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The weekendish 2006 July 25 22:52

Posted by diamond in : Random, Cycling , add a comment

On saturday myself and mark went out for a cycle, we did my now usual route of rhebogue to castleconnell and back. Distance: 24.88km. Avg speed: 29.73kmph, another personal best. I did the same route again last night, avg speed of 29.27kmph. I’ve begun to suspect however that my recent improvements fall into the category of low-hanging fruit. As such, i’ve consulted mark, and he’s told me to start on a regime of sprint and hill training. It’s gonna hurt -) I went out tonight for the first sprint exercise. I attempted to do 4 20 second sprints, with 5 minutes recovery time between. The result was 3 17 second sprints, and one final 13 second one that almost killed me. I’m looking forward to see how much that changes over the next few weeks.

I went home for the weekend for the first time in maybe 4 months (normally i’m probably there every 2 months). It was really nice to relax with the parents, in the 2-county powercut as it turns out -) There’s a major esb station, about half a mile from where they live, which went on fire on saturday night. That article seems to be a bit inaccurate however, as all of athlone was affected by the outage, as was a chunk of co. roscommon. Either way, it was an interesting evening. I ended up playing soduko (oh so badly and slowly) by torchlight. On sunday i went to church for the first time in over a year. I was glad to go back, i’d missed it.

Tomorrow i’m off to dublin as i’m flying to portugal at horrible o’clock on thursday morning. Myself, braz and zoney are going over for bruce’s wedding. I would go on at length about this, but nonado is about to go down for some maintenance rebootin, and i should probably sleep anyway.

The scoop, in snippets 2006 July 20 21:21

Posted by diamond in : Random, Cycling, Health , 6 comments

Train to dublin yesterday, passed field of magpies sitting on sheep, met atlas and drusilla for dinner, atlas paid (thanks -), met dredg ‘n stewie ‘n ann ‘n madduck, stayed in grand canal hotel, slept ~8 hours, had 3 interviews, 2 by video-conference with zurich, all went well, enjoyable, learned stuff, maybe one more phone interview, should hear back within a week, lunch with dredg ‘n stewie ‘n madduck ‘n conall, google will cover the cost of train+hotel+food (yay), train back to limerick was like a sauna, near 100% humidity, high 20’s temp, sheets of sweat pouring off, went for a cycle when i got home, 24.94km @ 29.23kmph, new record avg speed -)

*Update*
Oh yeah, there was partaking of the free ice-cream in google. Mmmmm -)

*Update part deux*
This just in from cheez: “In this weather flies tend to lay eggs in the wool of sheep which haven’t been shorn. These eggs turn into maggots, a healthy feast for magpies. Magpies are pretty much the only bird which is cheeky enough to stay on the sheeps back”. Awesome -)

In an attempt to staunch

Posted by diamond in : Random , 2 comments

the flow of “So, how did it go?” questions, here is the answer: it went well. All clear? -)

Things, days, happenings 2006 July 18 19:51

Posted by diamond in : Work, Random, Health , 1 comment so far

This was going to be a much longer post, but i don’t have the energy, so meh.

On saturday i went to tyrion’s 19th birthday party in waterford. It was quite a strange experience being at a party with a bunch of people who had all just sat their leaving cert. I sat mine 10 years ago. After an initial shaky start, the party was very enjoyable. About 22:00 i was getting ready to head home when megan (tyrion’s girlfriend) started playing the piano. Wow. The next time i looked at my watch it was 23:30 and i was no longer safe to drive (fun fact about amitriptyline: if you suddenly stop taking it, the side-effects re-occur 24 hours after you last took it, usually stronger).

I accepted the accommodation that had been offered multiple times by tyrion and his parents (very cool people), and stayed listening to the piano. I played piano for 9 years, had to stop when i came to college as i didn’t have access to one any more. To be honest, i was kinda sick of it at that stage. It had all been too rigid for my liking. However, sitting there listening to someone who could really play, it was amazing. It makes me want to go back and learn how to play again. I even started that night ,-) Megan showed me how to play Colourblind, by Counting Crows. I can’t remember the last time i enjoyed playing a musical instrument so much.

There was a hitch though. Because i hadn’t planned on staying the night, i hadn’t brought any medication with me. As a result i managed to sleep for 2 15 minute periods during the night, that was it. I gave up and spent the rest of the night chatting to tyrion and co. At 11:00 on sunday i drove home to meet up with my mother and lil’ sister for lunch. By that stage i was just tired, rather than tired an medicated. The latter is an unknown quantity, the former is not. On the way i gave a lift to a polish hitchhiker from clonmel to cahir. He’s a student studying computer science in poland, he’s come over here every summer for the last 4 years on holidays.

I dropped my rio karma mp3 player at tyrion’s party, it landed on the jog wheel which snapped off. Dan’s rio also suffered the same fate a while back, it’s still with dr cjb to see if it’s possible to fix, but i’m not holding my breath. It’s a real shame, i got it as a birthday present from diane, and it really is an excellent piece of kit. I can’t think of any other electronic device i’ve used that had such an intuitive and well-designed interface. It really does put the iPod to shame.

After mum and lydia had departed i had planned to go to bed early to try catching up on sleep. Then i got a txt from barry which put paid to that. He’s a guy who was in my class in college, lived with me for two years. A very good friend whom i hadn’t seen in about a year and a half, and he was only around limerick for the evening. He called over for a couple of hours, turns out he’s moving to italy in the next few weeks for the foreseeable future. It was all detailed in an email i hadn’t got around to reading yet -) I think i spent most of the 2 hours telling him about my last year. I realised that next month will be the 5 year anniversary of getting IC, i just hope things don’t get much worse than they are now. Currently, it’s copeable with, but it seems like that the point at which everything falls down isn’t that much further down.

I haven’t managed to catch up on sleep from the weekend yet. I’ve spent the last 2 days completely fried. Today i had to catch the 08:05 train to cork for a visit to Tyndall. I got up at 07:00, had breakfast and packed, then rang for a taxi. Calling a taxi in limerick is a tricky buisness. If you call and say you want a taxi in 30 minutes, the most likely time for the taxi to arrive is 5 minutes later. It’s happened to me so so often. So, the only way to work around this is to add extra time to your schedule for you to ring the taxi while fully ready. Today, it didn’t work out. I rang 2 of the major taxi companies in limerick, one of them twice. All the phonecalls rang out. By the time i had to give up on them, it was getting far too close to depend on a taxi getting here in time, so i decided to just drive to the train station.

Upon arriving at the train station, i found out that the carpark there requires you to pay on entrance, not exit. And it only takes exact change, which i didn’t have. The train left in 15 minutes time. I reversed out of the train station, and went looking for a carpark where i could leave the car for the day. The best i could do in the time i had left was find one that closed at 19:00. This meant i had to leave Tyndall at 15:00 in order to catch a train back to limerick before the carpark closed. It was a lot more stress than i had been looking for. The taxi + train plan had meant i wouldn’t have had to drive, or worry about parking etc, and that i could stick around in cork for a while after work to meet up with cjb and sammi. Gah.

Weight, car, toolset 2006 July 15 11:43

Posted by diamond in : Work, Random, Cycling, Health , add a comment

Today i went out for another cycle, this one was definitely meant to be a recovery cycle. I took it easy for the first half, and only pushed slightly on the way back. Result: 24.89km @ 28.1kmph. Well, as mark said, if i was able to do that then i obviously didn’t need much recovery. I’m putting down the recent increases in performance to the weight loss.

I’ve been on a diet for the last 4 months. I started off on about 82kg (just under 13stone). Since may i’ve been tracking, averaging and graphing my weight. The current status is here. I’m down to about 75.8kg (just under 12 stone), and aiming for ~70kg (11 stone), so i’m about halfway there now. I’m very happy with my progress, it hasn’t been that difficult because being aware of the trend makes it easy for me to decide, and i haven’t had to cut out food that i love (my diet consists of one Wild Onion meal and a bowl of cereal per day. It rocks -).

On the way back from the airport yesterday, i heard a most surprising story from paul. He was telling us about how a friend of his, who lived in rhebogue, and had a 1991 toyota, had his car broken into recently. The perpetrators had tried to hot-wire the ignition, and had broken the steering. I double-checked to make sure he wasn’t talking about me, and sure enough someone else had indeed suffered an almost identical incident to myself. Clearly these people have some particular attachment to 1991 toyotas.

A few weeks back, my father notified me that a certain toolset that aldi stock every so often that i had been looking out for for a couple of years was finally back in stock. Unfortunately at the time i was far too busy to make it over to aldi to pick one up. Then, a few days later, i realised that i was unable to drive. Mark had a look in the roscrea aldi, but they had sold out in the first day or two. I was kinda disappointed, but nothing major. Then, when my parents came down to visit me last weekend, they presented me with one as a birthday present. They rock -)

Some random photos of recentish: