It’s been sunny here today. Bertha was making the most of it.
I’ve also added the near nose to nose of Bertha and Doodles, but see how Doodles is top cat for once on the table looking down on her.
Mackenzie’s photo is just so he isn’t left out.
For Isobel xxx
Today I have been to the seaside. It has been a very cold but sunny day, so wrapping up warm with multiple layers, parka, gloves and my special Dr Zhivago furry hat, meant the cold didn’t bother me…. too much. I frequently remarked “I think it’s getting warmer, then turned a corner to be confronted by a cold wind and a revisited view.
My friend and I went to Saltburn by the Sea. The location of the Saltburn Yarnbombers over the last couple of years. We went to see if the Olympic and Jubilee characters were still in place. They weren’t. They may have been removed for the winter.
There was a new Octopus however! He was significantly larger than the other knitted characters which were around a foot high. The Octopus is about 5ft from head to foot.
We bravely strolled along the pier and looked out to sea. Then down to the hard souls who were approaching the water’s edge. A little girl had her baby sized doll in the water. The battery operated doll was doing a rudimentary front crawl but failing against the tide.
We returned to the esplanade, found a pathway to the town centre and went to look in a shop with life sized Betty Boop figures that my friend had seen on a previous visit. I was not convinced they would add to anybody’s home decor. A small boy came in with his grandparents to buy a rainbow coloured device which twirled in the wind. My friend’s eyes lit up. A purchase was made.
We found a cafe, read the goings on documented in the Saltburn Talk of the Town newletter, ate our cake then wandered round a couple of shops. I saw some gloves in a country pursuits style shop. We wandered around downstairs and looked at the Barbour boxer shorts (yes, really) and teeny tiny Hunters for the aspiring toddler horserider in the family before being told there was more upstairs.
It was like walking into the dressing up shop for the County Gentleman. Harris tweed, mustard waistcoats and cords from wall to wall. There were a number of flat caps. These were duly tried on. We laughed at the poor taxidermy skills which created a Basil Brush style smile on the fox – which may have been caught by some of the people who were the target demographic of the shop :-(
It was still relatively early in the afternoon so we came home via Redcar. Redcar is dominated by industrial cooling towers and looking out to sea, there were many tankers which appeared to be moored, plus a wind farm in the sea. We found a parking space on the esplanade and walked onto the beach which curved round the bay to Saltburn a few miles away.
Earlier we had talked about the strata visible in the cliffs at Saltburn and I dredged up my knowledge that it was from the Jurassic period. As we walked on the pebbles, my eye was drawn to an oddly shaped stone. I pounced. It was a fossil! I have never found a fossil before. I was excited. We turned it over and marvelled. Then I looked down again. There was another, and another, and another. I questioned whether everything we saw was a fossil; a fossilised sponge, a fossilised piece of wood, some lava?
I’m not sure if I have a bit of an ammonite or something else. There is another wonderfully shaped stone which almost looks like a pentagon and is built up in ridges equally on both sides. I don’t imagine it is an ichthyosaur. Or a brontosaurus which I recently discovered never really existed. It was a work of fiction following a war of egos between two early dinosaur hunters.
They will go into my stone collection immediately.
Over the last few months I’ve been learning how to run, or perhaps more accurately, how to keep running once you start. That’s something I never mastered. People would talk about how they did 2 mile cross country runs at school, I didn’t. I think I remember a 200m run. Maybe it was 400m. It certainly wasn’t more than that.
As an adult there isn’t a huge call to run sustained distances. I don’t have to do much more than scurry across the road because I rarely rely on buses, and, hence, don’t need to run for them. I’ve tried to run on the treadmill at the gym with varying degrees of success. In 2006, for a few weeks, I managed to regularly run for 10 minutes but then I pulled a muscle so that stopped.
Then this summer I decided to try again. I’d read about the C25K programme: to take you from couch potato to running 5k in 8 weeks. I started with the principle before I downloaded the app for my phone and followed the programme in earnest, or I did once I worked out that I had to manually move the run indicator on each run. As a result, for about a month the maximum I ran was a 90 second interval.
Most of my running has been outdoors. I’ve been running in 0 degrees whilst there is packed ice on the pavements – and haven’t fallen over! I don’t mind the cold, disliked the ice, but I’m put off by heavy rain.
Officially I started on 12 October. I finished today. The goal was the Christmas Parkrun.
Parkrun is a voluntary organisation that runs weekly 5k races in locations all across the country. The Christmas run was touted as being the day people dressed up. Last year there was a guy in a gold mankini, today another man was in gold lame trunks and wings. There were others dressed as Santas, elves, Smurfs, or in all encompassing bodystockings that left little to the imagination. Sadly I wasn’t able to take a picture: my phone was wrapped in a plastic bag in my armband to protect it against the pouring rain.
It had been raining so hard overnight that the route had been changed to allow the run to go ahead. The “short” distance without a path, which turned out to be about a kilometre normally, had been increased to around 3km – and it was muddy! I’ve not run on grass in my training so I wasn’t looking forward to it.
I started at the back of the pack; I knew that I would be running at over 30 mins. “Watch out for the man with the 30 min banner” – a pace setter to let people know how well they were running. I watched him run into the distance…..
The going was very hard. I ran for 15 minutes before I needed some water and an excuse to walk a few paces. One thing I’ve seen from running is that I breathe very heavily and my lungs always feel like they are about to burst. Once the run is over, I really feel like I’m getting lots more air into them and that feeling lasts for the rest of the day.
I managed to overtake a few people, but to be fair, they were mostly either very unfit or parents with children. I was lapped by a lot of people as I ran round the field first time round. I was about a third of the way round when my running “Coach” caught up with me to motivate me to get to the finish line – just at the point where I was beginning to fail again.
He had offered to run all the way with me but I had said no to this. I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk, and my approach with running at this point is to endure the experience and try to dissociate myself by blasting my eardrums with David Guetta and Flo Rida. Arriving when I was at a low point with a cheery smile and pep talk, and without the co-ordination to stop the music on my phone through its plastic bag wrapping, I kept saying “I can’t hear you” and “I can’t talk”.
His idea of slow running and mine didn’t quite match so this led to another two or three walking stints. The young boy in front was flagging so I had him in my sights. We started running and Coach Mick stopped to egg him on. It worked, and he had a spurt to overtake me again but this petered out in the last few yards just as I was being prepped for how to approach the finishing line for my photo, so I beat him – by 6 seconds!
I’ve still to see the photographs. I’ll be recognisable by the puce face. I do have my stats though. Finishing in 37:34, I was the 34th woman out of 46 (or 114th overall).
I’m not sure if this will be a regular occurrence. I’ve been looking at other routes in the area which would be on proper paths – but my time would make me virtually last, so I might rethink that….
I’m sitting in the garden watching the garden incinerator bonfire I’ve eventually got going. Just when I really want to go in for the night.
I’ve been out since 6pm, all safety precautions to hand, two boxes of matches, an old work notebook, lots of garden prunings that I’ve been collecting for weeks, and a big stick to stir it all with. I’ve not been terribly successful. All of the matches have gone and virtually all of the pages of my notebook. My nose has run all the way to the house and back, my eyes have streamed and my throat is raw. Most of the clippings remain however :-S
I’ve never had a bonfire before. I know the incinerator bin isn’t quite the same but it achieves the same thing. I think. I’m not sure if I will have one again given the resounding success this evening (not).
I had put off the deed for as long as possible:
I wanted to get all of the garden tidied up first
I wanted to let the clippings dry as much as possible
I was out all evening
I was going to be out till 7pm and it would be dark soon
In reality, I was a bit scared. What if I created the Towering Inferno? Chance would be a fine thing!
Eventually I decided tonight would be the night. The weather is forecast to change tomorrow. All of that drying might go to waste.
Ho hum. I wonder how much it would cost to pay somebody to take it all away….
Last week I took a trip to Saltburn by the Sea. A seaside town that has, you may have heard, some keen knitters who have adorned the railings of the pier with Royal Wedding, Jubilee and now Olympic themed displays. Read the rest of this entry »
Is it Supercat or Grumpy Cat? I can’t make up my mind.
Bertha is, of course, a Supercat but her nose is out of joint because of Doodles coming to live with us. There have been fights and psychological bullying, initiated by Bertha, because Doodles is on her territory. The spraying of a few weeks ago, thankfully, seems to have stopped, and I am at pains to spend time with Bertha to reassure that she is loved.
This is quite difficult to achieve since any time I sit down, Doodles seems to appear within seconds demanding to sit on my lap and Bertha makes a detour. My impression is that Bertha doesn’t think that I’m her territory any more and that makes me sad. The days when she would barge up and sit on top of Mackenzie, or lick him till he moved, just to be closest to me have gone.
She’s spending quite a bit of time upstairs on her own and this picture seems to convey to me that she’s not a happy girl.
Doodles was sleeping on the sofa beside me. Mackenzie wanted to come up beside me too and he nudged in beside her. It was close but there was no hissing (Doodles seems to accept Mackenzie more than Bertha – perhaps because he doesn’t chase her as much).
After a while I saw there had been a bit of an adjustment….
Doodles has been enjoying the garden over the last few weeks. She had never been allowed out previously so it was all new to her to start off with. She was terrified, however, over time she has got to the stage where she runs enthusiastically when she hears the door being opened, although she is not at the stage of crying to be let outside. Read the rest of this entry »
The garden is beginning to come into its own and lots of plants are in flower. I never really planned a spring garden. My interest is usually piqued from May onwards when the weather is a bit nicer (supposedly) and it’s nice to go for a day trip to a number of nurseries within a 50 mile radius (on a number of sorties) and see what special treasures they may have. Read the rest of this entry »
Doodles has mostly white fur. As a result of Doodles joining our family, my house is mostly white fur. Read the rest of this entry »
sophiescott's Blog 