Between imbibing brain food (aka reading), writing an article, preparing lectures and marking papers, I’ve managed to have a busy couple of weeks. Such that I ended up deciding not to try to write a speech for a conference, despite it being a really interesting opportunity. The amount of creative thinking and writing has probably had an impact on my motivation to write this blog, hence managing to skip it last weekend.
We’ve had a period of breakages. After one particularly windy night, I woke up Christmas Eve to find the fence in tatters… so much for giving the myriad visitors over Christmas a Zen garden to look out on.
The fence has been replaced, but the old bamboo front panels that I made won’t work with it so my mind has come up with a new idea to integrate the new fence into the garden… it’ll have to wait for the Spring though as it’s low priority! However, the ideation process threw up a great solution for a completely different problem… I now have more than one reason to learn some joinery skills.
I then smashed a salad bowl by clipping it with the cupboard door, our cleaner managed to smash a vase, and I cracked a piece out of my favourite pasta bowl in a drying-up accident.
As an incredibly versatile 15 year old ceramic bowl, used at least three or four times a week, it has survived more than 3,000 outings to the table and back to the cupboard via the sink. If I can manage to glue the fragment back on, it might even see a few more!
What amazes me is how fast accidents happen (in the blink of an eye)… and how much they affect other things when they do. Even when they are not health-threatening, they still affect our mood.
My commercial background means that I automatically do a lot of risk mitigation (which must surely be a bore to those around me) but even with this it’s not possible to account for all eventualities or else we’d be living in flame-proof, hypo-allergenic cotton wool.
So, two machine runs to report:
Last week I optimistically started off at 8 mph, but was forced to reduce this to 7 mph after a mile as I just couldn’t hold the pace. I completed 3.67 miles in 30 minutes, an average of 7.34 mph and was exhausted afterwards.
Today I was more circumspect and started running at 7 mph, but then increased the speed towards the end. At 30 minutes I decided that I might as well run for a little longer to make the distance 4 miles, which I reached in 33.17, an average of 7.2 mph. I even wondered about running further still… maybe another time.
I quite often walk outside to stretch afterwards, which I see as the English version of jumping out of the sauna into a freezing lake. This morning there had been a really heavy frost so I was looking forward to a chilly cool-down, but by the time I got outside, maybe around 10am, the temperature had zoomed up and it was in the ‘cold for a summer day’ category. England really is the place to go for changing weather!
Time to get back to the brain food… maybe prefaced by lunch!