Personal - Sam Hardacre

Personal

A collection of 37 posts

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 Star Wars show called

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.

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 from actively posting my thoughts to

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, I don't really post anything there

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 spending evenings

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 but I just carried

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, it's a

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

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

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 dunno... Anyway,

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!) and the

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 a few notable reads, I can't

20 in 2020

In the years prior to 2020, my reading habit had taken a bit of a nose-dive. I'd pick up a book every so often and work through it, but I wasn't reading nearly as much as I wanted to. With 2020 being a nice round number, I decided to aim

All alone

I've had this on my "to write" list for a while. I honestly don't know why I feel compelled to write this, I just do. My late father-in-law's ashes are buried in a cemetery in my wife's hometown. He passed before we met so as long as I've known her,

Re-discovering Nirvana

Yesterday, I was looking through Spotify for something to listen to and decided to stop on Nirvana. As I posted to Twitter [https://twitter.com/nocturnalmonkey/status/1282761099838992386], I was excited to discover Nirvana's Live and Loud set is now available as an album. When I was a kid, some

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

Last year, I planned to read more [https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/2018-reading-list/] and failed miserably. I used to read a lot and the last few years it's tailed off a bit so this year, I wanted to try again and not fail. This time is helped by Lu also taking

Re-thinking my podcast habit

I'd like to start by stating this is a very personal revelation. You're probably going to read this and think "Duh, you've only just got here?" so don't say I didn't warn you. I've been listening to podcasts for years and my app of choice for a good chunk of

Couch to 5K: about half way

Couch to 5K: about half way

Since we found out we were having a baby, fitness kind of fell of the radar a bit. When the baby came a long and we were sleep deprived zombies, doing exercise wasn't an attractive prospect when compared to a few quiet hours of rest. Fast-foward 4 years and things

Back to blogging

Back to blogging

It's been a while since I last tried to define what this blog is about. Going back through the archives, it's moved around in it's focus as my own focus and interests have shifted over the years. It's even fallen into neglect with huge gaps of time between posts. I

Self-improvement

Challenge for August

I'm very happy with the progress I've made in the last year, going from reading next to nothing at all to reading something, be it articles or part of a book, every day. As I'm a glutton for punishment and feel I need to make a dent on the backlog

Self-improvement

Making some changes

Back in December I wrote a resolution blog [https://blog.nocturnalmonkey.com/resolutions-for-2012/] post with some intentions for the year. So far they've not really come to fruition aside from learning a little more French than I thought I would while in Paris and I really want to be able

Living the good life

Some friends has kindly allowed Lu and I to use a patch of their land to grow some veggies. We've been wanting to do so for a while but our garden isn't really equipped so we jumped at the chance when offered. Before any planting could take place we needed

Leaving DC

It's been a fun 9 months working for Digital Consortium (DC) but as of today I am leaving the team. To psuedo-quote The Godfather, I've been made an offer I couldn't refuse. I've been invited by an old friend and colleague to join his company based over in Hebden Bridge.

Final day

Our final day in Paris and we had nothing planned other than a river tour. We headed out of the hotel around 11 and made our way to Pont de l'Alma where the boat tour casts off. The tour took us from the Eiffel Tower down river, passing under every