Personal - Sam Hardacre

Personal

A collection of 45 posts

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'll also notice that this isn't the first

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 75 days to go, I'd say it's pretty

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, I now favour writing

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'm

Malta, August 2023

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 year to plan another

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 searching up and down the house. I'd used

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 and watch the film then come back to

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. So we're now back

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