Month: January 2012

I had planned to go for a run this morning but then as I stayed up ‘til 3:30am that plan was scuppered as I got up late and had to go to the supermarket and work on stories and stuff and so this afternoon I went for a mile walk and asked Shaun if he wanted to accompany me. His initial response was to tell me to fuck off but then he changed his mind and came with me. We got to the half mile point and I said shall we carry on and go further? and he said yes and so we walked down the muddy trail in the dark and he mentioned about Grant and Tom doing the Grim Night Terror and I said that they had been trying to get Adele to do it too and that she was tempted and that I wouldn’t want to do it as I’d fall over and break my leg and then we were back on the pavement and walking down the hill in the dark as there’s no streetlights and the cars were blinding me with their headlights and we got back after exactly 25 minutes.

Stats (walking)
Distance: 1.57 miles
Time: 25 minutes
Pace: 15:53
Fuck offs: 1
Night Terrors: 0
Streetlights: 0
Cars blinding me with their headlights: lots

I walked to the supermarket and bought some food wrapped in cardboard boxes because I fancied some Indian food but couldn’t be bothered to cook it and then I didn’t even need to heat up the cardboard box wrapped food myself as Shaun got too hungry while he was waiting for me to cook and so he heated it up himself and it was very nice indeed and I’m getting very good at buying processed food but I forgot to turn my Garmin off while I was in the supermarket so it looks like I walk really really really slowly.

Stats (walking)
Distance: 1.22 miles
Time: 33:13
Pace: 27:17
Calories: 87
Processed food bought: Aubergine curry, black bean dhal, samosas, pakoras, onion bhajis, chapatis, raita

Janathon today was going to be a bike ride to the station and then from the station to The Quarterhouse in Folkestone (where I was going to see One Day [great book, great film [except for the parts where Anne Hathaway’s non-regional English accent slipped into some kind of spoof Lancastrian or something one]]) and back but then Shaun rang and asked if I wanted a lift so I said yes please and so I didn’t cycle anywhere (and felt very weird on the train without my bike – my purple metal mate usually always accompanies me to Folkestone) so today’s Janathon was a 15 minute walk from Folkestone Central to The Quarterhouse and a 15 minute walk from The Quarterhouse to Folkestone Central (also including a stair exercise from the ground floor of The Quarterhouse to the bar on the first floor.

Stats
Distance: A bit under 2 miles walking and some stairs
Time: 30 minutes
Calories: probably not as many as in the large glass of wine I had in the bar

I heard the post come through the letterbox this morning and went downstairs and there was a red card. I looked at the time on the red card and it said it was delivered at 9:25am. I looked at the clock. 9:27am. I opened the door and tested the doorbell and it dinged and it donged like it’s supposed to and I thought WHY DIDN’T YOU RING THE DOORBELL YOU F*****G C**T? and I thought about running down the driveway and seeing if he was up the hill not delivering parcels to other people but I was still in my dressing gown and I looked at the card and it said it was a parcel from amazon and I thought that must be my new straighteners and the card yesterday must be the book but the card yesterday said it needed a signature and so why would a book that cost under a tenner need a signature and a pair of straighteners that cost about £80 not? and anyway, why couldn’t he just have left the packet on the doorstep like he did last week or in the woodstore like he also does sometimes or maybe it’s a different postie and maybe even the postie who unsuccessfully posted a parcel through the door before Christmas and left it like this instead

and so then I had to do a five mile round trip to the post office and I wanted to stay in and do my assignment that’s due in on Friday and also I have another assignment that’s due in on Monday and neither of them have even been started yet although that’s not actually true as I have started one of them but it’s rubbish so it will have to be redone and I want my old postman back because our old postman was the best postman ever and he had mad grey frizzy hair and a permanent tan and he wore shorts every day even when there was two feet of snow and he used to either hide the parcels under the doormat or leave them in the woodstore and he used to sign for recorded or special delivery ones but then he retired last year and if I was a millionaire I would offer to double or triple or even quadruple whatever he earnt in an effort to make him be a postman again and not once did I have to go to the post office when he was our postie although I didn’t really mind the postie not delivering the one that needed to be signed as I assume they’re not actually supposed to sign for us but today I hate him for not ringing the doorbell and I cycled up to the post office and locked my bike up outside the gym and then wished I’d brought my gym stuff with me and the man in the post office gave me the package and says the other one won’t be back yet and he gave me a package that wasn’t very book-shaped or straightener-shaped and I opened it and it was a pair of headphones that I got sent to review that I’d forgotten about and if I’d have known that was all it was, I’d have left them in the post office until I went back to get my other package and I really need the book that I thought it was because it has a chapter about interviewing people that I need for my non-fiction module as our tutor has set us an exercise where we need to interview someone and I’m going to be interviewing my friend Peggy who will be having her debut novel published next year by a proper big publisher and I’m going to interview her next week in a cafe in Waterstones which is an appropriate setting and then I cycled back 2.5 miles in the rain, cursing the stupid postman.

Stats (cycling)
Distance: 5.03 miles
Time: 36:18
Speed: 8.3mph
Calories: 156
Doorbells working: 1
Postmen ringing doorbells: 0
Red cards collected so far this week: 2
Packages waiting for me in the post office: 1
Pairs of headphones I’d forgotten about: 1
Retired postmen that I want to be unretired: 1
Authors to be interviewed in Waterstones: 1

I was going to go for a walk at lunchtime but then I saw that the Johnny Cotter gallery was open, so I popped in to say hello to Johnny and to look at my new picture

then I was there for ages and ages and ages and then there was no time for a walk although my Garmin says I walked 1.97 miles and so that’s good enough for me and also I walked for a bit in the morning as I got to uni early at 8:15 but it doesn’t open ‘til 8:30 and so had to walk round in the freezing cold for quarter of an hour but I didn’t Garmin it.

Stats
Cycling: 6 miles
Walking: 1.97 miles
Unis not open ‘til 8:30: 1 
New pictures: 1

See above.

(In case you’re wondering what I bought, I bought leeks, mushrooms, a yellow pepper, an orange pepper, broccoli, brussel sprouts and pears.)

Stats (cycling)
Distance: 2.2 miles
Time: 14:55
Speed: 8.8mph
Calories: 64
Farm shops visited: 1
Types of vegetable bought: 6
Types of fruit bought: 1

I did a plank.

I got bullied on Twitter by Local Adventures, Running Goth, font {size: red;} and It Ain’t Fast and it Ain’t Pretty to go for a run. Local Adventures even promised that if I did a mile, he’d do a marathon tomorrow. I gave them my best offer of .75 of a mile but then that plan got scuppered when Shaun said I had to go to the supermarket first and so that would mean changing out of my dressing gown into normal clothes and then changing into running gear later which in my mind is a definite no. My order of clothes is dressing gown/running clothes/normal clothes and there is no deviation allowed.

So when I got back from the supermarket (after buying falafel, hummous, halloumi, feta and spinach parcels, stuffed olives, stuffed vine leaves, dips, nachos, breaded garlic mushrooms, pitta bread, artichokes, chilli prawn and squid thing and jalapeno poppers for dinner, it would have been cheaper to go out to a restaurant), I had a Janathon dilemma. What to do? Then I saw someone mention #plankaday on Twitter and thought aah, I can do a plank for Janathon, yay. But Shaun said that wasn’t allowed and I had to go for a run but then I thought, aha! I can walk for a mile, that’ll do.

So that’s what I did.

Stats
Distance: 1.01 miles
Time: 16:18
Pace: 16:10 m/m
Calories: 77
Fellow Janathoners bullying me on Twitter: 4
Supermarkets visited: 1
Deviations from proper clothes-wearing order: 0
Walks in the dark: 1

I know this should be on my other blog and it will be at some point but I’m so excited I could burst and I want to tell everyone NOW!

I actually wanted to tell everyone yesterday when I got the email saying I’d been chosen as one of the authors to have their story featured in an ebook but I was sworn to secrecy until it had been formally announced.

Caroline Smailes (author of In Search of Adam and Like Bees to Honey) organised a challenge to celebrate the launch of XBox Live TV and its integration with YouTube.

Authors were invited to submit a 100 word story inspired by a song on YouTube. The stories chosen will be published as an ebook on Amazon, with all money collected going to the charity One in Four; a registered charity which provides support and resources to people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence.

And my story Dirty Boy (inspired by the song of the same title by Cardiacs) was picked! I’m going to be in a book and it’s going to be professionally edited and have a professional cover and everything! Yay for me! I’m so excited! (You can tell this by the number of exclamation marks.) You can see the whole list of authors here.

Oh, and I went to the gym and did stuff for Janathon.

Stats
Ebooks I’m going to have a story in: 1
Exclamation marks signifying my excitement: 5
Stuff done down the gym for Janathon: cycling, rowing machine, cross-trainer, body pump class

I can’t remember why, but I asked Shaun to wake me up early this morning (he does this by putting the bedroom light on when he goes to work. I do have a fake sunrise but that only stays on for 10 minutes and I can quite easily ignore my alarm for much longer than 10 minutes) and when he woke me up, I apologised to him for having a dream where I went to meet another man. I didn’t even want to meet this man because he was boring and he had bought me a grey dress for my birthday that I didn’t like (he had also bought me a book but I don’t know what book it was as I didn’t bother taking it out of the plastic bag) but I had arranged to, so I went out to see him and he wanted to go to the pictures but I didn’t want to and so he said dinner or drinks then? and I said both but he said he couldn’t afford to do both and so I said ok, we’ll go for a quick drink and I didn’t have any make up on but I thought I’d only be out for an hour so it didn’t really matter and I wanted to go a certain way, away from any pubs Shaun might be in (yeah, because he’s always out on pub crawls…) and so I followed the boring man and we were walking and walking and then he led me into a deserted house and he kept me in a room for 364 days and then he put the TV on and there were people on the screen that he had filmed and he had put Sellotape on their toes and I thought oh no, he’s going to put Sellotape on my toes and I wondered what would happen the next day, as then I would have been kept hostage for a year, but I woke up.

Anyway, after I got up and tried not to feel guilty about going to meet another man in my dream, I started to look forward to going for a run in the dark. Although, then it occurred to me that I didn’t have a route that’s only on pavements and I didn’t want to run down deserted trails or country lanes in the dark and so I looked on Google Maps for a route (after misreading ‘zoomable maps’ as ‘zombie maps’) and found a 2.5ish mile route that was purely on the pavement but by the time I’d finished drinking my tea, the sun was coming up and so I thought, fine, I’ll go for a run while the sun is rising then, that’ll be cool and I hurried up and got out and the sky was a nice pinky colour and I wondered if I should go back and get my camera and take a photo of the sunrise but decided not to in case it got light and it would be a waste of putting on my new hi-vis vest that I won from Women’s Running Magazine and so I started running and there were a lot of people around going to school or going to work or going to wherever it was they were going and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark came on my iPod which reminded me of a joke, and as some other bloggers have also been doing a jokeathon along with Janathon, I thought I’d share my joke with you:

Q: What do you call a man with a bird of prey on each shoulder who cleans his house with the lights off?

A: Hawk-kestrel-man-hoovers-in-the-dark

which is probably the best joke in the world (or to be more accurate, the only joke I know except for ‘A seal walks into a club’) and then I carry on running and I see a Kermit-green old-style Beetle and when I see Beetles it makes me want to learn to drive just so I can get one although I wouldn’t want a Kermit-green one but a yellow one or an orange one and then as it’s getting light I wonder if I should go through the titchy tiny park to see some grass and water but that would mean deviating from the route I’ve got in my head and I don’t like deviating from things but then I decide I WILL REBEL. I WILL DEVIATE and I go through the titchy tiny park and get home and it’s only just gone past 8am and I’m showered and hair washed and dressed by 9am and this is because I am skill.

Stats
Distance: 2.39 miles
Time: longer than it should take
Pace: slooooooooooooooooooooow
Calories: 251
Dreams about bad men who kidnap me and tape my toes up: 1
Sunrises: 1
Zombie maps: 1
Hi-vis jackets: 1
Jokes: 1
Deviations: 1
Minutes after 9am I’m still undressed: 0

Music
Roxy Music
Cardiacs
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Ben Folds Five
Los Campesinos