gawd bless 'merica

So it was the 4th of July and time to celebrate indipendance from George W. Well, I celebrate Christmas and I don't believe a guy with a grey beard made the earth in 7 days, so why not? We headed out of Laramie and managed to avoid any overt patriotism- just a few stars and stripes bandannas (on bikers riding machines that aren't road legal- Wyo has a state law that says bike handle bars must be lower than the riders shoulders. I wonder what the police do if the pull any of the offending chopper riders' over- attempt to surgically raise there shoulders?). We did hear one 'God bless America', but I'll come back to that.

We went up to the expensive stepford wives-ville of Highlands Ranch, CO. This is still under construction, we particularly liked the gate posts labelled 'town center' that made up an impressive enterance to a completely empty field. We were there to attempt another 10k. It was called the 'sunset 10k', so I foolishly believed it would occur during a cool part of the day. Unfortunately they moved the start time to 5.30 and I was soon wilting in the 29 degree heat. The chaffage from my horrible new running shorts was really painful too, I did breifly consider running half the race naked from the waist down. I'm still walking like John Wayne. I also naively believed the race would be 10k, but it was actually 10.5. I put in a very poor performace, and actually thought I was heading for my first DNF. Andy had other ideas, and bullied me around in a Personal Worst of an hour and 16 minutes, including lots of walking/ staggering. I finally cheered up in the last 800m, and raced Andy for the finish, causing the commentator to talk about 'the spirit of healthy competition'. Andy let me win because he is nice. I'm way more competative than him when it comes down to it. Maybe I'm just more insecure.

Despite an appaling time and being overtaken by all the ususal race rear enders (people with assorted pets, children and strange limps), Andy won 3rd place for our age group. Oh how we laughed (ok I admit I'm jelous of his medal). It was funny, we'd overtake the same collection of stragglers (man about to have a coranory, woman with sweaty bum, 80's cool dude and his woman), then I'd have to walk and they'd over take us. I'd then start up again and we'd whizz past them again. It was like being in a cheap Hanna Barbera cartoon.

I think we might be on some photos, if I can work out which company took them I'll try and get copies and post them here.

During the post-race awards, there was a fly-past of some military jets. The commentator said 'I'm glad they're on our side; God bless America!'... you try keeping a straight face when confronted with this!! Andy thinks he was being sarcastic but I'm not so sure. Not only was it a horribly, gushingly patriotic thing to say, since when did being on the same side as the American air force stop them shooting at you?

When we finished we went onto the village green to watch a crazy but cool mowtown showband in very dazzling red sparkly jackets. Cool, but probably too expensive to hire for the wedding :(. I never thought I'd see people line dancing to 'Soul Man', but now I have. It was like gatecrashing a family wedding. We relaxed and shivered as a front came over and the sky got darker and darker. The rain came, so we didn't get to see any fireworks, but we did see a lot on the way back.

Despite my PW, it was a good day, and it hasn't TOTALLY put me off trying to do a marathon. Andy got a medal for his trouble, I think he deserves one for putting up with me- he is being my third parent now, I never have to go too long without a hot meal, cup of tea or clean pair of pants. How do people write theses without someone like him to look after them? I'd have given up by now I think.

Oh and work still sucks. But they are paying me and I'm skiving off lots (i.e. writing my thesis, which is going suprisingly well)

Happy indipendance/ freedom from tyranny and opression day :-p


xxC

Devils Tower

Well I'm having a dull weekend wrting my thesis and recovering from a cold, so I thought I'd tell you about last weekend. I've always thought it was appropriate that Wyoming's colours are brown and yellow, since those are the dominante coulours of the landscape. In an attempt to prove me wrong, Andy took me to northern Wyoming, where it's actually green and nice. We were camping in temperatures that would actually register on a thermometer, so it was a big improvement over Christmas in Utah. We relaxed and read books and ate yummy camp food with an excellent view of the badly punctuated but impressive Devils Tower. It's a volcanic plug, and looks like a tall narrow verion of the Giant's Causway. We did a little bit of walking, and played football and frisbee (Andy has found one I can throw; amazing). It was nice to just relax and not worry about my thesis for a few days.


Below: Images of Devils Tower


















Right: The tower reflected. Sorry, I have a thing for photos of reflected images














Left: Noisy, stupid and very cute.. Prarie dog allegedly guarding his colony while being completely oblivious to me creeping up on him. I got within a foot of hime before he visibly bottled it, screeched and dissapeared down his hole.




We came back via South Dakota and these funny big head rock things. Mount Rushmore I think. They are an impressive feat of engineering, but the novelty of looking at them wears off quickly. You can extend it by debatingwhich cartoon featured a character emerging from one of the giant rocky nostrils. Sadly, they aren't hollow so it's not that likely to happen. Anyway it's funny watching Americans trying to be patriotic and think of things to say other than 'wow'. They are impressive, but I think Lincoln looks quite a lot like Robocop. Maybe that's just me.

Left: Robolincoln is shunned by the other trolls

Below: Fear me, my nostrils could engulf you

advice?..

Well I finally made a little progress, no thanks to tec support. It's taken me two weeks, but having tried everything short of turning my computer upside down and trying to run the migration sideways, I've finally made a *small* amount of progress. It got me thinking about how much time I'd wasted this week.. So here are some ways to waste time while still looking busy:

1) When you leave your desk, always walk briskly and carry at least one sheet of office paper or several post it notes.
2) When web browsing make sure you can switch to a work related site (Paradigm help desk in my case) at a moment's notice. This is where tabbed browsing really comes into its own.
3) Occasionally push back from your desk, sigh expansivly and run your hands through your hair. This is most dramatic and noisy if there are no wheels on your chair
4) Hunch intently over your keyboard. You may be risking RSI, but it does have the twin benefits of making you look deeply interested in your work while hiding the poker website you are actually looking at
5) frequently look at your watch and mutter paniced expletives
6) Photocopy everything. Absolutely everything. When you run out of things to photocopy, do it all again. This makes you look productive and also lets you get intimately aquainted with all the tuneful squeeks and rattles of your particular copier. I now speak the language of the geofiz copier, and can distinguish 'last sheet gone through' from 'paper jam' from 20 yards.
7) Pile a blank ream of paper in your intray, cleverly overlain with a page of such hard core intellectuallism that noone will examine it too closely
8) 'Work' through lunch. Even if you are looking at guitars/ running shoes/ ukuleles/ tranmere rovers continued search for a manger/ friend's blogs* online (*replace with personal interests), it makes you look extra dedicated, so when you leap up, look at your watch and shout 'DAMN' at 3.30pm and leave in a hurry, people will assume you are late for a very important meeting rather than sloping off home early,
9) Hire a PA. Not tried this myself, but it's bound to make you look importnant.
10) Update your CV. This makes you seem career focused and on the ball, and has the added benifit of helping you get the %&@# out of the job that is making you go to all this effort to waste time in the first place.

Yawn....

It's hot here. Really hot. Laramie only does 2 seasons: freeze off your appendages quickly or gradually cook them off in layers. At least that is a good thing about my job- I have a nice cool lab to work in. The job isn't going so great mainly because I'm trying to use some software that apparently only people in Israel know how to use. I didn't make that up, that's what tec support finally admitted after two weeks of unhelpfulness. So, since I don't want to apply for Isralie citizenship, I have to sit in my air conditioned lab moaning and getting better aquainted with my iTunes library. But at least I'm working insde, unlike the guy on our street who is renovating his house. He is currently leavering planks of wood off his house, which is confusing me because surely since the house is made of wood he'll eventually run out of planks to leaver off and be left standing in a rather large pile of dry kindling?

I'm writing my thesis in pretty much any free moments. I managed to escape occasionally to train for some ill-advised races I've signed up for or, even rarer, to play my poor neglected guitar. It's summer, I should be out exploring with Andy not sat at home pondering the extensional geometry of small ocean basins. Unfortunately, I've got to the point of having done enough work to not want my efforts to go to waste, but not enough to actually submit the bloody thing. If it wasn't for Andy I'd not have had any cooked food or clean pants for quite some time now. If he ever leaves me I'll be skanky and hungry within days.

I've just had 2 days of induction as a new employee, which mostly involved filling out forms and listening to presentations of various shades of dull. The most entertaining for me was the IT specialist who was unable to advance a slide in her Powerpoint presentation. You can stop throwing things like VPN and DSL into the talk now love, you have no credibility. The first challenge was getting there, it was like being in an Indiana Jones film. First hazard are the car drivers, who are courteous to a fault. If you even think about crossing the road they will pull up, even in the middle of a busy road, leaving you unsure if they have stopped for you or the cars waiting to pull out, and the drivers behind them wondering if they should overtake this odd guy who has stopped for no apparent reason. So they are courteous but lacking in common sense. Next hazard are the sprinklers. The uni ones are particularly lethal; they start without warning and suddenly increse power or change direction. One set were programmed to soak the pavement in a carefully correographed sequence, so to get past them relatively dry involved splitsecond timing, like some unfortunate about to be soggy sprite in a platform adventure game. And don't get me started on the dogs. Why does every bugger here own big noisy dogs that are free to roam and scare sensitive types like me? One even tried to heard me by nipping the back of my leg. Ok so no of this is on par with being chased by rolling boulders or thrusting spikes, but I do find humming the Raiders of the Lost Arc helps me get through. On the plus side, now I've done all the paperwork, at least if my morning walk in becomes so fraught with danger I get hurt, I am now insured to be put back together again.

Anyway, why is this post called yawn? Well, I'm doing that rather annoying thing of feeling ill and tired all the time. It means I'm basically either asleep, working, or writing my thesis without the energy to do much else. Although I obviously have sufficient time and energy to write this madness, so maybe I can't complain too much. xxx

Another bb pic

Not a great quality picture because I screen grabbed it from a website... but I thought it was pretty cool. You can tell it is near the start of the race :). It's a real shame Andy was chopped off.

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.