Miscellaneous

Whose house is this? DMG Wank apparently!

"So how is that dissertation of yours coming along?" I hear you ask, but I can see your eyes flick away into the distance, because you are already thinking about something else.
Well as a matter of fact I finished it and handed it in last Monday! So there you go. I just didn't tell anyone in case they wanted something. I've been busy anyway.

I took the week off work in case I had any last minute dissertation shenanigans, but I didn't. But I still have other work on a Wednesday, and then I signed up for two bank shifts with the Home Intensive Treatment Team, so I hardly  noticed I was off work because I was at work. My mistake really. I discovered that I could have done with a holiday. My brain was exceptionally floppy.

But I got a new bike off the Cyclescheme - I don't know quite how it works but some of the cost comes out of your tax contributions. I didn't get anything fancy, a Specialized Vita hybrid bike on the roady end of the spectrum. One completely unexpected thing it has is genius hand grips that have rubber rests that cushion your wrists exactly where all the vibrations normally come through. My mountainbike is in acute need of some help, I think a new chainset is probably what it needs, and it makes a noise like tap-dancing all the time now...but I haven't been able to get it sorted because I need it too much to put it in to the bike shop to get fixed. So now, next month probably, I can get that one fixed up too....It's an amazing feeling cycling a bike with lovely smooth new functioning components...

The weather forecast for this morning was BAD but I needed to knock out an out-sized run before the bloody Barry Buddon (it's not swearing, it's alliteration) half marathon. The forecast was SO  bad that I was actually looking forwards to the weather. People in England had been going on about high winds and even the forecasts up here were saying that a deluge of biblical proportions was on its way. It wasn't that bad when I got up, but I thought it would blow in from the east, and I wanted a camera along in case anything spectacular was going to happen. I was too scared to take my good camera in case the rain killed it, so I took one of our redundant cameras. It was a shock to see that the camera I was taking had a spare memory card in its case of 256mb. How things have changed. The camera I had was the one of the ones we took to Nepal and the Himalayas, and we thought it was pretty good. Now it just seems like a toy.

Anyway. The weather wasn't that bad. It was just a bit grey and there were a few spots of rain. There was hardly any wind, but what wind there was was blowing in both directions. That always seems to happen at the coast. I ran round the lagoons and was going to run on just a little bit so I would do a nice round 16 today...but by the time I got to the far side of the lagoons I wasn't that keen on extra mileage, so I shaved it a bit. My legs were surprisingly good considering I ran 12 on Friday. By "good" I mean they weren't really really sore until the last 3 miles or so. I was mighty glad to meet Aileen Ross on the prom. She was just heading out for a tentative run after some time out with a calf injury. Stopping and having a chat on a long run is fair enough I think these days. It's all time on feet.

The last few miles were a bit rubbish. I overtook someone who was going slowly, so that was good. Just as I arrived home the proper rain started, and now it is tilting down for the tour of Fifers and all the people in the festival. In the last mile I realised I hadn't taken a selfie at all. Ever since selfies became something that the Guardian thinks is indicative of the narcissism of the times - and proves we're all doomed because we're not taking life seriously enough, I have felt it is almost a duty to take a selfie every time I go out. I thought I might do a double whammy and actually do a plank selfie, because planking has been frowned upon for some time. I was going to do it in the park on a bench, but when I got there the park was full of Neds, so I forgot about it and ran home. Next time I go out it's a plankie. I haven't worked out the technicalities of it yet.
Bet you can't wait.

Anyway, that's all my uni work done. I won't get a final mark until October so there's no point even thinking about it. 4 years. It has been a long road...