Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Primal Board Games!

The only one that comes to mind is Stone Age - a pretty cool game. Anyways that's not what we're here for. It's been quiet here since January and well I've been meaning to get back to it but I (for the short time at least) have the time, the motivation and something to actually blog about!

Yes, my twitter bio claims I am a blogger so I should either become one again, or change it - urgh, online profile updates are so lame...
I'd say there's been two big changes for me so far this year - a change to primal living and a dive into the hobby of board games.
Both kicked off at around the same time, late January and for the most part it's all gone very well and I will probably share more of these stories in the future.


I have my good friend Wilson to thank for introducing me to Primal Living. He suffers (or maybe it should be suffered) from arthritis and discovered that if he excluded grain, processed sugar etc and just ate more natural, organic meats, vegs and fruits that not only did this mean he didn't have to take injections to relieve pain, but he lost weight, full of energy, felt great and didn't have to worry about portion sizes etc. It all sounded great so naturally I was intrigued - my diet was not great but being a coeliac (gluten intolerance) - I was almost half way there (In fact, we all have a natural gluten intolerance).
I won't break it all down here, that may come later, but basically around February time I went all in and tried to move to a Primal diet. It's not perfect and sometimes I slip up but most of the time it's not that challenging to keep it up. In fact I'm coming up to the 6 month anniversary of this change and I think I will have to take some progress pictures to go with the "before" pictures I've already snapped. I can confirm that progress initially was very good, but the last 4-6 weeks it feels like I've been away most weekends and so I have slipped but still am happy with how far I've come and the progress still to make.
I was hoping to be in better shape by the time of my birthday which is in a couple of days but I'm going to readjust my goals and aim to be happy with my image by the end of the year.

The other thing mentioned above was the new found interest in Board Games. I've dabbled in some board games before and no I don't mean the more mainstream games such as Monopoly and Risk etc but encouraged by Jeff Cannata's insistence of bringing up board games on the VIDEO game podcast Weekend Confirmed I tried to find people that met up to play board games.
To my luck, I found a group in nearby Telford and that's pretty much where I've found myself most Thursday evenings. My aim has always been to try new games and I've even starting to build my own collection and get my friends to give them a go, share the wealth and whatnot. The people I meet up with on Thursday are much older than me but that hasn't really been a factor - it feels like they're a generation that grew up with board games where I'm part of a generation that has grown up on video games - what I'm trying to say is they're just as nerdy about board games as people my age are about video games. The board game night is run by Paul who runs a board game shop so he does pretty good business off us guys buying games directly from him.
I may mention more board games on the blog but I don't want to turn into review posts. I got stuck in that rut before as I felt it would be something to encourage people to keep coming back to the blog but I simply don't have the readership plus I ended up getting burnt out - The pressure of writing a video game review, film review etc every week just became too much of a time sink that it stopped being fun.
No, what I plan to do is to make the blog more personal like it was during its early years. I went back and read some of those early posts and I was surprised and pleased at the "voice" of the posts (but I may just be biased). I'm not sure I am able to write with that same voice any more but I'm going to give it a go.

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