Two steps back

When I started the year I had grand plans for my health and fitness. I don't do New Years Resolutions, but the Christmas break is a great time to review my goals and to set new ones. Sadly, I've made barely any progress toward any of these goals, and in fact have regressed on some of them.

If you don't mind too much, I'd like to share the story with you. This isn't so much by way of making excuses as getting things clear for me, and sorting out some kind of accountability.

The first set-back was a wrist injury that happened pretty much as soon as I got back from Australia. It prevented me from kick-boxing for a couple of weeks and stopped me from starting any strength training. Perhaps for these reasons, I got fairly depressed in general, and started eating junk and drinking a little too much as a way of seeking comfort. Yuck.

Once I got back from that I went straight into grading preparation mode for kick-boxing. Grading is physically exhausting, and demands heaps of energy, so I just shoved food into my mouth for four weeks, desperately trying to get enough calories. It's also really stressful and time-consuming, so I didn't start that strength training I wanted to.

All this meant that I never got back on to my clean, pre-Christmas eating habits, nor my regular progress tracking. The latter is important, since it's an early warning system and is very motivating.

After the grading prep (and missing the actual grading day itself!), I dropped my kick-boxing training right back so as to help out more with wedding preparation and to find a place and move into the new flat where Joliette & I live now. That was heaps of fun, but I didn't take the opportunity to start new exercise habits, go back to tracking progress or clean up my eating. I think I went back on to drinking coffee at some point here.

Moving house also got me stress eating again (way too much pizza), which kept up right on to the final stages of wedding preparation too. Although happily that last turned from stress eating into celebration eating as friends and family started to arrive.

A couple of weeks before the wedding, I cracked a rib while sparring. That hurt a lot, and stopped me from doing any exercise. There's not much you can do when it hurts to raise your arms over your head, or to twist your torso.

And then on the honeymoon I spent a couple of blissful weeks doing nothing and eating everything.

I really don't want to make excuses. I didn't choose to crack my rib or sprain my wrist, I could have chosen to respond to them better, and I certainly could have chosen to respond to the various stresses in my life in a different, healthier way.

In the meantime, it's been really inspiring to watch the progress of friends and colleagues (especially Sean and Robbie) who have been getting fitter. I've never really much liked the idea of sharing my progress before – it just seems to personal a thing. But since their example helped me, maybe I'll figure something out.

What's next then? Well, I'm already eating better, am back at kick-boxing and Jolie is being very supportive. I'm going to look over my goals again and see what I can salvage. I might even make a bet or try to find someone to compete against in order to get a bit of extra motivation.

Recent reading

Because I'm too lazy to figure out how to do a proper reading journal, I'm going to continue to inflict my recent reading on you all.

I took a break from the business books that I am supposed to be reading and got into some proper holiday fiction.

• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
• The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
• Un Lun Dun, China Miéville
• Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
• Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
• Hangman's Holiday, Dorothy L. Sayers

Tristram Shandy soars above the rest of these. I started reading it just as wedding prep got ridiculously stressful. It's pleasant, wafting absurdity was such a welcome escape from logistics, phone calls and bills. I was surprised by how modern it was too. It's as if one is watching a scene in some 18th century English country house, and then Eric Idle pops in wearing an all-white morning suit and starts crooning away.

It's similar in place to Tom Jones, mostly in how it has a fair bit of bawdy humour and also not a few addresses to critics. I'm guessing both are functions of the time.

Happily, Have His Carcase refers to Tristram Shandy. It's one of the more mysterious of Sayers's mysteries, and a lot of fun. It is very hard not to like Lord Peter Wimsey. He turns up in the short stories in Hangman's Holiday too.

Un Lun Dun is the first China Miéville book I've started reading and not immediately hurled at a nearby wall. It's a kids book (not even a "young adult" book), but is fun for all that. Ready Player One is mindless, harmless escapism. It could have done with slightly less geeky wish fulfilment though: at one point, the protagonist is literally playing video games all day, except for when he is using his elite hacker skills to get buff.

The Psychopath Test is typical journalist non-fiction.

Currently working through some more anthologies of short stories. Now that I'm back from holiday will try to get stuck into my non-fiction books again.

Photos!

Our awesome wedding photographer, Kristian Leven, has published his highlight photos of our wedding. Take a look!

Married

A couple of weeks ago, Joliette and I got married in the sight of God and men. The day itself is a happy blur in my head, full of smiling friends and family, wonderful food, great music, some very serious words and, of course, her.

Right now, I'm sitting in the garden of the flat that we now live in together, catching up on three weeks of work. The flat is still a bit of a work in progress, with empty boxes and piles of junk belonging to the landlord and previous tenants lying around the place, taking up valuable room that we could be using to pile up our junk.

It's good be back at work though. I suspect it will get even better when my team mates turn in Argentina and Canada actually wake up.

More books

• Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers
• City of Dragons, Robin Hobb
• Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
• Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• This Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Reflections

• G. K. Chesterton is frustratingly smug. I wish he would make a clear argument. All too often he sort of smiles with a twinkle in his eye that says "You never thought of that, I'll wager".
• I want to read an anthology of correspondence between Dorothy Sayers and Ursula Le Guin
• Heart of Darkness would be better read in one sitting, I imagine
• When you know a little maths, long-winded explanations to help those who know less maths make things far more difficult to understand
• I couldn't explain most of what I learnt in This Quantum Universe, so I didn't learn it well enough
• I seem to need to have at least one work of fiction on the go at all times
• The Rain Wild Chronicles (of which City of Dragons is the third volume) is Hobb's least good series so far. It's still pretty good though.

Reading update

I have a post in my backlog about a couple of books I've recently read. However, what with moving house, my folks visiting, the upcoming wedding and the usual hectic pre-release, pre-UDS panic at work, I haven't had the time to polish it into something readable.

So, in lieu of actual thoughts and considerations, here's a list of what I've finished reading recently:

• Ancient Rome: From the earliest times down to 476 AD, Robert Franklin Pennell
• An Evil Guest, Gene Wolfe (thanks dash!)
• Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart
• Mabinogion, Anonymous
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
• Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers
• This Momentary Marriage, John Piper
• Pre-Christian Ireland, Peter Harbison

Currently working my way through a bunch of books.

• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• Innovator's Solution, Michael E. Raynor and Clayton M. Christensen
• The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey
• ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis, Hadley Wickham
• Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers, Allen B. Downey

Believe it or not, this is actually a kind of success in my attempt to be reading fewer books at once. The main lessons learned so far are not to set aside hard books so quickly and to start taking notes on genuinely interesting non-fiction books from the beginning. "7 Habits" and "Innovator's Solution" are still on there because I had to double back and re-read to note down things.

Jacket

A few weeks ago, I lost my jacket.

It was a nice jacket. The nicest jacket I've ever owned. It fit well, it was warm, I looked good in it, it was black and the pockets would fit a paperback or a Kindle. Everything that a jacket could be to a man, that jacket was to me.

It was my fault I lost it. When the train pulled in to Chalfont & Latimer, I was nestled comfortably in my seat, buried deep in some hacking and enjoying the subtle afterglow of the couple of glasses of Malbec I'd had with dinner. The stop took me by surprise. I rushed. I grabbed my laptop, my book and even felt a little proud of not forgetting my water bottle as I dashed off the train and plunged into the cold and lonely night air that seems to cling to country railway platforms. Meanwhile, that best of all jackets was in the rack above a seat no longer mine.

At this point, I lost my temper too. Were it not for Joliette's heroic patience and level-headedness, I would have haunted the station for hours, moaning incoherently at whatever staff I could find. Eventually, I became aware of her gently explaining to me that I should check in at Marylebone Station on Sunday, and  again in two weeks time. Don't give up hope, she said.

I checked in on Sunday, and filed some paper-work. They also told me not to give up hope. I think I mustered a smile to pretend I wasn't going to. Two weeks went by, and I went in again and Joliette called them up, but still no jacket. I gave it up as lost, and started looking for a new one.

It was a nice jacket though, and apparently nice jackets like these are a bit like nice mangos, and cannot be bought out of season. After much browsing, searching and shopping, I couldn't find a replacement in my size. I even got in touch with the manufacturer, who said that it was no longer for sale and my best bet was to try their factory outlets. I don't have the money, though, and winter might end any day now.

Today, though, I received an email from Marylebone Station, asking me if I had lost a jacket. I said yes, and very kind lady at the other end of the email said that they had an unclaimed jacket, and that she'd used her brain and checked the pockets. In one jacket, she had found a print-out of an email that had something to do with boxing, addressed to me. They'd had no paper-work and were surprised I hadn't noticed that it was missing, after all, it was a nice jacket.

As I sailed out of Marylebone today, I'm sure I looked better than I had in weeks. Whether it was the smile or the jacket, I couldn't say.