Personal Woody, 2009-2024 It was a cold dark evening in early 2010. Lu and I had only been in our first house for a couple of months when we were heading over to Mirfield to look at some kittens. We got there and the living room had a bunch of little furballs prancing
Digital Minimalism Digital Minimalism (part 2) It's been a couple of weeks since I kicked off my Digital Minimalism changes so I thought I'd post a quick update to check-in with where I'm at. Straight out of the gate, I've noticed a reduction (though not a complete eradication,
Personal 2024 goals - 6 months in... Back in January I wrote down a few goals to hit this year and as we're almost in the middle of June, that's near enough halfway through the year. Goal recap I know I linked to the original post above but if you happened to skip
Personal Digital Minimalism On the day I wrote down my thoughts about maybe ditching social media, I decided to buy a book I'd had on my wishlist for a long time, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. The book arrived the following day and within 24 hours of its arrival, I was
Art I have a sketchbook problem... One of the downsides of learning how to do some basic bookbinding is you can make a sketchbook much quicker than it takes to fill one so you very quickly become a bit overrun with sketchbooks. Most have soft covers but there are some with hard covers, some are big,
Journal An illustrated journal If you've been following along with my blog recently, you'll have noticed a slight increase in frequency of posts and some of those posts relating to my various endeavours to keep the creative momentum going and I've got another one for you! You'
Personal Reading goal for 2023: revisited We're into October now so it's been 9 months since I set myself the reading goal for this year. I'm going to be honest from the outset, I doubt I'll hit the goal of 50 books. With 31 books left and only
Personal Commonplace books I've been finding myself leaning more towards traditional or analogue ways of doing things. I haven't used my Kindle regularly for years (only recently for our trip to Malta), favouring actual printed books. Having tried journaling digitally for convenience and have it fall by the wayside,
Personal Takes me back My pal Kraig sent a message on a WhatsApp group with a link to a Studio Ghibli playlist on Spotify. I put it on this afternoon and left it playing in the background. After a while, the track above started playing and it triggered something in me. I think I&
Personal Malta, August 2023 Since 2013, we've been going back to Malta every couple of years to go see Lu's family out there. The last time we were there was 2018 and when we learned we were going to have another baby in 2019, we figured 2020 would be good
Personal 488 miles for 5 minutes Last week, I had the gut-wrenching realisation that I'd lost my passport. As we're just a few weeks out from flying to Malta for a holiday we've been postponing since 2020, it's safe to say panic immediately set in and prompted frantic
Personal Memories of Jedi... This week's podcast discovery is Missing Frames, a show where the host is joined by guests who haven't seen a particular film (sometimes they'll have one guest who has seen it, one who hasn't), they have a short discussion beforehand, go away
Personal Juno Lu's cousin recently adopted a cat and soon found herself with a litter of kittens to deal with. We already have a cat so initially didn't entertain the idea but once pictures started getting sent around, we decided to give one of them a new home.
Personal Hooking them in... My youngest son has been obsessed with a show called Spidey and his Amazing Friends for a good while now. If you're unaware of it, it's basically a Spider-man show aimed at audiences too young to read or watch the films. Recently, Disney+ also dropped a
Covid Lockdown longing? I was thinking the other night about the lockdown period. It was horrible being highly restricted in where we could go and who we could see but one thing I realised I missed was the Friday nights. Like everyone, we got into a habit of doing Zoom calls with friends.
Personal Trying out journalling This month, I decided to start a journal. A real, hand-written journal. I've tried journaling a couple of times before and it didn't really catch on but something about this time is slightly different. I'm trying to take a bit of a step back
Technology Slowly changing habits Aside from Instagram, there's been a steady decline in my active posting on social media. I'll sometimes have a burst of replying to people on the likes of Twitter but I'm mostly now a passive consumer of the content on there. Same with Facebook,
Personal To skate or not to skate? I spent a lot of time as a kid skateboarding. My brothers and I basically lived and breathed it. Didn't matter if it was hot or cold outside, if the ground was dry, we were off skating somewhere. Eventually (and regretfully), I gave up skating in favour of
Personal Thanks, Instagram. No, really! I didn't used to watch Reels a lot. For a long time, I used Instagram old-school-style just scrolling through my feed. But eventually, it got me. I got sucked in to watching all sorts of random crap. Some of it was funny, some of it wasn't
Personal So much free time... This weekend, Lu took the kids to see her Mum for a few days. I stayed home because I'd already planned a night out with my friends and someone needed to look after the cat so it all worked out. After spending years working your life around kids,
Life in Numbers Life in numbers: January '23 The On The Side community has been pretty active this month with lots of blog posts and links to pages on personal sites which cover off ongoing stats for things like health and fitness, films and podcasts. While I debate whether to set up my own dedicated stats page, I
Personal Bound to books A discussion in the OnTheSide Slack community was prompted by a post by Sam King about getting rid (or keeping hold) of physical media like CDs and DVDs. The discussion also turned to books with some members getting rid of books after reading them but I really struggle to do
Music Reclaiming my Likes playlist It was a number of years ago now and I can't quite recall the exact circumstances but there was a period of time when Spotify limited the number of artists/albums I could save to my Library. Maybe I was on a free account at the time? I
Personal 2023 Goals Today I recorded an episode of Make Life Work with Si and Mike and the focus of the episode was a bit of reflection on 2022 and looking ahead to 2023. I've already set out my reading goal for 2023 (which, I forgot to mention on the podcast!
Personal Reading goal for 2023 I didn't do too badly in 2022 for reading, at least when it comes to comics. I had a steady flow of reading material throughout the year but I wasn't really paying any attention to logging what I'd read and when so aside from
