weekend 17/18 April 2010

Saturday was quite lazy really; Pete manfully cycled firstly into town, to fetch more oats and ingredients to make muesli, and then with his trusty bike trailer to Pets at Home, to purchase cat litter and bikkit, thus dealing nicely with both ends, as it were. I caught up with some Desperate Housewives, tried some low GI-ish sort of baking, and went for a walk through the cemetery, which is full of lovely spring flowers. And dead people.  This brought me out at the end of Princes Avenue on the side of the road I never go – dangerous.  I found two nice shops selling bits – and bought some lovely red beads in the form of a necklace and a bracelet, and some nice greetings cards. Oops.  I was going to go home via the park, but I stopped in the local Sainsburys for some stuff, and the incredible string bag was a bit heavy, so I only did a couple of miles. That was my activity for the day, as far as I recall. Watched the rubbish Doctor Who, cooked a prawn and fennel risotto (with 20% less rice than usual), and a rhubarb crumble (with wholemeal flour and oats), which will do us three days instead of the usual two.

river near DriffieldOn Sunday, we ventured forth to Driffield, a market town in the Yorkshire Wolds. Had a mooch around the town, then set out along the canal for a bit – about 5 miles all told, I’d say. There’s a set of photographs on Flickr if you’d like to see more – a lovely walk, and we shall go there again.

We stopped in Beverley on the way back, as I wanted to pop into Lakeland (it’s quite dangerous living within spitting distance of a Lakeland shop). We bought a new pair of oven gloves (planned), and some small plastic boxes for the freezer, but woe – they have discontinued the range I love, and replaced it with horrible ones with rounded corners, and taller lids, and they won’t stack like the old ones 🙁 I shall write and complain.

Then into Julian Graves for supplies of ground almonds (low carb),  dried cranberries, some yellow raisins, and some chocolate ginger (which ought to be for Pete, but they’re hard to resist …)

Supper was lasagne (with half the amount of pasta I usually use) followed by teeny portions of the rhubarb crumble), but that’s OK because breakfast was three crispbread with marmite and a boiled egg, and lunch was a cereal bar in the car (felt a bit odd after the walk) and half a wholemeal banana muffin. We watched The Dark Knight – at least, Pete did. Far too noisy and splody for my liking, and a bit violent for its 12 rating, I thought, so I gave up about 40 minutes in.  He loved it though, so I’m probably a philistine.

And today, my scales tell me I am no longer officially overweight.  And I don’t care what anyone else’s say.

we didn't get to Scarborough …

scavengerBut only because I realised that once we reached Scarborough, we were only 20 miles from Whitby; it was a gorgeous spring day, so we decided to press on.

We stopped first at Robin Hood’s Bay – I’d only been there once, nigh on twenty years ago, I reckon, on a holiday with Clare and her dad (in those days, we did occasionally take holidays all together, even though he and I were divorced – so civilised :). I remembered it being a charming place, and for once my memory didn’t let me down; lovely village set on a steep hillside with the North Sea at the bottom, full of little lanes and alleys, and flights of well worn stone steps leading who knows where.  We had a good wander about after a sustaining cup of tea (and fruit slice to share) – it was busy, but not horribly so.  I bought some beautiful red glass earrings, some purple fishnet tights (!), and a pair of crocs – so ugly, but so comfortable, and I still have hardly any nail on my left big toe, after the wheelie bin Incident at the beginning of December, so I don’t want to wearing my normal warm weather foot uniform of FitFlops just yet.

After RHB, we carried on to Scarborough, parking up by the Abbey. I don’t remember there being a charge last time I went all those years ago, but they wanted £5.80 each to go and see the ruin, so we decided against it. We climbed down the 199 steps to the town, which was very busy .. almost, but not quite, too busy to be enjoyable.

Good mooch around, up to the marina, down to the harbour wall, fish and chips eaten in the sun sitting by the latter. Then we climbed back up the 199 steps, and that was a real pointed to how much fitter I am; I doubt I could have got up there without a couple of good breaks 4 weeks ago, but I went straight up!  I was out of breath at the top, but so was Pete, and I recovered quickly, so go me 🙂 We rewarded ourselves with an almond Magnum (a severe disappointment – wish they’d had the dark chocolate ones), a wander round the bit of the Abbey you don’t have to pay for, through the cemetary and back to the car.

The iPhone battery couldn’t cope with such extended strolling being tracked in Runkeeper, even with an emergency charge from the external battery pack, so I’ll have to estimate it, but we must have done about 5 miles.

Home to Dr Who on the Tivo (boo to the BBC for starting late, so we missed the end), several mugs of reviving tea, and a couple of crumpets.  So much for the diet yesterday … And Scarborough will be there another day.

false alarm

I took a second urine test into the surgery two weeks ago; I had no feedback on the result, and nothing about the letter than the optician had written about the pressure in my eyes, so I called in yesterday on my way to the local hustings (more about that later, possibly).

They’ve sent the letter off to the opthalmic department at the hospital – why they can’t tell you these things, I have no idea.  And the second urine test showed no problems.

I was astonished. After the first one, I did a lot of research, and I was positive that I was diabetic.  I had a raft of symptoms to back it up – the eyes, constant weeing, lethargy, prickly feet, headaches.  And so, I decided to start behaving as it if were a definite diagnosis – changed my diet, started doing exercising etc.

Surely just one week couldn’t have been enough to push it down below the trigger level? I think I’d better make an appointment with the doctor to discuss it, don’t you?

two rants

I went out leafleting yesterday for the LibDems – didn’t have that many to do, just our road (which numbers 208 houses), but an awkward round; every house needed a magazine, but some houses also needed an individual letter.  Next time, I’ll do the letters and mags separately – I’m sure it would be easier.

Rant #1 is about letterboxes – honestly, who would be a postie?  Some of them are vicious, and trap your fingers gleefully.  Some of them have Hounds of the Baskervilles lurking behind their flaps; I have a steel rule that I use for poking leaflets through letter boxes, and it has *teeth marks* in it from frenzied dogs.  Some letter boxes are at ground level (why?), and some are vertical, and fiendishly difficult to operate when you have a stack of paper in one hand, and a bag full of more paper to handle.

And then there’s the gates – some of them just don’t open; I guess people use the alley and back gates there.  Many of them have to be lifted to actually open.  Some of them have sneaky little catches that delight in trapping your fingers.  One house had its recycling boxes stacked in front of their front door. Honestly, I’ll be glad when this election is over!

Rant #2 concerns Hull City Council, specifically the Leisure Department.  We have a nice swimming pool across the park, with a small gym attached.  You can purchase what is called a Tonic Card for £22 per month, which gives unlimited access to swimming and gym, but I wasn’t sure I’d use the gym, so I bought a book of 10 swimming tickets for £25 (a saving of about six quid, I think), and I’ve used four of them.

Then I decided I would like to use the gym after all. You can’t do that until you’ve had an “induction”, which they can’t do at the local place because they have “lost their coach” (how careless).  So on Saturday we trogged over to the big leisure centre and had an induction there. £12 each to show us how to use machines that are *not the same* as the ones at Beverley Road. No blood pressure test or any sort of chance to actually use the machines, so about as much use as a chocolate teapot.  But still – I have my card.

Can I part exchange my remaining swimming tickets towards a Tonic Card?  No.  I have to pay a casual charge of £3.60 per session.  Well, I guess I can live with that. Except you can’t use the gym before 9 a.m. unless you have a Tonic Card, and that’s the time of day I like to use the gym.

I feel an e-mail coming on.

Easter weekend 2010

We had no plans, because the weather forecast was so horrible, but actually it wasn’t too bad, at least in the mornings.  On Thursday, we decided to walk to the appropriate Post Office to tax the car – this involved a round trip of  6.7 miles (on top of the 2 miles + swim I’d already done that morning).

We had a “down day” on Friday, just pottered about the house, and on Saturday we did another short walk of  7.3 miles over to Ennerdale Leisure Centre to book a gym induction, as they have “lost the coach” at the local council gym (how careless).  They could do it there and then – £12 each to be shown how to use a stack of machines that a) we know how to use, and b) are not the same at the machines at Beverley Road was, we thought, something of a ripoff, but hey ho.  We walked there along the river bank, and on the way home decided to walk on the other side of the river; this was fine, until we ran out of path, and in getting back to civilisation, had to cross some very damp terrain, and I got water in my trainers; this was officially Not Enjoyable, and I had a grump.  Rest of the day was slumpage.

Hessle foreshore />On Sunday we actually got the car out (shock horror!) and went over to the Humber Bridge Farmers’ Market. It seems you need to get there a lot earlier than 11 a.m. if you want any bread; it looked as though a plague of locusts had descended, but we picked up some locally milled wholemeal flour and oats, which I’m pleased about.  Then we strolled along the Hessle foreshore for about 3 miles (can’t be sure, as the GPS/Runkeeper ran amok, and thought we’d actually crossed the bridge). Came home and cooked a roast chicken with roast veg and new potatoes.

Sunday evening brought a bit of a panic, as one of the web servers had threw a wobbly, and we couldn’t log into it to make it stop (it had a load average of 453 when my log window gave up!).  In the end we had to ask Merula to reboot it, which they did at 23:30 – above and beyond the call of duty, really!  We got up at 6 on Monday morning, and upgraded some server components in the hope of putting a stop to such nonsense, then had a slumpage in the afternoon, although I did do 8.3 miles on the exercise bike while finishing episode 1 of Cranford.

We also managed to watch the two movies from Lovefilm that had been sitting on the coffee table for about a month: Wall-e and In Bruges. Very different, of course, but both utterly excellent.

weekend 27/28 March 2010

Saturday involved a short walk (5.68 miles!); we followed the old railway path, and then carried on mooching.  It was a lovely morning, and we just sort of kept going!  Came home and constructed a salad of chickpeas and tuna and stuff, and fell asleep on the sofa.  Badgers.

Sunday we were due in Thornton Le Dale, near Pickering, at 11 a.m. to collect the exercise bike I bought on eBay.  Again, a lovely day, so we decided to pack a picnic and explore the area a bit. So I heated up the oven bit of the microwave, and bunged in a couple of part-baked baguettes to bake, while I went and had a bath.  charredImagine my horror to come down to find a smell of burning in the kitchen, no control lights on the microwave, but the element still glowing red hot, and the baguettes in a somewhat charred state. I still can’t quite get over just how lucky we were – it’s not unknown for me to shove stuff in that little oven and go out, and the house could have burned down.

We bought the microwave from eBay on 16 December, and I have sent a Polite e-mail to the (business) vendor.  No response yet.

Pete hurtled up to Jacksons^H^H Sainsburys and purchased some wholemeal rolls, and preparations continued apace.  We took the rolls, a couple of apples, two Jordans cereal bars, and a rather elderly home made banana muffin, and a flask of tea.

Exercise bike duly collected, along with trampoline and gym ball, and we had a wander round Thornton – pretty little place, with a tiny market where I bought a pair of memory foam heel inserts for my shoes, as my left foot had a nasty stabbity pain – they were only a quid and seemed to work rather well.

From there, we went to Pickering – wandered all round the hilly town, climbed up to the Castle, which was closed (of course), and ate our picnic in the Co-Op car park.  Then home via Old Malton, where we had another wander about – must have done 3 miles or so in those trips.

On our return to Hull, we sallied forth to attempt to buy a new combi microwave – I use ours so much I didn’t want to be without it.  We found one in Currys; not something to get excited about, but Iggy does like to sit on the big silver box, so it was important that it was dealt with promptly.

We had a friend over for supper, and dined on moussaka, garlic ciabatta and salad, followed by plums with an almond sponge topping.  Lovely weekend, apart from the burning martyr element of it.  And now it appears to be going to rain for the foreseeable future, so it’s a good job we made the most of it, really.

p.s. the bicycle is really quite hard work.

joined up thinking

I strode across Pearson Park last night to Beverley Road Baths, and bought a season ticket.  Shame it was pouring when I got up this morning, and I didn’t fancy getting wet …

I note with some pleasure that the baths open at 6.30, which will suit me find in the spring and summer – I’m an early bird.  But why oh why (etc) do the steam room and gym remain closed until 9 a.m.?!

a walk in the park

We took a stroll after lunch today, as I’m trying to do *something* exercise-ish each day, and I slept this morning until the unspeakable Anne Atkins burst forth on Radio 4.

Killing two birds, etc., we wander through Pearson Park, stopping to see the ducks, and then encountered a chap in an electric wheelchair, looking as though he wanted to cross the road, and a rather confused looking woman behind the wheel of a Disco trying to work out what to do. It was clear that the wheelchair man was in trouble, so I asked if he needed any help – he did, his battery was flat.  So I pushed him over the road, his chair carried him along the pavement, and then Pete pushed him up the ramp to his (thankfully) nearby retirement home.  The chap could hardly breathe, nor speak, but reeked of cigarette smoke; I guess some people just never learn.

We were en route to Beverley Street swimming pool; it’s the nearest one to home, and I wanted to know how long it took to walk there (about 15 minutes, it turns out). Lovely place, built in 1903 – a real municipal baths, with dark green tiled walls, stained glass, etc. The pool looks nice too, so I must get off my arse and go swimming again – the walk there and back, together with a half hour swim, will be great exercise.

I’m writing this while waiting for roast veg to cook – aubergine, sweet potato, yellow pepper, butternut squash and garlic, with some middle eastern spice and sesame seeds.  And next – Glee.  Love it.