WTF?!

I appear to have developed eyebrow alopecia. I had to give myself a tiny combover this morning. I'm sure it's stress related rather than due to overzelous plucking.

I hope it grows back or I'll be one of those scary old bloated women with red lips and pencilled on facial hair :(

BolderBoulder

Left: anxiously waiting...

Well the lower altitude ment that I didn't get the 'breathing through a damp sock while having my lungs squeezed' feeling, but I still found it really tough. Andy helped a lot and encouraged me to a PB of 59'33", which is a good minute and a half faster than I managed in training last week. Bolder is a nice town and the course was interesting. There were lots of bands to keep us entertained, including some really bad cheezy guitar groups yelling a lot. The race was really well organised with the start staggered into waves to avoid the chaos of 50,000 people trying to get near the front. Great for us but not so good for the poor trumpeter who had to play a salute every 3 minutes. We didn't managed to start in the same wave as Christine and Angel, but they didn't take too long to overtake us. I wanted to give up near the end, which is a shame because I was too knackered to appreciate the novelty of a stadium finish.

After unsucessfully looking for our friends, we grabbed as much free food as possible and went back to the hotel to shower. After looking forward to it for miles, I couldn't face drinking my free cold can of generic larger, I was just too queezy. Maybe I would have appreciated the novelty of puking in front of a stadium full of people, but thankfully the race finished and I managed to keep my digestive tract sealed.

Left: Andy flying the flag for Norwich infront of the stadium finish. Interestingly, his official time was 1s slower than mine, even though he dragged me around the last 2k. hehehe

When we got back, the event was on TV. We picked a good time to escape- lots of scary memorial day type gushing patriotism was happening, including the playing of that god-aweful 'god bless the USA' song from a year or two ago. Truly cringeworthy. I'm all for showing support for the poor sods who have to get shot at in Iraq every day, but I don't really go for over zelous saccrine patriotism.. It was quite funny though. We watched the start of the women's race from the hotel, then went out to watch the end. The look of pain on some of their faces was crazy- I knew I was right, running ISN'T fun!! I haven't been so close to a professional race before- luckily I managed to remember to lean back away from the barrier with my camera as the lead pack thundered past (if skinny women can thunder).

After it was all over we managed to find our friends and go for the obligatory post race post mortem in the cheesecake factory. It was a well organised event, a nice course and a good place to hang out afterwards. Isn't that what it'll all about?!

Right: Our fan club cheered us on. Oh, alright, they were actually watching the GB professional men's team.

Sun and stuff

It could almost be summer: it's toasty warm and people are out mowing their lawns. You can tell the ones that own sprinklers because their homes are surrounded by a lush swathe of verdant green, rather that the dusty mottled brown stuff that normally passes for grass here. We have tomatoe plants and we are going to plant sunflowers soon.

I ran 10k yesterday, and I'm very proud of it. Having Alice in Wonderland to listen to helped take my mind of it.. unfortunatley, I tucked my mp3 player into my sports bra to stop it bouncing, and the display is now sloshing with what looks disturbingly like cleavage sweat. Hopefully it'll dry out. I kept running past this cute family, and after about the fifth lap they moved their daughter on her little stabalised bike over to let me past. Unfortunatly, they moved her over a bit too far and her wheels hit the grass. All I heard as I ran past was THUMP WAHHHHHHH!!! Should I feel guilty?

Andy is playing softball and seems to not be sucking at it too badly. It's cool to see him really enjoy something.

The guitar playing is going well, but I really must stop picking at my finger calouses. It's counter-productive.

Anyway I'm in work and the boss is here, so I better look busy :)

Another weekend...

I managed to get a few corrections done this weekend. I'm in the process of trying to resucsitate a truly awful chapter. The patient is doing quite well, and I think I might be able to save it... it's just a question of time now, i.e. I don't have any. I'm pretty stressed- I have to submit by 30th of Sept and every time I think about it I feel like I'm watching one of those big millenium countdown clocks with a sense of impending doom... It's a bit late for millenium analogies, but then I always say I think up the good jokes too late.

I escaped from the corrections on sat night and had a very nice meal with Andy, Christine, Angel and Gustavo. Andy and I went on to the Cowboy afterwards because there was a band on that I wanted to see. Well, I've never been to the Cowboy before and I was in fits of giggles because it lived up to its name. It's very much like the redneck bar in the Blues Brothers film, thankfully without the chickenwire around the stage. There was a plethora of people in denim, plaid shirts and cowboy hats in what is basically a barn with a stage. Unfortunatly they have taken the mechanical bull out for the summer. I never thought I'd live to see people spontaneously line dancing. There was a good atmosphere and lots of people watching fodder. My favorites were an old couple dancing to their own internal rhythm. The guy in particular looked like a partly shaven suntanned silverback gorilla. At least they didn't look like they were fighting on the dancefloor- country dancing is vicious!

Today was sunday, so it was time for another disasterous run. We drove up to Vedewoo for a change of scenery. That's us there on the left, the impressive Turtle Rock granite formation behind us. We are wearing very cool running tops from foska.com, which we bought with some money that Andy's parents gave us, so thanks Meri and David! Anyway, we set off over the trails, leaping over boulders and tree routes and generally having what runners would masochistically call 'fun'. This lasted for about 10 minutes until I felt like someone had reached a hand inside my chest and was squezing my lungs. We carried on, but I had to stop and walk up every slight incline and wheeze and hack at the top like an asthmatic old codger. I wasn't sure if it was the extra few hundred meters of altitude, the undulations of the path or just plain crapness, but it was very frustrating. I felt bad for Andy too because he was having to run painfully slowly and stop all the time because he didn't want to abandon me. Eventually we completed the loop, and I went for a walk while Andy ran the loop again to try and get some real exercise. I must admit, when he came back 30 mins later saying he'd had to walk most of it because he too had been wheezing like an asthmatic old codger I felt a bit relieved.

Anyway, I'm shattered. guitar then bed I think. Night night xxx

mmm... flaky

I look like a rattlesnake today, I appear to be sheading all the sking from my shoulders and it's bloody painful. You wouldn't think that an hour in the spring sun could sand all the skin from your body, but apparently it can in Wyo. That'll learn me.

I got horribly burned last sunday on an entirely unsucessful long run. Well, it was sucessful for Andy- he managed 10k, but I managed about 4. We are running in the Boulderboulder a week on sunday and my only two hopes are
1) it's at lower altitude so I might not feel like I'm trying to breathe through a warm sock and
2) 50000 people take part so it's likely to be so conjested I have to crawl all the way. Fine by me.

I ran 3k at a decent pace this morning... so only ~37 to go then I will have done a marathon!

My new toy

This is me with my lovely new Fender CD60. It was a bargain and it's a really nice guitar- playable, a good tone, new guitar smell :). It's chinese made from laminate wood, but you can't expect too much for $160 can you? I've been learning to finger pick, and Andy must be sick of hearing me playing the same simple 12 bar piece over and over again, but he is very patient. I've nearly got the hang of it, which is good because I've shreaded my fingertips! I'm going to take a class next month with Beth, the girl that sits next to me in the lab. I'm hoping to have learned all the major, minor and seventh chords by then as well as nailing the blues tune and one song... actually, that's a high standard, I'd settle for just being able to play without my fingers falling off.

Back in Laramie

I'm in Laramie, and this time you can actually go outside without appendages freezing off: it must be spring. I am adjusting reasonably well- I'm managing to get up in the mornings, but I am getting very tired at the end of the working day. Not that I'm working amazingly hard at the moment- I have all the ususal new job issues of paperwork and trying to get computers to work. I'm going to be working initially on sorting out a dataset that appears to have been randomly distributed across a large number of computers following no pattern and with no documentation. To say it's disorganised would be something of an understatement. Ah well, I'm being paid so I'll grin and bear it. I have a US bank now, but I have to go to the state capital Chyenne to order a social security number so I can offically 'exist' in the system here. Everything is fine; there was no culture shock this time but two things are perplexing me: why can you only buy toothbrushes with enourmous heads, and who would think an 8 foot varnished bear was a good garden ornament? The trip out was a little traumatic- 3 flights and then a minor hitch at immigration when my paperwork was a tiny bit iffy. All sorted now, amd Andy is making turkry burgers tonight, mm!