Starting over

Hello again

This past week has had a distinct feeling of starting from scratch and venturing into the relative unknown.

You may remember I spoke a little about Resolutions a week or so ago and since then I've been making a big effort to keep with them.

I've worked through about 3 hours of Italian audio and was pleasantly surprised that I remember more than I thought I knew.  I last had a crack at it back in 2006 when I got married and we went to Rome for our honeymoon.  It's still a bit basic but I should get somewhere with it if I persevere.  My main learning time is in the car to and from work a couple of days a week - I have a mini audio course on my iPod.  I think that will get me so far but I probably need to do a bit of work away from that to be able to really get to grips with it.

My other resolution was to learn guitar and that's going OK as well.  I've managed to learn 7 or 8 chords but I'm predictably finding stringing them together into something familiar a bit more difficult.  Obviously patience and practice are key here and to think I would be able to play anything in such a short space of time would be foolish.  That said, I've managed to learn a couple of simple nursery rhymes to keep my daughter onside.  I'm making the effort to pick the guitar up for about 15 or 20 minutes every day and I think that'll really help.  In the evenings I'm trying to watch the football with the sound muted whilst I "practice" and that's helping a little.  Hopefully I'll get to something passable by Christmas.

I've also done my first post-marathon run this last week and that's been a bit of a shock to the system.  It's not wholly unexpected as I'd not run for about 50 days for a variety of reasons (blisters, brusing, holidays to name three) but it's something I want to keep doing and now I know what I'm capable of, it all seems a bit more straight forward.  I'm entered in the Great Yorkshire Run at the start of September which is a 10km route around Sheffield and so I'm effectively starting over in preparation for that.  I'm revisiting my old 2 mile route twice a week at the moment just to get back into a routine.  I'll keep upping that distance when I get back to a decent level of fitness. 

Once again, I'm running for Diabetes UK and Sheffield Children's Hospital but this time I'm trying to raise a more modest £200.  If you feel like you can spare perhaps £2 for two worthy causes you can donate here (you'll have to click on the Great Yorkshire Run 2012 page).  If I reach my target for this run, I'll have raised £1700 for charity this year which would be incredible.

My wife has put together a record of the marathon journey we went through in a photobook.  Whilst the real thing hasn't been delievered yet, I have a link of what it will look like so if you're a little interested, you can see it here (I'd look at it in full screen for best results)

I suppose this post should have an actual point (it would make a change eh?)  Whilst trying something new can be a bit daunting and frustrating, I'm feeling positive about the challenges.  I think previously I've probably been a bit immature or fickle to really be able to sit down and learn a new skill.  It's fair to say that in the past, I've been quick to get bored of something if it's not going my way.  I think there's still a slim chance of that happening (it'd be a bit short sighted to think I've totally changed in the last few weeks or months) but hopefully I can stick with it.

I've started to find a genuine interest in things that would have previously passed me by and whilst I'll continue to waste a few hours playing Xbox or watching some second rate TV, I feel like I've found things that will give me some genuine enjoyment which can't be a bad thing can it?

I guess it's never too late to try your hand at something new.

Talk to you soon

Andy

Resolutions

Hello again


First up, apologies that I've become a bit erratic at posting lately, I will endeavour to do better in the coming weeks.  I've started two previous posts that have been abandoned either due to time constraints or the fact that they just sounded boring.  You deserve better.


So the most recent things of note that have occurred are that I visited Krakow in Poland and I turned 31.  As it happened these things actually overlapped but that was more of a coincidence than anything else.  We'd all gone over for the wedding of some friends which was a really incredible day.  As we were taking Violet, we'd decided to make a week of it and have a proper holiday.


Overall, it was about as exhausting as I expected but it meant that we could just take things a bit easier (read: spend lots of time in cafes) and enjoy the time away a bit.   If you've never been, I can recommend it, though I think 7 nights was a bit too long.  I'll talk a bit more about Krakow and my visit to Auschwitz in a separate post.


Being away did give me time to do some things I don't usually make time for when I'm at home - the most obvious of which is reading.  I managed to get through three books in 6 days which was very enjoyable, and one of which prompted this post.


I did a post at the end of December that touched on things that I had to look forward to in 2012 and I also made 10 New Year's Resolutions which didn't feature in that blog.  I'll be doing a half year review of how they're going sometime this month.  Celebrating the 10th anniversary of my 21st got me thinking a bit.  Training for the marathon obviously meant using a lot of discipline and I figured I should be able to use that for other things too.


And then I read "Guitar Man" by Will Hodgkinson.  It's no secret that I'm a big music fan, and it's equally no secret that my biggest regret is never learning to play guitar.   The book is a true story of a man (Will) who decides, at 34 to learn guitar and play a live gig of sorts in 6 months.  Now obviously I'm not that crazy, but I've decided that if he can do it, then there's no reason I can't try either.  I'm horribly uncoordinated but I'm going to give it a go.  And so, Birthday Resolutions were born.


I've made two as it happens, learn guitar and learn Italian.  Languages were something I always had a knack for when I was at school, and after stumbling through some Polish, I decided that I should be able to give an "easier" language  a try and get to a decent standard.  Plus I have all the free CDs I collected off a paper before I went to Rome on my honeymoon.


So today I have made the first steps in trying to achieve these two goals.  I dug the battered old classical guitar (I want a new acoustic but Mrs B is yet to be convinced I'll stick with this for more than a month) out of the wardrobe and restrung and tuned it.  It's worth pointing out that this thing is definitely older than I am but it makes a decent noise.   I've also put all the Italian CDs on my iPod and started going through them in the odd spare 15 minutes.


I'm under no illusions that any of this will be easy.  I've tried to learn guitar countless times throughout my life and I've never got anywhere.  But I've got a feeling this time it might be different.


I'll try not to post relentless updates about this stuff because it will be a slow process.  But I'll check in from time to time, to give myself the motivation to keep going if nothing else.


Whilst I'm on a music post, if you haven't listened to any of the new albums by Ladyhawke, Richard Hawley, Jack White, Citizens! or Howler then I'd give them as spin as I'm really enjoying them.

And finally, on June 16th I'll be at a mini-festival in Pannal near Harrogate that a friend of mine has organised to support the MNDA after she lost her mother last year.  If you're in the area and fancy parting with £15 to see 6 or 7 bands over 2 stages as well as talks by authors and chefs etc then you reserve tickets by e-mailing thumb.to.the.string@gmail.com and then paying for them on the door.  There's a Facebook page and here are the details of the event.  I'll be behind the bar for a bit of the day as well as roadie-ing so if you do come down, please say hi.

Thanks for sticking with me a bit there.  Hopefully I've not turned you all away permanently.

Talk to you all soon

Andy