Square One

2011 roundup!

2012-01-10T22:57:00.002Z

I have been a terrible, terrible blogger recently, mostly because while I can read blogs on my laptop while feeding Nick, it's sort of hard to type anything more than a few words. So here is a summary of the last year in Q&A form, ganked from Shauna (although I am sure I've done it before, in fact).

1. What did you do this year that you’d never done before?

The most important one: having a baby! Also changing nappies (and so on).

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next this year?

I don't think I had any last year, other than "don't fall over on the ice". Which I didn't.

This year I am feeling quite resolution-y. Among other things, I want to sort out what I'm doing with my career and do some writing. I also want to keep in touch with people better (yes, I know everyone resolves to do that all the time...)

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I did myself, and so (obviously) did people I'd met through ante-natal classes, but nobody else I have met in person. A bunch of longstanding internet acquaintances did, though.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

My great-aunt died in late spring.

5. What countries did you visit?

Sadly, this was another year when I never left the UK - so just Scotland and England. Didn't even make it to Wales this time.

6. What would you like to have next year that you lacked in this one?

A proper plan for the next five-ish years, including a plan for moving house. Ideally, I'd like to be pregnant again in another nine months or so.

7. What dates from this year will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

17 July, when the Peanut finally made his appearance.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Probably getting breastfeeding to work (are you tired of me going on about baby stuff yet?) Also making the Peanut's baby quilt.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Despite my best intentions, ending up having to work late at the office far too much. Not going to bed early enough.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not really - I had a bit of ligament trouble while I was pregnant, but on the whole I was ridiculously healthy. I put my back out on the 30th of December, which was pretty painful, but it's all better now.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

The Moby wrap - it has made getting out and about with the baby much easier!

12. Where did most of your money go?

Paying off the mortgage (hooray!), my student loan (double hooray!) and I probably bought a fair number of books. And some baby stuff, of course.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

The Peanut. Cryoburn, the new(est) Lois McMaster Bujold. The Doctor Who convention next March.

14. What song will always remind you of this year?

Close To You (I sing it to the baby!) and a bunch of nursery rhymes, probably.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?

Happier! Last year I was quite stressed, mostly because I was afraid that something would go wrong with the pregnancy. But the baby's here, he's healthy and I love him so much. And I'm really enjoying being on maternity leave.

b) thinner or fatter?

Bizarrely, even if you correct for the fact that I was three months pregnant, I'm thinner. After giving birth, I was half a stone below my pre-pregnancy weight, and I'm also down a jeans size. I did nothing to achieve this, so I don't really count it as an achievement, but I'm pleased, especially as I was expecting the opposite.

My shoulders are also more toned than they have been in years, from carrying the Peanut around.

c) richer or poorer?

Poorer as regards income (maternity pay) but with fewer outgoings too, since I'm not at work and we no longer have mortgage payments.

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Pre-baby: I wish I'd had time to have a more chilled-out pregnancy and do things like yoga and going swimming. Next time round (assuming all goes to plan) I'll have a toddler, so I never will get to do all that.

Post-baby: no regrets, really!

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Worrying and working late.

18. How did you spend Christmas?

With my lovely in-laws. We had a very pleasant family Christmas, aided by the Peanut being cute and smiley.

19. Did you fall in love this year?

What do you think?

I love both my boys.

20. What was your favorite TV programme?

Doctor Who, but I certainly watched more of Battlestar Galactica than anything else, since I was given the box set to occupy me while breastfeeding at 6am - thank you L and A!

21. What was the best book you read?

Tricky. Honourable mentions to Connie Willis's Blackout and All Clear, and Cryoburn. I also loved The Hare With Amber Eyes.

22. What was your favourite film of this year?

The only one I saw at the cinema was Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, which was fun but very silly. We signed up for Lovefilm, so have seen more films than usual: I also really enjoyed Inception and (500) Days of Summer.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I was 32. I went for a celebratory coffee at the Rocket cafe with Mum and the Peanut, then a wee look around the shops in Morningside. Rock'n'roll. (It was very pleasant.)

24. What kept you sane?

My lovely husband (especially during moments of pregnancy stress, and early labour). Books. Battlestar Galactica. Knitting. Rubbing my face on the Peanut's little downy head.

25. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Pirate Amy Pond. (I don't really go in for crushes...)

26. Who did you miss?

My sister and brother, as always. I've seen my brother more often recently than I used to - which is lovely! My in-laws (although we've seen them often too).

The other wedding

2011-11-14T22:30:00.004Z

The other wedding that we went to was a mere week after the first one and presented a totally different set of logistical challenges. We were guests rather than family (the groom is our neighbour of several years) so we didn't have to do anything other than turn up, but the wedding was held in Strathpeffer, a village in the Highlands which is about four hours' drive from Edinburgh.

Regular readers of this blog (ha! that would suggest there is anything regular to read...) may recall that we don't have a car, and that J doesn't like driving and I don't have a driving licence. Our total experience of long drives amounts to two trips to see J's parents, over very familiar roads. We have never driven an unfamiliar route, and indeed J had never been north of Perthshire. So that was a bit stressful in prospect.

However, it was all fine, and much of the route was rather scenic, although neither of us understands why 90% of drivers break the speed limit. Clearly we are both actually old ladies.

Strathpeffer is a pretty little village almost entirely composed of largish hotels. It was a spa resort that had its heyday just before the First World War, and the land round about is very scenic, divided between arable land and wooded hills. It's a gentler landscape than one immediately pictures when thinking of the Highlands. Our hotel was a strange mix of the grand (the exterior, the large wood-panelled lobby) and the basic (our room, which had rather 70s decor and 50s bathroom fittings). I think it mostly caters to coach parties. J said that it reminded him of Fawlty Towers and I can see what he meant - not that the service was in any way like that. In fact everyone was charming and helpful (being accompanied by a cute baby seemed to make us popular) and the food was rather good - not something you can count on when your party consists of a vegetarian and a pescatarian who's allergic to nuts and gluten.

The wedding itself went with a swing - held in a pretty little church a stone's throw from the hotel, and the reception in the Spa Pavilion, just a little way down the road. So it was all very easy for those of us with buggies (not just us). It was fun to compare the two weddings - I've never been to two on consecutive weekends before - and I can tell you that it is currently the done thing to have your bridesmaids wearing teal, design your own stationery on a turquoise theme, have a "cast list" in the back of the order of service listing people who've helped out, have female friends singing while you sign the register, and give your guests badges attached to their place cards.

As usual, the Peanut wore a particularly dapper outfit.

We had a lovely time, but the next day the boys were both exhausted.

After they had caught up on their sleep, we decided to make the most of our weekend in the Highlands and go for a walk somewhere in the afternoon. What we had in mind was maybe going to a town, having a wander around with the buggy and maybe going for a coffee somewhere.

The bride and groom were still around in the hotel and we asked their advice - the bride (who is from the area) suggested we go to Cromarty. For good measure, we asked if the hotel had any tourist info, and the receptionist suggested Strathconon as a good place to go for a walk that was near and easy to drive to. We decided to go to Strathconon.

We had gained the impression that Strathconon was a valley with a road along it, where we might stop at any point and have a stroll. That last bit was a misconception (and when we thought about it, the receptionist did not actually say that). It is actually a very beautiful long valley which has a single-track road leading through hilly woods and past lochs, but for much of it there is no place you could stop without blocking the road entirely. We got a bit lost on the way there, and J (who, as I've mentioned, is a nervous driver) was somewhat unnerved by the twistiness of the road and the impossibility of turning around.

By the time we got to the car park at the end of the single-track road, the rain was hammering down.

Some of our party were inclined to be a little discouraged, but we summoned up some British grit and decided to go for a wet walk anyway. The junior member of the party had not noticed the rain.

In the event, we walked for an hour and once we got going we enjoyed ourselves - the path was OK for the buggy, and the scenery was beautiful. We went back at the end feeling that we had been rewarded for our perseverance. And that we now deserved a hot drink (and maybe a glass of wine with dinner).

The next day we did go to Cromarty, and it was pretty much exactly what we'd been thinking of - a pretty town, easy to get to (a scenic drive on easy roads), and where one can walk by the sea.

And as you can see, the weather was much nicer. I'm not sure what the moral of this little tale is: listen to your friends rather than a random lady in a hotel? Or alternatively: go off the beaten track and you may find something good even if it wasn't even remotely what you were looking for?

Answers on a postcard. Anyway, the Black Isle is a very nice part of the world and I'd like to go back sometime for more than a weekend.

Weddings

2011-10-11T14:04:00.003Z

It has been a busy few weeks in our household. As Isabelle posted a little while ago, our family has experienced rather a lot of big life events this year (birth, a death, marriage, moving house, retirement, redundancy...).

One of the biggest was three weeks ago, when my sister got married. While I can't claim I did all that much towards her wedding, it did occupy us for a while before it actually happened - Mum and I made several trips to the dressmaker both for L's dress and my bridesmaid dress, which had to be made at the last minute because we had no idea what size I was going to be, nine weeks post-baby. It was really nice to have an excuse to meet up with Mum and spend time with her (we became regulars at Cuckoo's Bakery for a restorative coffee afterwards).

I feel a bit guilty about not doing more towards the wedding. I realise that having a very small baby is a fairly good excuse, but my sister's best friend did a lot more than I did.

This is the only photo I have of us... we don't have the official ones yet.

Anyway, the wedding went off beautifully. My sister looked beautiful and just sparkled with happiness. Her other half is an actor/musician and many of their friends are musical too, so the singing (and signing-of-the-register jazz numbers) were of a high standard. She designed all the orders of service, stationery, place cards and so on, so it all looked very pretty, smart and uniform, and they did something which worked really well - they asked each guest for a "fun fact" about himself or herself, and made them into badges which they put at each place as conversation-starters. (The Peanut still has his, stuck to his car seat - it says "My womb name was Billy". You haven't accumulated many facts when you're only nine weeks old.)

The Peanut was very well-behaved throughout, even though we dressed him up like this:

This suit was a present from some family friends in Spain and we feel it has a certain retro charm, although it is perhaps not the most practical babywear ever. He did also have socks and shoes on. The Peanut spent almost the entire reception being passed from admirer to admirer (allowing his mother to do some dancing!) and eventually went to sleep in his car seat/carrier thing depite the ceilidh band still being in full swing. My great-uncle and aunt were staying in the hotel and lent us their room for feeds, which really saved the evening for us (especially as I had to take my dress off to do this - not really feasible in public).

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the wedding - not that I was expecting it to go badly or anything, but I haven't attended a party with a baby before and I had thought it was likely to make things a bit difficult. But ir really didn't. And it was lovely to see so many of our relatives over the weekend, and meet the groom's family, mostly for the first time. His sister and her husband are lovely and I hope we get to meet them (and their two little boys) again.

And then the next weekend we did most of it again because our friends R and E were getting married up in the Highlands. But that is another post.

Five and a half weeks on

2011-08-25T13:19:00.003Z

Firstly, thank you for all the congratulations on our boy's birth!

The following extremely self-indulgent post is mostly a record for me, so I can write down things about our little peanut's first few weeks before I forget them. So apologies is this is boring (unless you're one of the grandparents or something, in which case it probably isn't).

The Peanut is now five and a half weeks old, and we are starting to settle more into a routine. J took some extra leave from work, so he was home until the baby was almost a month old, which was a great help as we were finding our feet. As babies go, the Peanut does not seem particularly difficult (I may regret writing this later!) He doesn't sleep all that much, but most of his sleeping happens at night, which is pretty good. So although he's too little to sleep through the night yet, often he only wakes up once, which is not too hard to deal with.

Everybody tells you that babies change and develop really quickly at this age, and it's true (not that I thought they were lying...) When they're born, they don't seem to be aware of very much other than milk. But the Peanut started to "track" with his eyes when he was only a few days old, and we had a Skype conversation with his English grandparents when he was about a week old and you could clearly see him trying to work out where their voices were coming from.

At about three weeks he started to take some interest in objects, usually ones with high-contrast patterns on them (which is what the health visitor said would happen - young babies don't have great colour vision but they can distinguish light from dark).

Around the same time, he started to smile as if he means it.

He's also grown. A lot. He was 7lb 2oz when he was born, and now he's 10lb. One week he gained over a pound. As you might imagine, we are no longer having any trouble getting milk into him, although there have been many days when he has wanted to feed all the time. This makes it a little tricky to do anything other than read or watch TV with the baby in my lap. I haven't worked out how to knit one-handed yet (or blog...)

Here he is at four days:

And this is him at just under a month, wearing the same suit. It's now too small for him (but he has it in a bigger size!) Mum thinks it makes him look like a tiny wizard.

He doesn't look like quite such a new baby any more. His first fuzzy hair is just starting to fall out and his legs and arms are getting stronger. He's still not very chubby, but he's definitely both longer and sturdier.

And we love him.

He's here

2011-07-25T20:26:00.003Z

Nicholas was born a week ago, at 1.27 on Sunday morning.

Since my last post, another week went past without any sign of labour starting. As a precaution, I was booked in for an induction on the 20th, at which point the baby would have been officially two weeks late. I was told that I’d be offered a full health check before they went ahead and if the baby was still fine, they’d be open to the idea of holding off for a little longer, which was a relief to me as I wasn't keen on induction - partly because J and I were not convinced that our official due date was really correct. It was revised from the 16th to the 6th after our first ultrasound, so going by the old date, the baby wasn't even late yet. I was also worried about the higher risk of having to have a caesarean section if induction failed. As I may have mentioned, I've got a phobia about surgery and anaesthesia which I'd been doing my best to deal with, but I was still hoping to have as few interventions as possible.

As the weekend approached I was beginning to come round to the idea of going ahead, though, if the baby really wasn’t here by then.

However, I woke up at 5am on the 16th with contractions that were about 30 seconds long and 7 minutes apart. I lay there for a bit trying to decide whether to wake J up, and eventually I did. We’d been told at our ante-natal classes to phone the hospital when contractions were 7 to 5 minutes apart, so they’d know to expect us later, so we did. They said not to come in until contractions were 60 seconds long and three minutes apart or less.

It was a long wait for that to happen, though. For a long time the contractions didn’t get any closer together. This did give me a chance to finish putting the binding on the cot quilt I was making (perhaps Nicholas was waiting for me to get that finished?)

Mum came over mid-morning, since she was going to drive us to hospital and it seemed as though we'd be needing her services soon. But the contractions never did form a regular pattern, much to everyone's frustration - sometimes they’d be 5 minutes apart, sometimes 10. They stayed closer together but mild if I was on my feet and moving around, but if I sat down on the sofa or on my exercise ball, there was often a slowdown followed by a really intense one when I stood up. Not being able to predict the next one made it hard for me to distract myself with anything else! At this point they weren't hugely painful, though.

J was also there throughout and was great - he and Mum both helped with timing contractions and talked to me to keep me occupied. His parents live 350 miles away, but as it was a Saturday they drove up. Unfortunately they arrived in mid-afternoon, at which point labour wasn't speeding up at all - so much so that I was able to go to bed for a nap, and when I got up the contractions were more than 15 minutes apart again. I wondered if they’d driven for six hours for nothing!

At about 6pm, things started to move again. I had some intense contractions with 2-minute gaps, began to have some back pain which didn’t fade between contractions, and started to use the TENS machine which a kind friend had lent us. At this point I was mostly dealing with the contractions by getting on to hands and knees on the floor or sofa.

We called the hospital again and were told to come in, and got there about 8pm. We had to wait a bit to be assessed and get into our labour room but it wasn’t as bad as waiting at home; by this stage it no longer felt as though everything might just stop. I was examined and told that I was 6cm dilated, so things were definitely happening, but that I would need to labour on a ward rather than a birthing suite, because they had some concerns about my phobia of anaesthesia. I think this was just so that if I did need anything they would be able to provide it without moving me very far and upsetting me.

However, apart from not having a birthing pool available, I don’t really know what more would have been available in a labour suite - there was a bath, an exercise ball and some big beanbags, and I was free to move about and be in whatever position I wanted. In the end, that was mostly on the bed, though not lying down - I had the end raised and used it to support me as I knelt up, which was certainly easier on the knees than the floor. I used the TENS throughout and started to use Entonox after a bit.

During this stage, the contractions were fairly intense and I lost all track of time. I think I spent a long time just leaning over the end of the bed clutching the TENS control and asking J to pass me the Entonox inhaler at intervals!

The midwife told me that they’d check my cervix again at 2am but to say if I felt the urge to push any earlier, and at about 12.30 I did feel it. So they checked and I was fully dilated. Another midwife came in and they helped me to get into a sort of semi-squatting position against the raised end of the bed, and we got on with it. At this point I found it quite hard to feel when the contractions were happening because I felt pressure all the time, but the midwives helped with that. (J asked me afterwards if I’d noticed their “good cop, bad cop” routine, and he’s right - one of them was telling me how well I was doing while the other was saying “You have to push hard NOW, you’re wasting this contraction!”)

After around an hour of pushing, I had a small episiotomy because there was just not quite enough room for the baby’s head - it had looked as if it was going to appear several times but no progress was happening. At that point I was so ready for him to be born that I didn’t care. Nicholas was born a couple of minutes after that, beautiful and remarkably un-squashed looking. I had him on my chest right away and he breastfed four times before morning. We were really elated although poor J had only had 4 hours’ sleep since the previous evening.

The next day, Nicholas was very, very tired and slept for long periods without demanding any milk. This was a bit worrying, especially as when woken up he didn’t latch on very well. He was also a little jaundiced. However, I had plenty of colostrum and was able to express some to give to him by syringe, and that woke him up enough for him to feed on his own. He continued to have difficulty latching on when he was tired or fretful, especially at night when he seemed to want to feed constantly. We stayed in for three days in the end so that we could have one-to-one help from the midwives, but on Wednesday his jaundice was disappearing, he had had all his tests and was passed as feeding well - he’d only lost 5% of his birthweight - so we came home.

I feel very lucky that the delivery went so well, and almost nothing that I was worried about happened. I seem to have recovered remarkably well.

J and I are now engaged in learning to be parents (we've mastered changing disposable nappies and are getting better at cloth ones). J has taken some leave and is getting very adept at cheering N up by singing to him. N is so lovely and we are so glad to have him here.

40 weeks, no baby yet

2011-07-07T17:19:00.002Z

So here I am, a day past my due date and wondering when this baby will actually turn up. It's funny - I have been saying for some time that I'm in no hurry for the baby to arrive; I want him to stay in there as long as he needs to, because although I want to meet him, I know life will never be the same again. And I've always thought he would be late, because the official date of conception seemed a bit early to us, and then the due date got moved up by 10 days after the first ultrasound (which would mean this is really only week 38 and a bit).

But... now I'm starting to worry slightly about whether labour really will start to happen naturally. I've no reason to think it won't, but I don't feel any different from a couple of weeks ago. On the other hand, the baby's head is now engaged, according to the midwife, so he's going in the right direction.

Then again, maybe it's just that it's hard to imagine giving birth when you've never done it. Mum says this is normal. I had a hard time believing I could get pregnant, if I'm honest. So I suppose labour will just start when it starts, and then we just have to see how it goes.

We are now officially Ready. We have clothes, we have nappies (disposable for the first few days, then cloth - pre-folds, should anyone be interested), we have a moses basket and a Moby sling. I have made and frozen lasagne and spiced savoury lentil cakes and stocked the freezer and the larder. The baby's room is ready and tidy. I still need to finish my baby quilt and blanket, but I'm working on those.

The baby is not quiltless, however, because one of Mum's blogfriends, Dianne, gave us this beautiful quilt, and a shawl and hat too:

Totally unexpected, but very much appreciated - the quilt is now beautifying the baby's cot, which he won't actually be using for a while yet.

So the baby can come any time. I wonder how we'll feel once things start moving? J is a bit nervous; I'm more apprehensive about needing labour interventions than about the natural course of events. But we can't tell how things will play out, so we're just trying to stay calm.

Some people in this house have no trouble staying calm at all.

Right. It is tea-time. I have no idea what we're having for dinner. (I think the aunt-to-be would suggest curry followed by pineapple... she's quite eager for her nephew to arrive.)

38 weeks (nearly)

2011-06-21T13:14:00.003Z

I'm now on maternity leave. This should leave me lots of time for blogging. And knitting. And doing all sorts of things. It isn't working out quite like that.

I'm conscious that I should really be making the most of this time because I am not going to have this level of freedom again for a very long time... but I'm finding that a lot of the time, I don't really want to do very much other than maybe poke around reading blogs and Ravelry. Unsurprisingly, I don't have much stamina, and I'm tending to find that if I spend a couple of hours doing anything much I have to have a nap. This is a bit weird, given that I don't usually need much sleep.

We did take on one major non-baby-related project: the lawn, which was infested with large quantities of soggy yellow moss. The process of removing it was made more tricky because I am not really up to the heavier work of raking, scarifying and so on, and J is not a very confident gardener. But he has provided a lot of hard labour, and no doubt has removed the moss much more thoroughly than I would have done myself. We've now re-seeded the bald patches and the rain we've had recently seems to be getting the grass off to a good start. This hasn't been a great year for the garden, but at least the lawn will look nice.

We are maybe 90% ready for the baby in practical terms. The baby's room was repainted and had new carpet put in a couple of months ago; we've assembled and arranged a cot and a moses basket, and we have bedding, and clothes (selected with Mum's help a week or so ago). And nappies.

Psychologically... I'm not so sure. Despite the fact that I can feel Billy scooting about (mostly from side to side) it is a really weird thought that sometime in the next two or three weeks, I will be giving birth and we will have a new little person to bring home.

It hasn't been a particularly rough pregnancy. I haven't had any of the pregnancy symptoms I was dreading (sickness, backache, gingivitis). And I haven't had any real health problems or gained a lot of weight. Even the pelvic girdle pain responded to the exercises for a good few weeks and wasn't much of a problem, although for the last month it has definitely been putting a bit of a kink in things. But there could be a lot of worse problems, and at least it doesn't affect the baby in any way.

Until a few weeks past the 6-month point, I didn't look all that pregnant either. Last weekend my in-laws and parents were both here, and Mum was saying "She definitely looks more pregnant now." Well... since the baby is due in three weeks, it would be a little worrying if I didn't.

I still have things I want to do before the baby gets here; both baby-related and non-baby-related. I've got a cot quilt in progress, and I still need to finish off the baby blanket I was knitting. I'm so lucky that my mother-in-law and a lot of my Ravelry friends have contributed knitted garments, because I have so far managed to knit a total of one baby jumper - which I'm quite pleased with, but wouldn't really be enough on its own!

Other than that... I have a few house-cleaning and re-organising tasks I want to do, but so far the famous nesting instinct has failed to strike. I'm trying to get on with things nonetheless (interspersed with naps).

23 weeks

2011-03-12T23:29:00.002Z

The weeks of this pregnancy seem to be slipping past awfully quickly. People tell you that the time goes very slowly, and maybe it did in the earlier stages (especially when we were waiting to tell people) but at the moment it feels like it's whizzing along. I can't believe we're more than halfway through.

In part it's hard to believe this because I still don't look pregnant, or not that anyone would notice. I am not particularly small-framed and so far, my stomach isn't sticking out any more than it ever was (although it feels different to the touch). I'm not complaining - so far all my clothes still fit, though I don't suppose this will last long.

But we had the second scan two weeks ago and Billy Baby is growing on schedule and appears to have all the requisite organs and things. And he's a boy. Fairly clearly. We are going to have to think properly and seriously about names now (it won't actually be Billy).

I have been able to feel him moving around for a few weeks now. He seems to object to my sitting down for any length of time... and today, in the bath, I actually saw my stomach twitch in response to a kick, which was pretty strange.

Along with not looking particularly pregnant, I have also not had much in the way of health problems, fingers crossed. The only trouble I'm having at all is some pelvic girdle discomfort, and an increasing tendency for my hips and lower back to seize up if I sit still for too long (which is apparently part of the same problem).

Extra-stretchy ligaments run in my family, and all the oestrogen floating around in pregnancy makes them even stretchier, hence the troubles. Apparently my mum had them too. I've seen a physiotherapist, though, who has given me tips on good sleeping positions and some exercises to help, and I am crossing my fingers that if I behave sensibly, it won't get too much worse.

Meanwhile, J and I have been thinking about moving house. We are not absolutely certain that we'll get this done before Billy arrives, although that was the original plan - at the moment, we are concentrating on doing things which will be necessary if we move but still a good idea if we don't, such as getting new carpets to replace the worn-out ones which were here when we bought our house. This is proving a bit time-consuming, especially as I can't lift anything to speak of (unless I wanted to risk my back) or move furniture.

We like our current house a lot, so mixed feelings abound, but it would be lovely to have more garden and an extra bedroom (especially as we are hoping Billy won't be an only child). And we could do with being in an area with better schools. But all the houses we've looked at seem to have been on the market a long time - over a year in some cases - so we're not certain of being able to sell ours, in which case we may have to put the plan on hold. We'll see what happens.

J has not been too well recently, unfortunately. He's been having terrible headaches, and (probably unconnected) severe nosebleeds. We aren't certain why, although the headaches might be down to some sort of food intolerance, or that's the theory. He's been on a gluten-free diet for a couple of weeks in an attempt to see if that's the problem. So far, it is a bit inconclusive. He hasn't had as many headaches, but he hasn't been headache-free either. He's been tested for coeliac disease in the past, and it came back negative, but apparently it is possible to be gluten-sensitive without being fully coeliac. Tricky.

We're sort of hoping that gluten isn't the trigger, because it is such a pain to have to find complete meals he can eat, especially as he doesn't eat meat. We usually eat a certain amount of Quorn and similar vegetarian products, but only the "chicken-style pieces" are gluten-free. Most things you can quickly stick under the grill are out; pasta is out, unless it's an expensive gluten-free version; lots of sauces are off-limits, and so is anything containing malted barley (a surprisingly common food additive). I have had to get creative with lentils, experiment with baking gluten-free cakes and biscuits, and cook lots of dishes with rice or potatoes. It's not impossible - just slightly harder work.

And if it's decided that gluten isn't the problem, we will have to try something else, I guess...

Seriously overdue post

2011-01-30T23:10:00.003Z

OK. I have been terrible at posting this last few months. For what it's worth, I've been a bit preoccupied...

J and I are having a baby.

You probably know this if you read my mum's blog. I have been finding it a bit tricky to write about, though. Which is why we are through the first trimester and halfway into the second before I've managed to do it.

We decided at the end of last summer that we were ready (if anyone is ever ready) to start a family, and then... decision made, in theory, we didn't start trying until the end of September. I had sort of assumed that we would need to try for a bit before we would conceive - perhaps because most of the stories one hears on blogs are about people having trouble - but we were lucky. I got a positive test at the end of October, just as we were about to drive down to see J's parents, which was a little strange for us as we'd decided not to tell anyone until the 12-week mark.

At that point, I was very tired, and having slight difficulty explaining why I was so tired. My father-in-law spotted this and I was convinced he was on to the reason why (but he says he wasn't!)

Luckily for me, I didn't have any morning sickness to speak of - I felt slightly off-colour and went off some foods I normally like, but that was all. For this reason I had a lot of difficulty convincing myself that everything was going OK. I don't know whether it was hormones, or what, but I stressed out a lot over whether the baby was healthy and what we would do if it wasn't.

The 12-week scan came as a great relief - the baby was actually there, moving, with a heartbeat! And arms and legs and things!

When this was on the screen, it was a moving image, and you could see the baby sucking its thumb.

That was the 28th of December. Yup, more than a month ago. Since then, things have gone remarkably smoothly. The occasional nausea went away, and I haven't yet put any weight on. I went back to see the doctor last week and all seems to be going well.

J and I are beginning to feel able to talk about this as if it is definitely going to happen. It still feels a little bit like tempting fate, but on the whole I have calmed down a lot. I thought I would get all stressed out again when the time came to take the triple test (for Down's, spina bifida and Edwards' syndrome) but I've managed to stay fairly calm; two weeks to wait for the results.

At the moment, we are 17 weeks along, and the baby is due in early July. We have plenty of time to get things ready before July... right?

The guinea pigs are all fine.

The weather outside is frightful

2010-12-18T00:41:00.005Z

Well, actually, not as frightful as it has been. But it's pretty cold. If you are reading in Canada or Alaska or the Midwestern US or Norway or somewhere (is anybody?) then you will probably be laughing hollowly at Britain's lack of fortitude and proper snowploughing equipment, but...

Currently we are not under a lot of snow, but everything is rather slippery, and we did have a lot in late November and the first half of December. I am almost the only person I know who managed to make it in to work all the way through this, so perhaps I don't have too much to complain about. (Actually, maybe my dad did. And Mum would have except that the college she works at was closed during the worst weather.)

Just to add to the dangers of falling over on the ice, we have had no streetlights in our road for a couple of days, which is not great when it gets dark at about 4 p.m. Though I can see that icy conditions may make the council less keen/able to get out there and fix the problem.

Struggling through the snow was made slightly more difficult by my not having any wellies. I haven't ever felt the desire for wellies since... probably the last time I was at Guide Camp, which could've been 1994 or so. But now I see the point. Unfortunately I can't find any that fit me - not even the expensive Hunter ones with extensible calf inserts - since I have average-sized feet but serious calves; I like to think it's the cycling that does it.

Ah, cycling. Yes. I haven't been out on my bike since before this weather started. Last year I kept on cycling in everything but the worst weather, but then I fell off three times on black ice and I'm really keen not to do that this year. J has kept going except on the snowiest days, but then his route to work is more along main roads. I am feeling somewhat under-exercised, which is a pity since generally the bike provides exercise that takes no time out of my day (if I didn't cycle, I'd have to spend at least as long on a bus). I shall have to think of something else. Walking gingerly over icy pavements doesn't really get the heart-rate up, or not in a good way.

Oh, moan moan moan moan moan. This is one reason I haven't posted since 23 November (really?) because all I have to say is a bit moany. Sense of perspective here! Our heating is working, and we now have boiler insurance (unlike last winter when the boiler broke in January) and the guinea pigs are fine and there are people with actual misfortunes out there. And I do now have some hiking boots, advertised as waterproof - reduced from £49.99 to £32! and in black, rather than lilac or turquoise! So if deep snow returns, I will be slightly better shod.

And I have now done considerably more Christmas shopping than I had this morning, although the house still looks resolutely unChristmassy. But I'm hoping this will change tomorrow.

I was at an educational/IT one-day conference on Tuesday and live-Tweeted it at the request of the organisers (not a special request to me personally, you understand, but to all the attendees). I now have about 200 new people who want to follow me on Twitter. I hope they won't be horribly disappointed when I revert to very infrequent tweets about my insomniac tendencies or the guinea pigs...

Oh, and Loth - I would happily knit you a Kindle cover. Any time.

2010-11-23T17:18:00.002Z

Daylight has been in rather short supply up here. It's been raining for much of the past week and at the time of year when it starts to get dark in mid-afternoon, it's a bit discouraging when noon is obscured by dark clouds as well.

However, it has been sunny today. The sunniest spot in our house is the kitchen table (above). I have made a little space among the potted-up cuttings and sprouting beans and lentils to put my laptop and do some work.

We have been having an unusually social time for us. The weekend before last was my father-in-law's 60th birthday and we went down south to spend a few days with them. We usually go by train, but this time we had trouble finding tickets at a reasonable price so we borrowed my parents' car (thank you, parents) and drove. Or rather, J drove. He has never driven that far without another experienced driver in the car, but I think it was good for him - now he knows he can, if he has to. However, despite the attractions of the ducks at Tenby services, we'll be getting the train next time.

We had a lovely peaceful weekend with the family, and FIL's party went well. I finished the second sock of this pair:

They've taken me a while, mostly because the pattern wasn't that easy to memorise, but I'm really pleased with them. They're my first solid-colour socks. (My granny thinks it is silly to put this much effort into socks, and that I should knit the pattern as panels for a cardigan or something, but then I don't really wear cardigans.)

As I was off from Thursday to Monday, I had the equivalent of an entire week off work. Which was very restful.

On Saturday I had another busy day - I went up to see my brother and his girlfriend in the town where they work as doctors. It was an enjoyable trip, but I wish we could have stayed longer and maybe done something together, other than go out to lunch. And we missed my sister, who has moved to London, possibly permanently. (Oh dear! I sound like my mum. Must learn to relax and enjoy the moment.)

On the other hand, it is hard to do anything very vigorous with my granny in tow - she is 88 and although she walks OK, she doesn't go fast and she gets tired. And we could have stayed longer except that I needed to get back to go to a party with J.

This was a friend's 30th birthday and it was a lovely party - we had a meal together and then everyone went to the Dominion Cinema for a private screening of Amelie. They have a room with a big screen, a bar and comfortable chairs and sofas - more informal and comfortable than the usual cinema set-up, but it feels more special than watching a DVD in your living room (shades of pre-teenage sleepover parties!) We like the idea and maybe we'll do it ourselves if we hold a party... if we can agree on a film.

An afternoon out

2010-11-07T21:26:00.004Z

Yesterday, I decided to go on a little outing to the Morningside Makers' Market. The weather was beautiful in the morning (while I was doing fascinating things like going to the supermarket) but just as I was leaving the house on my bike, it started to rain.

Never mind, I thought, it'll only be a passing shower.

By the time I got to the market, I had revised this view. However, the entrance looked positively festive despite the downpour.

There were lots of lovely stalls inside. I saw silver jewellery, knitted and felted items, quirky patchwork toys and stylish hats (possibly not for wearing in the rain).

I also managed to make a few purchases.

Firstly, I bought some beautiful lampwork glass beads from Min Fidler. They have an amazing amount of detail and change colour according to the light, and I'll have fun thinking what to make with them.

Then I found a little green finch on a stall with lots of toys (including some sock monkeys) and somehow he came home with me.

(This is not the stall - www.madestuff.co.uk - but our telephone table!)

The main reason I'd come, though, was The Yarn Yard's stall.

It was lovely to chat with Natalie and I eventually managed to choose three skeins of yarn - one DK, one sock weight and one laceweight. (I am trying not to buy too much sock yarn as I could keep myself happily knitting socks for about a year without buying any!)

Red, green and blue* - perfect if you should need to calibrate your monitor.

Then before I could spend any more money I headed out into the rain, but only went around the corner to the Rocket café for a cup of coffee and some warm melty chocolate cake, and a little sock-knitting.

There is something soothing about watching the rain pelt down when you don't have to go out in it. Unfortunately I had offered to get J some brake blocks for his bike and some extra dark soy sauce from the Chinese grocery (I always seem to have weird shopping lists at the moment).

So... once more unto the breach. Or the rain. At the bike shop I was served by the member of staff who taught our bike-maintenance class a few weeks ago and then had to fix my bike immediately afterwards (bit of an epic saga) and he rather sweetly asked if it was still working OK (it is).

By the time I got home, I was rather cold and wet about the trousers and feet.

Perhaps I should have worn more waterproof shoes...

Still, it was a lovely mini-holiday from the daily round (and a hot shower and dry socks sorted me out). Tomorrow I shall get back to doing useful things.

*Sorry about the weird shadows; daylight is beginning to be in short supply around here!

Blow, blow, thou winter wind

2010-11-03T14:41:00.004Z

At the beginning of last week, the weather was crisp and sunny and calm and all the trees still had all their leaves. Towards the weekend, the wind got up and most of the trees aren't looking quite so colourful now.

I don't have many trees in my garden but I appreciate the ones that are there: two Japanese maples which don't even come up to my waist, but which have beautiful leaves, and an Amanogawa cherry tree.

(Hmm. You'd think I had a Japanese theme going deliberately, but I don't.)

I love the bright colours in nature. I'm not sure I'd choose this garnety-red as a decorating colour, but it makes a lovely leaf.

In the meantime, I am eating pumpkin soup (from the "Butternut Squash Soup" recipe in How To Eat - soup from a recipe! how fancy) and knitting socks to keep the draughts from my ankles.

Happy November

2010-11-02T00:06:00.002Z

So the last anybody heard from me, I was in America, having fun at WisCon. Which I did. I don't have many photographs of the actual con - too busy having fun - but Madison looks like this:

While I was there I tried the local delicacy (tastes nicer than it looks), had my hair plaited up like this, met up with Mum and Dad's old friends J and B and their grownup children (who were lovely) and my internet friend Cabell, among others, and had many, many conversations about Doctor Who and Lois McMaster Bujold books. I did a lot of live-tweeting of panels and felt, for once, as if I was at the cutting edge. I also managed to win a book token and come home with all of these.

And then I came home and was reunited with J and my piggies.

In August I went to the Edinburgh Ravelry meetup and rubbed shoulders with lots of famous-to-me knitters, and some genuinely famous ones. I have been knitting lots of shawls, and a few socks.

Then in September, I went with my lovely in-laws on what has become our traditional British holiday. We were based in Bamburgh in the north of England, where we went for walks and I took lots of wannabe-arty photos.

We also went to Lindisfarne:

and to the Alnwick Garden, which I really liked.

A good time was had in general.

When I haven't been on holiday, much of my life has been spent at work. For various complicated reasons, work has been very busy this summer and rather more time-consuming than normal. I have been finding that I haven't had a lot of brain left to blog with, hence the silence. I am thinking about what I can do about this.

In the meantime I have mustered enough braincells to make a boyfriend for our sock monkey:

to knit some ghosts:

and to make a pumpkin lantern for Hallowe'en.

So maybe I'm back. Hello.

Metaphorical whirlwind

2010-05-29T14:00:00.001Z

Now that the con is in full swing, I am not finding much time to sit down and write a proper blog entry. I have, however, been using my Twitter - over there in the right sidebar. Possibly everyone who reads this blog either already follows me or has no interest in Twitter, but there it is!

No longer in the air

2010-05-25T19:32:00.000Z

Later on Tuesday, Madison -

Once I was on the plane and we were up and away, I remembered how much I like flying. I mean it. I think it’s one of the most magical experiences a person can have. I always look out of the windows and it always makes me feel that I live in a wonderful and diverse world, and wonder about the people living below in these places that I’m flying over.

It helped that it was a clear day for much of the journey. We started out by flying more or less directly north up Scotland – I remember last time we flew across the Atlantic, the Highlands astonished me by their apparent emptiness. Presumably the settlements are just too small to see from that height, but the mountains and forests look completely uninhabited. There is still some snow on the higher mountains. As we passed over the north coast I saw some amazing sandy beaches lit up by brilliant sunshine.

Then it was largely empty sea for a bit, with more cloud cover, and I had a bit of a nap until we passed the south coast of Greenland. We also passed slightly south of Iceland, but I didn’t see it (cloud cover plus being asleep) and presumably we were not within range of the volcano. Greenland was deeply impressive – knife-edged peaks with snow clinging to the creases and grey-green vegetation, sloping down to bays that were full of fractured ice, looking like roughly-ground rock salt.

Then it was nothing but sea (with a few icebergs) for a while more, during which time I watched Up In The Air. I won’t write a critique, but I thought it was pretty good – the story seemed to avoid the clichés I thought it might fall into. (It is also a reassuring film to watch if you are in the middle of a complicated air journey, because it is about people who do this all the time and does not show them missing any connections or having any serious travel-related frustration. And there are no plane crashes. It did strike me as a little odd to watch a film about air travel on a plane, but when else am I going to get the opportunity?)

Film over, we were over Canada and I watched the rocky bits of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia give way to an amazingly human-created landscape that seemed to have created to be viewed from the air. Lots and lots of long, narrow, pale yellow or green fields, running exactly east to west. I suppose that the land boundaries must have been determined by someone in a surveyor’s office with a map and a ruler, and then they worked out where the field boundaries were. I think it must look a lot different from the ground.

Once we got over the American border, fields were squarer (though still equally rectilinear) and the ground wasn’t quite so flat. I had thought of New England as being relatively crowded (as American landscapes go) but there were still huge swathes of what appeared to be untouched woodland, especially on the hills. Occasionally you could see what must be a ski slope in winter, but currently just a few stripes of grass leading down a mountainside. There are also a lot of lakes, all of which looked brilliantly blue as they reflected the sky.

As we started to descend I could see more detail of American towns – the most prominent landmarks from that high were athletic grounds. I could often see several running tracks per town, golf courses, and parks with fan-shaped orange areas which I think must be baseball diamonds (I’ll find out). As we started to descend towards Newark I could sometimes read the words on the local football field, such as “Go Wildcats”.

Newark itself looks remarkably like the town you used to get playing the computer game “Transport Tycoon” – rows of similar-looking buildings side by side on streets in a grid, with shallow pyramidal roofs. I’m sure the effect was heightened by seeing it from above, but it was quite striking. As we came in, I could see the towers of Manhattan off to the left, including the Empire State Building, and that arch-shaped bridge that you see in films with all the girders.

The airport experience wasn’t exactly as magical as the flight. I was a bit anxious about making my connection, but I had no problems going through immigration or customs, apart from slow-moving queues and a long wait at the baggage carousel. In fact I think I got the cheeriest immigration guy ever – he was young and jolly and made jokes, not at all like the stereotype!

There wasn’t quite such a good view on the flight to Madison – the weather had turned a bit cloudier – but I did get to see the Great Lakes and discover why they call them that. Imagine if you were exploring and came across a lake that size! I wonder if early explorers thought they’d reached another coast.

When I got off the plane it was extremely hot – even hotter than in Newark, where I had melted more than slightly as I was jogging through the airport. But I managed to find the bus stop without too much trouble and made conversation with a very pleasant PhD student who was also catching the bus back into town. Various people on the bus complained that it was slow and roundabout, but it seemed perfectly efficient to me.

The only flaw in my plan to walk from the bus stop to my hostel is that as soon as I got off the bus, it began to rain. First just a few drops, and then about as hard as I have ever seen it rain (with the exception of the notorious Oxford Punt Incident, maybe). So I dived into a Starbucks, which is where I’m typing this. The menu in American Starbucks is not the same, and iced, unsweetened green tea costs $1.55 – bargain! (This may not sound awfully palatable to those who do not like either green tea or iced tea, but I was desperate for something cold but not sweet, so it fitted the bill very nicely.)

The rain seems to have abated. Off to find the hostel!

(Later still)

I had no trouble finding the hostel, and have now called J by Skype to let him know I'm OK. I haven't used Skype over long distances before, but it seems to work!

And now I'm going to sleep. Madison is six hours behind the UK, so the 25th of May has been going on for rather a long time as far as I'm concerned. Night night!

Zoom

2010-05-25T09:00:00.000Z

I’m sitting typing this on my laptop in the departure lounge of Edinburgh airport, about to go on a holiday I haven’t told you about because frankly, I had difficulty believing it was really going to happen. This has been a very busy month, one way or another, not least because of the last-minute nature of this trip.

I’m going to WisCon, which is a speculative fiction convention with a feminist slant in Madison in the USA. I have various Livejournal friends who have been to the con on a regular basis, and I was hoping to go last year, but I was involved in a project at work which clashed with it. However, this year I am really going. I’ve never been to a con before, but as they go, this one is meant to be small(ish) and friendly.

Anyway I can just about count on having enjoyable conversations about the minutiae of books that I like but which the general public have probably not heard of. Once you get me started, I can talk about books for hours, but unless the other person is at least interested in the same genre, it quickly becomes self-indulgent.
J and I have several interests in common – music, visual arts, languages – but our taste in books, film and TV doesn’t overlap all that much. J has nobly read various books by Neil Gaiman, and even came to see him read once, but otherwise he maintains a fairly strict “no spaceships, no pointy ears” policy. He prefers comedy to drama and non-fiction to fiction, and I go the other way. My family are all readers, but are not particularly drawn to fantasy or SF – the word “piffle” has occasionally been bandied about. This is fine. There are genres in which I have no interest (straight romance, the kind of crime novel that has lots of information about different types of ammunition, horror). But it will be nice to meet some people in real life who know what an ansible is or how to get a dragon to do what you want (it seems you need his true name, and nerves of steel...)

It will also be lovely finally to meet the LJ friends in real life. As it happens, some old friends of my parents live in Madison (total coincidence) and I’ll be meeting up with them too.

This month has been a bit of a rollercoaster of stress, followed by relief, followed by stress. One of our guinea pigs is still not completely better, which has been taking a lot out of both of us (although she seems to be responding to treatment). And it is such a long time since I have been away that I’m totally out of practice (also, last time there wasn’t a volcano). I think next time I go abroad I’ll go somewhere within the EU – much easier!

Tonsils

2010-04-28T17:19:00.002Z

What was a mildly sore throat on Monday - hardly noticeable - became a really quite sore throat (and swollen tonsils) by Tuesday evening, and this morning when I got up, it really hurt to swallow and my sinuses had decided to join in. So I admitted defeat, called in sick and went back to bed, where I had a rather feverish type of dream in which I dreamt that my feet had developed several extra toes without my noticing.

This is definitely not true - I checked - but for a few moments after I woke up I really thought it was. It must be Weird Dream Week in my family (my grandmother has apparently been having dreams in which she worries about the end of the world and mountains turning into volcanoes).

I hope I'm going to feel better soon because I keep thinking about all the things I need to do at work...

Turmoil

2010-04-24T23:54:00.003Z

April has been a pretty rough month. I have been putting off posting until things evened out a bit, because I don't like to write a big dollop of self-pity - especially when so many other people are going through trying times as well...

At the start of April, J's grandfather died. He had been unwell a few times recently, but had only just been told that he couldn't go on living alone because of his Parkinson's. He'd agreed to this, then took ill, was taken to hospital and died a couple of days afterwards.

So the news wasn't totally unexpected, but we hadn't realised he was as ill as that (I'm not sure if anyone did). We have been bearing in mind that this was a reasonably merciful way to go - Gramps really didn't want to move out of his house, and in the event he didn't have to, and he wasn't confused or demented and he didn't linger on suffering. But it's still sad.

We went down for the funeral and spent some time with J's family, who are, as ever, lovely.

That was the first week of April. About a week after we got back, we noticed that Pumpkin, one of our guinea pigs, was making a noise and looking uncomfortable when urinating. J had noticed this a few weeks earlier, but I hadn't been able to catch her in the act and was rather inclined to put it down to his OCD - he does get very worried about things, often without much cause.

However, we could now clearly see that Pumpkin was in pain, and thought it was likely to be bladder stones, which are common in guinea pigs. They're caused by a diet too high in calcium, which some guinea pigs have difficulty excreting (it's genetically linked). The stones can be fatal - two friends of mine have recently lost guinea pigs to them. We took Pumpkin to the vet, who thought this was a likely diagnosis and admitted her for ultrasound scanning to confirm it, then possibly surgery to remove the stones. Pumpkin is a little tiny thing, so we were quite upset at this prospect; but the alternative would be putting her down, which we couldn't bring ourselves to face.

We returned home. That evening, Brownie started showing the same symptoms as Pumpkin.

So we took her to the vet too, and spent the rest of the evening wondering if we were going to be down to a single pig, and feeling that it was all our fault for feeding them the wrong things. All this was complicated quite a lot by the fact that we don't have a car and were obliged to rely on Mum for lifts to the vet - which she nobly provided. In the midst of this, my great-aunt fell and broke her hip and was hospitalised, and my grandmother hasn't been too well, which put yet more pressure on poor Mum.

As it happened, Pumpkin did have stones, but they were relatively small and she passed them on her own before she was due to have surgery - when she was scanned again, they'd gone. Brownie didn't appear to have stones, but she had calcium buildup which is a precursor, and she had it flushed out (as did Pumpkin). Both of them came home a week ago, and although Pumpkin has been a bit subdued, she's beginning to perk up. Brownie seems to be completely recovered.

All this was very stressful. We love our animals, but hadn't previously come up against the moral dilemmas of having a seriously ill pet. A lot of people would find it silly to go to so much trouble over a little rodent, and I can hardly blame them - but I don't think we could have decided not to.

This week has mostly been taken up with squirting antibiotics and vitamins into the pigs' tiny little mouths, letting them lick slimy drippy invalid food off my fingers, and making sure our well pig didn't chase the others and make them panic. Training for parenthood, maybe?

Things are starting to calm down now. The pigs seem to be recovering on course (the vet said it may take them six weeks to return to normal, but they improve every day). My aunt has had her hip pinned together and seems to be doing OK.

I think we might take a while to recover completely, though.

Green shoots

2010-03-16T22:32:00.004Z

If you squint, you could convince yourself it's spring. The sun has been shining (some of the time, anyway); bulbs are poking up in the garden; it hasn't been as cold (except on the days when it has).

The onset of possible spring is making me think about plans for the future: short-term ones like knitting projects, and more life-changing ones like moving house and the Baby Question. Only I need to get the Thesis done before I can really think about any of these. I think I maybe need to take some time off work and grind away at it - I have two days a week to do it in, but somehow I never manage to get as much done as I think I am going to.

Not a lot else is happening here at the moment. We went out to lunch with my parents and Granny for Mothers' Day, which was lovely. We'd really celebrated it the week before (since my sister and brother were both away for the actual day) but can you celebrate mothers too thoroughly? Of course not.

J's big news this week is that he has bought a digital satellite receiver. He speaks German fluently and is fond of watching German free-to-air TV, but has hitherto been doing this through an elderly Sky box without a card, which isn't ideal. This new box is very clever, and among other things will receive signals from two different satellites without getting confused, so he can watch either UK television or German through the same box.

This means, of course, that he will need two dishes, one to point at each satellite. He has one in our back garden at the moment (see above) but I happen to know there's another one squirreled away under the stairs. Maybe our (hypothetical) new house needs a bigger back garden.

The other snag is that the new box needs an update to its software before it will receive German HD channels, and he is a bit anxious about installing this. Fingers crossed. (This all seems like quite a lot of trouble to go to to watch *The Simpsons* dubbed into German...)

I received a request a little while ago for a combined picture of my sock monkey with a guinea pig. Here you go, Loth's Second Born - will this do?

J has decided that the monkey's name is "Mrs Monkey". I will shortly be making a Mr Monkey to keep her company, so I expect more sock monkey photographs will be forthcoming.

In other news, I only have one week left of yoga. According to the yoga teacher, I am the only person who's been every week. Unfortunately I still can't do the Half Vinyasa. Perhaps I need more practice...

February's ice and sleet

2010-02-27T21:22:00.007Z

You know what? I have had about enough of it being February. March can start any time it likes. It has been very cold all week and we have had snow and rain alternately, with high winds from time to time. I don't normally mind winter, but I would really welcome even one day of unseasonal mildness with a bit of sunshine now and again.

On the other hand, February does have a few consolations.

J and I celebrated Valentine's day in our usual fashion, with home-made cards for each other. And then he made us dinner and produced some pink fizzy wine, as seen above (it really was pink, although the red candle behind it is making it pinker).

Then on the Tuesday it was Pancake Day and we duly ate pancakes. I've never quite bought the official explanation that we are supposed to eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday so that we can use up any ingredients that are forbidden during Lent; apart from the egg, there's only flour and milk in them, which doesn't sound terribly indulgent even by the standards of more austere times. Although I'm pretty sure that lemons, maple syrup and large lumps of vanilla ice cream would count as luxuries. (We did not put all these on the same pancake.)

My spare time lately has been taken up with a bit of knitting for the Ravelympics. This is an event on the knitting/crochet social network, Ravelry, and the idea is that during the course of the Olympics you take on a knitting challenge. I decided I was going to learn entrelac, which is a technique that produces knitting that looks like it's woven over and under itself.

Since I was just starting out with this I chose to knit Quant, a headband.

Entrelac turns out to be much less complicated than it looks. The blocks of knitting are attached to each other at right angles; you start one by picking up stitches along the side of a previous block. Then you join it to the one at the side by knitting two stitches together at the end of each row. (There, that made no sense to anyone who doesn't already know how to knit. Sorry.)

I'm very pleased with the finished headband - it should get plenty of wear, since I have another knitted headband that I use a lot. If I wear my hair up, I can't wear a woolly hat, so this lets me have tidy hair and warm ears.

Or it will if I can persuade Pumpkin to give it back.

Upward dog, inhale

2010-01-25T15:54:00.004Z

Sorry about the pause! I have had a rather busy and exhausting couple of weeks, but am now recovering.

I have been so exhausted that... shock horror... I have done hardly any knitting. I finished off these socks on Boxing Day, but the ones in the previous post are still languishing. I messed up one of the heels, didn't notice until the sock was nearly done, and am still psyching myself up to rip it back.

Still, you don't care about my socks. You want to know how the yoga is going.

My sister and I have now had four classes and are enjoying it. We are doing Ashtanga yoga, which is fairly energetic, although not so energetic that you seriously break a sweat. Our teacher is very nice; she's Spanish, and as a consequence we are probably learning all the words for the different positions with a Spanish accent.

To begin with, we both found it quite tough going: after the first class, I couldn't raise my arms for a few days, while S had a sore, um, gluteus. We seem to be adapting, though I wouldn't say I'm precisely graceful yet. Most of the others in the class are students, although one girl has started bringing her mum, so I'm no longer the oldest in the class. Probably still the chunkiest. But I'm managing OK.

On Monday evening I tried something new: I made a sock monkey.

Sock monkeys have a whole history in the US, but they're practically unknown over here. I think they're cute, though. And surprisingly easy and quick to make. I also like the fact that you do almost all the sewing before you have to cut into the socks, and that one monkey uses up one pair of socks, with hardly any wastage. (These were cheapo knee socks, cost £1.49).

The instructions I used are here.

Sock monkeys are very good at yoga.

I don't know if anyone noticed (other than Mum), but the comments on my last post contain one from J! A rather scathing one, frankly, but still. He excuses himself by saying that he's never commented on a blog before and doesn't know the etiquette. (Honestly. You'd think it was 2003.)

2010

2010-01-09T23:16:00.004Z

Despite the fact that I was quite happy saying "nineteen-whatever" for the first twenty years of my existence, I am having trouble thinking that this year is "twenty-ten". I'm sticking with "two thousand'n ten" for now, although I hear that most people seem to be quite happy saying "the twenty-twelve Olympics".

I'm hoping that this decade will have a good last year. I will finish my thesis. Maybe we will move house (though I'm sticking with "maybe").

Just now, our own house seems quite big and commodious since the Christmas tree went back in the loft. We have to move the sofa to accommodate it, so we lose a bit of floor in the living room; strange how much difference it makes.

During December, the guinea pigs' living space underwent some renovations:

They're now on a fleece blanket (over newspaper) instead of wood shavings. The wood shavings get kicked on to the carpet, and they also create huge amounts of dust, which was annoying for us and possibly not that healthy for the piggies. The room's been much less dusty since we swapped, and the pigs seem to like the fleece.

They also now have a play-pen in the spare room (which folds away when we need the room), which is what we were making in my last post. I tried to get some pictures and video of them trotting about in it, without much success yet - it's been too dark.

We have not been as badly affected by the snow as... well, as most people we know. Our street is very snowy, but it's not on a slope and we don't have a car, so it could be worse. The main roads are clear, the buses haven't stopped running and the supermarket is within walking distance. It could be a lot worse.

The beasties, of course, are not hugely disadvantaged by the snow (though it would come over their ears if they went out in it). They do seem to think it's hibernation season, though:

It seems like the weather for knitting.

No, I haven't gone completely nuts - these are the toes of socks which I'm making for a "travelling knitalong" (the sock gets passed around a group of five people, each of whom knit a section and finally get their original socks back again). Should be fun. They make good guinea pig hats, don't they?

I cast on a non-travelling sock on the bus when I went to meet up with Loth and Mum on Monday. Mum said she was disappointed by my lack of progress a couple of hours later. I dunno - I don't knit particularly fast, and I thought this was quite good for one day's knitting...

This was rather a rambly post, wasn't it?

In other news, my sister and I are signing up to do a yoga class this year, so as to be calm and serene. "And to have thighs the size of pencils" - sister. Wish us luck with that one.

Busy busy busy

2009-12-02T23:45:00.004Z

I have been grinding on with various useful tasks today, none of which were terribly exciting until the evening, when I went to B&Q to buy materials for a Mystery Piggy Project. The boy and I then did some sawing and sanding. Pictures when we finish!

(See what I do to try to induce some dramatic tension?)

Then we built the Billy Bookcase which has been languishing in our spare room for two weeks. It looks beautifully empty now, but I promise it won't stay like that.

The books in the picture are not in any kind of arrangement - they were hanging about on the landing waiting to be reshelved. I keep all my fiction in alphabetical order, which may be a little mad as it means that if I buy a new book by Margaret Atwood, everything after "Atwood" has to be shuffled along. Still, I can always find everything.

Other things that happened today: some yarn arrived in the post and I spent some time admiring its beauty:

It's going to be stripy socks. I need to finish my current socks first, though!

And the Christmas Elf arrived. A little late - he should really have been here yesterday, but he's a busy elf. Every home should have one.

By the way, if you are currently elfless, my mother is having a giveaway at her blog which includes this elf's cousin, among other Christmassy prizes. The deadline is the 8th of December.

And now I must go to bed as it's midnight!

(In answer to questions in comments: they're silicone muffin cups, from our local budget supermarket - for some reason they do really nice cookware! And the potatoes are Pink Fir Apple and you don't need to peel them; they're the waxy type that are best boiled.)

Happy Advent!

2009-12-01T23:50:00.003Z

Or, if you're not contemplating the advent of anything in particular, Happy December.

Sorry. NaBloPoMo was a resounding Fail this year. I don't know quite what happened, but I lost the rhythm somewhere there.

Still, new month, new attempt to blog a bit. Two weeks ago, rather to my surprise, I managed to sort out my annual leave for the year. Because of various events beyond my (or anyone's) control, I had a lot left - more than I had working days left this year, in fact.

And they're letting me take them. I don't have to work again in 2009 :)

This is something of a boon as I have this thesis to finish. The original plan was to have a first draft in by Christmas. I don't know whether I'll manage that, but it's looking a lot more likely than it was.

In addition to which, I have had time to do things like dig up our homegrown potatoes (see above) and make chocolate-cherry cupcakes.

The cupcakes are very good indeed. Possibly not health food. Oh well, chocolate has antioxidants in it...

Petty scofflaws

2009-11-16T17:33:00.002Z

So apparently it is the law that you can't go to IKEA without buying tealights and napkins (see yesterday's comments).

Well, I may be incriminating myself here, but we didn't buy either of those. In the interests of full disclosure, this is what we came home with:

* A steel vegetable dish with a ceramic lid
* Four white pasta bowls
* A washing-up brush
* A sieve
* The famous salad spinner
* A shower curtain
* Two venetian blinds (for the bathroom and the downstairs loo)
* A Billy bookcase

J is not very big on candles, being afraid of fire, so I don't think I have ever bought tealights from IKEA. We have a small box of Sainsbury's Basics ones in case of powercuts, but they have remained unopened since we moved here, I think.

Come to think of it, I would normally call little candles in metal casings "nightlights". What's the connection with tea? Do you put them under your samovar, if you happen to have such a thing?

Neither the venetian blinds nor the Billy have been assembled yet. My family have meanwhile been suggesting that buying a new Billy is a bad idea, because it may provide more book storage but doesn't address the real problem, which is that I buy too many books. A bit like extracting oil from tar sands.

I have pointed out that it was J's idea to buy another Billy (which may make him an enabler of my book addiction, but there we go). Also, if you have lots of books, you're sequestering carbon. Right?

Crisis over?

2009-11-15T13:39:00.002Z

We now have a theory about why the piggies were nibbled (though not who did it). I mentioned it can be a sign of stress.

Last week we had to remove their little wooden house temporarily on a couple of occasions, because they had got it wet and it had to be cleaned and dried out (guinea pigs don't do well in damp conditions). This definitely freaked them out a bit and they all crammed into the other shelter, which they don't normally sleep in. I wonder if that's when the nibbling happened.

In any case, we have made a trip to the petshop and bought them a new plastic house, which will be readily washable and should give them a safe place to hide even if we have to take their wooden house out again. You're really supposed to provide one hiding-place per pig, and while we had the wooden house, a cardboard tube, and a shelter, we didn't have a spare if any needed to be removed.

No more nibbling has taken place. Fingers crossed.

We also went to IKEA yesterday and bought various household items, including a salad spinner. Apparently my husband has always yearned for one. Known him for eleven years, but he can still surprise me!

So we are not going to worry too much, and going out for Sunday lunch. See you later!

Good news, bad news

2009-11-13T23:55:00.003Z

J's parents are here, which is lovely. It is J's dad's birthday today, which is also good.

Not so good is that two of our piggies, Brownie and Pumpkin, seem to have nibbled patches in their fur, on their cheeks - which means that they didn't do it themselves. This is known as barbering and it's not a good thing - it can be a sign of stress or aggression, and can be a forerunner of biting. The un-nibbled pig is Cupcake, who is about as aggressive as a cotton-wool ball, as far as we can tell.

So maybe Brownie and Pumpkin are doing it to each other? But it seems very odd that the patches would be in exactly the same place, which they are. We've never seen any of them behaving aggressively, so it's hard to tell.

I have posted for advice on a guinea pig forum and am awaiting developments. We do tend to worry about our piggies' health far more than we probably need to; but then they can't talk, so they can't tell us if something's wrong.

Whatever is wrong, it's not life-threatening and we can take them to the vet next week if we need to. Think about something positive.

It's six weeks until Christmas! I feel fairly positive about this; I like Christmas. Yesterday I saw that they had started to put up the Winter Wonderland amusements on Princes Street. I've never been on the big wheel, but I like the way it looks.

Fusion music

2009-11-12T01:05:00.001Z

As I cycled home tonight* after doing a bit of late-night shopping, I passed one of the touristy shops selling Scottish souvenirs that infest the centre of Edinburgh. You can usually tell when you're getting near one because of the very loud piped bagpipe music which will be blaring out. (I'm really glad I don't live above one.)

The music sounded a bit odd. As I was stopped at a set of traffic lights, I had a minute or two to listen to it.

It was the Can-Can. Arranged for massed pipes.

*Don't worry, Mum, I had my lights and my new helmet and everything.

A red hat

2009-11-11T23:53:00.003Z

I went back to work and tackled my e-mail backlog, as you do.

Then I came home, and tried on the latest product of my needles, which had been drying out after being blocked (soaked in water and re-shaped).

I like red hats. A significant proportion of all the hats I've ever owned have been red. Maybe it's the result of early exposure to the Amazon pirates.

Anyway, this red hat is particularly fine because the cables get bigger from the crown following the Fibonacci sequence. I don't suppose Captain Nancy would have been terribly impressed with that, but I like it.

Brownie's not that impressed, either.

Nothingy kind of day

2009-11-10T22:03:00.003Z

So most people seem to much prefer either summer or winter?

I don't feel as strongly about it as I used to - when I was a teenager I actively disliked summer. Partly, I suspect, because I didn't like wearing summer clothes because the choice seemed to be between "revealing" and "frumpy" and because I felt hot and pink and undignified.

These days I'm not quite so self-conscious, and also I garden, so I like the period when everything's blooming or fruiting. And I like the light. Not good at waking up when it's dark. But I do like cooler weather, in general - maybe I have a tendency to hibernate.

Today was a nothingy kind of day in which I typed up stuff for the Dreaded Thesis, interspersed with brief bouts of messing around on Ravelry. Sorry. Some days are like that. I did cuddle my little furry friends several times, and fed them grapes.

Do not get between a guinea pig and her grape.

I go back to work tomorrow after my two-week-plus absence with the Virus. That'll come as a shock to the system...

Frosty morning

2009-11-10T00:15:00.002Z

This was the view from my bedroom window this morning - the first frost of the year. It was pretty chilly when I ventured out to go to the supermarket.

Although I feel slightly cheated if it's cold and rainy in summer, I never mind the cold in autumn or winter. To every thing there is a season, and all that. I would rather deal with cold weather than hot weather, because I find it much easier to warm up than cool down.

Besides, I prefer winter clothes to summer clothes any day. There's something satisfying about getting out the flannel pyjamas and long socks and woolly scarves and hats. I like to be prepared for all eventualities, though it must be said that our winters aren't really very harsh in southern Scotland. I might feel differently if I had to struggle through feet of snow.

Even without severe cold, though, the onset of autumn is a good excuse to do a bit of nesting at home, and to wrap up and go for brisk walks.

And to contemplate knitting woolly socks.

Woolfest!

2009-11-08T20:43:00.004Z

Yesterday got off to a very good start. We made good time down the A1 (we had borrowed Mum and Dad's car for the day). J does not love driving, but it was one of those bright crisp autumn days and there was no traffic to speak of.

St Abbs is not a big place and even with my less than reliable sense of direction, we had no trouble finding the community hall. However, there were no alpacas (or angora goats) outside this time. C'est la vie. I suppose autumn isn't really baby goat season.

We had slightly more difficulty getting into the hall for some reason - the door should have been perfectly obvious, but we ended up circumnavigating the hall completely before we could get in. Oops. But once we were in, we were greeted with tables covered as far as the eye could see in lovely colours:

It wasn't very long before I encountered Ysolda (Edinburgh's local superstar designer) and Jeni of Fyberspates, who I hadn't met before, but who dyes some of my favourite yarns. I bought my first skein of Fyberspates yarn at the last Woolfest in March, and several more have followed - it's all so pretty and lovely to knit with.

I said I would look at all the yarn before investing in any, but I became entrapped by a lovely skein of chunky green twirly yarn in the Fyberspates bargain tub and had to buy it before anyone else did.

It was only £2! Major bargain. It's very, very soft. After this triumph J and I fortified ourselves with tea and scones before looking at the rest of the stalls.

At most of them, something like the following conversation took place:

Me: Feel this: isn't it soft? It's got cashmere in it. And look what a lovely colour!
J: Very nice. What could you make with that?
Me: Oh, socks. Or a little shawl. Or some fingerless gloves, maybe.
J: Mmmm.
Me: I suppose £12 is a bit expensive for socks. Hmmm, look, this one's pretty too. It might be harder-wearing. Maybe I should get this one.
J: Yes, it's nice too.

And so on. The boy deserves a medal.

In the end, I bought two skeins of sock yarn (a bright springy green from The Yarn Yard, and a green/blue/purple Sheila's Sock Yarn from Fyberspates) and the blue skein in the photo above. I think this was very restrained.

Then J and I went for a little scenic walk around St Abbs.

I don't know if you can read this (click for bigger), but the sign says "Harbourmaster's Office".

"It looks suspiciously like a shed" - J.

Unlike when I was there in March and nearly froze and blew away over the North Sea, the weather was calm and still. There were some people at the harbour preparing to go scuba diving.

By now it was mid-afternoon and already starting to look a little evening-ish. The light goes early in Scotland after the equinox. We headed back up the hill and drove off to a country pub - unfortunately arriving after they had finished serving lunch. Oops again. They did us a very nice lemonade and packet of crisps each, though, and we may go back for their beer festival next week - J undoubtedly deserves an outing of his choosing after his patience with my wool-gathering!

We had a lovely time

2009-11-08T00:29:00.002Z

and I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

The alpacas didn't materialise, but the scones did. I did indeed meet some Ravellers. And I have four nice new woolly colourful bundles to play with.

I leave the house

2009-11-07T00:21:00.001Z

Today I wrapped myself up in a big coat and ventured out into the rain to go and have lunch with my sister. Our offices are just a couple of streets apart, so we try to do this every week, and it's so lovely to see her.

I handed over the mitts - they fit, and L seems pleased with them (though she would never ever let me know if she wasn't, because she's lovely!) I am pleased with them myself - they're the best mitts I've done yet, I think, and the neatest as regards the finishing off. I didn't have any holes to sew up at the thumb joint, which is a first.

After lunch I wandered down to John Lewis and bought a clear acrylic desk-tidy thingy in which to put all the notebooks that live on our telephone shelf. Then I went to the café for a cup of peppermint tea. I know how to live.

Tomorrow J and I are going to the Woolfest in St Abb's, a village in the Borders. I am going to look at all the nice yarn (and maybe, just maybe, buy some). J is going because... well, because he's a good husband, really. And he can drive and I can't. I have told him there will probably be alpacas, which are cute, and tea and scones. I hope it lives up to my build-up!

More about knitting and guinea pigs

2009-11-05T17:56:00.004Z

This is great. The way this is going, I can spend the entire month just answering the comments... well, maybe not. But the snag about starting this in a week when I was recovering from being ill is that I haven't done very much other than knit.

Answers!

Anna wants to know if guinea pigs go to sleep on you (presumably while you're knitting) or move about.

Guinea pigs are weird animals - most of them don't sleep very much at all. They alternate between twenty minutes of moving about and twenty minutes of sitting still - but looking perfectly alert - all day and all night. How they get by on so little sleep is a mystery as yet unsolved by science. It's thought that they take micro-naps but never sleep deeply at all.

I've known some guinea pigs for years without ever seeing them close their eyes. We do see Pumpkin and Cupcake catnapping, but Brownie is pretty much always alert. Cupcake is the sleepiest pig I've ever known, but even she has only gone to sleep outside her cage once (when she was a baby).

They do sit fairly still when they're on our laps, though. A restless pig is usually a pig that needs a toilet break.

Loth, I'm sorry that I can't show them knitting. Can I offer you an intelligent mouse instead?

Meanwhile, I have finished knitting the mitts for my sister. They were a commission rather than a surprise, so I feel I can show you photos without any trouble:

You can see the lacy bit better in the second photo, but I thought I'd better put the first one up just to prove I did knit two! The other knitted thing is a hat, not knitted by me, from which I copied the lace pattern.

Knitting with guinea pigs

2009-11-04T19:27:00.002Z

Loth wants to know how you knit with guinea pigs.

Well, to be honest I don't.

I have crocheted a guinea pig:

And they often help me take photographs of finished projects:

But frankly, when it comes to the actual knitting, they're not that helpful.

She feels accomplished

2009-11-02T16:13:00.000Z

Today I succeeded in reverse-engineering a very simple lace motif.

This may mean nothing to you if you don't knit, but it represents a step forward in my knitting abilities. Previously I have managed to knit lace, sort of, by following the directions blindly without knowing what the different stitches actually do. Now I can - just about - look at a knitted item (provided it's not too complicated) and work out roughly how it was made.

The current project is a pair of fingerless mitts for my sister - they're working out nicely so far. I didn't invent the whole pattern - it's adapted from this one, which I've knitted before and is simple and very comfortable. I am so grateful to all the people who put free patterns up!

(clears throat) Is this thing on?

2009-11-01T23:03:00.003Z

Hello world!

I haven't felt like blogging for ages and ages. But since it's November, month of Nablopomo, I feel inspired to give it another go.

In the interim I've been away twice (to Crieff and to Norfolk) and spent a lot of time thinking about Freedom of Information for my thesis, knitting and playing with my guinea pigs.

OK, maybe that's not very exciting. So I'm going to set a goal for November, which is to do (at least) one fun and interesting thing every week, and write about it. It may be generally interesting. It may only be interesting to me. We'll see how it works out. I'll tag the relevant entries "Thing".

This week's Thing may have to be quiet and gentle as I'm recovering from a nasty virus, but I have to start somewhere!

Socialising

2009-06-16T15:55:00.003Z

In the past few weeks, I have had something approaching a social life. I spent a lovely day with Rosemary Riveter and her parents, and we went to the current exhibition in the Queen's Gallery (The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life. It was good, especially as Rosie looks at pictures for about as long as I do.)

Then later in the week, I went to the knit night at K1 Yarns, which was very pleasant. I met lots of lovely people, including Wendy aka Tartanqueen, who I know from Ravelry. I also got quite a lot of sock knitted simply because I could knit uninterrupted for a couple of hours. I wasn't able to go back last week because I had to collect my bike (it was in the workshop - I managed to break the axle!) but I'm sure I will return. And I'll bring my crocheted guinea pig as requested.

Last weekend my parents-in-law made a flying visit. J took Friday off work to entertain them, which was just as well since somehow I failed to realise in advance that they were leaving on Sunday morning. (Whenever I think I'm getting better at knowing what's going on and organising myself accordingly, I do something like this.)

Despite this, we had a nice time, I think, if somewhat low-key.

All this socialising is very nice, but it is causing me to think that I am on holiday. Which I'm not. Soon I will have to get seriously going on my thesis (I'm still in the writing-vague-plans stage) and this is making me a bit nervous.

However, this week I will genuinely be on holiday at least some of the time. We are going up to Crieff for a few days. Crieff has the advantage of perfect, perfect familiarity; there is plenty to do if you want it, or you could just go for walks. Or sit and read books. No pressure.

We are taking the guinea pigs with us. I'll let you know how that goes...

Time passes

2009-06-07T22:09:00.002Z

That was not meant to be a nearly three-month hiatus.

I didn’t feel much like blogging for a while. I was doing a big project at work which was stressing me out, and was working late a lot and then coming home and feeling that I had no brain or energy left to blog with. Yeah, I know; I only work three days a week. There we go.

2009 has been a depressing kind of year in so many ways, which has probably contributed to making me feel that I want to draw my head in, like a tortoise. It’s not had too much of an impact on J and me; we still have our jobs, and we’re doing OK. J has been feeling well enough to go to work for much of this year, as well, which is fantastic, although tiring in its own way as he has needed a lot of support. We’re beginning to feel we might be able to do grown-up things like book exciting holidays and actually expect J to be well enough to go, but we’ve been so tired out by the daily round that we just don’t feel like it. Yet. Things are getting better.

What happened in the past three months? Let’s see. We redecorated the entrance hall/stairway/landing of our house, and hung some pictures up. I did quite a lot of work in the garden, mostly on the lawn (boring) but also growing vegetables from seed and some flowers.

We did a lot of cycling and fitted panniers to J’s bike so that he can carry more stuff on it – I’ve had panniers for a long time and they do make a bike a lot more useful. We visited my brother in Dumfriesshire, which was lovely and very relaxing. I read quite a lot of books and did some knitting.

I completed the six-month fitness course in the gym; at the end of it, I still hadn’t lost any significant weight, although I was running a good bit faster and lifting heavier weights. A couple of weeks later, feeling my motivation starting to sag a bit, I had a couple of sessions with a personal trainer. This resulted in a new programme which relies almost entirely on free weights rather than machines, and a different sort of interval training (much shorter intervals, but higher intensity).

The new programme is interesting, and I enjoy it while I’m doing it, but it is definitely more demanding and takes longer to do than my old routine. Instead of having different days for upper and lower body, I do all the muscle groups every time. I know that the old programme wasn’t having quite the impact I wanted, but sometimes the new one feels like a lot to tackle in one session.

For that reason, a few weeks ago I took a break from it until my big work project was finished. I know that exercise is supposed to give you more energy, but if I’m too exhausted to do anything else, then it’s not working. I’ll be resuming this week, but if it continues to be too difficult to keep up, I will think about following the same basic outlines but splitting up the exercises into upper/lower body days to make the overall routine shorter. It won’t be as high-impact, but it will have more impact than not doing it because it’s too much!

The piggies are in good health and are not suffering from exhaustion in the slightest.

Summer has arrived in Scotland and last weekend we went to the beach and swam in the sea. No photographs were taken of this. This is what the sky looked like that weekend, though. It’s not so hot now, but still feels like summer – maybe the second half of 2009 will be a bit more promising?

Pounding away

2009-03-24T11:28:00.002Z

I've now completed three-and-a-third weeks of the six-week fitness challenge I signed up for at the gym. It's going pretty well, I think. As usual, I'm enjoying the weights more than the running. but the running is all right, especially since I started remembering to bring my headphones with me. I can't listen to music while running on a treadmill (I always try to match the rhythm of the music, not the treadmill, which isn't a great idea) but I can watch TV. Countdown is surprisingly good to run to - all those ticking clocks make the time go by more quickly!

I'm noticing the same patterns I remember from before: lower-body exercises are easy; upper-body exercises that use free weights (all dumbbells in this case) are harder but progress is being made; and upper-body exercises that use machines are hard and deeply unrewarding. I think it may be simply that the machines are designed to accommodate much broader shoulders, but aren't adjustable in that direction. Maybe I need to find dumbbell exercises to replace those, too.

The only disadvantage to the dumbbell exercises is, again, perfectly familiar - I'm always the only girl in the bench gym. I'm really not sure why, as you do see the occasional woman in the Olympic gym, and lots of women use the machines. Or maybe the place is full of women on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and I just don't see them...

I've been increasing the weights for every exercise except the dreaded upper-body machines, and I've increased my average speed for the interval training. I've also noticed an improvement while cycling. I haven't lost any weight to speak of, though. Hmmmm.

The disadvantage of all this gymming is that I tend to come home pretty tired, which has (as you can see) had a knock-on effect on my blogging. Often I just don't feel like turning the computer on. Maybe this will change as my fitness levels improve - let's hope so.

Notwithstanding my poor blogging record lately, I seem to have garnered an award.

I know for some people this sort of thing is old hat, but I have never (to my knowledge) been given an award before! Thank you, Warty Mammal.

1. Put the logo on your blog or post
2. Nominate at least 10 blogs which show great Attitude and/or Gratitude!
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
5. Share the love and link to the person from whom you received your award.

Actually, I will need to think about who to hand it on to. And work out whether I am being recognised for my attitude or my gratitude. I think I probably do better on the latter.

A blogless month

2009-03-09T23:33:00.002Z

Yes. OK. I don't think the February daily posts were meant to be. It's been a while since I've gone a month without posting at all.

February was a rather depressing month in many ways. The weather was horrible. Lots of credit crunchiness on the news and on everyone's blogs, and the Australian bushfires. We are lucky not to live in such a flammable country; we're also lucky in that we, personally, haven't felt the effects of the economy in any serious way.

Lucky in many ways, in fact. I wish everyone else wasn't having such a bad time, though. (We're also worried about J's grandfather, who hasn't been well.)

What have I been doing while I wasn't blogging? Well, J's brother visited and we went for a snowy walk at Vane Farm, a nature reserve in Tayside.

(Click to go to my Flickr and a lot more photos - it was a beautiful day).

Then his parents came up for a weekend and we went to Crail (in Fife). J's grandfather was stationed there during WWII, so it has a bit of historical interest for the family. (This photograph does not fully capture how cold and windy it was.)

Apart from that, I did a lot of knitting:

This is my latest - the Halley's Comet Hat designed by Marnie McLean. It has a pretty flower (or comet, I suppose) on the top:

It's the first lacy pattern I've knitted and I'm very pleased with it. I also went to the Woolfish festival in St Abb's on Saturday and bought lovely handpainted and hand-dyed sock wool, so probably more socks are on the way...

The other thing I did this month is get back into the gym. My old gym is offering six-week basic training programmes, including a free one-hour induction. I've been out of the gym long enough that I felt I needed a refresher course, so I signed up. The induction was excellent (thanks, Bob) and I'm now halfway through my second week of weights and interval training on the treadmill.

I'm somewhat irritated by how weak and slow I am, but nonetheless, I've now been running more times than in the whole of 2008!

My fourth blogiversary was last week. 2008 was not a good year for fitness, mostly because I was working too hard (I seem to remember this happened last time I did a Master's degree...) Let's see if 2009 can be better.

Thinking of Australia

2009-02-09T23:41:00.003Z

It's hard to know what to say about the fires in southern Australia. So many killed, and so many more homeless; and it's still going on. Even for those who are safe, it's such a terrible thing to have to contemplate.

Words just fail. But we are thinking of you, Australians.

I didn't post over the weekend, though I started writing an entry which I still haven't finished. Maybe tomorrow.

Six things

2009-02-06T23:52:00.001Z

The Holistic Knitter (in her guise of http://lyndasbookblog.blogspot.com/) has tagged me for a meme. I do memes all the time on LJ, but I'm not sure anyone's ever actually tagged me before! Here are the rules:

Link to the person who has tagged you.Write down six things that make you happy.Post the rules, tag six others and let them know you did it.Then tell the person when your entry is complete.

1 Reading. This must have brought me more pleasure in life than any other activity, since I've been doing it constantly from an early age. I am shamelessly addicted to stories; although I enjoy non-fiction as well, there is nothing quite like having a new book from a favourite author. I always have a book in my bag, and love reading on-screen more than I ever thought I would, as well.
2 My family - see last entry: my parents are pretty nice too :) I include J's family, who are the best in-laws one could ask for.
3 Reading in the bath. This may be a subset of number 1, but there is no better place to read. My ideal bath is deep, and the water is hot enough to last at least 100 pages. Sadly, with environmental considerations (and because I'm so busy) I mostly have showers these days. Haven't worked out how to read in those.
4 The natural world, and our imitations of it in gardens and parks. I love flowers, and I love... landscape. Woods, hills, shores. I'm fortunate enough to live in a place where all of these are fairly easy to get to.
5 Making things. Whether it's baking, drawing, sewing or knitting, or just putting flat-pack furniture together, I find the process very satisfying. I am always disproportionately pleased with the results, maybe because I don't truly believe it's going to work.
6 Sitting in cafés. This may be a slightly odd one. I like good coffee, but it's not just that; I enjoy sitting in a place apart from the cares of home or work for a bit, whether I'm with friends or on my own just reading or people-watching.

Tagging. Hmmm. As I've never been tagged, I don't think I've ever tagged, either. Isabelle, scoliyogi, Rosemary Grace, Loth, Jeni and Anna - please don't feel obliged, but I'm waving at you.

Siblings

2009-02-05T23:45:00.003Z

My sister's company moved offices a week or so ago, and handily for me, her new workplace is a stone's throw from mine - I can even see part of the building out of my office window. So we've decided to have a sisterly lunch every Thursday. This week, my brother was in town as well, and he came along too.

I get on well with both my sibs, though we're all very different. I will never be either as organised, imaginative, or stylish as my sister, and I'll never be as witty or grounded as my brother. They're very good company.

We've always got on well. Apparently when my sister was brought home from the hospital, I thought she was the best thing ever, and she was my boss from then on. When my brother arrived, she and I instantly co-opted him as an extra doll. The poor kid spent the first few years being dressed up in a variety of outfits, put in a doll's pram, and arbitrarily re-named for whatever imaginary game we were playing.

We did this a lot. My sister was always the guiding spirit, and there are plenty of pictures of us dressed up to play circuses, schools or Peter Pan. We also drew and made things with paper and sellotape ("There are lots of little bits of paper all over the carpet again...") and built intricate structures out of Lego. We didn't always do the same things - my brother was a big car enthusiast from an early age - but we did often play together, and were closer than most siblings I know. I'm glad we all still like each other!

This photo was taken almost 22 years ago - I'm seven, and the others are almost six and two. Doesn't the weather look lovely?

It is minus 5 degrees (only celsius, but still) outside at the moment. It seems impossible that sandal weather will ever arrive again. But it will. Patience.

What we did at the weekend

2009-02-04T22:45:00.007Z

I may not have mentioned this before, but my husband has a lively interest in audiovisual and broadcasting technology. Not just the programmes, but the methods of transmission and recording. He also likes to be well-supplied with equipment for receiving and recording transmissions, though he doesn't require it to be new - in fact, he'd rather have something old if he can get it to work. He also likes his hi-fi to sound as good as possible.

As a result, this is what the corner of the sitting room looked like until last Saturday. Lots of boxes and wires.I'm certain that I've mentioned that the TV in the picture above was on the blink. Latterly, it was switching itself off almost immediately after being switched on, which made watching it a bit difficult.

However, the corner of the sitting room now looks like this. Better, isn't it?

(That's an episode of Frasier - the one where a basketball player rubs Niles's head for good luck.)

It took a while to select and buy the TV, partly because we are cautious people when it comes to buying new stuff, and partly because it is impossible to buy new cathode ray TVs any more, and the flat ones seem to sell out very quickly. However, the decision to buy a corner unit was taken and carried out in about 24 hours, mostly because a family trip to IKEA happened to coincide with TV Delivery Day. (If you're reading, Shauna, it's a Leksvik.) I'm so glad we went for it.

Still, you're not interested in our TV. What you really want to know is whether Linds's carrot cake turned out well.

I think this picture speaks for itself. (Goodness, Cupcake looks huge. Maybe she's actually an albino wombat or something.)

Better day

2009-02-03T23:00:00.001Z

The snow was all gone by the morning. I'm sure that the high spirits were just because this much snow is so rare, as Anna said in the comments. It's not often that there's enough snow for a snowball here (and there still wasn't really enough for good snowman-building).

Earlier in the day I had walked into town along the bike path. I wouldn't have dared to bike in the snow, but some hardy souls evidently had, from the tracks. It was fairly pleasant walking, as the track had hardly been used, so the snow was still white and "dry". There were a few footprints, covered over a little; by the time I had been to Homebase and returned, my outward footprints had disappeared under more snow. (This probably doesn't seem unusual if you live in a snowy country.)

I was buying matchpots (for the ongoing hall-redecoration project), tie-back hooks, and two underbed storage boxes. I slightly regretted this as I was trying to walk home carrying two unwieldy plastic boxes - fortunately not heavy. But it's worth it. I now have a tidy bedroom. When I got home I hemmed the new red curtains for the spare room and hung them up, and they look very good. So it was a pretty productive day, really, up until the trauma.

Today wasn't quite so productive, although I did manage to paint the matchpots on to the wall (they look completely different in the light conditions at the top and bottom of the stairs - it's so confusing). And I made this carrot cake. I like baking, but we tend to make the same three cakes over and over, and they're all out of How To Be A Domestic Goddess. Time to branch out.

My brother-in-law is coming at the weekend, so we had an excuse. I hope he likes carrot cake. This is a BIG mixture - we got a loaf tin and nine largish cupcakes out of it. The icing is delicious, though we haven't actually tasted the cake yet! Aren't we restrained?

Mixed kind of day

2009-02-02T23:46:00.001Z

At about 6pm today, I was all set to write a nice upbeat post about the constructive day I'd had - I got quite a lot done and went for a snowy walk. Apparently Britain has had more snow today than it has for eighteen years!

Then, just as I was waiting for J to come home from work, some boys came past our house and decided to pelt our windows with snowballs. Big teenagers. Hard.

We live in an area of Edinburgh which used to have a bad reputation, and is undergoing regeneration. I've honestly never had any regrets about moving here, or much to complain of regarding neighbourly behaviour. We live between a young doctor and a retired couple. The place seems perfectly civilised.

This didn't. When I heard the boys throwing snowballs at the elderly couple's house next door, I went to the window to see what was happening, which was obviously a mistake. I'm sure it wasn't personal, and I'm sure it was just high spirits really, but they were shouting and swearing and I was genuinely frightened that the windows were going to break. I don't think they could tell how much noise it made for the person inside.

I ended up calling my mum and the local police, in that order (but by then the boys had moved off). The policeman on the phone said that they were getting a lot of similar complaints - and it was happening all over Edinburgh - and they had just sent a police car to patrol the streets, but they wouldn't send anyone out to our house unless we had property damage. Which was fine. Nothing to see here. The boys didn't come back.

J came home just after that, and we had our tea and watched University Challenge and I felt a bit better, but he's now worried that our windows will be broken when we aren't here. He's rationalised that we are under pretty much constant surveillance from the old people's home across the road, so disaster is unlikely to occur, but he's unnerved.

So maybe you'll get a cheery upbeat blog tomorrow. I like snow, and I like people, but I'm feeling a little bit jaded about both just at the moment.

So that was January

2009-02-01T23:41:00.002Z

Oh, I didn't post much, did I?

One reason is that I haven't been doing anything for my course, so I haven't had the computer on nearly as much. The other is that I've been unusually tired, and haven't really done much to blog about or felt like blogging. I have been twittering a bit, and if you read them you might have noticed that notable events this month have mostly involved falling off my bike.

Right. New month, new resolutions to blog properly and get on with things. I successfully did NaBloPoMo last November (one post per day for the whole month). Let's see if I can do it again. February is a short month, anyway.

In months that aren't November, NaBloPoMo does themes. This month's is WANT. So here goes. In February, I want to blog daily and I don't want to fall off my bike again.

January doesn't bring the snow yet

2009-01-13T21:34:00.004Z

We didn't have a terribly wonderful start to the New Year - J was feeling very down after we got back from his parents, and didn't manage to get in to work all week. But he seems to be recovering from this setback much more quickly than he normally does.

He hadn't seen his cognitive therapist for a couple of weeks because of being away, and was beginning to feel that the therapy wasn't really helping. After his session on Thursday, he was considering not going back. However, he IS going back. She said at the session that he may need to accept that there are times when his depression will be bad enough that it gets in the way of making progress, and to learn to wait it out, rather than blaming himself or despairing.

He's also supposed to build something enjoyable into every day. This would be easier if he weren't so tired in the evenings, but we're working on it.

Last weekend he decided that he needs to do things that will have a visual result, and consequently has started painting the woodwork in the hall as a preliminary to redecorating the walls. This is excellent. We've been meaning to paint over the multitudinous scrapes and handprints since we got here, but put the hall off till last since it's an awkward area - the stairs are narrow and it's pretty much impossible to go up or down if someone's painting there.

He's finished the banisters already. Now to start thinking about colours for the walls. He fancies pink, which I have some trouble envisaging, so I see shade cards and test pots in our future.

Apart from this impressive progress towards an Ideal Home, he's been really pretty sanguine and resilient, has gone into work twice - well, it's only Tuesday - and has recovered quickly from daily frustrations (such as phoning Orange customer services) which would ordinarily cast him into gloom. I'm cautiously optimistic about the rest of the week.

For the last few days I've been very tired, partly because it's been that time of the month, partly... I don't know why. I've been to bed at a decent hour and everything. The past couple of days have been spent mostly in desultory tidying, the kind that doesn't have the visual result J finds so important. (I really don't like tidying, but it will be worth it.)

Which is to say I haven't been to the gym yet. I am going to at least phone them about renewing my membership before the week is out, though.

Resolution time

2009-01-08T21:45:00.002Z

Happy New Year, everybody (only 8 days late!)

I got back to Edinburgh on Sunday and rather hit the ground running - Monday and Tuesday were spent frantically springcleaning the house (or removing the pall of very fine sawdust that the guinea pigs generate) and since yesterday I've been back at work. I had a very nice restful time over Christmas and New Year, but the restorative effect has worn off rather quickly.

I have an awful lot of New Year's resolutions. It's more like a to-do list. This is probably bad.

* Finish my degree
* Redecorate parts of the house (paint the hall, get rid of the awful dirty-beige living room carpet)
* Sort out all the stuff in the cupboard in the study, ditto the spare room, and rationalise it
* Go on holiday somewhere that is not Britain
* Spend more time making things
* Revamp this blog so it looks less 2001 (it didn't even exist in 2001...)
* Read more widely
* Eat more healthily, avoiding chocolate biscuits
* GET BACK INTO THE GYM THREE TIMES A WEEK

Yes, the last one is deserving of those capitals. 2008 was not a good year for fitness in the slightest. I spent the first half of it with sore feet, and once I got my insoles I went running twice. Not stellar. I hardly did any weights and basically depended on cycling to remind me that I like to move, and it wasn't enough.

That, combined with spending three days a week in a room with a constantly replenished tin of chocolate biscuits, has not been good for the body. Weight-wise, I'm about back where I started back in 2005 - slightly fitter, perhaps, but still. It may not be a coincidence that at this point I had not long finished a postgraduate degree, and that during my university career I had depended largely on cycling as my exercise. I am somewhat frustrated to be right back wher eI started. (Maybe I should have called this blog something indicating that I intended to learn from the past?)

Anyway. This period of my life is over. The biscuit tin at work officially no longer exists. (That red thing over there? Just an optical illusion.)

As for the exercise... well, I managed to hurt myself on Monday in an incident involving a fully loaded drawer. I pulled it out too far and then leant in and grabbed it, preventing it from squashing my feet and kneecapping me on the way, but wrenching something in my lower back. Not my finest moment. However, it's feeling a lot better now and if all goes well, I'm hoping to get back on a treadmill by next week.

The frozen south

2008-12-31T12:09:00.002Z

Hello, people! I am blogging from the frosty Midlands, where I'm staying with J's family.

I came out of the other end of Assignment Time and was instantly plunged into finishing up my Christmas shopping, and then socialising with my friends and relations. So I haven't had a lot of time to blog. But I had a lovely Christmas in Edinburgh with J, my parents, siblings and cousins, and then came down to Worcester to spend New Year with the in-laws. It's very chilly, but we've been out for walks and around the town, and seen some friends and their children.

I got lots of lovely books for Christmas:

Diplomatic Immunity (Lois McMaster Bujold)
The Ghost Brigades (John Scalzi)
Beauty and Spindle's End (Robin McKinley)

I've read the first two already, and reviews may be forthcoming shortly on the other blog. Meanwhile I am rereading Bellwether by Connie Willis, as I need a break between all these new stories.

I am being summoned to have a cup of tea - a major part of activities when staying with my in-laws. I'll be back home on the 5th.

Busy busy busy

2008-12-16T20:46:00.005Z

I have two assignments to hand in on Saturday, so have not had a lot of time to blog. Or a lot of time to do things that are blogworthy. Or to do any Christmas shopping.

There's always time to cuddle the guinea pigs.

On the other hand, I got an early Christmas present yesterday when my Bookbloggers' Christmas Swap parcel arrived from Mariel of Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops. Thank you very much, Mariel!

(You may contend that I am not a bookblogger. However, if you look to your right, there's a link to something called Bibliomane, and I do sometimes blog about books there. I'm hoping to have more time and brain to write proper reviews when I'm finished with all this studying.)

As you can see, my parcel contained a copy of The Gift by Alison Croggon - an Australian writer and poet I haven't heard of before, but the book sounds like my sort of thing.

It also contained these fabulous digital socks.

I have something of a sock addiction which goes beyond a desire to have warm feet. In the winter I particularly like knee socks, which these are (moreover, they're knee socks which stay up). So I'm very pleased with these indeed. They are also so very loud and cheery that I smile every time I look down.

My last day of work is tomorrow, but from then until the weekend, I will be determinedly writing essays about Scottish Local Government. I'll see you on the other side. I can do it, with the help of my new socks -

- and my lovely assistant.

Took a week off

2008-12-08T10:36:00.000Z

I didn't mean to. I think the first week in December must be relatively unblogged, since so many people are recovering from NaBloPoMo.

I don't have any terrific excuses, other than being up to my ears in work (but then I always am).

My parents-in-law came to stay for the weekend. It was good to see them, and also good that J could show them, in person, that he's making progress. It's been very difficult for them over the past months, being at a distance.

J is still plugging away at his therapy, and does seem to be getting somewhat better at leaving the house with less checking. It's still there, but it's not taking him so long and he's managed to stop some checks altogether.

I have nothing profound to say. Here, have a video of a talented mouse.

Wet pigs

2008-11-30T23:46:00.000Z

I've just finished clearing up after the daunting task of giving the guinea pigs a bath. They do not consider this a fun way of spending a Sunday evening. In fact, they usually protest loudly and either cower pitifully in the bath and shudder (Cupcake), try to run away up the sloping end of the bath, giving the illusion of running on a treadmill (Pumpkin) or demonstrate just how high a pig can jump when desperate (Brownie).
But on this occasion they were very good and I'm only lightly scratched. We have to shampoo them periodically to ward off fungal skin infections, which Cupcake and Pumpkin had earlier this year. Otherwise I wouldn't bother - we never washed our previous guinea pigs and they kept themselves perfectly clean, cat-fashion.

They do look nice and fluffy once they've been towelled off and blowdried (on a VERY gentle setting, with the dryer held at a distance!) And Cupcake always looks beautifully white when she's dry, like a washing-powder advert.

I think they've forgiven us. Maybe.

This is my last entry for NaBloPoMo. I did it! I posted every day for 30 days. It may all have been piffle, but it's nice to know I can do it.

I'm going to have some time off work this week - will we see if I can keep this posting up? I suspect I won't, but I think I've proved I do have time to post more often than I did before this month.

Frosty day

2008-11-29T23:26:00.003Z

It is really cold tonight. I've just been out in the garden (to empty our collected vegetable peelings into the composter) and the grass was crunchy and the birdbath was frozen over. It's supposed to be -4°C according to the weather forecast.

We went into town to meet our friend S this morning as planned, which involved getting up rather earlier than we normally would on a Saturday. But it was worth it. The morning was crisp and sunny (though not warm) and we had a very nice breakfast in the Southern Cross café in Cockburn Street. I'm pretty sure this particular café was chosen because it was the first one we encountered on the way from the station, and I do not function very well before I've had my breakfast.

I don't normally have croissants or hot chocolate for breakfast - which is perhaps just as well - but it's nice as an occasional treat!

S is a serious globetrotter, at least compared to us. He had been in Germany and France the previous two weekends, and has also recently been to China (in fact, I've never been able to mention anywhere he hasn't been). We aren't nearly so good at booking holidays. When we mentioned this, he said "Why, what's so difficult about it?" and we didn't have a very good answer.

One reason is that J gets stressed by the prospect of leaving home (and his piggies) but that isn't the whole reason. I like travelling, but I'm not confident about organising it myself, especially if someone else is going to have to put up with my decisions (what if I choose terrible accommodation? what if the place I decide to go is really boring?)

Also, I've not had a lot of time off from the degree in the last two years. Maybe once it's over, we will organise more trips.

We stayed up town for a while and bought J some new swimming shorts. He claims to have had his old ones since he was either eleven or thirteen (he can't remember) and years of chlorine has faded them from navy blue to a sort of greyish purple. Late November isn't the best time to buy swimming shorts, but in the end we did manage to track some down. Unfortunately, we didn't actually have time to go swimming after all that. Still, now we have the kit, there's no excuse not to go!

Unbounded domesticity

2008-11-28T23:44:00.003Z

I've spent the last couple of hours making two banana loaf cakes and an apple pie, with J's help. ("It's the opposite of making meals," he said. "You're in charge and I'm the sous-chef.") All this is in aid of our parents; mine are coming to Sunday lunch (with my sister and Granny) and his are coming for the weekend. Not this coming one, but the next one. The freezer is a great invention.

The banana cake is the recipe from good old How To Be A Domestic Goddess. I hated the title when it first came out - I don't feel I was born to domestic goddesshood, or even priestesshood - but I've made more stuff from it than any other cookbook we own. I find the recipes easy to follow and not nearly as prescriptive as some; there's a certain willingness to accept that you might not have the exact ingredients to hand, or that you might want to experiment. In any case, the banana cake seems to be foolproof. We've made it many times with and without sultanas, and with slightly more or less banana than the recipe suggests, and we've always ended up with a tasty cake.

I've started to think about Christmas - December isn't far away now. Advent is one of my favourite times of year, and we've already got our Advent calendar ready. And as you can see, I've churned out a couple more little woollen heart ornaments in odd moments. I like having a finished object after less than an hour's knitting!

Tomorrow we are going to meet a friend for brunch (his term; I don't really move in brunching circles) and maybe go swimming. I haven't been swimming for ages. This may depend on whether I can find my swimsuit.

Nothingy kind of day

2008-11-27T23:43:00.000Z

Today was blissfully free from incidents, but it hasn't left me a lot to write about. J is still cheerful. I went to work, and nothing much happened there either. I knitted a small Christmas tree ornament (that's what I'm using it for, anyway) in my lunch hour.

On the way back from work, I got very very wet. And cold. This is the first day I've got caught in seriously wintry weather. Fortunately for me, I had changed (I don't always on the way home) and had my hi-vis waterproof jacket on, so the wetness restricted itself to my trousers, which I then changed when I got in.

I'm not feeling under the weather any more. See, I have a superior immune system. Or I'm just lucky. Or my body knows I'm too busy to be ill. Or something.

The lurgy of Damocles?

2008-11-26T23:44:00.004Z

Unfortunately, I am still feeling a bit tired and headachy - well, achy in general, in fact. Perhaps I am incubating the bug everyone else seems to have. If so, it's somewhat irritating, since it seems only a couple of weeks since I recovered from the last time I was ill (actually, it was mid-October). My ears seem a little blocked up and my head feels a bit... heavy... although I don't have any cold-type symptoms.

The head wasn't helped a great deal by the office being extremely hot today. Apparently, it was freezing in there yesterday, and they got someone to come and turn all the radiators up. Well, it worked - possibly too well. It's an old building and the room has several cold spots, all of which seem to affect my colleagues and not me, so I don't feel I can ask them to open a window and freeze for my sake.

Anyway, when I came home, J made the tea and I sat on the sofa and knitted (I've got half my scarf done now) and then watched Heroes, which was very exciting, of course.

The TV switched itself off several times during what was evidently a silent montage of various of the characters watching the eclipse (a Meaningful Moment) which perhaps wasn't terribly helpful of it. We're quite used to this quirk it has, and we've got cable, so if we route the sound through J's hi-fi setup the sound doesn't vanish when the picture does. University Challenge works OK as radio, but Heroes definitely suffers a bit. Perhaps we need to bite the bullet and find a new TV.

Right now, however, I'm going to bed. Night night.

Sunny day

2008-11-25T23:16:00.002Z

It was a beautiful day today, with bright blue skies and golden light. It was pretty chilly, though, and there was still frost in the shade at lunchtime. I went out to buy some groceries, came back into the house and thought "Good, it's lovely and warm in here." Then I noticed that the thermometer in the living room was showing 14° C. The guinea pigs were all piled into their little wooden house in a big furry lump.

Whether the cold had anything to do with it or not, I've been a bit headachy all evening. I used to get them all the time, but it's been a while. It's a bit better now, but nevertheless I am going to have a relaxing bath and go to bed. With a hot water bottle. I think the pigs have the right idea.

In which I develop professionally

2008-11-24T23:01:00.004Z

I went to a one-day training seminar today (on Financial Records). It was a lot more fun than it sounds. My previous job was in the archives of a bank, and when I started, I was prepared for it to be very boring. So I was amused when the archivist leading the seminar also admitted that when he started his job, he thought exactly the same thing.

The practical session, in which we got to look at some real account books and ledgers, was particularly satisfying. My current job is interesting and challenging, but it's almost entirely hands-off, and I do miss working directly with records.

It was also good to meet up with several former colleagues and catch up. One of my current colleagues was also there, and she asked if I was going to claim back a day of leave, since I don't usually work on Mondays. J asked me the same. Perhaps I missed a trick there - it never occurred to me.

I'm not very good at using up all my leave anyway. When you're only at work three days a week, it never seems like a good idea to take a Friday off without a special reason, because that will make the working week so short that it'll be stressful to fit everything in. And I'm never quite sure I won't want the leave at a later point. It's the same rationale which leads to keeping things (bath gel, craft materials) rather than using them up, because they are too good to waste.

It's a silly thing to do, though, because craft materials are doing no good in a drawer, and bath gel will go off eventually (I know, because I've managed to keep it long enough that it did). And if I don't use my leave, I lose it - I can only carry over five days, and I don't get paid any extra for not using it.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to fit in the extra leave days before January, but maybe I should make a New Year's resolution to make use of what I've got, while the opportunity is there.

Light on the horizon?

2008-11-23T22:43:00.004Z

J has been a lot better all this week, and has been to work for the whole week and been generally cheerful.

What's more, as we were making our way into town yesterday, he said to me that he now believes he can get better. It may seem like a small thing, but for so long he has been completely without hope. It's understandable that he would become discouraged after such a long period of depression, and so many attempts to treat it. But it made it very hard for him to motivate himself for the hard work of getting better.

He's not cured yet (if you can talk in terms of a cure for depression). He may have achieved a lot this week, but it's been at the cost of a lot of OCD checking. However, he's not been completely derailed by the checking, and he has managed to go into work even if he knew he'd be a bit late. In the past, he's tended to see lateness as a complete disaster, and just as bad as not arriving at all. That's not helpful.

But still! He's been to work every day, cycling nine miles each way; he's managed to come to a decision and buy a digital camera, some new jeans and warm gloves; he's caulked some crevices in the guinea pigs' run; he's kept filling in his CBT tables; and he's not been thrown into gloom by our TV being on the blink and the video recorder not working. I think this may be more than I've achieved this week.

I have, however, now made it through all but a week of NaBloPoMo. Again, I've got some way to go, but I can see the end in sight!

We have a working camera

2008-11-22T23:20:00.008Z

And we like it a lot. We've just spent the past hour taking pictures of our little housemates.

Whether they are overjoyed to be co-opted as photographic models is a bit uncertain, but we're quite pleased with the results, given that we haven't yet memorised all of the manual, and were taking these photos after dark, in rather dim conditions.

We're particularly impressed with the macro setting, which is excellent for showing the details of fur and whiskers.

Guinea pigs are somewhat ludicrous animals. It's hard to imagine how they could have evolved, given that their main purpose seems to be to squeak loudly and bumble around. But we love our three very much.

We spent most of the daylight hours today in town, buying clothes - cords for me, jeans for both of us and - finally! - new tracksuit trousers to replace my aged and ragged ones. It took a while to find any which were warm, decent and black, but BhS finally provided some for only £12, which seems pretty cheap.

I'm not so thrilled about the jeans, since they serve to prove that irritating quotation about it being difficult to have both a finely honed mind and a finely honed body. Postgraduate study is bad for both one's physical fitness and the fit of one's jeans. (These ones are the same size as my old ones according to the label, but in a more forgiving cut.)

I've always found buying jeans frustrating, but it's even more annoying when I know that if I'd kept up my maintenance efforts successfully, I wouldn't need to be doing this. But there's no point in dwelling on it. I don't have much time at the moment, and weight loss is not top priority, and there's no way it can be. When I finish this degree, I will get back to it. In the meantime, well, I need to wear something.

The piggies don't worry about their weight. If you're a guinea pig, you're supposed to be rounded.

Nearly the weekend

2008-11-21T23:33:00.004Z

Had a somewhat more restful day today, as I was attending a conference at work. Which required mostly sitting still, taking notes, and waiting for opportunities to ask questions relating to data protection issues. It didn't involve any phone calls, answering difficult questions, or thinking about databases. See? Restful.

I did get a surprise at the first coffee break, when I heard a voice greeting me, and turned around to find Rory of Speedysnail standing there.

In the early days of my blogreading, I was semi-convinced I would encounter other bloggers just in the course of events. Edinburgh is the sort of place where you bump in to people, and for a while I would look around (subtly) every time I heard an Australian accent on the bus, in case it was Shauna. And so on. But I never did meet anyone, although I worked in the same complex of buildings as Rory for a while, so it wouldn't have been very surprising if we had encountered each other.

Eventually I did meet up with a few people, by appointment. Rosemary Grace and Shauna and I got together a while back, YP and I had a drink after she had run a marathon, and Isabelle* and I met up with Loth for coffee. And, of course, Anna just a few weeks back. But I never did meet anyone just by chance. After a while I started thinking that while it's a small world, it's not THAT small**.

Now it's happened - sort of - twice in a few weeks. It doesn't make much of a story, but I spotted Ysolda at the Neil Gaiman reading last month. I'm pretty sure she doesn't read my blog, so I was too shy to say hello, which I've been regretting since.

Anyway, if you're reading this, Rory, it was very nice to meet you!

*I encounter Isabelle all the time, but then she is my mother.
**Except where Rosemary Grace is concerned.

Skin of teeth

2008-11-20T23:56:00.003Z

OK, this is going to be very brief because (as Mum noted in her comment to my last entry) I had another very busy day. When I came home I was exhausted, and after tea decided to have an early bath. I didn't switch the computer on, got into bed, and completely forgot about blogging until 11.50.

So there we go. The big news of the day is that our digital camera arrived today, but we haven't tested it out yet (see above).

I imagine that once we do, you will see some pictures of guinea pigs.

Hitting pause

2008-11-19T22:53:00.004Z

Had a slightly frantic day at work today, not helped by a fire alarm in the middle of the morning. Just a drill, and we weren't standing outside for all that long, but somehow it threw me off. I was rather late home.

However, my dear husband had made the tea, and then did the washing up while I watched Heroes. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I've been addicted to Heroes since the beginning. It seems to provide just the right balance between mindless entertainment, humour, and the mental challenge of following the highly convoluted plot.

J does not watch Heroes, but puts up nobly with my breathless updates on this week's happenings: "Sylar learned to copy people's powers without killing them, and Elle forgave him after she shot him with a lot of lightning bolts, and Tracy seems to be going to betray Nathan to Arthur, and Flint turns out to be Claire's uncle, but he doesn't know that yet and chased her down a sewer..." Do you get this level of drama on Coronation Street? I don't think so.

My favourite character is Hiro, partly because he's almost always cheerful, and partly because he has a very cool superpower: he can stop time. (This is conveyed in an endearingly lo-fi way, by getting everyone on the set except Hiro to stand very still.)

Wouldn't we all like to stop time, sometimes? I would have had a much less hectic day if I could have hit the "pause" button for everyone except me, allowing me to catch up in peace without needing to stay late. You could tidy up on a Saturday morning and still have the day to do things in. You wouldn't ever be late for anything again.

On the whole, I look forward to the future, so I wouldn't want to hold time permanently in the same place. I'd want to know what would happen next. But when I'm busy, it would be wonderful.

For those who were wondering how I cycle to work "one way" - I perhaps didn't express this very well. I cycle along the path in the morning, then home by road if it's dark. There may be more traffic, but it's better lit (and by home-time I should have woken up enough to cope with it).

Bike path

2008-11-18T23:35:00.002Z

I'm lucky enough to have a bike path* that runs almost from my house to my workplace. I don't mind cycling on the road, but it's more restful not to have to deal with the traffic at 8.30 in the morning, and the journey is definitely quicker if you don't have to wait at traffic lights.

It's almost a year since I started this job, and while I didn't tumble to the advantages of the bike path straight away, I've now cycled on it in every season. And I do appreciate it.

The lack of traffic (apart from a few other bikes, and occasionally someone walking a dog) gives me a quiet space to think. I may be pistoning along, but I don't have to worry about shooting under the wheels of a lorry. Often I've set out feeling stressed (either about J or about work, especially at the end of the day) and when I reach the other end, I've calmed down a lot.

By now, I have used the path in every season, and watched the trees bud in spring, and the verges burgeon over the edges of the path. I've seen ragwort and rosebay willowherb blooming (and pondered about why so many wild flowers seem to be yellow or purple). I've zigzagged to avoid running over snails on rainy summer days. More recently I've seen students gathering brambles and watched the trees change colour and the leaves drop.

I've also seen animals: mostly the usual birds you might see in your garden, but also pheasants, a wren, ducks, herons, and what may have been an owl (it was a summer evening, and SOMETHING biggish and tawny flew over the wall). There's a loch not far away. I've also seen a dormouse, not sleeping but running across the path early in the morning.

It gets dark about half past four here at the moment, so I'll only be using the path in the mornings for the next while. I'm still glad to have the chance to escape the traffic, even if it's only one way.

* I used to refer to this as a cycle path, but after more than one occasion when the person I was talking to has misheard it as "psychopath", I've stopped. I definitely do not use a psychopath to get to work in the morning.

Erratum

2008-11-17T23:08:00.004Z

Of course it is the camera, not the SD card, which is a Fuji Finepix S5800. Oops. This is the inevitable result of dashing off entries in ten minutes or so. Still, better to have posted with mistakes than never to have posted at all, or words to that effect. Thank you all for not posting comments saying we should have got a Nikon or a Pentax or something.

Today has been a day... not terribly packed with incident. It rained. J went off to work. I did some work and played with the pigs and later made a cake. Then J came home and we had tea and watched QI. (By the way, I got a message a few days ago saying that Stephen Fry is following my Twitter updates. I wonder if he does his own Twitter-maintaining, or if he has an underling who automatically adds everyone who's following him?)

I am reassured to hear from yesterday's comments that deliberating over electronics purchases (or maybe any purchases) is general male behaviour, and not particularly obsessive. Maybe I've been thrown off the scent because my dad, while he likes to investigate what's out there, never needs very much persuasion to get a new camera. Or laptop. Or whatever. Perhaps he's atypical.

I thought we were going to have a bit of an episode of obsessiveness when J came home from work today. His bike wasn't changing gear properly. Like me, J uses his bike as his main means of transport, so it had to be fixed. J dislikes fiddling with mechanical devices, and always fears he'll make the problem worse instead of better. On past occasions we have spent several long greasy sessions during which he makes tiny adjustments first one way and then the other and then declares that nothing is making it any better, and goes into a decline.

However, on this occasion, he overcame this tendency, made a decision as to what to do, did it, and then had a shower and felt a lot better. He's still plugging away at the tables for his CBT, too. I am not going to overstate things, but I've been impressed by his dedication, especially since he still has plenty of periods when he doesn't think it has a chance of working.

If you really believe in the future and in your abilities, success is still not guaranteed, it's true. But keeping on trying when you can't make that leap of faith is truly impressive.

This has been a very random post indeed. Sorry about that. I will try to come up with something a little less stream-of-consciousness for tomorrow!

The approaching hoofbeats of a deadline

2008-11-16T23:40:00.002Z

This will have to be my quickest post ever, as it's 20 minutes to midnight (again). I haven't been able to get on the computer because...

J and I have just ordered our new digital camera!

This may not be the news of the century, but we have been saying we must get a new one for months. My old one, much loved, stopped working ages ago. However, we're not at all good at making our minds up, and J's obsessive tendencies mean that he needs to be sure he's buying exactly the right camera and getting exactly the right deal. So he needs to look at every model on the market, decide the time isn't right, look again, get stressed out by the necessity of making a decision, put it off, and look again before he finally buys anything.

I, on the other hand, have an approach which goes more like: "Oh, that one looks nice. It seems like the best one? OK, let's get it, I'm sure it'll be fine." I am not very good at distinguishing between two (or seven) cameras with near-identical features, and tend to assume everything will be all right whatever we decide.

I was never much good at film photography because I couldn't bear to waste expensive, limited film on experimental shots. So digital photography has been much better for me, and I very much enjoyed my old camera. I've been slightly frustrated over the past months that my blogging (etc) has been largely image-free.

Fortunately for marital harmony, we made a decision fairly early this evening. Which left only decisions about batteries and flash memory. I think we spent longer choosing the SD card than the camera. It's a Fuji Finepix S5800. If you know anything bad about them, don't tell us.

Waiting

2008-11-15T16:21:00.000Z

Do you ever feel as though you are waiting to start your real life? Waiting for a particular thing to happen, or to get finished with something you're doing, or for circumstances to change so that possibilities will open up?

I feel like that quite a lot at the moment. Partly because I'm studying - I genuinely will have more free time once I finish. There are several activities which I haven't done at all in the past two years, some of which I thought were parts of my life I would never want to give up.

Singing is one. I don't have a fabulous voice, but I've sung in choirs since I was seven, and I do miss it.

The other main thing is that I don't get anything like as much exercise as I want to, and certainly not in a systematic enough way. I think I've proved to myself now that in order to be motivated to exercise three times a week in all weathers, I need to pay upfront for a gym membership, pack my gym bag and go afte work. I've tried buying weights to exercise at home, and going running at home, and the trouble is that because I could do it any time, I end up not doing it often enough.

I'm not knocking the cycling - I'm sure it's responsible for a fair amount of damage limitation. But it's not enough.

There are other things that J and I would like to do which we haven't because he hasn't been well enough. And I do feel that I'm so busy at the moment, I don't give him enough support in his efforts to get well. So I suppose the plan is: finish degree, get J better, then start on Real Life. I do believe we'll get there. Sometimes it feels like it's a long time coming, though.

Day off

2008-11-14T23:23:00.003Z

Well, what world-shakingly exciting things did I do on my day off?

None. I stayed in and did some work, spent a bit of time on Ravelry* (mostly discussing the colour of Miles Vorkosigan's socks**, thus achieving two kinds of geekdom at once) and played with the guinea pigs. Oh, and did some laundry.

When J came back from work, we went round to have a look at a house which a local community group is trying to buy to turn into an activity centre. They put an article in the local free paper a few months ago, asking for people to write in with ideas about what the building could be used for. J wrote in and suggested a community radio station. There are three such stations already in Edinburgh.

Last week he got a call out of the blue asking him to come round to the community group and talk about the possibility of setting one up. So he did. He used to be involved with local radio as a presenter when he was a teenager, and did student radio when we were at university, though he doesn't have direct experience of setting up a station.

Today there was an open day at the building, and people could vote on ideas. There are quite a few rooms, and if the group manage to buy the house, several ideas may be chosen, including a computer room, which J would also be well placed to help with. I think it'll be great if the project gets off the ground; the house is yet to be valued, though, so everything probably depends on that.

J is quite enthusiastic about the possibility of the radio station becoming reality. Being realistic, he can't be in sole charge of the project because his health isn't good enough, but other people are interested too. We'll just have to see what happens.

* Online community for knitters.
** Protagonist of a series of SF novels.

For Science!

2008-11-13T23:19:00.003Z

When I was a child, if an adult asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I would always say "A scientist". I don't really know where I got this idea from except that from an early age, I was very interested in the natural world. When I was five or six I had a large book called Our World, which explained all about plate tectonics and volcanoes and the water cycle and how rocks turn into sand, and I read it again and again until it almost fell to bits.

Later I had other science books, some of which were Christmas presents from my uncle, who had been a research scientist for a while. And I enjoyed Chemistry and Physics at school, though not Biology, since I was much too squeamish even to watch videos of dissections (it having been declared unhygienic for the younger classes to do real dissections. Which was just as well for me).

I did well in Chemistry in particular, and was on the school's science quiz team, and up until I was fourteen or fifteen I still thought I might maybe do Chemistry at university. Unfortunately, the ability to remember a lot of vaguely science-related facts, and to take pleasure in doing classroom experiments, don't actually make one suited to do proper science. By the stage that Chemistry became all about doing calculations and working out formulae, I realised that I didn't have either the mathematical aptitude or the dedication to do the duller bits.

I'm still interested, though. Throughout my years studying English and French literature at university, I continued to read popular science and science-based magazines, and a few years ago my parents got me a subscription to the New Scientist. I still read it every week. My friends and family have probably learned to dread my saying "Yes, I saw something about that in New Scientist recently..." on diverse occasions. It arrives on Thursdays, hence this post.

Maybe I've spent many hours reading New Scientist that could more profitably have been spent reading the Journal of the Society of Archivists. Or Tolstoy. Or learning Japanese. I don't really have any conviction that the things I learn will have much practical application in my life; my knowledge will never get beyond "interested layperson", and it's not an interest I can really trot out to any but my nearest and dearest, who, as I've said, are used to me banging on about genetically modified food and new kinds of laptop batteries. Some of the articles I have to read twice before I can work out what's going on, let alone understand them. (These are usually the ones on maths or quantum physics. I was never under the illusion that I'd make a physicist.)

But on the other hand, I do feel that it has given me an intellectual toolbox which sometimes comes in useful. I'm not a scientist, but I can work towards some understanding of what science is supposed to be about, and what it's for (and it isn't generally what we read about in headlines). I can read an article about climate change and know what the background is. I can read an exercise programme on a website and decide whether it's worth trying on the basis of what I already know.

I feel, too, that it makes me a more complete person. I won't make any world-shattering discoveries, but I've found out a lot of interesting stuff. And I have a shot at answering some of the science-type questions on University Challenge. Though not the ones involving much physics or maths.

Taking time out

2008-11-12T22:57:00.005Z

No, not from NaBloPoMo.

I've been at work today, and spent nearly the whole time in meetings, talking to people. I now sound a little husky. Sometimes I feel as though I'm leading a double life: half of the week I spend in jeans and T-shirts and silence, the other half in work clothes in a busy office.

I have annual leave to use up, and when I saw that I had no meetings at all this Friday, I made a sudden decision that if it was OK with my workmates, I would take the day off. It will help me catch up with my university work (which is still behind from when I was ill) and will just make things less pressured. Luckily there was no reason why not.

The trick now will be avoiding what I normally do with unexpected time off: I make detailed and elaborate plans for everything I will achieve during that day. And inevitably I never get even half of it done. So here is the plan for Friday: work. Go for a walk in daylight. Work. That's all.

Of course, now I am making elaborate mental lists of all the things I need to achieve tomorrow in order to leave on time with a clear conscience. Perhaps I am a slow learner.

(By the way, kind commenters, I do respond to you, underneath your comments on that post. Is this cumbersome? Should I be responding in the next day's post?)

Remembrance day

2008-11-11T23:37:00.004Z

I didn't go to church on Remembrance Sunday, so I'm doing my remembering today.

None of my relations were killed in WWII, but my grandfather was in the Royal Engineers. He was the first bomb disposal officer outside the UK, in Egypt, at the age of 20. The army sent him everything they had on German bombs and told him to get on with it, and he did. He won the George Medal. Later he (as he put it) "liberated Belgium" and built bridges over rivers from Normandy to Berlin. Then he came home and resumed his university education and got on with his life. He died last year, and the war had clearly been a hugely significant part of his life - he told us many stories about it. This is one:

When he was called to an unexploded bomb, he used to tie the end of a length of string to the fuse, retreat to the end of the string (which was quite long) and pull out the fuse, causing the bomb to explode. The string would break, and he'd coil it up ready for reuse. But of course the string got shorter every time, so it was vital to get a new bit every so often...

My great-grandfather Campbell died when I was two. He had been at Gallipoli and had one finger permanently bent down into the palm of his hand - it had set that way after being broken. My mother remembers thinking that maybe all grandfathers had a finger like that. He was a newspaper compositor, but he learned to do it again with nine fingers. He didn't have much hair, and he always put the blame on the tin hats they wore.

His brother-in-law, my great-great-uncle Alec, was gassed and was never well again after the war. He died in 1921. I've seen photographs, but don't know much about him, except that he was close to my great-grandmother and gave her two tall blue vases for a wedding present. My mother still has one of them (the other was broken years ago).

Great-Grandpa Campbell's best friend Buddy was killed in France, after a very long journey to join up. My mother has told his story here, better than I could.

It's been a peaceful day here. But not everywhere.

Various little annoyances, but also cake

2008-11-10T22:46:00.004Z

Today was the sort of day when things do not go right, but not in any grand and world-shaking way that you could be justified in moaning about. The house was cold in the morning. I have a hole coming in my favourite jeans. A blue bowl that I like has a crack in it. The trellis attached to the fence blew down in the wind, possibly taking my clematis with it (I haven't dared look to see how much damage it's done).

See? Nothing very major. But I was a bit fed up so I took myself out for a little windy walk and then made some baby bundt cakes. Sometimes you just need to do something different.

The bundt cakes were based on a recipe in How to be a Domestic Goddess, but I didn't have various ingredients, so here is my somewhat improvised version. You need a mixing bowl, something to melt butter in, a wooden spoon and some sort of muffin tin.

150g plain flour
About 25g caster sugar and 100g brown sugar
Half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
75g butter (or alternative), melted and cooled off a bit
Individual pot of plain skimmed-milk yoghurt (about 125ml)
2 eggs
Double handful of sultanas, soaked briefly in hot water
Lemon juice (instant squeezy)

Sift the flour, sugar and bicarb together in mixing bowl.

Combine eggs and yoghurt with butter and give them a mix. Make a well in the flour; pour and mix them in. Add the sultanas and a good squeeze of lemon juice (maybe a tablespoonful) and give it another mix. Divide it between the spaces in the tin and bake at 170 degrees (fan oven).

I have ring-shaped cake tins, and I find I get twelve cakes from the mixture and they take about fifteen to twenty minutes. It might be a bit longer or shorter if you're using full-size or mini muffin tins - fifteen minutes isn't very long to hang around, and they won't come to any harm if you take a peek at them.

Nigella ices hers; I didn't on this occasion. While I am not claiming these are health food, they aren't big or stodgy. If you make 12, they've got about 10g of sugar and 6g of fat each. And clearly a cake with a hole in the middle has fewer calories than one without a hole...

Not much going on today

2008-11-09T22:53:00.004Z

I've spent most of the day sitting at the computer, working, except for a few hours when we went over to my parents' for a meal. My brother has come home for the weekend - it was lovely to see him again (he's a junior doctor in a hospital in another town and I haven't seen him much since August).

J has been busy doing laundry, going to the supermarket, and generally tidying up. He is a star. I know that I don't talk about him much on here except when he's having a crisis, but he is. He's about the sweetest, funniest person I know, and when he's well he is incredibly organised and efficient.

He is also very gentle and completely adores animals. He has an affinity for cats which causes them to appear for a stroking session whenever we go for a walk. Although it was my idea to get guinea pigs, J loves them and does most of the work of looking after them. It's sweet to see him with them, although it's also mildly hilarious, as he's very tall and thin and the physical contrast is quite amusing.

He's my snuggle and I love him very much. I really, really hope he starts to see an improvement in his health soon. Enough of an improvement that even he can start to believe in it.

Things I've never done

2008-11-08T23:10:00.005Z

For a long time, I haven't tried anything new in the realms of physical activity. In fact, lately it's been cycling and nothing but. I'm not always so unadventurous; when I was little I didn't think anything of trying new sports. In the summer holidays, we used to take short courses at the local college for games teachers. I remember modern dance, trampolining and canoeing. Somehow those were always more fun than the actual games lessons at school.

I also took ski-ing lessons on the dry ski slope in Edinburgh each summer from age 13to 15. Unfortunately, I failed Parallel 1 the year I was 15, and that was it for me and ski-ing. It's more fun being an absolute beginner in some ways: if you're bad at it, well, you're only starting and you have the potential to be much better!

When I started university, I decided to join the women's football team. And I had a lot of fun, even though I wasn't very good. Later on, I took up running and weightlifting and found I liked them, though I wasn't expecting to enjoy either.

However, there are still quite a few activities I'd like to try which I haven't:

Fencing. I have fancied this one since I was at school, but the fencing club clashed with Highland Dancing, to which I was already committed since my best friend did it. I have failed to take it up since out of a conviction that I will be awful at it, since I'm not at all coordinated, but I'm beginning to think this is a silly reason not to do it.

Squash. I don't know if I would prefer it to badminton or tennis, but I'd like to try it. I used to play tennis quite a lot in summer, and I still play badminton when I get a chance. I'm a lot better at badminton. The first time J ever picked up a tennis racket, he beat me (although he had a sore arm later).

Climbing. I don't really have a desire to do this in the great outdoors, on a natural rock face. But I would like to have a go on the shiny new climbing wall at my old gym. Actually, I did once go on a climbing wall before, when I was ten and in Guides, but I found it very hard to get higher than a couple of metres, because the hand- and foot-holds were spaced for adults and were too far apart. This must have been before my growth spurt. I suspect that I might have to work on my upper body strength before this is much of a goer, though.

I hear a lot of people talking about how much they love kickboxing and martial arts, and in some ways they sound fun, but I have a feeling that I'm too much of a wuss!

Grown up?

2008-11-07T22:22:00.001Z

A little while ago, I was talking to my mother and the subject of early computer games came up. (I don't remember why.) I said something about not being able to remember the earliest computer games, and she said neither did she, since she was too old for such things when they were first developed.

I am the same age now as my mother was when I was born. When the earliest computer games were available, she was younger than I am now. I still enjoy playing computer games; although I don't spend very much time doing so at the moment, because I'm too busy, I don't envisage that I'll ever go off the idea altogether. (Here's one I particularly like. It took me ages to work out what you have to do, though.)

Yet the concept that adults don't play computer games doesn't seem particularly alien. And it does seem to me that people of our generation are much less "grown up" than our parents' generation at the same age. Most of my friends don't have kids; only a few are married or settled down in a particular location, and not all of them have fixed on a career yet. We read fantasy and watch Doctor Who and play World of Warcraft (well, I don't, but I know people who do) and it probably all looks rather childish from the point of view of Real Grown-ups.

Maybe I'm biased because a lot of the people I know are academics or postgraduate students; I can certainly think of exceptions to what I've just said. But it does seem to me that there has been a slant towards not letting go of your youth, or even childhood. When my mother got her first teaching job, she cut her hair so as to look grownup and responsible. I used to think I would cut mine (it's long) when I was 30, but now... that's not as far-off as I'd expect.

I suppose that in many ways the eternal-youth thing is superficial. We might look scruffy and read books about dragons and listen to new music, but we still have grownup responsibilities. I mean, there are good reasons why J and I don't have children yet, even though we might like to, and not all of those are under our control.

Whither our generation, though? Will we still be wearing T-shirts with obscure slogans and playing computer games when we're in our fifties? Or will things take another turn? I would hesitate to make any predictions.

Enterprises that require new clothes

2008-11-06T21:36:00.007Z

Nobody starts cycling because of the glamorous outfits you get to wear, but my winter cycling attire possibly hits a new low as far as stylishness is concerned. It's probably best described as Roadmender Chic. Big fleece, woolly hat, tatty and possibly muddy or oily black tracksuit bottoms, and the ever-so-flattering high-visibility waistcoat. J's dad works for a company that makes workwear, so we are well-provided with fluorescent outer garments.

My summer cycling gear is not so bad, and benefits slightly from having been acquired only a year or so ago. But I really need to get some new tracksuit bottoms. I've had the current ones since my last year at college, which would be 2001.

I'd aquired them to replace some which had been part of my school gym kit, purchased sometime in the early 90s. They were marginally more presentable because they didn't have gathered ankles and weren't too short for me. I wasn't at my most sporty in those days, but even I needed something in which to play badminton on holiday.

The black trackies got their first wearing when I hastily pulled them on over my pyjama bottoms to go and sit with J in the hospital when he got meningitis, early in the autumn term of 2001. (If I'd known I'd be there for more than 24 hours, and that J would be OK, I would have got properly dressed.) Over the next few years, they served me well in whatever exercise I did and even did duty for pulling pints if my other black trousers were in the wash.

I didn't buy any new exercise gear when I started exercising methodically in early 2006, apart from new trainers. Part of me felt that it was best not to invest much money in attractive workout gear until I could see that this was going somewhere. Once it started to go somewhere, I had realised that there is little point buying attractive clothes just to sweat on them.

Eventually the faithful black trackies started to look a little careworn. The fabric wasn't as fluffy as it had once been, and repeated washes had made them start to creep up my ankles somewhat. I tried twice to replace them but could never find anything quite as good. My requirements aren't stringent, but still hard to meet: fabric of a certain thickness, drawstring, not clingy on the thighs. I did buy some grey ones but the fabric has the annoying quality of being sweaty when it's hot and not insulating enough when it's cold. Also, light grey is not as flattering a colour as black. I don't aim to be particularly attractive when I'm exercising, but you might as well not be discouraged before you start.

Still. It is now time to replace the black trackies. You know they've outlived their usefulness when you find yourself rationalising that they're still decent because you'll be wearing black tights under them.
----------------------
After my moaning yesterday, I got six comments! Thank you, people. Scoliyogi has deduced that I am doing NaBloPoMo. Indeed I am, but I was going to wait until I had a whole week of posts before I put the badge up.

Nearly forgot to post tonight

2008-11-05T23:19:00.005Z

And it would have been a pity to deprive you, dear reader, of my scintillating posts, wouldn't it?

I have a suspicion that the last post might have been boring, since only one person has commented. Or perhaps people are busy midweek. Or perhaps they're not used to this plethora of updates from two-posts-a-month K.

Anyway. Loth commented, for which I am grateful. She is impressed that I can knit. (She is an impressive person herself).

I am quite impressed that I can knit, frankly, since I only learned to do it a year ago and have not had a lot of time to hone my skills since. My total output amounts to a pair of fingerless gloves, two woolly headbands, three-quarters of a sock and one-third of a scarf. And I'm stuck on the sock.

Still, I find repetitive pastimes very soothing, and knitting is marginally more useful than cross-stitch, and definitely a lot more useful than hours of Tetris. And knitting is easy to pick up for a few minute and put down again, so it's my craft of the moment.

I still don't feel like a REAL knitter, though, compared to other bloggers I know who knit - I wouldn't be up to making this, for example, or these. Or not just yet. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying the beginner stage. Maybe one mythical day when I know what I'm doing, I will no longer think it's magic when the string turns - against all likelihood - into a scarf.

Knitting doesn't always have to be useful, either. I definitely do not have enough spare time to do this sort of thing. But it makes me happy that somebody does. I particularly like the lamppost.

It is wet and misty in Edinburgh. Very traditional for Bonfire Night. I got rather wet cycling home.

Things look a bit brighter

2008-11-04T22:42:00.005Z

J seems better today. I can hear him downstairs, singing along to the radio. Singing's a good sign.

I managed to get out of the house for a while in the morning and go in to town on the bike. I went to the library, had a cup of coffee at a café, and bought some squishy pale green wool to knit myself a hat. Which was all quite therapeutic, and certainly beats dashing around in my lunch hour, which is when I usually do such things.

I am also feeling a bit more organised as regards my academic work. I'm a terrible procrastinator, and have previously managed to keep myself up to the mark during the modules from the courses because they are split into lots of little deadlines, and everyone is doing the work at the same time. However, since the university gave me a big extension while I was ill, I'm out of step with everyone and it just feels a bit weird and disjointed. But I've written myself a revised study plan and I WILL get this done by early December. I will. I want my life back. And I'm not letting myself start making the hat until then.

In the meantime, my brother-in-law is visiting soon. Which will be nice. I have, as yet, no genius-level ideas about how we're going to entertain him. If you're reading this, B-i-L, think about what you might like to do!

50 minutes to midnight

2008-11-03T23:10:00.005Z

It's been an up-and-down kind of day. J went to work, without too much OCD checking, but was very tired and down when he came home, and later in the evening had a slight strop over doing his homework for his new therapist. He's only seen her twice, and she does give him a lot to do outwith the sessions. There's a table analysing his negative thoughts, and a sort of diary of what he's done each day (including the time spent doing OCD checking), and an exercise where you try not to think of a pink rabbit. And some more stuff, but I can't remember the details.

In a way this is good, because we, rather than the taxpayer, are paying for the sessions, and we want the therapist to get the information she needs quickly, so they can make the best use of the sessions. On the other hand, I can see why he quails at the thought of filling in a table with percentages every time he has a negative thought - wouldn't you? Then again, I WANT him to fill in the stupid tables. We do not have an unlimited budget for this, and it is imperative that he engages with the process right from the start. Which means, as far as I can see, providing the information on his moods that is asked for.

So I stropped back, and he did the tables, but I am feeling not very noble, and also that you're not supposed to have to tell 28-year-olds to do their homework.

The guinea pigs are sweet and squeaky. And fluffy. Brownie came and sat on J in a successful attempt to get him feeling phlegmatic enough to tackle the tables.

I am still trying to catch up on work for my course after having been ill, which isn't putting me in the best of moods. The world suddenly seems to be full of wondrous activities which I could be doing if only I could get the course over with.

Sorry if I sound gloomy. I'm not, really; but I'm trying to give an honest run-down on the day with these daily posts. The general stropping is over. J has gone to bed, and I shall follow him shortly, and tomorrow will be another day.

Sunny day

2008-11-02T15:50:00.003Z

Not that I've been out in it much. We were at a marriage blessing and party yesterday evening, and although we were in bed by one a. m., we were both pretty tired today. We've been doing exciting things like dusting and hoovering the sitting room, and trimming the guinea pigs' toenails. What an exciting life we lead.

When I'm tired, I find it very easy to rationalise eating junk, because it seems logical that I need an energy boost. However, we don't have any. We don't have any exciting food at all, with the exception of the leftover sweeties from Hallowe'en. There was a very low turn-out of guisers this year - we bought four bags of assorted sweeties and lollies and only emptied one. Fortunately for me, I don't find Love Hearts and Fruity Pops particularly tempting, or not in large quantities.

At work on Friday, one of my colleagues had the local radio station on, and it was already broadcasting Christmas adverts. I know that IKEA has had Christmas stuff in for a while already, but I just can't quite get my head around it yet. It seems like ages - and yet, I have eight days of leave to take before the end of the year, and I can't quite think how I'm going to fit them in, since I only work three days a week. Take two weeks off completely, and go home at lunchtime on four Fridays? Take one day off every day? I have no pressing reason to take time off at a particular date, so I'll have to see what suits everyone else.

Quick little update

2008-11-01T18:15:00.005Z

I got back on the bike for the first time on Tuesday evening, going to see Neil Gaiman at the Church Hill Theatre. I didn't fail to make it up the hills (it's almost up hill all the way to Morningside) or have a massive asthma attack, which were my two main fears. I've biked to work every day since. I'm still a bit husky, but nothing terrible, and the preventative inhaler seems to be working. It's "the brown one" (Beclometasone) which isn't all that powerful as they go.

It's been really cold this week. I have been wearing a fleece over my longsleeved technical top while I cycle, and gloves with closed fingers, and a hat, and I'm still cold. Britain has had some freaky weather this week - snow in the south of England, which doesn't usually happen at this time of year if at all - and although Edinburgh hasn't had snow, it feels very wintry.

This is a problem for J, as he appears to have developed Raynaud's disease, which is a circulation problem that comes on when it's cold. His fingers go yellow and nasty-looking, and they're very painful as they warm up. We're thinking of getting him some heated gloves as it's a particular problem when he's cycling. In the meantime, I am pestering him to remember to wear his woolly gloves, and giving him my small hot hands to hold.

Cough cough

2008-10-14T21:30:00.003Z

Well, I've been to the doctor. The cough was diagnosed as probably a virus which has been complicated by asthma - the virus itself has run its course by now, but my lungs are now irritated by all the coughing. Which means that I keep coughing and irritate them further, and so on. She says I may just have lungs which are easily irritated.

She's given me a preventative inhaler (which I 've never had before) and told me to rest. Which sounds good.

At first I was a little incredulous, since my asthma is generally triggered only by allergens and very cold dry air, and often I don't pick up my inhaler for months at a time. But now that I think about it, this happened to me on a lesser scale when I was 20: I had mild bronchitis, but the cough lingered on through most of a university term, causing me to miss a lot of football practice. And according to Mum, my little brother used to have similar problems.

The new inhaler does seem to have improved matters a little already; I'm still coughing, but not so breathless. I'm still quite sore, though. I don't think I'll be going running just yet. Maybe next week.

Holidays, coughs, stuff

2008-10-07T22:43:00.006Z

So we had a lovely time in Devon. It was like taking a holiday in some kind of mythical kinder, gentler time, with everything you could possibly want from a seaside holiday if you are, like me, endearingly wholesome*. This included beaches (sandy and pebbly); retired donkeys; mini golf; craft galleries; stripy deckchairs on the prom; thatched cottages and elegant Georgian stuccoed houses; clifftop walks; gardens filled with flowers. And it was warm. We paddled.

J started compiling a collection of Things Overheard in Devon – samples:
“Joyce, what did you do with my teacake?”
“Has anyone here lost a sunhat?”

I slept very well and it was highly restful and I’m glad we went.

J's mother sent us some photos of the trip, and while I can enjoy them as a record of us having a nice time, my pleasure is tempered slightly because I look really chubby in every photo. It would be nice if the camera was lying, but I don't think it is.

I am not taking this too much to heart. J described the photos as "lovely" before I had seen them, and I'm sure he genuinely thinks I look nice in them. I may cringe gently, but nobody else cares particularly.

However! This should spur me on in continuing with the healthy eating and trying to move a bit more than I currently do. My efforts in this direction are going OK as far as food is concerned, but not exercise because two days after we returned from Devon I started coming down with a cough, which is still with me (that's almost two weeks). I'm going to the doctor later today, as I'm too short of breath to do anything much, and frankly it's getting me down a bit.

* This is now my official description - see comments to last post. I would say that the “wholesome” bit is pretty accurate. Nobody would ever mistake me, even at a distance, for someone who is edgy, louche or slinky. Despite efforts in my late adolescence to wear a lot of black, read intellectual books and cultivate a taste for international cinema, I am still a fundamentally unsophisticated person, and I still like doing pretty much the same things I did when I was ten. Some might call this boring.

Where did September go? Never mind August...

2008-09-23T17:24:00.002Z

The answer to this question, short version:

I had a lot of work to do for my course, and then I collapsed in a heap for a while.

Actually, I wasn't totally collapsed. I seem to have done a few things in the past month or so:

* I knitted a pair of fingerless gloves
* My friend C came to stay for a few days and we visited castles
* I learned to make pastry from scratch (it's easy: what was I afraid of?)
* I bathed the guinea pigs on three occasions (they had a skin problem, poor little crumbs)
* I found a pair of comfy shoes I can wear with skirts
* I read a lot of books
* I ate tomatoes and peas that I grew myself
* I planted a lot of bulbs
* I watched several episodes of Firefly, and - only three months late - the series finale of Doctor Who
* I had my 29th birthday

What's that you say? None of these have anything to do with fitness? Oh.

I have to be honest (or what is this blog for?) The fitness isn't going well at the moment. I've been working hard, and am tired, and there's also been worry about J's health (nothing new, but no clear improvement in sight, either). Although I know I need to get back into the swing of eating healthily and exercising harder, the will has not been there. I went out running twice with my new trainers back in July, and that was it. I'm still cycling, but that's about it.

The tiredness is something of a concern to me because I know it's probably because I haven't been exercising enough or eating the right things. On the days when I'm at home, it's not too bad, but work tends to have Bad Foods sitting around the office. I don't even really want to eat them; it's just... they're freely available, and it's an excuse to get up from my desk, I suppose.* And I have no self-control, especially when I'm a bit stressed. I haven't quite got to the stage where I ask my workmates to put the biscuits somewhere I can't see them, but nearly.

My weight is a good bit higher than I'd like at the moment, but again... I know what I need to do, but the will isn't there. The next module for my course has just started, so I feel that if I start anything now, I'll soon become so busy that it'll be hard to stick to it. Which is rather silly, because you could use that excuse for not starting things in almost any situation.

There are two minor bright sides to the situation. Firstly, this is my last module (assuming I passed the previous one, that is), so I'll have a bit more flexibility from late November onwards. The end is almost in sight.

Secondly, although the numbers look bad, I'm clearly in better physical shape than the last time I was at this weight. My bodyfat percentage is lower by 7%, and I can still get into my jeans, although the Annoying Jeans are slightly more annoying than usual. And my thighs still look a lot more toned than they were last time. I've never been terribly convinced that cycling makes a huge difference to my physical fitness, or not at the level of intensity I usually manage; but I think it has had some damage-limitation effects, for which I'm duly grateful.

Despite the lack of any new content for almost two months, Sitemeter tells me there were 60 visits to this blog last week. Again, I'm grateful if anyone is still reading! It's a bit late to answer individual comments on the last entry, but I do read them and appreciate them.

We are going away for a few days tomorrow. I'm planning to go for walks (if it doesn't rain all the time - and it might not) and catch up on my sleep. And do some reading for my course, naturally. See you when I get back.

*I've tried going to the watercooler more often instead, but it only works up to a point.

Back on the bike

2008-07-24T22:07:00.004Z

I have indeed been back on the bike and zooming all over the place. It's been hot this week (by British standards, anyway) and I'd no doubt have been very sticky were it not that I now have a cycling top.

I've had it for a while. It came from a shop called Mountain Warehouse, and was reduced to about tuppence in the sales, possibly because it says it's a size 18 but fits me (generally a size 14 or 16 on top) pretty well. It's grey and a darkish fuchsia pink; possibly not the colourway I'd have chosen first, but it makes me nicely visible to traffic, and (as I said), it was cheap. I've also acquired gloves, and I've been wearing knee-length baggy shorts this week and feeling almost like a proper cyclist.

I've noticed that I seem to be a lot more noticeable than usual when I'm wearing the "proper cyclist" kit. Over the last few days:

Several waves and smiles from other cyclists, mostly togged up in much more impressive cycling gear
Happy hen-nighters leaning out of the windows of a pink limo at one in the afternoon, calling "Keep pedalling darling!"
Smiley young man at traffic lights with Afro hairstyle and American accent: "Live strong, lady!" (This is really not the sort of thing people tend to say to each other on the streets of Edinburgh.)
Wolf-whistle from guy in van.

This is all rather a mystery to me, especially the last two. It's not as though the cycling kit is remotely revealing or anything. It must be the fuchsia. Or maybe it's the warm weather making everyone uninhibited.

I haven't been feeling all that attractive lately. Over the last few weeks, I've had to accept that the numbers on the scale have gone up a bit, and it isn't just a random fluctuation which will go down again next time. It's not very encouraging.

I know that some of it could be muscle from all the cycling - my bodyfat percentage has stayed much the same, and my thighs and core seem to have firmed up a bit. But my eating hasn't been fantastic, and there is definitely squidge on top of the muscle. Things have been a bit stressful* and busy lately, and there's been chocolate at work, and that's not a very good combination. I need to take in grapes or something to nibble instead, but I keep forgetting because I am pathetic sometimes.

On the other hand, I have now had my last podiatry appointment for a while, and my feet seem to be working well with the orthotics. Unless I develop another problem, I don't have to go back for four to six years - and I don't have to go through my GP again if I do. I can just phone the clinic and make an appointment directly.

In preparation for the Last Podiatry Appointment, I got myself to Run and Become and bought myself some new running shoes so I could get the podiatrist to take a look at them. Unlike the last pair, these were properly fitted; they have a neutral footbed (not one designed to correct pronation) but the insole lifts up and the orthotic fits underneath. As with the ordinary shoes I've bought, it was a bit tricky to find shoes that were both deep enough to take the orthotic and wide enough for my duck-like feet, but I'm fairly confident.

I have yet to take them for their first run, partly because it's got to be a trial run on the treadmill just in case they aren't right and I have to swap them. The plan is to pay for a single session at my old gym and see how I do, and then join the beginners' group in the running club I used to belong to at work. That's if I haven't lost my ability to do this in the year I've been off. Wish me luck.

*The stress probably deserves a post of its own, but the short version is that J is still having problems with depression and OCD, not sleeping well, and finding it very hard to leave the house to go to work in the mornings. Not good. I am pretty busy with work and coursework, and I'm not able to provide as much support as I want to. No doubt this too will pass...

I'm back

2008-07-13T16:42:00.002Z

We returned from our holiday yesterday - we spent a week in a holiday house near Rydal, not far from Windermere, with my parents, uncle, aunt and grandmother. (The siblings were at home, working and looking after my parents' cats and our guinea pigs.)

It was very restful, but rather wet. We had one day when it was sunny in the morning, and several days when it rained torrentially for most of the day. These stepping stones* were just along the road from the house. This is what they looked like when we got here**. By midweek, they were completely underwater.

The weather rather put a damper on my plan to go for lots and lots of healthful walks - we did manage three walks, but none was longer than a couple of miles. It was long enough to discover that I will really need to get some better walking shoes. I spent most of the week wearing these, which are perfectly comfy, but since I wear them to work I had better get something a bit more mud-resistant.

We did go to Blackwell (very pretty Arts and Crafts house, highly recommended), Brantwood (the home of John Ruskin), Hawkshead village, Hawkshead Brewery (which is not in fact in Hawkshead at all, and which would probably have been more interesting if we'd managed to be there on a Saturday), and Dove Cottage.

We also took a trip on the Eskdale and Ravenglass steam railway, took a boat trip on Lake Windermere and had a wander round various villages. Which all sounds quite busy, but on the other hand there was also rather a lot of lying around on sofas reading books or doing the crossword. And, as J puts it, "eating two meals a day", by which he means going out somewhere for lunch and then eating a cooked meal in the evening as well. Which we did.

So although I feel rested, I also feel that the past week has contained more food and less physical activity than might be entirely optimal...

Time for another system-reboot, I think. And time to get back on the bike.

*My camera is not working and J was taking film photos which have not yet been developed, so the pictures in this post were found on Google Images.

** Except that it wasn't so sunny and the trees had a lot more leaves.

Terribly sorry - I fell off the world

2008-06-25T23:04:00.003Z

Yes, I know it's more than a month since I last posted. I have no excuses, other than being busy. I still am, so this is just a quick update on what's been going on.

J finally returned to work in late May, and managed about three weeks without needing to take time off. Then he got a stinking cold with a temperature, had to stay at home to recover, felt exhausted and weedy and became despondent again. However, he saw the doctor yesterday and she thinks he has post-viral fatigue syndrome - which is quite plausible as he's had it before. The possibility that there might be a physical cause for the way he's feeling is actually making him a little more cheerful. We'll see how things go.

Meanwhile, I have had an awful lot of reading to do for my current module, which is hard work, and also a fairly busy time at work. Which doesn't leave me much brain left for blogging. Also, my digital camera continues broken-ish (it seems to think the battery is depleted almost instantly).

I got my orthotics on 4 June. They're quite sturdy chunks of plastic, but only half-length, for which I am duly grateful. They have foam insoles which go over them to stop me sliding about. I was able to break myself in to them quite quickly (thanks to my bendy ligaments) and now have two new pairs of shoes. No sandals yet. I may blog the Shoe Search in more detail later if I feel like it.

I completed my detox week and felt a lot better in myself, although I didn't lose even a tiny bit of weight (although I did lose about a pound and a half the next week - some sort of delayed effect?) But I have now gone back to my coffee-drinking pasta-eating ways, although I am eating less sugar.

One interesting thing that came out of it was that I avoided cow's milk during that week, and when I ate a wholemilk yoghurt after the week was over, I felt really weird, digestively. Almost immediately. I'm used to this feeling, but hadn't thought it might be caused by anything specific before. I tend to be sceptical about the concept of "food intolerance" - it seems like an example of the modern tendency to find quasi-medical descriptions for everything - but will concede that it might be worth cutting down on cow's milk a bit. I have since had a couple of lattés* with soya milk as an experiment, and can't say I notice any difference in taste or texture. That's probably as much milk as I ever take in at any one time, anyway. I think if I gave up cow's milk completely, I'd want to take a calcium supplement, though.

The next thing on the plan: get back into running. According to the podiatrist, my current trainers are rubbish, not "foot-control running shoes", and too big for me. Which has been apparent for about three years**, but I'm dense and also unwilling to spend money on running shoes when the current ones hadn't fallen to bits and there are so many nice books waiting to be bought.

Oh, and go on holiday. I am going to the Lake District in early July. Looking forward to that quite a lot.

*I came of coffee-drinking age in the 90s, naturally.
** Yes, three years is a long time to go without replacing running shoes. But I haven't been running at all for nearly a year because of the foot issues!

Not so much a detox as a system reboot

2008-05-20T17:20:00.003Z

This is detox week.

I don't normally follow any diet other than "every meal must contain protein, not too many carbohydrates and lots of vegetables". I'm a vegetarian, so I've become accustomed to watching my protein intake over the years, and what I eat tends to be low-fat, though not low-carb. After tracking my general intake, I've worked out that I don't really need to worry about the amount of fat I eat as much as I do carbs. And even those, I don't worry about very much. I try not to eat large quantities of bread because I don't seem to digest it very well, but that's it.

However, the last few weeks have felt a bit uncontrolled, food-wise. J's parents came up to visit and we went out several times, and then my family's Birthday Season started. We have three birthdays within a week of each other in May, and then one a month all summer. So last week contained three birthday dinners (and a strawberry shortcake on J's actual birthday) and it feels as though cake has developed into a major food group lately. I've also had a few more glasses of wine than I normally would; nothing major, but again it's calories I wouldn't normally have.

I've also not been making the best choices for lunch on work days, and I've been finding myself drinking a lot of coffee and not sleeping too well. I know it's partly that the weather is warmer and the mornings are lighter - I keep waking up because I'm too hot, and then I can't get back to sleep at all after about 6am. Which wouldn't be a big problem if I had to get up then, but I don't. So I've been tired and a bit headachy in the afternoons.

The number on the scale isn't looking terribly happy either. (The battery ran out the other day, and when we replaced it I accidentally programmed the scale to say that I was male instead of female, and it displayed my bodyfat percentage as 25% instead of 36%. What's going on there, I wonder? Is it in fact not measuring BF% by electrical impedance, as claimed on the box, but just putting the total weight reading through a sex-specific algorithm? I wonder how I could find out... Sadly it went back to normal once I'd corrected the setting.)

The last party was on Sunday. So this week I'm:

not drinking coffee
avoiding bread
drinking lots of water and herbal tea
making a concerted effort to eat vegetables or fruit as snacks, not carbs or random bits of cheese
avoiding anything sugary
trying to get plenty of sleep

I'm not counting calories or not eating when I'm hungry, just changing the choices I make a bit. So far, I'm doing well on everything except the last (I stayed up late to finish a piece of work on Monday). But then I've been at home. We will see how well I resist the siren call of the chocolate biscuits once I'm back at work. If this goes well, I may extend it for another week.

In the past, I've definitely noticed that if I avoid something for a while, I don't crave it. While I don't plan to give up coffee or bread or sugar permanently, I do want to remind my system that it can do without them perfectly well, and that I don't "need" coffee or sugar to get to the end of the afternoon without falling asleep.

I am also weighing myself every day, just to keep myself mindful of what I'm doing. Today's number was one pound lower than yesterday's, which is probably one of those random fluctuations, but mildly encouraging nonetheless.

The official diagnosis. Or rather, diagnoses.

2008-05-15T19:42:00.002Z

I finally went to the podiatrist last week, and - I'm sure you were all on tenterhooks - she didn't mention weight at all, even though I was wearing shorts. Which Mum said she wouldn't. Mums are wise.

The short version: I have the feet of a baby. And I do need orthotics. I'll get them in a couple of weeks.

It seems I'm significantly hypermobile (though still not so bendy as the siblings). That means that my ligaments are stretchy rather than taut, so my feet don't support themselves, which is why the arches are flat. Also, my knees bend backwards and have a tendency to "lock" when I stand. I've always known this, but apparently it is very bad and I mustn't do it.

When babies are born, their feet are flat and tilt outwards a bit. (Imagine a baby's feet dangling as you pick it up.) As children grow, their heels and the balls of their feet tilt inward and downward, leaving the arch of the foot higher by comparison. But my feet didn't make it all the way, so that effectively leaves me with feet that are still tilted, and which roll in when I stand, causing me to overpronate. And that's what's causing the pain.

As a secondary result, my big toes aren't working properly because they're at the wrong angle.

The podiatrist was very thorough. She examined my wrists (to see how bendy they were), the pattern of callouses on my feet, and the way I stand; she got me to walk up and down for several minutes; she drew lines up the backs of my heels and calves and examined the angle at which my foot rests. Somewhat worryingly, for my foot to be at a natural angle, I'd have to tilt it outwards far enough that none of the toes rest on the floor. The orthotic inserts will fill in that gap so each foot is level.

They'll be made of polypropylene (which sounds a little sweaty to me, but there we go) and I'll get them at the beginning of June.

I also have exercises to do: calf stretches (familiar to the runners among us), balancing on tiptoe, standing on one leg (well, one at a time) with my eyes closed, and walking around on my heels. This last makes me feel, and no doubt look, very silly.

But it's doing something! My feet don't hurt when I get out of bed in the morning any more.

Sorry for disappearing

2008-04-26T22:08:00.004Z

That wasn't meant to happen.

I am having a few weeks with no coursework to do, and this seems to mean that I don't turn the computer on nearly so much in the evenings. So I haven't been blogging. You would think I'd be capable of coming upstairs and pushing a button, but... no.

There are several posts in my head which I meant to get up during Blogiversary Week, but some of them required illustrations, and my camera has died, and...

And I've been feeling really boring lately, somehow.

Life has not been totally without occurrences; I had a cold (another one) and then we went to see my in-laws, and while we were there we went to the theatre, and work has been busy, and I've been knitting and reading a lot and watching Doctor Who and doing the garden... no. I really am boring. I'm not unhappy, but I'm slightly discontented with myself at the moment; I look in the mirror and see a sort of harried scruffy mouse-ish person. This is probably the mood in which other people get exciting new haircuts that they later regret. I'll just have to resist the temptation to buy lots of new clothes, and also resist the temptation to eat chocolate, which is only a short-term mood lifter.

There is little to report on the fitness front, except that I'm still biking to work - and indeed I go somewhere on the bike most other days as well, so I probably rack up about 40 miles per week. Probably I should do more; the weather's getting nicer, and I'm not so tired in the evenings as I am during the winter (that said, I came home from work on Friday and fell asleep on the sofa at 9pm). I still can't walk more than a few miles, or go running, because I'm still having problems with my feet. Warning: even more boring bit coming up.

Remember my feet? I've had long-term problems with arch pain, blistering under the arches, and aching feet when I get out of bed in the morning. Last September I went to the doctor about this - I thought I had flat feet, and he agreed, told me to avoid doing anything that set it off (like walking long distances or running) and referred me to the podiatry clinic. When my appointment came up in December, the podiatrist decided that I had plantar fasciitis, for which he gave me exercises. Although he agreed my feet were a bit flat, he thought it wasn't that bad. He also picked up that I'm slightly hypermobile (double-jointed) which can cause joint problems, so referred me on to the orthopaedic clinic for assessment. In the meantime, he told me I shouldn't go running, although doing weights and cycling would be OK.

The appointment for that has just come through - I'll be going on the 6th of May. While I'd be the first to admit that my sore feet are not exactly an urgent or life-threatening condition, I'm not overjoyed that it's taken so long from start to finish. When I got the appointment in December, I naively thought I'd be getting measured for orthotics there and then, and would be able to get back to what I consider normal activity pretty soon after. I've been doing the exercises I was given - possibly not quite as often as I should - but haven't really noticed any improvement: just as before, my feet don't hurt if I don't run or walk on them much, and if I wear either Doc Martens, Clarks' flat mary janes or the increasingly battered black Skechers I wear to work. School shoes, in other words. (This is something of a grief to me. I have lots of interesting and decorative shoes, and I've not worn most of them for months. It's not even as if I am a diehard fan of high heels - most of them are flat and sensible, just not quite supportive enough.) I took trainers down south with me the other week, walked into town in them, and bingo - arch pain and rubbed areas on my insteps.

In the meantime, I think I've discovered something else wrong with my feet: Morton's Neuroma or possibly Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. Which is just a scary-sounding way of saying that I get pins and needles in my toes when I exercise, which is caused by trapped nerves. This has also been going on for years, but I didn't know there was a name for it; I often get numb toes in the later stages of a longish bike ride, and I always used to get them on the cross-trainer (another thing I haven't done for ages). Apparently these conditions are associated with flat feet, and tarsal tunnel syndrome is brought on by exercise in that way. It may be possible to sort it with orthotics, or I may just have to put up with it.

The weight is still hovering around 180. I have a horrible feeling that the doctor at the clinic is going to tell me that I have sore feet because I am asking them to carry 180 pounds, and that they'd get better if I lost weight, and that there's nothing else to be done about it. Maybe I'm being paranoid. I hope I'm being paranoid. Not that I wouldn't like to lose more weight, but in the past I've only managed to do so through running several times a week... which is exactly what I've been told not to do at the moment.

Happy birthday, dear Square One

2008-03-14T22:04:00.007Z

This blog is three today! *

It rather astonishes me that I, the most unmethodical person I know, have managed to keep doing anything for three years. Admittedly**, there have been some times when I've posted less frequently than others; there have also been times when the whole Fitness Enterprise has taken a back seat. But I haven't ever forgotten about it, or lost sight of the goal of being fitter and healthier even if I wasn't in a position to make a lot of progress.

This week seems like a good time to look back. I don't usually reflect earnestly on my own progress, but I am going to do so now. Be warned!

When I started doing this, I was fairly unfit. I walked quite a lot - slowly - but I thought of running as a thing I just couldn't do. Though I'd never lifted weights, I was fairly strong, but my cardiovascular fitness was not great. When J and I went for a walk, I would be labouring behind before too long, and if we climbed a hill he'd have to wait for me to catch up.

I don't mean to indicate that physically speaking I'd been a total slug all my life. I didn't enjoy sports at school, but I'd been in a dancing team and ridden horses, and at college I'd cycled all over the place and played in a women's football team. But I'd somehow done all these things while feeling fat and unfit. I was Not Sporty. That was how I defined myself.

I wasn't happy with this state of affairs.

I also wasn't very happy with the way I looked. Although I'd got over the episodes of angst about my body that I used to have as a teenager, and mostly come to accept the way I looked, I was fatter than I was comfortable with. When I was younger, I'd thought changing my level of fitness was impossibly daunting, and then later there were other things I was concentrating on (such as university). But in 2003 I'd started reading diet and fitness blogs, and began to realise it might not be so hopeless after all.

I'd been engaged for about six months, and I knew that if I wanted to lose weight before the wedding, I would have to get on with it. (I felt like a bad feminist for needing such a shallow reason to get started, but there we go.)

I joined a gym. It took me two months to work up the nerve. In the meantime, I got a pedometer and tried hard to get in - was it ten thousand steps a day? I think so. At the time, I had a job that required lots of walking back and forth to the photocopier, and if I got in a walk at lunchtime, that brought me up to the total. But although it was undoubtedly better than nothing, I needed to go up a gear.

To begin with, I only used the exercise bike and the Nautilus machines, which I'd been shown how to use. I was scared of all the other cardio machines: couldn't work out how to get into a rhythm with the elliptical; was scared of falling off the back of the treadmill and landing on my bottom with a thump. The Nautilus machines, however, were my friends. This was something I could do!

I also managed to start weighing myself, which I hadn't done in years and years. I still tend to behave slightly oddly towards the scales - I don't want to know what they say, and put off finding out, but once I weigh myself... it's just a number. Which was just as well, since it was (in this case) a rather higher number than I was expecting.

As you know, this isn't one of those dramatic weight loss stories. These days I weigh about sixteen pounds less than I did then. At my lowest (where I'm trying to get back to now) I could claim to have lost twenty. In the world of the fitness blog, this is very small potatoes.

On the other hand, I have lost at least ten percent of my body fat. I conquered my fear of the treadmill and learned to run. I also learned to brave the mostly-male arena that is the free weights area at the gym. My teenage self would be very surprised.

I also acquired some clothes with horizontal stripes and some skirts that stop above mid-calf, and that's something my teenage self would NEVER have believed.

Tune in later this week for further installments of this enthralling narrative!
---------------------------------------------------------------
While I'm at it, here's a little update on more recent events.

J has come off his anti-depressants with his psychiatrist's approval. They were not having any visible positive effect, just unwanted side-effects, including constant exhaustion.

Since he's stopped, he has, on the whole, felt better. He's been playing music, which he hasn't done much for about a year, and has been cycling and running again. He's been feeling very unfit because the pills made him too tired to exercise, and also made him hungry, which is not a good combination. Fortunately he's naturally slender, but it doesn't do a lot for the self-esteem.

There was a temporary bad patch at the weekend, but this week things have been much better. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, I have been very busy trying to catch up with the academic work I missed while I was ill. Hence the radio silence this week, and there will probably be a small hiatus after I finish my birthday-week posts. However, during April I will have some time off from academia, and I have some plans... watch this space.

*It is also Pi Day. In celebration we had pies for tea tonight. (Actually, it was not in celebration but a total coincidence. The pies were Linda McCartney vegetarian ones; they're quite good.)

**If I don't admit it, I know Isabelle will point it out :)

Keeping on

2008-03-07T22:16:00.002Z

No longer ill, but still a bit weary. I'm going to have an early night tonight.

I'm back to more normal eating - maybe with slightly fewer chocolate biscuits than in the pre-illness week - and so far have not encountered any weird effects. I'm still at 182, though the bodyfat monitor on the scales has gone down to 34%, having been stuck at 36% for longer than I can recall. I know these things are hideously inaccurate, but am choosing to see this as a hopeful sign on the grounds that it must be measuring something.

My new bike is still good (and I must book it in for its after-purchase free checkup). I went right back to riding to work, although I didn't do it today because I went to bed with a mysterious achy calf, which was still there when I woke up.

I'm blaming it on too much time spent sitting at a desk. I still haven't entirely caught on the work for my Archival Ethics unit I missed through being ill; I think the next two weeks (at least) are going to involve a lot more desk-sitting, and there's not much I can do about that, other than get up and stretch periodically. And maybe get a new desk chair that allows a better working posture, which I've been meaning to do for ages - except of course that I don't have time to go and shop for one...

Think how much time to exercise I'll have when I finally finish this degree. (Except that I'll presumably be working full-time, and will no doubt immediately over-commit myself to various activities in the heady rush of not having any homework to do...)

There may have been a point to this post, but I have forgotten what it was. I shall go to bed and read Oxford Today, and re-engage with Archival Ethics in the morning. And maybe go for a walk.

You know how I just had a cold?

2008-03-03T15:55:00.009Z

I seem to have last posted on the 22nd, eleven days ago. At which point I was moaning about my sinuses.

The cold had gone by Monday, but I continued to feel tired and rather chilly and achy. When I'm tired, I have a tendency to comfort-eat (I was also PMSing, which didn't help a lot). At one point the scales were reading 187, which is not a number I really wanted to see again. On Wednesday, I came home from work, sat down, wrapped a blanket round myself and basically did nothing of any utility all evening. This probably ought to have told me something.

On Thursday, I woke up feeling sort of sick, decided I would feel better once I had had breakfast, had it, went to work and lasted an hour and a half before coming home. Some kind of feverish gastric bug.

What is wrong with me at the moment? Normally I am rarely ill, but this is the third virus of some kind I've had this year (counting the one I started the year with). My immune system must need a boost. Possibly it is stress.*

Fortunately the vomiting was limited to one day, and I've been out of bed and moving around since Saturday (also fortunate, since my brother-in-law was staying with us for the weekend), but I'm still feeling somewhat nauseous if I eat anything too exciting, such as a normal-size meal, as I foolishly tried to do on Sunday. So I'm sort of sticking to the odd bit of dry toast and so forth.

This probably amounts to one of those crash diets you are advised against. I appear to have lost five pounds since Thursday - and I can see the difference, which is really weird. Usually I lose so slowly that I don't notice a thing. It can't all be water, because I've been rehydrating religiously.

I'm a bit worried that if I don't start eating normally soon, my metabolism will go into famine mode, and that when I do go back to normal my body will store everything just in case. But equally I don't want to push my digestion further than it wants to go, since what with all the ailments I've hardly done any MLitt work since pre-cold, and I really do not want to get any further behind.

We'll see what happens... At least I don't have to go back to work until Wednesday.

*J has been having some pretty rough times with his depression lately, which deserve an entry of their own. Several entries, even. That's why posts have been a bit sparse lately, indeed - I wanted to wait to write about it until the situation became a bit clearer. Which it has. I think. Watch this space.

Colds are not good for the soul

2008-02-22T21:37:00.002Z

I have a cold. Everyone else in Edinburgh either has it, has just had it, or (I'd guess) is incubating it.

Mine is mostly sitting in my sinuses, throbbing quietly.

There will be no triumphant tales of exercise exploits this week, because I am just too tired. Normally I'm a night owl, but I've been in bed well before 10pm twice this week, and am about to go there now.

*whoosh*sniff*whoosh*

Night-night.

New clothes

2008-02-12T20:23:00.000Z

The whole biking thing must be causing me to gain some muscle, because although the number on the scales is resolutely remaining in the 180s, my jeans are falling down. I have two pairs of jeans in regular rotation: the black ones, which are soft and comfy if a bit faded, and the blue ones, which are annoying.

Whoever it is that designs women's jeans did not have me in mind. The ubiquity of low-rise styles in recent years is a particular problem; I am high-rise. Even if the jeans aren't very low-rise, they are going to fall off me. I have a relatively small waist and a large bottom, so I need jeans to come higher than my hipbones if decency is to be maintained.

The only answer to this has been to buy boys' jeans, which works better than you might think. I feel there is something wrong when boys' jeans accommodate curves better than women's, but there we are. The only snag is that they're not as roomy in the thighs, which is why the blue jeans are annoying. Mostly, when you buy jeans, they stretch after you've washed them, right? I bought the blue jeans slightly tight for this reason, and they've stubbornly remained slightly tight ever since. Not unwearably so. Just enough to be annoying.*

However, they've become noticeably less annoying over the last month or so. The black jeans, on the other hand, have started to require a belt, and also started to unzip themselves every so often... It's good that they're loose; the auto-unzip isn't quite so good.

So I've bought some new black jeans. And somehow managed to acquire two new black tops. Because owning upwards of twenty black tops isn't enough, obviously.

Dietgirl posted recently about how she feels she hasn't yet learned to dress for the way her body is now, and hasn't learned to enjoy putting outfits together. That prompted me to think about my own attitudes to clothes over the time I've been doing this.

I've always liked clothes, but I used to be very, very conscious of the things I could and couldn't wear, particularly when I was in my late teens. I needed to have the right clothes for every situation, and I also needed them to be impeccably modest and body-disguising. But mostly I needed them to be Really Good Clothes, because if my clothes were perfect then maybe nobody would notice the body underneath them. Times when I couldn't control what I'd have to wear, such as school gym classes, were real ordeals. I can remember it perfectly well, but I have difficulty remembering why I felt so strongly about it.

All over the place I've read posts about how you should be able to look great (and find the clothes that you want in order to achieve this) whatever size you are, and I agree with that completely. But I can also see the attraction in not trying quite so hard. I always used to envy the skinny girls, because they seemed not to have to worry whether something suited them; it would look good anyway. What looked carefree and informal on them looked frumpy on me. (Of course, all thin girls don't have an effortless ability to look good whatever they're wearing. It just seemed so at the time.)

These days I don't try nearly so hard. Probably it's partly because I've grown up, and I know what suits me by now; also I don't care so much. When I'm not at work, I wear the same jeans and T-shirts a lot of the time, and it doesn't particularly matter to me whether they suit me. (I make slightly more effort when I am at work, but that doesn't extend to wearing makeup, or buying a proper suit.) I suppose as I get older, it matters less to me that people think I'm pretty or stylish. In my interactions with most people,that couldn't be less relevant (and J thinks I'm pretty, and tells me so, even if I'm in my jeans and T-shirt with my hair scraped back). I'm not nearly so worried about concealing my flaws, even though they're still there, just slightly smaller than they were. There are still things I wouldn't wear in public - shorts come to mind, and I don't think I'll ever do strapless - but I don't agonise over it.

I wonder what would happen if I ever managed to achieve "thin"? Would I go out in sleeveless tops and shorts at last? Or would I retreat further into scruffiness, content in the knowledge that I can now Wear Anything?

*What they haven't done is wear out between the thighs. When I was younger, my jeans always used to rip at the knees when they wore out (and sometimes I kept wearing them like that. It was the 90s.) But when I was at my heaviest, they inevitably ripped at the inner thigh first, which I found really mortifying. I'd be doing well if I had jeans last a year without ripping there. While my thighs are still far from lean, I've now had jeans last more than two years without this happening. It's an odd achievement, but it makes me happy.

A multitude of things that have happened since last I posted

2008-01-29T06:30:00.000Z

We went down to the in-laws’ and spent a pleasant Christmas despite my horrible cold. Although I had assurance from the doctor that it was just an upper respiratory infection, not a chest infection (which my little brother tells me is doctors’ less-alarming-speak for pneumonia, so I'm quite glad it wasn't), I was ill enough to get sent home from work the day before we flew down. Which is not like me. So I spent quite a bit of the festive period lying on sofas and coughing.

As a result, I spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with my family. Though I’m not sure we’d have gone and partied on Princes Street even if I’d been feeling better. I have done that while running a temperature in my student days, but – sigh – am probably getting a bit old for that sort of carry-on.

After that, I sank into work for an end-of-unit assignment for my degree, which sort of ate the first week of January. It was supposed to be handed in on the fourth, but I got a few days’ extension because of the aforementioned cold. I really hate getting extensions for things, because the extension starts to eat into the time for the next thing. It was only three days, but I feel I’m still trying to catch up, even now. Which partly explains my blog silence. I have still not completely caught up with everyone else’s blogs, either. Sorry.

Once the Assignment of Doom was finished, J and I spring cleaned, and I had a blissful week of no homework, in which I finished a variety of craft projects that have been lying partly-done in plastic boxes in my spare room. See in my sidebar where it says I do crafty things? I really do! Or I do when I have time to. Pictures on Flickr, details on the LJ if you’re interested in that sort of thing…

However. What of my fitness and so forth? On the third of January, J and I ventured to the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative and, at long last, bought my new bike, a Revolution Streetfinder. Although I’ve been pretty sure this was the one I wanted since about September, I’ve been dragging my heels on actually buying the thing. We were helped in our decision-making process by the bike shop guy telling us that this was the last bike in this model and frame-size anywhere.

Why did I spend so long vacillating, given that I had been given the money for my birthday by my loving parents, and that I haven’t had a new bike since 1992? Partly it was sentimentality: my trusty old purple-and-lilac Raleigh Cassis has carried me faithfully through my teenage years, university, and through my twenties thus far. Partly it was a sort of sense of environmental frugality. OK, cycling is pretty green in itself, but there is an environmental cost inherent in manufacturing and transporting a new bike, even if it’s fairly carbon-neutral once it’s been bought. Did I really need a new one?

And partly I wondered whether the new bike’s light frame and 21 gears would turn me soft. I mean, I CAN get up the hill on my old bike. Just not very quickly. And it certainly gives my leg muscles a good workout. (Also… how am I ever going to learn to work 21 gears? My old bike has 5!)

However, the bullet has been bitten, and I’ve ridden the new bike to work on every possible day, sun, rain or hail* (not the ones with 70mph winds, though) and over to my parents’. I can confirm that it was a good buy, and am now wondering what all the dithering was for. I can now, for example, go up the hill without wanting to die halfway. And I can change gears without suddenly losing all momentum, because the intervals between the changes are much smaller. If I want to work harder, I can always change up.

The only snag about the new bike, as far as I can see… Well. The old bike, as I mentioned, is purple (Cassis is French for blackcurrant). Which is not exactly my favourite colour, unless it is a very dark purple verging on midnight blue. I made many comments in the run-up to buying the new one that I’d finally get a colour I like. Red or blue or silver. The catalogue lists the Streetfinder as matt silver, which is what it looks like in the photo.

Well, it’s actually silvery lilac. Or as J says, lilac-y silver. Probably more silver than purple, but still!

But it’s got every feature I want, so I decided it was petty to quibble over the colour. Maybe if I’m still riding it in 2024 I can have it repainted. (Another thing: I have a snazzy new pannier too! The old one was bought when I went to university in 1998, had had hard use, and was held together by duct tape and prayer.)

I still have my old bike in the shed, and have given it a good clean and going-over in preparation for finding it a new home. Yes, it's old, but it's been well-cared-for and I hope there's a student or someone out there who could make good use of it. (And if you are she, do leave a comment, obviously.)

Meanwhile, I keep forgetting to weigh myself. I wish I could say this is part of some grand psychological plan, like PastaQueen's. What I need is more awareness of the numbers and patterns, not less. I just keep forgetting. Back in the summer, I was trying to get into the habit of weighing myself first thing on Monday mornings, so it would be easy to remember. Trouble is that I did it without my clothes on. Now that it's winter, I jump out of bed and instantly throw clothes on, and it's only as I'm wandering downstairs that I think "Oh no! didn't weigh myself!" But by then it seems foolish (and chilly) to get undressed again just for that.

However, I did manage to weigh myself last Saturday. I was 183 pounds, which is exactly what I was last time I did it. It was immediately pre-period, though, so I'm hoping for something better when next I do it. Apart from a brief visit to 179 during the summer of 2006, I have been stuck in the 180s for... more than two years, probably. It is time to move on.

*Not on purpose. It wasn’t hailing when I left the house, but by the time it started, it would have taken longer to go back than carry on. And I am claiming full points for hardcore-ness anyway. Hail stings when it’s coming right at your naked face!