wish you a good time. The main structured bits after that involve everyone staring at you, and it is easy to get nervous about them. I was much more nervous when I was a best man at my brother’s wedding, however. I think there is a lot more pressure on the best man to be funny and/or entertaining. I returned the favour to my brother and he delivered an excellent best man speech complete with a PowerPoint presentation. 

As we believe in equality, it was decided fairly early on that Jo was going to do a speech and hers was great and funny, and I was annoyed because I had to follow her! There is not much pressure on the groom’s speech, though as you’re supposed to be quite soppy and I was pretty good at that.

The most important things of all are a) we got married and b) it very much felt like our wedding day. We had managed to personalise it and the memories will stay in our heads forever.

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 2: Get engaged

Nothing to do with us getting engaged but a nice photo as we desscend Snowdon.

<–Part 1: Fall in love

[This is copied from what wrote in my super occasionally kept journal on the 8th of August 2016]

I am now engaged to be married! This is very exciting, although it is taking a little time to sink in as, although I always thought that this was the path that me and Jo were on, the fact that we have taken another step along it is awesome. We have decided to take a little time to enjoy the feeling before we start with the planning.

We had previously discussed that Jo would be the one to do the proposing. This is for a couple of reasons – firstly that I would have done it far too soon.

Secondly, and more importantly, we both believe that we have been living in a male dominated society for far too long. Why should it be that men are the ones who decide when to get married and have all the power in relationships? The only way to change this is by small individual gestures to attempt to change it.

On Friday night (5th August), I got home from a day of watching cricket in the sunshine to find that Jo had made a candlelight dinner for us. I knew that she was arranging dinner but we usually eat in front of the TV so this was a nice romantic addition to my evening.

We had egg wrap things – I’m sure there must be a technical term for these but I don’t know what it is – and then I offered to do the washing up. This is the point when I started to twig that something might be up, as Jo told me she wanted to enjoy the ambience.

A few minutes later, she told me she had a present for me, and that there was a treasure hunt I had to go through in order to find it. She had placed the clues in significant places – for example, one was by our guardian deity, Thor.

After some searching, I had worked my way through the six clues and returned to her with my present which she gave to me whilst telling me all the reasons she wanted to marry me as I cried tears of joy. When she asked me to marry her, I said “of course I will.”

The rest of the evening was spent talking and cuddling and enjoying being engaged before we started to tell people the next day.

Part Three: Get married –>

Bucket list item #11 Fall in love and get married and have kids and that. Part 1: Fall in love

Falling in love, they say, like breaking up is hard to do. Or at least I could have sworn that was a saying. Or at least in a song. Having done a Google, I now think that I’ve probably made it up. Which is annoying as I was about to disagree with it. So now I’m just going to disagree with something that possibly has never been said by anyone ever which makes me look a little bit weird.

Falling in love with Jo was possibly the easiest thing I’ve ever done. And I think that’s probably how I knew it was right. After our first date she thought to herself “I wonder if I’ve just met my husband.” She didn’t tell me that until way later as she didn’t want to come across as crazy. I’m not sure I would have thought she was (although at that time I didn’t know how addicted she was to rowing) because the first date was basically perfect and it wasn’t long before I was thinking the same thing.

It is possible that the first date went so surprisingly well as I didn’t have any expectations going into it. I had been doing online dating off and on for a good few years and whilst a few of the dates went well, the majority seemed to be less than average. As someone who has a reasonable understanding of maths I know that this is statistically impossible. The whole online dating thing could fill up several blogs on its own. There is a lot of time and effort that needs to be put in to even establish any sort of meaningful communication. Whilst I knew a few people who had met their partners online, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that I would do so too and therefore I went into our first date not really expecting anything amazing.

After that first date I changed my mind quite quickly. We went for a drink at the now non-existent Googies before taking a stroll down to Folkestone Harbour where we sat near the mermaid watching a storm over the Channel (Thor really helped a brother out), ate cake (Rocky Road which has marshmallows in which I hate), talked (about castles and music) and eventually kissed. We clicked instantly and there were no awkward silences or the frantic scrambling around for conversation topics that can often plague first dates.

I was very excited to keep in touch and arrange a second date which also went well. We went to a Tapas bar and then for our third date, I persuaded Jo to go to the cute little cinema in Folkestone to watch a film I’d heard good things about (but not heard what the plot was). It was called Gone Girl which – in case you were wondering – is not a particularly romantic film. Afterwards Jo did promise to never frame me for her murder though, so that was a positive. She’s kept that promise to this date.

Despite my catastrophically unromantic choice of movie, things continued to go well. It just felt so natural. To repeat a bit of the speech that I gave at our wedding, when I was single I had often asked my friends who had got married how they knew they’d met the person they were going to marry. Their answers were varied – one said they couldn’t imagine finding anyone better, one said that they made each other better, one said they made everything better even the bad stuff and another said that there was just no bullshit.  It was near the start of our relationship that I realised that all of those were true about me and Jo. If anyone asked me that question now, I would say that I knew I’d marry Jo because it was just obvious that I would.

Why was it so obvious? It was obvious because it was obvious. Which I know is a tautology but so what? Jo and I each have our own things but we also share in each other’s things at times. We make each other laugh. We make each other smile. We have lots of fun. Jo is an amazing human being – she is fun, funny, caring, thoughtful, adventurous… and exactly the person I was looking for.

Part 2 –>