Snow

As you may have all seen in the last few days our little country has been hit with the white powder know as snow and for everyone this is a three edge sword. The reason that I say this is because a third of us lover the snow and enjoy the time off to play, the second third just can’t stand the cold and want summer to come quickly while the last third find that it makes their journeys to and from work a lot harder.

Personal I cover all three of this because I am not the greatest of fans when it comes to the colder weather and with the snow it always feels colder than normal, I get annoyed that my journeys to and from work are dangers and filled with idiots on the roads (I will get to this in a few moments). Lastly I do enjoy seating by a window watching the snow fall and if I happen to feel a little adventures I may even go to the nears park to just stand there and take in the view.

The biggest question that a lot of people keep on asking when it snows is why does this country always comes to a standstill when it snows, the answer to this question is very simple. It only snows at least once may be twice a year and when it does it tends to be heavy or a little dusting, because of this it is not financially variable for us as a country to spend a large amount of money on equipping the country to handle the snow. You do have to hand it to them that this year because they have done a better job than they have done in previous years.

If we take a moment to look at say Canada or Russia what is the one thing that comes to mind when you first think about these two countries, for me the first thing that comes to mind is it is cold and with that cold comes snow. With that information alone you already know that the chance of snow is going to be very high and because of this they need to gear themselves so that they can continue with their day to day lives when it snows so they tend to place more money into snow equipment than we do.

Which bring me to the one thing that I hate the most when the snow comes, the idiots that believe driving round the road with five inches or more of snow on the top of their car along with those that only removing the snow by using their windscreen wipers. I do have to ask, have you ever hear of road safety, I guess you haven’t because if you had then you might have had the sense to remove all the snow on your car before leaving for your distinction.

If you had any common sense then you would know that by leaving the snow on your car you are more likely to have an accident or create an accident for someone else if you just leave it up there. I know that it is hard work to remove it all but at the end of the day you will be helping yourself and those around you.

So if it does snow again or if you haven’t already cleaned your car from the snow so far then could you please at least remove the snow on your car not just for me but for yourself and those around you.

Until Next time.

Story Time

This week I wanted to take some time out to talk about what is involved in trying to create a story that everyone wants to read. The first thing that I would like to mention is that this is from my point of view in which I used to create my own story and that every writer has their own way in which they do it.

The reason that I wanted to write about this topic is because this will be the template to coming topic that I want to talk about later on in the year when I look at other stories plus I have this feeling that a lot of people don’t realise how much work really goes into writing and creating their own story.

Now the reason that I wanted to write stories is because I have spent a lot of my life reading, watching and playing all different types of stories and I have found that it is because of these story and the way in which they are down that keeps on bring me back to them later down then line.

As I said moments ago ever write has a different way in which they go about writing their own stories and that can also be said for the way in which they create their own ideas too. If you have been reading any of my blog’s as of late you might have noticed that I have spoken about writing my own story and that I would like to get in published some day.

When creating any type of story the first thing that anyone needs to do is to work out what the story is about and how it will end. The reason that I believe that this is very important is because you at least know where it is going. For me the end of my story came to me when I was seating in a car trying to break up with my girlfriend at the time, let’s just say we didn’t break up then because I wanted to get home as soon as possible to write down every that came to me at that point. The moment that I got home I grabbed a bit of paper and to start writing everything that I could remember of how the story was going to end, all I placed on the piece of paper was the outline of how it was going to end, I had no location or  character names in place that this time.

Once I had written this down I then got another piece of paper and started to write down who were going to be the bad guy, good guy Locations, ages, what made up them who they were and what could happen afterwards. The reasoning behind all this was so that I could get all of this within my story and to have some idea where the story could go if I wanted to write anymore stories.

With this basic information I knew that I could start out lining the direction in which my story was going to take. The best way that I found to do this was to get a note book and do bullet points of what I believed was going to happen and in what order. This is what I would like to call the beginning of story structure because once I had completed it I now had an outline of what was going to happen and when, all that I had to do now was to fill in the blanks.

As you can see before I had even started writing my own story I had a lot of work to do before hand, think about the amount of pre production that film makes have to do before they start shooting their film. The time that It took me to get all of this information down was about a week.

The hardest part that I discovered when I started writing the story was trying to get everything that I had put into my notes into the story, the reason that is hard is because deep down you want everything to go into it but some time when you start to write up parts of the story it just doesn’t flow very well so it is sometimes easier to take it out or change things round so that it still flows.

Now you might be ask why did I have so many notes before I started writing and the answer to that question is I don’t have the best memory and second was so that I had some kind of record that I could keep going back to.

I do hope that by reading this that everyone can see that there is a lot of work that does go into creating a great story and those that create these stories have the right to tell it the way they want to because it is their idea to begin with.

Until next time.

Let the diet begin.

With Christmas, New Year and resolution all out of the way I wasn’t quite sure what this week’s topic should be about but after some careful through I came to the conclusion that the best way to start this week’s blog would also be a good way to example in a bit more detail about one of my New Year’s resolutions.

The one that I will be looking at this week will be weight loss and the reason why I decided to lose weight and the shock that I discovered today when I got on the scales.

Now the story of my weight lost can be traced all the way back to August last year where I believed that the best way to lose weight was to continue to eat the same food that I have always been eating but to make sure that I at least go to the gym from two hours a week, it wasn’t until November that I then ran into a road block which was shouted at me that I wasn’t losing any weight but instead was putting it on.

That was when I went out and bought myself a pair of scales to weight myself and find out how heavy I was. As I got on them I was shocked to learn that I now weight in at 218lbs (15.42 stones or 98.88KG) at this point I knew that I had to do more if I wanted to lose weight.

The only way that I could see myself losing weight was to try and go on a calorie controlled diet, at that moment I remembered that my other half had at one point downloaded an application for her Iphone which I decided to do as well. The application is My Fitness Pal and it is free for everyone to download and of you haven’t got an Iphone, you can always go on to their website and join up.

Now the way in which My Fitness Pal works is that you will need to create an account with them tell them how heavy you are now, what your weight goal is, how tall you and what you believe to be your working conditions (do you have a job in which you are seating down all day or moving round a lot). The last think that your will have to complete before starting your account is how much weight you would like to lose over a week, they recommend that you lose 1 pound a week which is what I have done but you can lose more if you wish to. With your account created it will then tell you what your daily calorie count is for each day alone with how much carbohydrates, fat and protein you are allowed to consume each day too.

With my account created and application loaded on my phone I now started to place everything that I had eaten for the day into the application and too my horror I knew straight away that both my lunch and dinner were over by daily allowance of calories. Now just as I was about to start changing my diet I then ran into a little problem called the vomiting and diarrhoea bug (I very rarely get ill and when I do it always tens to be the bad ones) which knocked me out cold for a two weeks.

Now having this bug was good and bad mainly because it meant that I wasn’t eating a lot of food and when I was eating it always ended up being soup or a very small amount of dinner. The second problem that came with it was the fact that I didn’t have the energy or the will power to go to the gym. By the time the bug had cleared my system I decided that it was time to start my dieting again and also took it upon myself not to weight myself due to the fact that I felt like I hadn’t lost any weight (this was where I was wrong). On the 23^rd of December I decided that it was time to jump on the scales and see how much I weight I had lost and to my shock I found out that I now weight in at 200 pounds (14.28 stones 90.71 kg) and I believe that this large weight loss was due to me being ill and not being able to eat a lot of food for almost two weeks.

Now this one is the kicker, we all know that over Christmas and New Year we all eat a hell of a lot of food and I will be honest and tell you that Christmas and the summer are the two times of the year that I love food the most because Christmas brings so many different types of food and in the summer it is all about the Barbecue and cooking your own food outside and so some reason it always taste so much better.

Sorry about that little detour there. Now I knew that over Christmas I tried to keep track of everything that I was eating and I will be honest that on Christmas Day and New Years Day I did miss some of the entries for those two days but at the same time I knew that I was going to be over anyway so I made sure that I was over my allowance for both those days.

With the New Year out of the way I decided that I would give everything that I had to start losing weight and I believed that having a pedometer on me at all times, apart from the gym would be a good idea. I am also trying to make sure that I at least go to the gym three to four times a week, which would be about an hour per visit at the gym.

Now that we are now fourteen days into the New Year I took it upon myself to weight myself to get some idea as to how must heavy or lighter I am. To my luck it would seem that I everything has been working for me because now I weight only 193 pounds (13.78 Stone and 87.54 KG’s).

So you can see the weight loss has already began and to lose 7 pounds (0.5 Stones 3.17 KGs) in just over three weeks with Christmas and New Year in that time frame is very impressive and I do hope that I can continue to lose the same amount of weight within the next three weeks or so weeks.

As long as you put your mind towards it anything can happen.

Until next time.

New Year’s Resolutions

I guess it is time to welcome everyone to what is to be the start of a New Year and unlike last year it has two digits that makes up a number that not everyone likes and believes is unlucky, welcome to 2013.

Now if you have been read any of my blog’s since I started then I hope you have learned at least two things, one being that I am not superstitious person and two you have the power to create and choice what type of year you are going to have.

What I mean by this is that you have the ability to choice if you are going to have a good year or not and that if you spend the next year believing something is going to go wrong then you are more likely to make that come true. So let’s forget that we have a thirteen in the year and start making this year like the years before or better and if something does go wrong pick yourself up and move on.

Now there is always one thing that everyone tries to do before the New Year and then attempt them at the beginning of the year and those are called New Year’s Resolutions. Now I will be the first to admit that in the last two years I have done very badly and I have forgotten about them after about a month or two but this year I hope to us my blog as away to keep them going.

The way in which I want to do this is that I am going to set myself some goals for this blog, an example of this would be to create two blogs a month. Once I have laid out what I want from this blog I will then talk about my New Year’s Resolutions and how I will achieve them and keep a log of my process though out the year.

This blog well be staying the same as it always has but the only difference is that the blogs will have some form of structure to it unlike before. A good example of this would be that I may take a few weeks to go over a topic that has a lot of information in it or is very important to me. I am also hoping to at least cover a minimum of three topics a month with at least one of those being a look back at my progress so far with my New Year’s resolutions.

The last time that I took a New Year’s Resolutions seriously was back in 2010 and to the most part I did very well with them even with everything that happened to me that year. The last two years I have started them but somewhere along the line I just stopped because I believed that I wasn’t going complete them but this time round I will go in trying to succeed as best as possible.

The first one on my list is one that everyone goes for each year and each year we all give up or get nowhere close so my plan is to set myself a weight goal that I want to reach. As you could have guessed my first New Year’s Resolution is to lose weight but I want to weight as close too or less than 170 pounds, I should also point out that before Christmas I weighted in at 200 pounds but with Christmas comes weight gain so I have a feeling that I now weight more than I did before Christmas.

My next New Year’s Resolution is something that I bought up in last week’s blog when I spoke about films, I have always been a fan of films but last year I saw less new released films than I have ever seen in previous years so my action plan is to watch at least one new released film each month.

 

So what should my next resolution be? Well the next one is going to be a personal one but as my blog will be heading in this direction soon and it has been a topic that I have touch on once or twice before so I should at least try and work on it. I know that I need to work on my own relationship more than I have in the past year. Before anyone says that it takes two to tango I should point out that some of what I want to cover I don’t do or I don’t do very well so if I want to preach about something I need to be at least be doing it or have experienced it.

 

The last two that I have in mind are ones that have been nagging at me for some time. One of them is to complete the editing that I started last year on my book and to start getting the ball rolling on trying to get it published. The last one is to play and complete Final Fantasy VII, the reason that this is on my list is due to the fact that everyone I know and everyone on the internet says that this game is one of the best of all time but back when I it was released and became very popular I did everything that I could to stay clear of it (a bit like the Assassin Creed which I am playing and enjoying at the moment.) 

 

So there you have it, those are my New Year’s Resolutions for this year and what I have planned for my blog too. I hope that you all have had a good New Year so far and if you have any New Year’s Resolutions that you wish to share with me then place them in comments.

Until next time