Great effort with the fitness! Must feel amazing to get so many compliments! Diet plays a massive massive part of it and it's so difficult to make those changes; shit food is everywhere and is so easy to pick up for a quick snack and satisfy those cravings.

Sounds like things are going great in general, happy for you pal!

Good luck with the quitting, I can't imagine how difficult it must be! What techniques have you tried? I've been away this week, but my previous week was fine, met up with a couple of friends for drinks on Saturday which was nice, one of which I hadn't seen for 20 years which was cool.

Same reason dentists dont stand in the xray room with you, the dose makes the poison

We're talking about supermarket checkouts? I don't think anyone's bagged anything for me... maybe once or twice ever...

I'm absolutely happy to do it myself, eggs first tins on top...

And as for leaning and pulling large packs of beer across the scanner whilst sat down, nope, I wouldn't want to do that all day.

It will if you do it all day every day at awkward angles. Like I said tills have been redesigned so it's not like it was.

Yes I'm saying I'm happy to bag my own shopping because I only have to do it once per trip. I think it's a good thing staff choosing not to injure themselves.

basic movements like putting things in a bag, really shouldn't be ruining your body...

also your post reads like you're happy that they aren't doing it... but then you go on to talk about how you can't do it and appear to want it to be done... it's very confusing

Very easy to setup. Learning temperature control and having a nice flame over just when pizza goes in took a bit of practicing, but after a while easy. They also have nice resources with good tips. I’ve been very happy with it.

Fitness classes are my jam right now. I'm getting compliments left/right/center these days. I plateued weight wise at 12 stone this past week, but it is going down slowly. I'm slowly upping the morning youtube pilates with fancier moves and moving more.

I've avoided my main triggers: cola, chocolate, processed sugars for 6 weeks now without really missing it (coffee, tangerine / banana instead), but might need to reduce my intake if I want to beach body ready by summer.

Date #2 with beauty went really well (after an initial clarification of "hey, we're not just hanging out, right?"), and am currently planning Date#3.

House is getting more walls/ceilings torn down, so everything tastes once more of dust.

Work is shite, but it's mostly my fault as I'm distracted by life.

Oooh. Not heard of ooni before. Just had a look, they look nice. Easy to use / setup?

Tried to quit smoking again so I was an absolute JOY to live with. Managed 9 months last time, two days this time. Oh well. How about you @blackn1ght@feddit.uk?

I live fairly close to the distillery - it’s a fun trip, even if you don’t drink. Like most gins they just use grain alcohol so all the flavour comes from the choice of botanicals and they seemed to care about the quality.

I prefer Hendricks myself but Bombay do a lot of very good special editions.

I'm drinking it right now. I'm a scotch/bourbon guy but I drink it neat, so if I just want a light cocktail it's usually gin and club soda. It's hard to beat ~$25 for 1.75 liters for a pretty good but nothing special cocktail liquor.

I quite like it.

I see it quite often, and order it myself as I quitr like it and the distillery is only 30 minutes from where I live.

I know you didn't ask but my favorite gin is Xorigeur Menorcan gin but that may be as a result of where I drink it most!! :)

(AI warning note) I see while their sales have dropped about 25% in the UK since peak GIN-mania, it's actually picking up more of the overall market share. So 12% market share in 2020, 17% in 2024

Planetary cut and dry is league better of a rum

Due to a calendar issue we'd organised my partner's parents to stay AND I was going to visit mine... needless to say, I didn't cancel my booking

So, I spent 2 days catching up, came home AND had a day chillaxing at home... absolute bargain 🕺🏻🎉

How was your week?

Travel for work during the week was not so great, but the long weekend was nice. We had friends over for BBQ on Saturday and today we made pizza in the Ooni bought on a whim 18 months ago. My wife absolutely nailed the sour dough and the pizzas came out great.

I used to drink it all the time. That it Gordon's gin, what ever was on special

Ideal.

I reckon it's a combo of a few things. Mostly for this one, it had both the business and consumer sides of the equation kind of line up at the same time.

On the business side, one of the biggest factors was we'd just come out the other side of a recession. This meant interest rates were low and there were a load of people looking for new jobs/businesses and there were a lot of cheap places to set up that business. This naturally meant there were all sorts of new businesses being created around that time.

One such boom was small batch alcohol, because ultimately if you're good at it, you stand to turn relatively cheap ingredients into quite a bit of money. You'll probably notice modern craft beer really kicked up a gear around the same time.

Interestingly for this one, a lot of the early craft gin places didn't really set out to be gin-makers, they want(ed) to make whisky. The problem with whisky is you can't even call it whisky unless it's at least 3(?) years old, and it's not really going to be any good unless it's at least 2-3x that. So what do these distilleries do whilst they're waiting for their whisky to age and hoping they don't go bust? They make quicker to produce spirits such as gin!

Now, small batch is more expensive to make than the industrialised big brands, but gin has the benefit that there's a lot more freedom for the maker to mess around with the flavour. This allowed gin-makers to make their gins stand out against the competition and the sector was born.

There were also a few law changes around the world in a few places that made this kind of business a bit easier to set up.

Now on the consumer side there was this big resurgence in cocktail culture going on. So you've got all these interesting new flavours coming out of these small batch distilleries, what are bartenders who want to twist an old recipe into something new going to go for? It's going to be these cool new gins. Less cutting edge bars want to seem like the cutting edge ones so they start stocking the same spirits. As you'd imagine this creates a feedback loop that means the gins become successful and you see them behind more bars and on more shelves. After a while it's just kinda everywhere

All that, plus gin drinks just make some tasty cocktails and easy mixed drinks

(Sorry that was longer than I expected when I started)

I did.

Once.

This sounds right up my street, maybe with a scoop of ice cream…

Amazing! Thanks so much for the full recipes!! The banana bread & cookies are certainly worth a try. The sweet potato one might be a step too far for a non American, although I could see elements working in other desert style dishes. Saved for future inspiration, off to check if I have some overly ripe bananas to try that recipe this week…

Tried a bottle years ago. Like others have said. Much better and cheaper is available