Quiet

A quiet weekend this week – I stayed in on Saturday and made a point of not having anything to drink. It was a genuinely satisfying venture: I managed to tidy my room, finish the second draft of this short-story I've been trying to work on since February, and finish the b3ta version of a running website:

Our running site

The website needs more feedback and input from the adrgnr team, but at least it doesn't look as crappy as it did last week. It's php based and written using the Eclipse PDT tool, not that anyone is fussed about these nörtti details.

I spent the whole of Saturday night being creative, and was up until 6am.



I got this completely awesome hat from the shop on Saturday. You can do that when you aren't doing anything else. This is what freedom is about.



I was out in the forest on Sunday afternoon. I'm in an Adventure Race in two weeks time with my brother, and these are practice runs. I think that my practice has paid off – I can control the bike over the rougher terrain a lot smoother than I could, and I have a better feel for the bike as well. I came back with about 45 pictures from the forest, 5 of which are worth sharing with people. I don't want to post loads of pictures in one entry, so I'll post the rest of them next week or something.



The Ants were out in force in the forest today, and there were some parts where the path was like a little moving carpet. Usually I didn't see them until the bike was just about to go over them. I don't know how many I took out today, I suspect that having a tyre roll across them doesn't hurt that much, they certainly didn't seem to mind.

The difference a night can make

On Friday night I posted this slightly naff review of the last 12 months, and I posted it as a list of points that had or hadn't changed during the last year. I only posted it on the My Opera blog, because it refers to that blog.

I think that I need to review some of the points made in that post:

My secundigravida friend is no longer secundigravida. As of 19.57 (Finn time) on the 21st June she is the proud mother of Daniel Andrew. 3200 g, healthy and happy – congratulations to Vicky and James.

One of the people who I no longer talk to got in touch unexpectedly. I wish she hadn't, but she was a good friend once. I'll see how it goes, if it doesn't work out then I can stop talking to her again.

She's got this stupid idea that I'm going to get back with my ex... I don't know where or why she thinks that I would do that, it really isn't going to happen.
And thirdly....

My straight friend who I went out with last weekend is an excellent fellow. I don't exactly push straight people to come to gay venues, but I do think it would be nice if just occasionally the friends who drag me out with them to straght venues would actually consider coming out to one of our places. They usually refuse - what exactly do they think is going to happen? The friend I went out in Brighton with last week is a better friend than that – having been out to straight places last week, this week we bar-hopped around Kemptown (Brighton's gay quarter), drank beers on the beach and sat around some big fire that someone had, wandered round the Laines before heading back to Kemptown and closing down a couple of places. A most excellent night's entertainment – we got squiffy and spoke to complete strangers, danced and fooled around in several places, and finally left town at about 5am. 

After a cup of tea at my friend's house I got the 6.19 train from Preston Park to Gatwick. I got to Gatwick at 7.00, and had a 47 minute wait for the Crawley train. I spent the time in Starbuck's drinking a White Mocha Coffee and eating cake. Gatwick was really crowded, and drifting round the airport slightly drunk and spacy from lack of sleep was pretty good fun. I finally got home at about 8.10. So I'm not totally disappointed with Brighton anymore – I just need to find good people to go with.

Dress code at the Fortuens of War.

I think I had about 2 hours sleep – I can't sleep when I've got things that I want to do. At 11 I headed into town to get things for breakfast, and then watched the Grand Prix De France on the telly. Boy Wonder Lewis Hamilton didn't do so well – 10 place penalty from the Canadian GP followed by a penalty in the early stages of the races saw him pretty much stuck at the back. I think that part of the problem is that he is is not getting the support that he needs from the McLaren team – Hamilton doesn't seem to have anyone talking him through the situations where he gets into trouble, and Ron Dennis doesn't seem to want to take responsibility either.

Never mind. I finished Sunday with a trip out to Tilgate Forest on the bike. I'm really starting to explore the forest now, and I even have a pretty good idea of where I am most of the time. I've found a couple cool trails – one of them is the trail I was on last week when my brakes went. It's less terrifying when you can slow down. I found another trail this week which is awesome. At a point in the trail the trees and bushes just part, and you have this fabulous view across the valley in the middle of the forest. I tried to take a picture of it:


View across the valley on the Valley View Trail

But I don't have the camera which can really get the image properly, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't take it mountain biking.

Metsätyttö

It's been one of those weekends where I didn't really get the chance to stop and do very little. 

I stayed in on Friday night and worked on this website for this run which my brother and I are doing in October. If you've never hand-coded a website before, you might not realise how long it can take – it's at about 4 hours work so far. I could just use a website editor, but I'd rather not. I used to make websites for a living, and I find working with code pretty therapeutic. It's like clay to me.

So Saturday night was a trip to Brighton with a friend from work. There isn't much to report from it: we went to one nice venue, and the rest were all straight ones. That's mostly because one of the guys who turned up wasn't so keen on gay venues. I'm getting slightly vexed with Brighton: every time I go to Brighton I go with straight people to straight places, and while there is nothing wrong with that, why go to Brighton at all?? 

So that was disappointing, but at least nobody died.

Deep in Tilgate Forest. Tilgate Forest is the forest just to the south of Crawley. It used to be part of a massive estate, but now it's just a small area outside of Crawley. I spent maybe an hour cruising round the forest – there are some nice, and some pretty tricky trails in the forest. There are still a few puddles, and the mud in them is deadly: because the soil round here is fine and a bit sandy it turns into quicksand when it gets wet. The puddles trap you, it's almost impossible to bounce straight through them, like I would do when I lived in Bedfordshire. Bedfordshire is mostly clay, so puddles are easier up there!

My problem with puddles is exacerbated by the tyres on the bike. I still have the shop fitted tyres, and of course, most people who buy MTBs use them for a few weeks in the summer and never go off-road, so shops fit budget rate road-tyres.

Looking back across Crawley. I like that in this picture you can't really see the town, although you are looking that way.

I have a problem with my brakes as well. For the same reason that that tyres are a bit weak, the brake blocks didn't last that well either. I've had the bike about 5 months, and the brake blocks are pretty dead. They gave up on me while I was in the forest trying to get down a really thin, quite steep trail – not the best time for brakes to get a bit flaky. So there are a couple of things which I need to fix before July 12th.

The Ant. There were lots of ants in the forest.

Speed, speed, speed

It's 10,30 and I'm on the train out of Kråli. It's not the fastest train to Victoria Station, London, but it's not the slowest either. I'm 30 minutes late because I couldn't get to sleep quickly the night before. In today's Britain there is usually weekend engineering work on the railways somewhere, and this weekend it's on the Victoria line through London and on the train line to Birmingham - I finally arrive in town about 2 hours late. Pretty good for a Saturday.

First thing was to meet an old friend from University. All of a sudden he has two children! Very cute. Rest of the evening quite - watched a movie (City of God, amusing but not realistic) with Brother then went to bed and slept pretty badly.

The next morning we were up bright and early for the Kenilworth Rotary Club's Two Castles 10k Run. There were about 2,500 runners there - the weather was fantastic, although not as hot as it was in Oslo. A nice course from Warwick Castle to Kenilworth Castle and through some of the Warwickshire countryside. I've never done the run before, it's mostly slightly uphill, which is a nice challenge - I'd like to do it again, it was a fun race. I kept a nice even pace for most of the race and didn't try to push myself too hard, managing to stay at a pace which I was happy with for the whole course.


537 Coming into Kenilworth Castle. Picture by my sister in law, who would have done me as well but I was on the wrong side of the track where she couldn't really see me.

The time. My training run is (ironically) 11.3 km, and my best time for that is 1.06:43. This means a 10k should be 57 minutes, or there about. I thought that because of the crowd I may have to slow it down a bit. My time came up as about 54:10, better than I'd expected, and a personal best. The time is approximate: we were running with these ankle chips, so I didn't time that accurately, but I'm sure that I'm not far out. The numbers will get published soon enough. It's the fastest pace I've made for that distance at about 8:45 minutes to the mile, although at the start I was going quicker. I know that I can do it faster, and I felt a bit bad for not keeping the pace for the whole course, but I'm still a rookie runner with only 10 months running. Heroics next year.

My brother finisehd in about 48 minutes. My running buddy Rick was in Southend doing the Southend-on-Sea Half Marathon.


Cool news: we have our final two races for the rest of the season planned out and booked!. July 12th we are Adventure Running in Bracknell Forest. This means cross-country running for 5-10 miles and mountain biking for anouther 10-20, with a mystery challenge that is revealed on the day. It's the first Adventure Race we've done, and it sounds really cool - I love going off-road!

Our final outdoor event this year is the Great North Run on October 5th. It's a half-marathon, and we are running for Epilepsy Action. We're working on a website which I'm hoping to have up and working this time next week, so folks can check it out and see what we're doing, and why. :D


Team "Low Fliers", next in action on July 12th.

I got back late Sunday night because I had to stay and watch the Canadian GP with my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law Lisa is a huge GP fan - more than anyone else in the family. It was a pretty exciting race - the track was falling apart, Lewis Hamilton screwed up and crashed into Kimi Räikkönen in the pit lane, Polish racer Kubica won his first ever GP for BMW Sauber, and David Coulthard finished on the podium. Cool.

Fusion

The exciting but pointless midweek post.

This has, actually been the most genuinely exciting Wednesday that I have ever had since that week in November when I went on holiday with Sandy and got drunk every day.

It started in the morning when the police stopped me on my bike. I was wheeling my bike down this no-cycling alley, and got stopped by the coppers at the other end. Admittedly, had the rozzers not been there I would have cycled, and the pigs were actually there because they had had complaints about the number of people cycling down the alleyway. Shame on me.

Then work. I had a pretty eventful day at work, but I'm not allowed to say how. Suffice it to say that there were many events, and they were mostly good. That's all that you need to know.


Mainline through Crawley. The Crawley Model Railway, through Goff's Park.

I've just been to a talk on Nuclear Fusion, the power source of the future. We have about 50 years of oil and gas, although that's pretty frakking hard to estimate with any degree of accuracy, and maybe 200 years of coal. Most forms of renewable energy do, in fact, suck, which leaves nuclear. Nuclear fission, in addition to being potentially quite dangerous, isn't a long-term solution anyway: we have maybe 100 years of uranium left, which means it's all gonna be burnt up before coal. So that leaves Fusion. We have about 1000 years of Fusion energy, if only we can get the frikking thing to work.

If you are reading this on blogspot, then it's cross posted from my current blog at MyOpera. I'm testing out Blogspot. At the moment, I'm 50-60 either way.

Weird

This is cross posted from my other blog.

This has been a weird weekend.

I was going to go to a friend's birthday party on the Friday, but had to give it a miss due to the world's most stupid sports injury. So that was a shame. I had a constriction injury on my knee, caused by a badly fitting sock. Injured by a 45cm long piece of fabric - proof of "stupid design", if you needed it.

Things were a lot better on Saturday though. I was in London again, on my way to see this show, which the company I work for had gotten us tickets for. I went partly because of some curiosity about the show, and partly to see people from where I work. Our company is spread across three sites, and I'm on one of the smallest of the sites, in Crawley. In fact, I was the only one from Crawley to go, so it was a work do, but didn't feel like a work do at all because I didn't know many of the people there.

I'd arranged to meet my colleague Samantha (Sam) for coffee before the show, and we met at the First Out Café Bar in Soho. It's round the back of the Centre Point building and about 100 metres from the the theatre, which was useful. First Out Café is also the only gay café I've ever heard of, which was cool, although there were a couple of straight people in there kissing, which at lunch time is just offensive... not because it's a gay café, but because people kissing anywhere at lunchtime is just plain annoying.

The show was “We Will Rock You,”, this cheesy excuse to play a lot of Queen songs and make a big pile of money. They have this flimsy excuse for a story to play the songs too. On the whole the show was fun, but I was a bit disappointed with it as well. I thought that the scripted parts should have been cheesier and camper, and I was annoyed by the way they had changed the lyrics in the Queen songs (sacrilege, surely). And I don't care how good they may be, but nobody can do Freddie Mercury the way Freddie Mercury did. But it's not a bad show, just not a show that you have to see before you die.

Sam and I left the show and went to wander round London, looking for somewhere to eat. We ended up at this Italian restaurant somewhere in Holborn (Trattoria Verdi, in Southampton Row). The food was reasonable and the table service was good – and all the staff were real Italians too! After that we took a nice unscheduled walk around Aldwych, before meeting Sam's husband Griff in The Crown pub, Oxford Street for a couple of Britneys. All very civilised.

I could have gone home after that, at about 10.30, but I really wanted another drink and I craved the company of sapphists, so I headed to the Candy Bar in Soho. But the Candy Bar wanted £6 to get in. I was of the opinion that that price would have been fine if I was with friends out for a night, but just for a solo-mission end of the night nigthcap was probably a little bit steep, so I headed into Soho in search of somewhere less pricey, arriving at the Admiral Duncan at about 11. The AD is one of the best known venues in London. I've never been in because it's mostly a guys' venue, but it was free so I ventured in. Then I went outside to stand on the pavement and talk to people there.

On the pavement outside the Admiral Duncan I met someone who I hadn't seen for about 10 years. And he remembers my ex. And he tells me that the Clarence Hotel in Bedford closed down years ago and Russell and Abdou left, and that the Barleymow is now being run by lesbians (that's probably not a bad thing), and that he really, really, remembers my ex very very well, and is pretty glad that she's my ex now.

So, anyway, eventually the bar closed, and I went back to the underground. There was a big party going on on the London underground – the new mayor of London has banned alcohol from the 1st of June, so the London party scene responded by having a huge party on the circle line on the 31st. Excellent. I didn't go to the party but on the streets above we knew that it was going on, and then they closed the underground down, and all the boys in blue disappeared from the streets to go keep an eye on the Circle Line, heh heh.

I drifted round Soho, talking to and being talked to by tipsy strangers, chancers and just the lost. I got chatting with this (straight) South African girl, who had weekend objectives. Hers were to get a picture of a police officer, which was thwarted slightly by the dearth of coppers on the surface. Mine, incidentally, were to get the phone numbers of two women*, and the lovely woman generously helped by giving me hers. I told her I'd text on Monday to see how she did, but I'll probably forget, or chicken out, or something.

Then I met this other guy with a weekend objective: he was a psychotherapist, but is retraining as a film producer. He needed to someone to be his muse, had been talking to people all evening, and just happened to spot me. He wanted to talk to me because I look different to most people... telling a woman she looks different is probably one of the easiest ways to get her to talk to you, as it appeals straight to one's vanity, does it not? We ended up sitting in some doorway smoking cigarettes and discussing Kierkegaard, which is a pretty unusual way to end an evening.

Oh, the fripperies you indulge in when you are alone.

I got me this Heart Rate Monitor watch on Sunday, on a whim. I really wanted to go work-out in the afternoon, but my knee isn't 100% yet so I'm resting until tomorrow – I've a 7 mile run with my running buddy scheduled. Instead I monitored my heart rate for sitting around the house. It is about 60 for sitting around, rising to 70 when caffeinated. About 90 – 100 for cleaning the kitchen, shooting up to 130 when I run up the stairs. There are two flights to run up to get to my room.

It's currently 57.


Sussex House in Crawley, one of the town's most important eyesores, has been demolished. It's all gone now, but last week this much was left. It's being redeveloped as shiny new soulless boxes and mindless consumer outlets, which is something to look forward to.


*Set by Rick, following the England - USA 2 - 0 result on Wednesday.

Vai niin

I've been blogging for ages now, religiously writing about my life for the entertainment of friends and complete strangers alike. I'm currently on my.opera.com, which is a nice enough site, but I'm beginning to outgrow that site a little. So, Blogspot is about the biggest blog site, and it makes sense to see about putting one here.

I'm going to cross post on the two sites for a bit, and see if I prefer this site or not.

=)