While deep in the all-new, all-dancing, partially-healthy lifestyle I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing this year I fig­ured I was long over­due for a bit of back work. My pos­ture isn’t that bad (in my incred­i­bly unpro­fes­sional opin­ion) , but if I go too long with­out a mas­sage I tend to form large knot­ted bun­dles of oxygen-starved back flesh. If left alone I’m sure these knots would form a large cara­pace across my back.

So Tues­day night I headed down to the local Osteopath for the first of hwta Im assum­ing will be many ses­sions. The Osteopath men­tioned that her job was to ensure I didn’t have to return, but really who wants to work them­selves out of a job? She began the treat­ment with a ultra-detailed ques­tion­naire about my body and it’s pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids. Diges­tive Sys­tem? (No prob­lems there!) Repro­duc­tive sys­tem? (No kids, but every­thing appears to work fine).

She ran me though a few stretch­ing exer­cises to deter­mine the dam­age, then pro­ceeded to bend the liv­ing hell out of my extrem­i­ties all the while calmly ask­ing if it hurt. Of course it did. I’m not Gumby! As she yanked, poked and prod­ded things that really had no busi­ness being yanked, poked or prod­ded the process worked won­ders and I felt the tight mus­cles unknit them­selves with­out Gor­dian intervention.

At the end of the ordeal she gave me the ver­dict: my ham­strings are too short. Before I see her again I need to per­form a series of stretches designed to cause max­i­mum pain while “stretch­ing out” my ham­strings. Two min­utes of blind­ing pain a day, but if I don’t do them I know the Osteo/Sadist will be bend­ing me into even more com­plex shapes. And I’m pay­ing for it by the hour.

Vin­tage Web Design. A very nice col­lec­tion there. Maybe I need to plan for Panama V3.

Since post­ing the res­o­lu­tions I’ve not so much attacked them as I’ve taken a few cau­tious side­ways glances at them.

This changed when Mike gave me a chance to tackle num­ber 5: Home brew beer. For Xmas Jus­tine had given him a voucher for Bar­l­ey­corn Brew­ery, a small brew-your-own ware­house in Oakleigh.

Our group of four (myself, Mike,Stephan and Chris) met up on Sat­ur­day to cre­ate the unap­petis­ingly named Mike Juice. We spent the first few min­utes try­ing beers to deter­mine what we’d be mak­ing (prob­a­bly too long as the “assis­tant” kept com­ing up and ask­ing if we’d made a deci­sion yet). The win­ner of that lit­tle con­test was a Stella Artois knock-off called Stella! Strangely enough Mar­lon Brando imper­son­ations were kept to a minimum.

The process itself was idiot proof: Mea­sure out ingre­di­ents into coloured bowls, add con­tents to large vat of boil­ing water at spec­i­fied inter­vals. While we tended to the heady brew Chris — being the only one smart enough to bring a cam­era — snapped off a tonne of pho­tos, which will hope­fully be avail­able on his Flickr account soon (hint hint!)

Once the brew­ing was com­plete and Mike had emp­tied the con­tents of the vat into it’s new plas­tic drum home we zig-zagged across town to the cen­tre of Oak­leigh for some well deserved lunch. We go back Feb­ru­ary 2nd for The Offi­cial Bottling.

The whole thing was hell of a lot eas­ier than what I thought it would be. When I go it on my own (note use of ‘when’, not ‘if’) I’ll be a lot more con­fi­dent. Sure it’ll be a lot more inten­sive with­out a mas­sive boiler or mechan­i­cal mixer, but there’s very lit­tle chance of me com­pletely balls­ing it up. And now that I’ve said that there’s a very good chance that I’ll com­pletely balls it up.

Pixel cook­ies! Oh. Hell. Yes.

Fel­low­ship of the Ring — HD vs DVD. So thats what all the fuss is about!