Vampires and blood transfusions

("Nasty bit of artex" you're thinking - "and the stake isn't sharp enough"..picky, picky, picky!)

A nice Wednesday off today, although the weather wasn't. And before you start bitching about all the time I have off I was working on Saturday and Bank Holidays aren't even a thing in my life. So sleeping latish - well till half past 8 was pretty good. The miserable grey drizzly sky was not too impressive but since it was forecast to rain all day I had already made up my mind that I'd be braving it.

I've been feeling jealous and depressed by the antics of those around me. People off doing ultra-runs and having adventures. Not that I want to ultra-run. But I do want an adventure and I do want to plan. It seems like it might be mid-October until I see more doctors and then we'll see if they can fix me. In the meantime I remembered I'm entered for the Aviemore Half Marathon round about mid-October. I might well not be able to do it, depending on what's happening, but I might as well focus on training for it. It was pretty expensive I think. (Although I think Peter paid me in.)

So it seems like one thing I could be doing in preparation for a half marathon is lengthen my runs a bit. 14 miles seemed like a good starting point so that's what I went for today. As it was to be bleak and cloudy and grey anyway I didn't waste any time thinking of somewhere nice to go, and just headed off down the Forth 7 miles and back again. I'll swear the wind played some kind of trick on me, being in my face in both directions.

I was late setting off. I make a general rule, if I'm at home on my own, to get out running as soon as I can after breakfast because otherwise I get caught up in stuff. Today I made the fatal mistake of opening my mail and discovered that for an upcoming session of mandatory training I had to do a module on-line about  blood transfusion. This seemed a bit odd because I'm a psychiatric nurse and I really don't do blood transfusions although I've been accused of worse. (Putting chips in people's brains, you know the kind of thing, I never do that either.) I queried it with the nurse bank and they got a bit terse with me. "What the hell" I thought, "I'll do it, it might be interesting." Its actually just given me more things to worry about. And it took an hour or two. So I set off late. Nothing wrong with that but by the last 5 or so miles it was 7 hours since breakfast and I was absolutely starving. For the last 4 miles or so the skies opened and biblical quantities of rain fell down and the thunder nearly masked the rumble in my tummy.

So I was a very hungry wet thing by the time I climbed the stairs to our door and found that some cheerful, whistling workmen were replacing my neighbour's door and making a right mess at the same time. I had to remove the tools they'd piled up against our door just to get in. However I didn't really mind because they were jolly and asked me if I'd had a nice run and laughed heartily at whatever I said about that. It was only later when Peter came home and went into the toilet that we discovered that they'd somehow knocked a large wooden stake right through my neighbour's wall and into our flat. It looks kind of like someone's been killing vampires next door.