One of those funks

Commenting over at a friend's blog just now made me realise something - I've been a little bit out of the blogging loop. And I promised this one would not become another of those started, not continued numbers. Plus, I should really get back into the rhythm of writing again.

It's not that I haven't had much to talk about. In fact, life's pretty 'interesting' right now. And my head is teaming with a swirling soup of fantastic ideas which may simply be blog stories in the future, but may also be the seedlings of something larger.



I've completely changed my way of living in the past couple of months. Part of this whole 30s/looking after myself/being healthy thing which began about 10 months ago with giving up smoking. I've joined a gym (and still regularly attend!), I've had some personal training and am keeping a food diary. I have no burning need to lose heaps of weight (although some would be nice), but I do have this strong internal feeling that I haven't really been all that healthy for the past 30 or so years, and it's time to turn that around.

That in itself is pretty monumental. By nature I'm a fairly sedentary creature, so being fit and active is a 180-degree turn. But that hasn't been the be-all and end-all of my activity lately. There's an edgy feeling around my workplace at the moment, with whispers and rumours flying everywhere. Suffice to say, with 5 years under my belt at this workplace, I'm a little excited and a little apprehensive about what the future may hold in that regard.

Add to that a renewed musical activity, which is keeping me busy at least 2 nights a week. Nothing too ambitious or thrilling - just a loose collective of 4 mates with a semi-decent grasp of their instruments getting together to belt out a few numbers after work and on weekends. It's been good to get that creative outlet up and running again.

It's been a pretty cool couple of months, actually. A sort of rediscovery of myself in a way. For the past couple of years, my life's focus has been on the complicated and time-consuming elements of conducting a long-distance relationship, then the visa hassles, then the wedding drama and then just settling into coupledom life (can't believe our first wedding anniversary is this Monday!). It's been really enlightening to spend the past few weeks turning a little bit inward again and finding the joy and passion with those purely "me" things again.

And now tapping back into that writing vein... wonder what this will bring. Hopefully not a heap of boring diary entries like this one. But thanks for indulging if you got this far.

Right now, I'm intrigued by shuffle on my iPod. It's really loving Alex Lloyd tonight. Strange.

Blog War Ends

Well, it seems the battle for blog supremacy has fizzled to a rather disappointing end. Much to the angst of many fellow bloggers around this fine land, jspace's recent dramatic demise has been sort of a blessing in disguise for me.

A few months back, in a moment of pure lunacy, I decided that my other 2 blogs were kinda crap and so it was time to start a new one: this time with a theme! Problem was that at the time, I had a couple of theme's swimming around in my head - the gentrification of the gorgeous suburb I lived in (which will eventually lead to me being squeezed out) and my psuedo-reviews of the gigs I go to see. So, with a brain-wave similar to that which leads someone to think that beginning a PhD is a "really good way to spend a few years", I decided to make 2 blogs.

Lo and behold, a few months down the track and all my good intentions got swept under the carpet and both blogs started getting fairly eagerly neglected. That was until a couple of weeks back when my source of many blog ideas, John Birmingham's Cheeseburger Gothic, suddenly went missing. Poof! Kapow. Gone. Just like that. Which also meant that my meager few blog entries had also gone, but more importantly, so did the growing sense of community and camaraderie with fellow jspacers.

It has meant that this is now my only blog site (and I don't propose to start more anytime soon!), and thank you if you found your way here through jspace - I was Albion Love Den, but also known as Blue Box to some. The abrupt disappearance of jspace has also kicked me in the butt and forced me back to the keyboard - so expect to see more of me in the coming months. I have a review of Augie March in the pipeline, as well as a wrap-up of the 2-odd days of my tenure at the Woodford Folk Festival. For now, however, is my list of Top 50 artists as decided by my charts on last.fm. Now, this is not my list of greatest albums or artists or anything like that - simply top to bottom of the top 50 artists I listened to on my iPod on iTunes for the entire 12 months. You may be able to infer a few things about the type of person I am...