This morning I am working from home… The picture above might give you a sense of why 😉
Author: Maleghast (Page 20 of 38)
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OK, so I am giving Nanowrimo another go – it’s been six years since I did it last…
Here are the first 500 or so words – I’m ahead of the curve, finishing day one at 1,824 words so far…
The smell of blood is thick in the air as you come to, ears ringing and eyes full of tears. You blink repeatedly trying to clear your vision; for some reason you have an unconsidered mental block on using your hand, so you keep blinking. Eventually, after what seems like an age but is probably only a handful of seconds, reality starts to swim into focus. People had tried to explain to you what it was like to be in close proximity of an explosion, but you are starting to realise that there is nothing like the real thing when it comes to comprehension. Everyone seems to be moving in slow motion, but you quickly realise that this is only an illusion that is predicated on the relative silence. It is not actually silent, there is a continued and terrible ringing in your ears, but the effect is that you cannot seem to detect the normal sounds of the chaos you can see around you through the aqueous lens of your tear-filled eyes. There is Fletcher, running across your field of vision, well trying to run anyway, waving around the bloody stumps of his wrists, his mouth distended in what you can only assume is a prolonged and bestial scream, except that you cannot hear it. The vicinity is filled with shredded paper hanging in the air, and the odour of cordite is actually overwhelming now that you have noticed it. You look down at the hand you were instinctively not using to wipe your eyes, and you realise that like Fletcher you are injured, though not as seriously. Still there is blood and wotnot all over your right hand, which despite this does appear to work when you try to curl and flex your fingers. Your left hand is immobile, but at least it is whole, and so you turn your attention to your legs. They appear to be in passable working order. The rest of your body is now starting to report a kind of general level of pain that you think must be the bare minimum you should expect after being next to an exploding bomb, as the adrenaline runs out and physical realities start to seep into your consciousness. Carefully you push yourself to your feet with your better hand, and cast around for the exit. You know perfectly well where it should be, but since a bomb went off in here you would not be surprised to discover that there might be a more convenient route out of the thankfully ground floor office and into the arms of paramedics that are doubtless congregating at that very moment. You smile to yourself as you spot a large hole in the office wall and begin to head for it; the smile leaves you in an instant when you nearly trip over Donaldson. No matter how hard you might want to believe the opposite there she is, and it looks very plausible that she is dead.
Let’s see if I can get to the end…
So, those with an eagle eye may have noticed that I, of all people, have been mentioning the fact that I’ve been starting to go running on Facebook and Twitter. Now why on Earth would I do that? Anyone who knows me well, but has not known me for more than 17 or 18 years might not believe that I’ve ever been a runner. To be fair I’ve never been a particularly __good__ runner, and I am mindful of the fact that having been a runner in my teenage years, at boarding school, should not allow me to misguidedly think that I can easily recapture that level of fitness. After all it was roughly 21 to 17 years ago, and while I’m not __old__ I am older. So why would I put myself through the horror of trying to become a runner once more?
Well, I have gone through short periods of finding some success with running in the last 8 years, but not really in the last 4 years, so it’s not actually that long ago that I have done __some__ running, and so it’s not quite as mad as it might sound. Still, having made great strides (if you’ll pardon the pun) with adopting cycling for my personal fitness and as one of the core choices supporting my decision last year to slowly and sustainably change my lifestyle with a view to better safeguarding my long-term health, what need is there for running? The answer is quite simple – it’s not really very safe for me to be out cycling 10 to 15 miles in the pre-dawn mornings or the post-dusk evenings that I have access to as a working stiff. My vision is more than good enough in fine and light conditions, though I do have to take particular care with regard to looking over my right shoulder, with the defecit in my vision being mostly in my right eye, but I am of the opinion that it is other people actually seeing me, even with lights and high-vis / reflective gear that is more worrisome. I am intending to continue to cycle at the weekends and on days when I am not working, and of course once the year rocks around to light mornings once more then I want to be putting in as many miles as I can on Suzie, but in the meantime I am worried that my fitness is going to suffer if I don’t take up something as an alternative, an activity that I can easily and cheaply partake of 4 or 5 days a week. Thus I have started running. This is not as grand or foolhardy as it sounds, I am taking it easy, keeping an eye on my knee (the one that’s damaged), and not going all out to immediately be running half-marathons by Christmas, but listening to my body and yet allowing myself to push enough that I am doing meaningful exercise.
The thing is, I’m a bit of a neophyte as to the science of all of this… I’ve had one good recommendation on Twitter, that I should buy a heart-rate monitor and use it to achieve and maintain a target heart-rate, while also using it to time myself so that I run for an allotted and increasing amount of time, rather than worry about distance, and this seems to be a very good bit of advice on the surface… The thing is that I’ve not even the first clue about which brand of heart-rate monitor to buy, let alone how much I should expect to spend or once I’ve got the thing how to work out what my target heart-rate should be. I am still managing to lose weight by increments, and my primary motivation for exercising at the moment is to support and strengthen the weight-loss objective, but I’d like to think that I might be able to get a little bit fit(ter) as well, over time… Do I focus on fat-burning, do a bit of both (i.e. fat-burning AND cardio), or do I wait for fitness to come as the next stage after I achieve my target weight? I’m sure I could find answers to these questions on the ‘Net, but I’m just as sure that I could find five different answers (at least) on the ‘Net and I’m not really sure who to believe…
I suppose what I am asking for is some guidance from friends / readers who have gone through this process, so based on actual experience and wotnot. If you’ve bought a heart-rate monitor or you’ve got some good advice about training regimes and so forth, then please let me benefit from the wealth of your experience, and beyond that, if you can recommend any good fitness / running / cycling websites to me then than would also be really cool.
Right, back to the lazing around and reading… 😉
…hopefully Bill Bryson will forgive the shameless poaching / plagiarism inherent in my using that title (above!), and we can move on to other things – call that a pre-emptive diffusing of flamebait, ok?
Anyway, I arrived in The TRNC – The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus – on Saturday evening, on time amazingly after the chaos of the journey, and since then I have been doing very littletm…
There has been a lot of spending time chatting with Mum and Dad, there’s been some running, swimming and walking, and there has been some reading and sleeping as well… I really can’t recommend this delightful place enough! Oh no, hold on a moment… No I’ve thought about it and you wouldn’t like it really *wink*.
So far the only deficiency I have been able to spot with the whole arrangement has been the absence of a certain special lady (yes I am referring to Lee-Anne, in case you were raising an eyebrow), but that will all be dealt with on Saturday evening as she will be arriving here, to spend eight days with me and my folks, under the “almost North African, almost MIddle Eastern” sun – hurrah!
Right, I’m off to get an early night so that I can go running in the morning – yes you did read that right, and I’ve not been replaced by an alien…
G’night!
P.S. I’m thinking of something interesting to say about Milliband the Younger, but so far I’m just stunned by how much he wants to be “not the old guard” and yet how much he sounds like Tony “the hair” Blair when he delivers a speech! Also, what’s wrong with being “Red Ed” as leader of the LABOUR PARTY? Ah well, I guess that there’s a reason that “plus ça change…” is a saying…
I spent the weekend engaging in Cross Country Pantomime(tm)*, and my good friend Si got a picture of me, in kit, that I not only don’t hate, but actually quite like 🙂 Thanks dude!
* This term is copyright Ian Andrews and is an affectionately laconic term for LARP
It’s been a busy week…
What with the car drama – my alternator died and on it’s way to Hell it cooked my battery – and getting ready to go to Belgium, not to mention the second week of “Sprint 0” at work I’ve not really felt as though my feet touched the floor…
I would write more, but I have to get some template tuning done before I leave early to pick up the car from the dealership in Reading – they love me there now based on how much money I’ve spent on the car in the last four months… I think that early next year if all is well with finances that I might have to trade the Civic in against something a little younger, preferably something still under warranty…
TTFN
So, it turns out that I did not manage to write anything here last week at all!
What did I get up to, I hear you ask? Oh hold on a minute, I can barely hear you there at the back my one reader 😉
Anyway, the week was a busy one; is there any other kind I have begun to wonder to myself..?
The week got off to a running start with many, many meetings at work, a trend that continued for most of the week, one way or another… We (in my team at the BBC) spent last week in the last round of planning for the next release phase, i.e. to get ready to do the work I was hired for, and as such, what with the Beeb having adopted SCRUM methodology there were certain processes to go through in order to make sure that all of the features we are going to approach in this release were storied, prioritised and scored. It may sound like a painful process, but by the time the end of the week came I felt as though we had a REAL sense of what we were going to do, how much work it was all going to be and that there was a real sense of scope and expectation. I have to say, without coming off all “SCRUM-evangelist” I hope, that it feels like a good way of working so far.
Friday was a little bit of a blip, a blip that ate into Thursday as well… Friday was the first public / out-of-team demo for the product that I am working on, and my colleague Mike and I had to scramble to get the thing ready. As with anything prepared in snatched moments and without a clear plan, something went not-quite-according-to-plan, but the overall reception was good and the people who matter – our project owner, his boss, and our project architect were all perfectly happy. More to the point, people from other teams were really supportive, and in the end all the wait-and-hurry-up was worth it.
I spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings with Lee-Anne, and we had a lovely time.. I’m consciously not going into minute detail for two reasons; I am not deluded into thinking that you all want to know what we cooked together, or what we talked about, but also because I am enjoying it being “just for us” a little bit too…
On Thursday evening I went, with Lee-Anne to see an old friend of hers in a pub off Tottenham Court Road and I think it went well; I really enjoyed meeting him and the others that he brought along. We spent the better part of the evening putting the world to rights(tm) and then headed back to Sevenoaks to crash out before the last schoolday of the week.
Friday was a “girls’ night out” for Lee-Anne, seeing some good friends that she’s not had a chance to catch up with for a while now, so I made my own plans, and we caught up again on Saturday afternoon evening, as I made my way over to Sevenoaks with Suzie (the Secteur – my bike). Saturday evening we went out to the movies to see Inception. No comment for now (as I am formulating my ideas for a longer post on the subject), beyond: AWESOME!
Sunday Lee-Anne had some more studying / writing to do for her OU course, so I made myself useful doing the shopping (on Suzie) and then going out for a nice long ride through the Kent Countryside. The hills around where she lives are still pretty f’ing tough, but I am getting better at dealing with them, which is a good sign I think.
And so it was Monday again before we knew it, and I was up early to get Suzie on the train to London before the cut-off for full-size bikes and in work for eight 🙂
More to follow – this week should be better for blogging…