Month: April 2020

Keeping going

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Another morning, another mile…

…because I’ve still got quite a lot to do this week, and also I woke up slightly later than I would have liked. I think that for the next few weeks, long runs will be a weekend thing, with maybe a middling one squeezed in on a Wednesday if possible. This would be a return to my marathon training pattern, which is no bad thing, given that marathon training is currently scheduled to start again in just over a month.

I’m happy to report that I weighed in this morning and lost 4lbs! I’d been struggling a bit for the last few weeks, as I’ve not been getting nearly as much exercise in as I did before the lockdown (when I was marathon training and doing a lot of walking in addition), and yet my marathon training appetite has not gone away. This last week, I’ve been a lot stricter and have reduced my portions. It’s obviously working, and I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, because I would love to be back at my target weight by the end of lockdown. I’m currently paying a reduced Slimming World fee so as to maintain access to the website – I also have the opportunity to attend group on Zoom if I want to, but I’m not sure if it’s for me, because being hard of hearing has always meant that I’ve found teleconferencing difficult in the past. (I could write a whole post about my anxieties about social distancing as a hard of hearing person – and I probably will at some point!)

It’s nice to be getting back to writing at the moment. I’ve got a small number of competitions to submit to over the next few weeks, and I’m also going to be spending May deciding which novel project I’m going to finalise over the summer, so that I can start querying agents again in the autumn. For various reasons relating to my career plans, late 2020/early 2021 is probably going to be the last substantial chunk of time for a good few years that I will be able to dedicate to writing, so I want to make the most of it.

I feel that being stricter about making sure my evenings are downtime-only has really helped with my productivity as well, because I don’t feel quite so burnt out. This is definitely something I’m going to continue with, even after lockdown has come to an end.

(Oh, and as promised: the link to the video of the group poem we did for poetry night, read by Pantisocracy Poetry founder Charlie. The first verse is mine!)

Getting to target at Slimming World
31st May 2018: with my brilliant and much-missed first consultant Katie, on the day I first got to target at Slimming World. I can’t wait to have that feeling again.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Roxette – ‘Dangerous’
Tight Fit – ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’
Roy Zimmerman & The ReZisters and Sandy Riccardi – ‘The Liar Tweets Tonight’

Phone Box Thursday: A93, Crathie

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Here’s another rural Scottish phone box from Mum and Dad’s travels.

Red phone box
Red phone box, A93, Crathie, 12th October 2019.

(Coordinates 57°03’99.3″N, 3°21’46.7″W.)

Stuff I learnt today: if you drop the wee Google Street View man onto the map around Crathie Kirk and Balmoral Castle, he turns into the Queen. Somehow I doubt she goes for walks along the A93!

(I wonder if it does the same for all of the Royal residences? I will resist checking, because I really don’t have that level of procrastination time available today.)

Anyway, this phone box is a lot better kept than most rural phone boxes in the UK. It’s super shiny and red, and there’s still an actual phone inside, which is unusual these days! Hopefully, this one is here to stay for some years yet.

Midway through a busy week

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Yet another mile this morning…

…because between writing, editing, admin and housework commitments, the to-do list has been pretty long this week, and so today has been as busy as the last two. I feel as though I’m getting a lot done though, which is great, and I’m still managing to make time for a bit of videogaming at the end of the day.

Today’s minor irritation was an interior door handle that has suddenly become loose and refuses to tighten up again. One more thing to look for when we brave the social distancing queues at B&Q later in the week!

Tomorrow is a ‘less admin, more writing’ day, which I’m looking forward to.

Cat on wheelie bins
This week’s ‘next door’s cat’ photo. Our wheelie bins provide a good vantage point.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Traditional – ‘Morning Has Broken’
Duran Duran – ‘Ball Of Confusion’
Vera Lynn – ‘We’ll Meet Again’
Roxette – ‘Dangerous’
Roy Zimmerman & The ReZisters and Sandy Riccardi – ‘The Liar Tweets Tonight’
Paula Abdul – ‘Straight Up’

And a bonus track that Geth was humming earlier:

Stan Bush – ‘The Touch’

Different types of creating

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Another quick mile today…

…because I had quite a few things on my to-do list today. Most of them took longer than expected and now there are quite a few things on my to-do list for tomorrow as well. Hopefully it will balance out throughout the week!

I’ve been preparing my submission for this month’s virtual poetry night group poem, which has required a bit more of an analogue approach than I’m used to. (Actually writing something out by hand and taking a photo of it? Yikes!) The group effort will go live tomorrow night, so I’ll post a link to it on Thursday.

In the meantime, I have a few more things to tick off my list before I can collapse with a videogame. Tomorrow I’m hoping for a slightly longer run and an equally productive day!

Summer hat
A sneak peak of my poem submission, without the poem bit, obviously. What could this old straw hat be representing?

Today’s earworm playlist:

Yasunori Mitsuda – ‘Where It All Began’
Duran Duran – ‘Union Of The Snake’
Mesh – ‘I Can’t Imagine How It Hurts’
Rihanna – ‘Russian Roulette’
New Radicals – ‘You Get What You Give’
T.Rex – ‘Metal Guru’

Cleaner, cosier, comfier

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Just a mile for this morning’s run…

…as I had various other things to do. Looking forward to some longer runs later in the week.

It was a bit of an odd weekend as I was trying to keep myself from feeling too down about the fact that if not for the coronavirus situation, I would have been in London running the marathon. By and large, I managed to distract myself with videogames, and I did a couple of short, fast runs to test out my pace a bit. I also spent most of yesterday trying to solve technical issues, as our SteamLink box was playing up again. I’ve told Geth that we have to keep an eye on it by turning it on every day, which provides lots of excuses for videogaming this week!

I’ve also managed to get a really good clean of the house done. I’d been neglecting it a bit, because I usually base my cleaning schedule around when we’re expecting company… and obviously we’ve not had any recently. However, I’ve spent the last couple of days getting on with it, and the house feels a lot nicer now.

I’ve got a small amount of day job work lined up for this week, which is great, and I’ve got several more housework-type tasks to get on with as well. I also want to finish my graphics for my next adventure game before the end of Camp NaNo on Thursday, so I’ve got plenty things to be getting on with! It’s nice, though, because it provides a bit of structure to the day. I’d obviously love it if I could just sit and play videogames the whole time, but I think I’d probably lose track of days and nights as a result! Oh, for those student summers when I’d regularly be playing until 7am and it didn’t matter…

I’m still getting a good few hours in every evening though, and I find I’ve got time for lots of reading and TV-watching too, so if I ignore the general world situation, life is quite relaxed at the moment!

Tikiboo Run London tights
Yesterday, I wore what should have been my race kit. I’m looking forward to taking these special London-themed Tikiboos out for some longer runs to make sure that they will hold up during the marathon.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Tomohito Nishiura – ‘Froenborg’
Yasunori Mitsuda – ‘Elysium, In The Blue Sky’
Abba – ‘I Have A Dream’

2019 Pizzas #20: Co-op Stonebaked Thin & Crispy Margherita Pizza

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I am so behind with my 2019 pizza logging. I’ve got a 2020 series (for a different foodstuff) planned as well, but that will have to wait for a while, as I’ve still got a few stragglers from last year to record.

Co-op pizza
Co-op Stonebaked Thin & Crispy Margherita Pizza.

I had this pizza at a buffet lunch in August last year. It had a really nice sauce and a good crispy texture – very pleasant.

I’m not usually a Co-op shopper but I’d be happy to have this one again!

parkrun tourism: Oriam

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I’m a bit behind with my parkrun tourism blogs, but seeing as we won’t be parkrunning again any time soon due to the coronavirus lockdown, it’s a good time for me to catch up with them!

Oriam parkrun
I love those pop-up signs and am always really disappointed if I’m visiting a parkrun and they don’t have one out! Geth had to ask the volunteers to put this one out again specially for the photo as they’d already packed it away by the time I finished. Sorry, volunteers, but one’s 100th parkrun only happens once!

On the 28th of December, while visiting Edinburgh for the Christmas period, Geth and I got in the car and drove to the new local parkrun at the Heriot-Watt University campus in Riccarton. The parkrun takes place in the woodland trail behind the Oriam sports facility (hence the name), which is a much nicer setting than I’d originally assumed – I’d thought we’d be doing laps of a football pitch or something!

Oriam parkrun was only a few weeks old when we attended, and the Scottish winter weather had resulted in a lot of mud. Like, a LOT of mud. More mud than I had ever seen on a parkrun course, by quite a considerable margin. The trail is not at all flat, either, so you’re basically staggering uphill through a quagmire at various points. Not one for your PB. (Apparently the mud was more manageable by the end of the winter – whether this was due to weather or land management I’m not sure – but I still don’t see this ever being a fast course!)

It also happened to be my 100th parkrun. I had hoped to do my 100th at home, either at Newcastle or Jesmond Dene, but a really nasty cold took me out of the game for most of December and so the date for my 100th ended up coinciding with my Christmas visit to my hometown. (I could have done it on Christmas Day… but I’ve never yet made a Christmas Day parkrun, as Christmas morning with the family is fairly sacrosanct, and 2019 was no exception!)

As such, while it was too busy and disorganised a time of year to organise any real celebration, I did wear my red 50 shirt for the very last time, and after the parkrun, Geth and I drove back to Mum and Dad’s and ate lots of the cake that we already had in due to it being Christmas. You can’t have a parkrun milestone without cake!

I will return to Oriam at some point… but it will almost certainly be in the summer!

Two metres, please

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I managed a slightly longer run this morning…

…and felt so much better for it! My shoulder pain seems to have subsided for now, although I will be putting it to the test with a bit more yoga later today. I’m hoping to get out for some longer runs over the weekend as well.

It’s a bit busy inside my head at the moment, and I feel like my creative ideas are not keeping their two metres of social distance apart from each other (or, you know, two centimetres, or whatever the correct scale is for inside your brain). I’m not working on as many creative projects as I usually am – I’m having a few months’ break from prose fiction writing in order to refresh (and it’s probably working because I miss my characters BADLY); I’m not writing as much poetry as usual due to poetry night having gone virtual like everything else (although I did enjoy writing my short verse today for the group poem we’re doing this month!); my adventure game creation process is currently in a drawing-bad-graphics phase rather than a writing-interactive-fiction phase; and I’m not actively seeking out writing competitions and submission requests and the like because it was starting to stress me out by the end of last year.

It’s good to take a semi-break, especially in the current circumstances (many writers have blogged more eloquently than me about the fact that a pandemic does not actually make for an efficient writing period, despite all the additional free time, because the ever-present sense of dread is something of a distraction). However, I’ve always found that if I don’t get my ideas out, they rattle around in my brain, and at the moment there are a lot of them in there.

I think I just need a couple of days to write freeform and see what happens. Maybe next week, if work is still quiet.

I’m looking forward to the weekend (such as it is) now. Geth and I will be doing the parkrun quiz tomorrow morning and taking a trip to the now-reopened B&Q on Sunday in order to get more gravel for the garden and stretch the car’s wheels (I’ve not turned on the engine since we returned from Inverness last month, and I know it needs to be done every now and then). I’ll be doing a couple of scenic runs and not thinking about the parallel universe and my parallel self’s trip to London. And, of course, I’ll be playing a lot of videogames.

As I mentioned last weekend, I won’t be doing diary posts tomorrow or Sunday – I’ll be sharing my running vlogs, though, and I’ve got a couple of review posts that will be going up. I’ll be back on Monday to update you all on my continued lockdown adventures 🙂

Cherry blossom
Today’s run was another sunny adventure with bright blue skies and beautiful blossom everywhere. This spring has been so good to us weather-wise.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Toto – ‘Africa’
Pulp – ‘Common People’
Survivor – ‘Eye Of The Tiger’
Timecop1983 and Primo – ‘My DeLorean’
Yasunori Mitsuda – ‘Elysium, In The Blue Sky’
Chaka Khan – ‘Ain’t Nobody’