Today started off with a bump.
Got a letter last night from British Gas, forwarded from London, saying that because they'd estimated our bills for years, we now owed them a shedload of money, thankyouverymuch.
Then I made the mistake of getting on the Nazi Scales. Suffice it to say that yep, the couple of days away have had a head-kicking effect. Don't care though - the days were fabulous, and I know I can get things back on track.
Devised a budget today by which to get us by on a month-by-month basis, which was sobering, though not of course that terrifying.
I guess on the whole, today was a day for coming down to Earth with a bit of a bump. On the other hand, got back on with unpacking my office, set up the Bose, discovered I can only use it on minimal settings without shaking the building to bits, which is kinda fun, in a Crocodile Dundee, "that's not a hi-fi...THIS is a hi-fi" way. And it's got that feeling to it when you come back from a truly, truly kick-ass holiday - Mannnnn that was good, but it's great to be back in our own space and time, and be moving forward with the reality of life.
So - not so much a bump as a pat on the ass, I guess. Have tried to keep my food intake light and mainly fruit-based today, with some beautiful porky protein thrown in. But other than the box-work, have done nothing energetic to speak of today.
Oh yeah, not for nothing, but this has also been a feature of today - people occasionally ask d and I about the nature of our relationship. We argue ridiculously rarely, but we disagree about plenty of things, I'd say. She's a general optimist and a political pessimist, I'm exactly the opposite. She's got a level of faith, me, notsomuch. She's generally quite polite and respectful of others, whereas I'm basically a brat. But we've always had a resonance, built through talking over a long distance.
Today, we happened to be watching a TV show where rich people dilly-dally and choose between six houses to move to. It was weird, but we had almost exactly the same reactions to practicaly everything to do with living-spaces.
"Ach - nasty beams!"
"Ick - horrible horrible tiles..."
"Hate you, hate you, hate you, you rich, poncey fucks..."
And seconds ago, we had a bizarrely resonant moment. Watching Miami Ink, a reality show based in a tattoo parlour (for the very first time, I should add), we both watched a Navy guy get a ship tattooed on his back, with a mermaid lolling in the foreground. As one, we piped up -
"Mermaid needs a nipple, dude!"
That, ladies and gentlemen is emotional and pedantic synchonicity, and that's the kind of thing that seven years of marriage are made of. Well, that and the fact that d's just noticed a moulding has popped off, and trudged out to get the toolkit, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't know a moulding if it hit me in the face, and wouldn't have the first idea how to pop one back on if my life depended on it...
Ahhh synchronicity is sweet...
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Friday, 6 January 2012
6th January - Getting Gooey
Yesterday was d's birthday. We woke up in our own time, and thankfully, her toe was moderately less swollen than it had been at midnight, so we pretty much resumed a version of our original, loose-fitting plan. Got up, had a hotel breakfast that, frankly, was about three meals in one, and went in to Cardiff. I wanted to get d some stuff...as plans go, it didn't entirely work - she ended up getting me a Bose iPod dock that had been gloriously marked down in John Lewis. I love birthdays. Especially those where the people whose birthday it is end up giving me stuff! Not sure I understand how that works, but...Re-freakin'-sult!
Oh, there was a ring...thing, too. Long time ago, pretty much about the time I started this experiment in fact, d got a hankering for sparkly things, for pretty much the first time in our marriage. She pointed out a ring in the local Samuels jewellers, and the woman who worked there gave me the details, and her ring size.
Naturally of course, being a bloke, I 'lost' the details pretty quickly...as in 'lost them into my wallet'...and a couple of weeks before we took off from London, I went and bought her the ring, and got it sized for her. The very day she buggered off to Wales with all our furniture, I was in that store when it opened. I've been holding on to the ring ever since, hiding it since we got to Wales.
She cried. Re-freakin'-sult!
So anyway - did the day in Cardiff (with d seeking out every spotlight or store light she could find, and glittering). Then, with a little help from a couple of frantic texts to people who've been telling us about it for months now, we found a place called the New York Deli for hot-dog lunch. Re-freakin'-sult number three!
Came back, swam some more, and d got into a very special outfit for dinner. It was the outfit she was in eight years ago for her first birthday in London, when she was over on her first visit to see me (when, ironically enough, she was hugely lurgied), and I'd managed to surprise her with tickets to Phantom of the Opera...ahem, row 1 - looking right up the Phantom's nose and getting a chandelier dropped on our heads. Eight years on, she still rocked that outfit. I mean, she looked goooooood. We went to dinner. Yum.
Finished the evening with a great call to Lori, d's 'sister' in the States, and a bottle of fizzy pink sparkling wine (s'kind of our signature). And then...
Well, then it was today.
Now, I should have mentioned. When we arrived, since it was a spa, we toyed with the idea of actually...y'know...doing spa treatments. So today, we checked out, and went over to the spa. We'd been booked into the Couples' Room. d was getting a back, head and facial massage, and we added a leg and foot massage just for fun. Me? Well, I defied a thousand years of Valleys Bloke evolution and had a 'Holistic back, neck, head and facial', and joined her with the leg and foot...thing. We got very gooey, courtesy of Lucia (small, young, answered almost every statement with a drawl of "Ohhhh wooooowwww," or "Ohhhhh my goooooood") and Sue (older, whitish sci-fi-bobbed hair, sheep's voice, stern demeanour, blinking tic).
Now, it's fair to say, this represented progress for us both. A handful of years ago, I actually got d a spa day as a Christmas present. Her face didn't fall, cos she's good at hiding her disappointment, but I knew I'd reeeeeallly blown it. She's always hated the idea of strangers touching her. And for me...it was an extension of a thing I learned yesterday. Being 'the fat kid', I've never been remotely comfortable in communal changing rooms. Longer-term readers will remember that even in Croatia, surrounded by don't-give-a-fuck Europeans of varying attractiveness-levels, I couldn't take off my T-shirt and get in the pool. But yesterday...I stopped caring. I was me, getting in, doing things, not giving a damn. And that was also, pretty much, how I approached getting gooey today. I wanted to share the experience with my wife, so nehh - here you go, this is my body, this is our money...handle me!
d said something similar too - she's over the whole 'strangers touching her' thing, I think. So that was the culmination of our day, getting gooey together...
Except it wasn't, quite. They had a special on deep hair conditioning, and so I went to the Relaxation Room for a while. When she came out, she was not only gorgeous, she was amazing, straight-haired, fantastically gorgeous.
Sooooo...yeah. Great day.
Not expecting to break the five stone barrier this Tuesday. Not even really expecting to maintain last week's result, because this has been a calorifically heavy couple of days. But - getting together with Ma (and our mutual pal's dog, apparently) for big walking on Sunday. So who knows?
Back home now though, so back to the office for box-unpacking tomorrow probably - and Monday, I start the one-day-a-week early-as-fuck London commuting. Never a dull moment, eh?
Oh, there was a ring...thing, too. Long time ago, pretty much about the time I started this experiment in fact, d got a hankering for sparkly things, for pretty much the first time in our marriage. She pointed out a ring in the local Samuels jewellers, and the woman who worked there gave me the details, and her ring size.
Naturally of course, being a bloke, I 'lost' the details pretty quickly...as in 'lost them into my wallet'...and a couple of weeks before we took off from London, I went and bought her the ring, and got it sized for her. The very day she buggered off to Wales with all our furniture, I was in that store when it opened. I've been holding on to the ring ever since, hiding it since we got to Wales.
She cried. Re-freakin'-sult!
So anyway - did the day in Cardiff (with d seeking out every spotlight or store light she could find, and glittering). Then, with a little help from a couple of frantic texts to people who've been telling us about it for months now, we found a place called the New York Deli for hot-dog lunch. Re-freakin'-sult number three!
Came back, swam some more, and d got into a very special outfit for dinner. It was the outfit she was in eight years ago for her first birthday in London, when she was over on her first visit to see me (when, ironically enough, she was hugely lurgied), and I'd managed to surprise her with tickets to Phantom of the Opera...ahem, row 1 - looking right up the Phantom's nose and getting a chandelier dropped on our heads. Eight years on, she still rocked that outfit. I mean, she looked goooooood. We went to dinner. Yum.
Finished the evening with a great call to Lori, d's 'sister' in the States, and a bottle of fizzy pink sparkling wine (s'kind of our signature). And then...
Well, then it was today.
Now, I should have mentioned. When we arrived, since it was a spa, we toyed with the idea of actually...y'know...doing spa treatments. So today, we checked out, and went over to the spa. We'd been booked into the Couples' Room. d was getting a back, head and facial massage, and we added a leg and foot massage just for fun. Me? Well, I defied a thousand years of Valleys Bloke evolution and had a 'Holistic back, neck, head and facial', and joined her with the leg and foot...thing. We got very gooey, courtesy of Lucia (small, young, answered almost every statement with a drawl of "Ohhhh wooooowwww," or "Ohhhhh my goooooood") and Sue (older, whitish sci-fi-bobbed hair, sheep's voice, stern demeanour, blinking tic).
Now, it's fair to say, this represented progress for us both. A handful of years ago, I actually got d a spa day as a Christmas present. Her face didn't fall, cos she's good at hiding her disappointment, but I knew I'd reeeeeallly blown it. She's always hated the idea of strangers touching her. And for me...it was an extension of a thing I learned yesterday. Being 'the fat kid', I've never been remotely comfortable in communal changing rooms. Longer-term readers will remember that even in Croatia, surrounded by don't-give-a-fuck Europeans of varying attractiveness-levels, I couldn't take off my T-shirt and get in the pool. But yesterday...I stopped caring. I was me, getting in, doing things, not giving a damn. And that was also, pretty much, how I approached getting gooey today. I wanted to share the experience with my wife, so nehh - here you go, this is my body, this is our money...handle me!
d said something similar too - she's over the whole 'strangers touching her' thing, I think. So that was the culmination of our day, getting gooey together...
Except it wasn't, quite. They had a special on deep hair conditioning, and so I went to the Relaxation Room for a while. When she came out, she was not only gorgeous, she was amazing, straight-haired, fantastically gorgeous.
Sooooo...yeah. Great day.
Not expecting to break the five stone barrier this Tuesday. Not even really expecting to maintain last week's result, because this has been a calorifically heavy couple of days. But - getting together with Ma (and our mutual pal's dog, apparently) for big walking on Sunday. So who knows?
Back home now though, so back to the office for box-unpacking tomorrow probably - and Monday, I start the one-day-a-week early-as-fuck London commuting. Never a dull moment, eh?
5th January - Darkness Falls
"Errrr...honey?"
"Yeah?"
"One thing we forgot," I said. I held out my swimming shorts from my body.
My 20-stone swimming shorts.
"Ah," said d, seeing the chasm between cloth and body. "Well...there's a photo for the blog."
"Yyyyeah..."
We were staying at the St David's Hotel and Spa, and it was the night of the 4th. We'd battled through ridiculous wind and icy drizzle to get there. Then we stopped battling and got a cab, cos...well, battling was just silly. Signed in, got into our room, d went crazy for the flowers I'd arranged (Oh yeah, Ladeez - old skool!), we revelled in our balcony, mainly from indoors cos of the aforementioned ridiculous wind and icy drizzle, then decided to hit the pool-cum-jacuzzi.
"Wow," she said, coming over and quite literally yanking my string. I yelped, as the corsetry-effect kicked in.
"Why Mammy, you're no fun at all!" I whimpered, as she tied me in to my shorts, before going back to pulling on her fabulously-gorgeous red Baywatch swimsuit. I pondered my weirdly flab-hourglass shape, then tried an experiment - I shook and shimmied as though I had rhythm. My tight-tied swimming shorts gave up the ghost and shimmied their way to my ankles.
"Damn," I said, pulling them back up. d helped me re-tie them up around my heart, so I looked at least twice the numpty I had before, but they didn't dare shimmy when I shimmied. We hit the jacuzzi.
Fab. Just fab. Managed to do a few laps of actual swimming inbetween sitting on my ass getting bubbled within an inch of my life, and tried out the sauna. Me liiiiike.
"Yeah?"
"One thing we forgot," I said. I held out my swimming shorts from my body.
My 20-stone swimming shorts.
"Ah," said d, seeing the chasm between cloth and body. "Well...there's a photo for the blog."
"Yyyyeah..."
We were staying at the St David's Hotel and Spa, and it was the night of the 4th. We'd battled through ridiculous wind and icy drizzle to get there. Then we stopped battling and got a cab, cos...well, battling was just silly. Signed in, got into our room, d went crazy for the flowers I'd arranged (Oh yeah, Ladeez - old skool!), we revelled in our balcony, mainly from indoors cos of the aforementioned ridiculous wind and icy drizzle, then decided to hit the pool-cum-jacuzzi.
"Wow," she said, coming over and quite literally yanking my string. I yelped, as the corsetry-effect kicked in.
"Why Mammy, you're no fun at all!" I whimpered, as she tied me in to my shorts, before going back to pulling on her fabulously-gorgeous red Baywatch swimsuit. I pondered my weirdly flab-hourglass shape, then tried an experiment - I shook and shimmied as though I had rhythm. My tight-tied swimming shorts gave up the ghost and shimmied their way to my ankles.
"Damn," I said, pulling them back up. d helped me re-tie them up around my heart, so I looked at least twice the numpty I had before, but they didn't dare shimmy when I shimmied. We hit the jacuzzi.
Fab. Just fab. Managed to do a few laps of actual swimming inbetween sitting on my ass getting bubbled within an inch of my life, and tried out the sauna. Me liiiiike.
*
"Ah, dammit!" I whinged, having bumped into a wardrobe in the dark.
"What's the matter?" asked d from the bathroom.
"Too damn dark in this room," I muttered. "Dunno where anything is...bumped my hip on the wardrobe!"
"Ah, ya big wuss," she called, alluringly. "You can always open the closet door - the little light comes on!"
I opened it. It did. It was like looking into a fridge, except more wooden. And empty. And somehow hope-sucking, but anyway...
"Oh yeah," I said. I stared at the illuminated innards of the wardrobe for a few seconds. What I was waiting for, I'm not sure. The opening of the service entrance to Narnia, possibly. I closed the door and the light went out. I shrugged in the dark and got under the covers of the enormo-bed that we'd paid for.
d came out of the bathroom. Took three steps.
"GODDAMMNsonofa-!" she yelped. Normally, I'd have known it was serious by the fact that she went ultra-sonic on the word "bitch!" but I couldn't help but laugh.
"Dark, isn't it, dear?" I muttered dryly.
She didn't answer me.
"Oh oh," I said.
"....Eeeeeeeeeeoooooowwwww!" said d, descending back into audibility. I rolled out of bed, and hit the light switch.
"Oh Jeez..." I said, looking at d's foot, gripped between her hands. It looked like she'd torn her toenail off at the root.
"Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy-" she nodded, the pain making her incoherent for a few moments.
"Need...ice..." she said when she could trust her voice. "And...bandages," - which, for the Brits among you, meant plasters.
Never wonder whether the Girl Scouts are worth their training. Even through the pain, my girl MacGuyvered herself an ice pack from a tea towel, some ice from a bucket, a self-sealing plastic bag, and a big towel. By which time, it was two minutes past midnight.
Through the snot of her lurgi and the pain in her foot, d looked like a sorry article. I kissed her.
"Happy birthday, baby..."
She smiled a little.
Then she turned out the light.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
Vindication!
Ha!
Had my pal Lee around last night. Lee's not a Disappearer, he's just cool. It was also fun to realise, as I relax into this 'being-40' lark, and he looks it squarely in the eye in April, how scarily similar we still are in some ways.
Lee I've known since school, and we always have fun conversations. I mentioned my wandering walk up to Cwm Cadlan and back, and he told me this story...
"I was walking the dog one night not long ago, and I went down the Taff Trail. From Pentrebach (one stop on the Valley Lines train from Merthyr towards Cardiff), I went down to Aberfan. Pouring with rain mind, me and the dog just out for a walk...Went on to Merthyr Vale, thought 'Oh, I'll carry on...'. Went past Quaker's Yard. Now, I've been down to Quaker's Yard before, but never really past it. It's about eight miles. Still absolutely sheeting it down with rain, and my shoes are bubbling by this time. My feet are starting to rub raw, so I thought...'Tell you what, I'll just on a little bit further...then I can get to Ponty (Pontypridd - about the mid-point between Merthyr and Cardiff), then I can get a train back...So me and the dog, trudging on, looking like drowned rats..."
He broke off at this point as a thought occurred to him.
"Rats can swim, can't they?"
"Yyyyyeah," I agreed, seeing immediately where he was going.
"Well, why do people say they're like 'drowned rats' when they're soaking then?"
"Good question," I acknowledged. "People are weird," I explained.
"True," he agreed, seeming to ruminate on the idea. He was in danger of getting lost in thought.
"So - you and the dog..." I prompted. He snapped back to life.
"Soooo yeah, me and the dog, trudging on down to Ponty, the dog's looking at me by this point, like 'Are you 'avin' a laugh or what?'. My feet are really rubbing themselves raw with every step, can't see for rain..."
"Typical Welsh Summer then was it?" I asked.
"Zactly," he nodded.
"Got down to Ponty," he said.
"...?" I asked.
"...annnnnd that was when I remembered I hadn't brought my wallet," he finished. "Had to beg a friend to come and pick us up..."
What I especially loved about this story, what makes me hugely glad to be back in the Valleys among my very personal kind of stupidity, is that it was only when he got down to Quaker's Yard that the idea of getting the train back occurred to him. Every stop he mentioned, with the exception of Aberfan, was a stop on the Valley Lines, so salvation could have been his at almost any point along what was ultimately a twelve-mile walk in the pissing-down Welsh Summer. But noooo...he kept on going, seeing whether he could make it to the next stop. This is EXACTLY the same logic which led me up to Cwm Bloody Cadlan this week, constantly hoping to find civilisation around the next corner, while all the while getting further and further away from the civilisation I already knew was back behind me in Cefn.
So there you go - it's not just me.
It may, very conceivably, be just us, but still, idiocy loves company just as much as misery does.
Speaking of which, my cynical little black heart has been warmed, since the Cwm Cadlan story, by the number of people who have volunteered to go walking with me. Pulley of course has plans to take me hither and yon cross some of our country routes. My pal Rebecca (who's an international jet-setter and celebrity), has also said she'd be up for a good long stroll now and then. And this afternoon, my pal John also volunteered his walking companionship, more as an aide-de-get-the-fuck-out-of-the-house than an aide-de-Disappearing (John's a Beanpole Man, frankly, not a scarp of Disappearable meat on the bugger!). Lee, notsomuch on the walking-volunteerism - other stories of the evening involved him getting staggeringly lost WHILE FOLLOWING Google Maps on his phone, so the chances are, putting the two of us together on an Adventure might cause a kind of critical mass of geographical fuckwittery, and the universe might implode. As it is, it's entirely possible that most of my volunteers are really just trying to avoid reading headlines of "DISAPPEARING MAN...DISAPPEARS...WHILE OUT WALKING". But still - this is very kind of them, considering everything, and I'm grateful.
Oh - note for the vampires - blood was 4.3 this morning. Now then, away, to the joys of Cardiff Bay, in my not-a-little-like-Captain-Jack-Harkness coat, for two days of celebrating the d'ness, almost in spite of her continuing lurgi.
Catch you on the flipside, Groovers!
Had my pal Lee around last night. Lee's not a Disappearer, he's just cool. It was also fun to realise, as I relax into this 'being-40' lark, and he looks it squarely in the eye in April, how scarily similar we still are in some ways.
Lee I've known since school, and we always have fun conversations. I mentioned my wandering walk up to Cwm Cadlan and back, and he told me this story...
"I was walking the dog one night not long ago, and I went down the Taff Trail. From Pentrebach (one stop on the Valley Lines train from Merthyr towards Cardiff), I went down to Aberfan. Pouring with rain mind, me and the dog just out for a walk...Went on to Merthyr Vale, thought 'Oh, I'll carry on...'. Went past Quaker's Yard. Now, I've been down to Quaker's Yard before, but never really past it. It's about eight miles. Still absolutely sheeting it down with rain, and my shoes are bubbling by this time. My feet are starting to rub raw, so I thought...'Tell you what, I'll just on a little bit further...then I can get to Ponty (Pontypridd - about the mid-point between Merthyr and Cardiff), then I can get a train back...So me and the dog, trudging on, looking like drowned rats..."
He broke off at this point as a thought occurred to him.
"Rats can swim, can't they?"
"Yyyyyeah," I agreed, seeing immediately where he was going.
"Well, why do people say they're like 'drowned rats' when they're soaking then?"
"Good question," I acknowledged. "People are weird," I explained.
"True," he agreed, seeming to ruminate on the idea. He was in danger of getting lost in thought.
"So - you and the dog..." I prompted. He snapped back to life.
"Soooo yeah, me and the dog, trudging on down to Ponty, the dog's looking at me by this point, like 'Are you 'avin' a laugh or what?'. My feet are really rubbing themselves raw with every step, can't see for rain..."
"Typical Welsh Summer then was it?" I asked.
"Zactly," he nodded.
"Got down to Ponty," he said.
"...?" I asked.
"...annnnnd that was when I remembered I hadn't brought my wallet," he finished. "Had to beg a friend to come and pick us up..."
What I especially loved about this story, what makes me hugely glad to be back in the Valleys among my very personal kind of stupidity, is that it was only when he got down to Quaker's Yard that the idea of getting the train back occurred to him. Every stop he mentioned, with the exception of Aberfan, was a stop on the Valley Lines, so salvation could have been his at almost any point along what was ultimately a twelve-mile walk in the pissing-down Welsh Summer. But noooo...he kept on going, seeing whether he could make it to the next stop. This is EXACTLY the same logic which led me up to Cwm Bloody Cadlan this week, constantly hoping to find civilisation around the next corner, while all the while getting further and further away from the civilisation I already knew was back behind me in Cefn.
So there you go - it's not just me.
It may, very conceivably, be just us, but still, idiocy loves company just as much as misery does.
Speaking of which, my cynical little black heart has been warmed, since the Cwm Cadlan story, by the number of people who have volunteered to go walking with me. Pulley of course has plans to take me hither and yon cross some of our country routes. My pal Rebecca (who's an international jet-setter and celebrity), has also said she'd be up for a good long stroll now and then. And this afternoon, my pal John also volunteered his walking companionship, more as an aide-de-get-the-fuck-out-of-the-house than an aide-de-Disappearing (John's a Beanpole Man, frankly, not a scarp of Disappearable meat on the bugger!). Lee, notsomuch on the walking-volunteerism - other stories of the evening involved him getting staggeringly lost WHILE FOLLOWING Google Maps on his phone, so the chances are, putting the two of us together on an Adventure might cause a kind of critical mass of geographical fuckwittery, and the universe might implode. As it is, it's entirely possible that most of my volunteers are really just trying to avoid reading headlines of "DISAPPEARING MAN...DISAPPEARS...WHILE OUT WALKING". But still - this is very kind of them, considering everything, and I'm grateful.
Oh - note for the vampires - blood was 4.3 this morning. Now then, away, to the joys of Cardiff Bay, in my not-a-little-like-Captain-Jack-Harkness coat, for two days of celebrating the d'ness, almost in spite of her continuing lurgi.
Catch you on the flipside, Groovers!
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Loving The Nazis For New Year
Sooooo.....yeahhhh....
There may be something to Pulley's palaver about the Nazi Scales and their floating five pounds, cos I'm fairly sure it's not medically advisable to have achieved this morning's first official weigh-in of 2012 figures.
Which are:
15 stone, 9.5 pounds!
Given that just before Christmas, I was 16 stone 1.25, and on New Year's Eve, they weighed me at 15 stone 13.75, that would be a 4.some-odd pound loss in about three days. Allllthough I guess, the day before New Year's Eve, I was 15 stone 11, which would make today's figures a reasonable loss...
Anyhow, until anyone tells me different, they're the scales I have available, and I have to trust in their judgments, even when their judgements seem far too good to be true. Sooooooo yeahhhh - two little pounds away from the five-stone barrier. More early-morning walking, here I come (though ideally, sticking to roads with pavements).
Although, thinking about it, this may not be my most energetically taxing week. Am off to Cardiff tomorrow night (d-lurgi permitting) for a two-night celebration of her birthday-cum-welcome to our new nearest-City. Not even sure I'm taking the computer with me, to be honest, so, as with our holiday in Amroth, might do tomorrow's entry, then do two when I get back on the 6th.
If it's any consolation, it's a spa hotel we're going to, so they'll have a gym, so I'll probably try and get some gymming done while we're away...
Whaddaya mean, that's not what celebrating your wife's birthday's about? Humpf...
So anyway, loving the Nazi Scales right about now, and basking in their benificence on this cold-as-buggery, gale-force-windy day.
Oh and the blood was down to 4.1 this morning. Hmm...
There may be something to Pulley's palaver about the Nazi Scales and their floating five pounds, cos I'm fairly sure it's not medically advisable to have achieved this morning's first official weigh-in of 2012 figures.
Which are:
15 stone, 9.5 pounds!
Given that just before Christmas, I was 16 stone 1.25, and on New Year's Eve, they weighed me at 15 stone 13.75, that would be a 4.some-odd pound loss in about three days. Allllthough I guess, the day before New Year's Eve, I was 15 stone 11, which would make today's figures a reasonable loss...
Anyhow, until anyone tells me different, they're the scales I have available, and I have to trust in their judgments, even when their judgements seem far too good to be true. Sooooooo yeahhhh - two little pounds away from the five-stone barrier. More early-morning walking, here I come (though ideally, sticking to roads with pavements).
Although, thinking about it, this may not be my most energetically taxing week. Am off to Cardiff tomorrow night (d-lurgi permitting) for a two-night celebration of her birthday-cum-welcome to our new nearest-City. Not even sure I'm taking the computer with me, to be honest, so, as with our holiday in Amroth, might do tomorrow's entry, then do two when I get back on the 6th.
If it's any consolation, it's a spa hotel we're going to, so they'll have a gym, so I'll probably try and get some gymming done while we're away...
Whaddaya mean, that's not what celebrating your wife's birthday's about? Humpf...
So anyway, loving the Nazi Scales right about now, and basking in their benificence on this cold-as-buggery, gale-force-windy day.
Oh and the blood was down to 4.1 this morning. Hmm...
Monday, 2 January 2012
One Of Our Reservoirs Is Missing
“Whaddaya mean ‘What reservoir?’”
As texts go, it sounded rather exasperated.
“Haven’t passed a reservoir anywhere,” I explained.
“Must have,” texted Pulley. “There’s no way of getting from where you were to where you say you are WITHOUT passing the reservoir...”
“No way!” she reiterated.
It always amazes me, at this point, when people make statements like that. Trust me when I tell you it’s perfectly possible to be self-involved enough to miss...anything. I’ve missed Big Ben before now.
“Have you walked over the Dam?” she asked.
Dam? What Dam??
The thing is, physics and geography, being their usual bastard selves, do rather concur with her. The route I took on what turned out to be rather a mammoth walk, should have seen me pass a reservoir...and Hell, probably even a viaduct. Should have walked over a Dam, apparently, but damned if I did.
I started out, as planned, on the ‘Taff Trail’...then...well I don’t really know what to tell you, I took one of those Turnings of mine that looked right...or at least looked North...and then I was heading along a road with a cemetery on either side (the Valley of the Shadow of Death?)...annnd then I was walking along the A470. For those who don’t know, of which I imagine there are now many, the A470 is the main road linking Cardiff and Merthyr, and then, as I discovered today, it buggers off all the way up to Brecon. (Brecon, likewise, is either an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or a desolate hole, depending on your point of view. The SAS train there, and, when Doctor Who needed a place to depict somewhere called The Death Zone, they chose Brecon. Any questions?). Thing is, the A470 heading up to Brecon has no pavements, so, technically, I was walking into the path of oncoming traffic. Of course, the logical thing to do at that point would have been to turn the fuck around and come home. Which of course means what I did was to keep walking...and walking...and walking...hoping for a turn-off with pavements, leading to some sort of civilisation.
I ended up in a place called Cwm Cadlan. No idea, so don’t ask. All I now know about the place is it’s quite a way away from where I started out, and there’s apparently a freakin’ reservoir, inevitably, between me and it. Which I managed to miss.
Twice.
Because one thing that came muscle-strainingly into focus today is that London miles are not Merthyr miles. Quite apart from anything else, in London, you could walk five miles and then jump on a Tube to take you quickly where you needed to be.
No damn Tubes in Cwm Cadlam, I can tell you – no, you have to turn your ass around and walk the whole way back again...With the result that a couple of hours walking by city standards ends up taking, as it did me today, about five bloody hours.
So – this is how I go into the first Tuesday of 2012; my first weigh-in, and co-incidentally, the start of my career as a work-from-homer. Oh and incidentally, Pulley has also called into question the veracity of the Nazi Scales. Turns out she has exactly the same scales, and yesterday, they weighed her five pounds HEAVIER at the start of the day than they did at the end of the day. That simply doesn’t happen if your scales are right...
Hmm...Will treat mine nicely and deferentially in the morning (perhaps, possibly, not calling them Nazi Scales might be a start), and if they bitchslap me, I might just bitchslap them back right in their little digital teeth. Five pounds! I’m not putting on an entirely imaginary five pounds for any set of scales...I can miss reservoirs, but not that much of a discrepancy!
Oh, and my blood was 4.6 this morning.
Sunday, 1 January 2012
The Subtle Art of Self-Pleasure
Now, those who've been paying attention will know of my ongoing love/hate relationship with Starbucks, and its ongoing part in my Disappearing story.
There are no Starbucks here in Merthyr. Lots of cafes, to be sure, and some who even understand the complexities of a de-caff skinny latte, but...shrugs...somehow it's not quite the same.
d, being who she is, and knowing me better than anyone, foresaw this difficulty, and gave me, for Christmas, my very own fancy-pants milk-frothing proper espresso-cappucino dewberry-maker. We hadn't used it so far, because the kitchen is one of those rooms, like my office, that's still a work in progress, but tonight, to celebrate the dawn of this year of new potential, we broke it in. Have to say, if anything is gonna ease the Starbucks pangs, it's this machine.
It's an amazing palaver though - buttons to heat the water, paddles to compress your little spoonful of coffee, twisty things to slot into place, tight as can be, buttons to press to surge the water through and give you a smattering of gorgeous espresso, then nozzles to pull and knobs to turn to spurt some steam, and then you dip the nozzle and swizzle and swill till the milk grows double, then pour one into the other and away you go...
Except, as with all complicated pleasures, there you don't quite go, for then there are buttons to unpress, twisty things to untwist and unhook, capsules of soaked coffee to dump and rinse, nozzles to wipe down and spurt through for cleanliness, and nooks and crannies to wipe clean, so they don't go manky. Then, in an extra special twist, there are trays to remove and wipe down, and jugs to wash and dry, and then, maybe, away you go, with a cup of coffee that costs you £2.75 in a Starbucks but here at the point of need is free as your effort can make it.
That's the thing about pleasures - you have to make sure the happiness you get from them is more than worth the effort you expend to attain them. Now, in London, if you were to ask me whether it was worth doing all this when, for the price of £2.75 I could get a trained barista to do it for me, I'd answer you with a derisive snort and probably a hand gesture. But here, as we prepare to shift from 'setting up our life' mode to 'battening down hatches and living on a reduced income' mode, when I'll be able to simply nip down from the office, make myself a coffee of a Starbuckian taste and quality, and then bog off back upstairs, you bet your ass it'll be worth the effort.
Haven't Disappeared much at all today - ate a hearty, welcome-to-the-new-year breakfeast, and a faintly colossal late lunch. But d assures me that this is OK, as it's 'the end of the holidays', and that, in real terms, dietary austerity should actually start tomorrow.
Hmm...
Still haven't found the power cord for the Bike. Have a feeling that, if d doesn't object, and reasonable weather permitting, I might pop out tomorrow in proper boots and a proper coat and hat and investigate the Taff Trail. This, from all reports, is a walking or cycling path that follows the river Taff (which is the river that flows just acros the road from our flat). Apparently it runs all the way to Cardiff in one direction (which is 26 miles, and which under no circumstances am I planning to walk tomorrow). Not entirely sure how far it runs in the other direction...Of course technically, this information is just one Google-search away, but think it might be rather more fun to just walk it, or at least some of it, and then come home and Google it, to see how far I've gone.
So - maybe 2012 starts properly on the 2nd of January. Or maybe it doesn't - my mate Karen (Pulley) has begun her own Disappearing efforts today, joining me on the Xenical Run, and talking of walks over some undoubtedly godforsaken hilly bit of the countryside, to which I have to somewhat perversely confess I'm looking dreadfully forward - London's roads are one thing, but much in the way of up and down, there is not.
Oh also - I'm in conversation with my pal Sian. Sian, as I may have mentioned at some point...runs.
I mean, she runs properly - marathons for fun, endurance marathons for, she claims, even more fun.
She is of course stark raving mad, bless her, but at a moment like this, she's phenomenally useful. Because, though I swore it would be impossible at the start of this experiment, I'm thinking, in a vague way, of running myself.
Not, of course, marathons or anything as mad as that. But maybe a little running, for endurance, for strenght, for the sheer lung-bursting what-the-Hellness of it. Sian's given me a basic introductory idea of stop-start running for reeeeeal beginners. Who knows? It might come to nothing when the metal in my ankle resists. But I'm prepared at this point to try new things, and running might just be one of them.
It might even come to be a pleasure.
Oh and finally, talking about the metal in my ankle, it occurred to me this morning that it's fifteen years today since it entered my life and my body, in the wake of that mugging I mentioned a couple of days ago. It's been through a lot since then, carried me at twenty stone or more. Time to see whether it can be trusted to take me, at this lesser weight, through the pounding of a run, maybe?
There are no Starbucks here in Merthyr. Lots of cafes, to be sure, and some who even understand the complexities of a de-caff skinny latte, but...shrugs...somehow it's not quite the same.
d, being who she is, and knowing me better than anyone, foresaw this difficulty, and gave me, for Christmas, my very own fancy-pants milk-frothing proper espresso-cappucino dewberry-maker. We hadn't used it so far, because the kitchen is one of those rooms, like my office, that's still a work in progress, but tonight, to celebrate the dawn of this year of new potential, we broke it in. Have to say, if anything is gonna ease the Starbucks pangs, it's this machine.
It's an amazing palaver though - buttons to heat the water, paddles to compress your little spoonful of coffee, twisty things to slot into place, tight as can be, buttons to press to surge the water through and give you a smattering of gorgeous espresso, then nozzles to pull and knobs to turn to spurt some steam, and then you dip the nozzle and swizzle and swill till the milk grows double, then pour one into the other and away you go...
Except, as with all complicated pleasures, there you don't quite go, for then there are buttons to unpress, twisty things to untwist and unhook, capsules of soaked coffee to dump and rinse, nozzles to wipe down and spurt through for cleanliness, and nooks and crannies to wipe clean, so they don't go manky. Then, in an extra special twist, there are trays to remove and wipe down, and jugs to wash and dry, and then, maybe, away you go, with a cup of coffee that costs you £2.75 in a Starbucks but here at the point of need is free as your effort can make it.
That's the thing about pleasures - you have to make sure the happiness you get from them is more than worth the effort you expend to attain them. Now, in London, if you were to ask me whether it was worth doing all this when, for the price of £2.75 I could get a trained barista to do it for me, I'd answer you with a derisive snort and probably a hand gesture. But here, as we prepare to shift from 'setting up our life' mode to 'battening down hatches and living on a reduced income' mode, when I'll be able to simply nip down from the office, make myself a coffee of a Starbuckian taste and quality, and then bog off back upstairs, you bet your ass it'll be worth the effort.
Haven't Disappeared much at all today - ate a hearty, welcome-to-the-new-year breakfeast, and a faintly colossal late lunch. But d assures me that this is OK, as it's 'the end of the holidays', and that, in real terms, dietary austerity should actually start tomorrow.
Hmm...
Still haven't found the power cord for the Bike. Have a feeling that, if d doesn't object, and reasonable weather permitting, I might pop out tomorrow in proper boots and a proper coat and hat and investigate the Taff Trail. This, from all reports, is a walking or cycling path that follows the river Taff (which is the river that flows just acros the road from our flat). Apparently it runs all the way to Cardiff in one direction (which is 26 miles, and which under no circumstances am I planning to walk tomorrow). Not entirely sure how far it runs in the other direction...Of course technically, this information is just one Google-search away, but think it might be rather more fun to just walk it, or at least some of it, and then come home and Google it, to see how far I've gone.
So - maybe 2012 starts properly on the 2nd of January. Or maybe it doesn't - my mate Karen (Pulley) has begun her own Disappearing efforts today, joining me on the Xenical Run, and talking of walks over some undoubtedly godforsaken hilly bit of the countryside, to which I have to somewhat perversely confess I'm looking dreadfully forward - London's roads are one thing, but much in the way of up and down, there is not.
Oh also - I'm in conversation with my pal Sian. Sian, as I may have mentioned at some point...runs.
I mean, she runs properly - marathons for fun, endurance marathons for, she claims, even more fun.
She is of course stark raving mad, bless her, but at a moment like this, she's phenomenally useful. Because, though I swore it would be impossible at the start of this experiment, I'm thinking, in a vague way, of running myself.
Not, of course, marathons or anything as mad as that. But maybe a little running, for endurance, for strenght, for the sheer lung-bursting what-the-Hellness of it. Sian's given me a basic introductory idea of stop-start running for reeeeeal beginners. Who knows? It might come to nothing when the metal in my ankle resists. But I'm prepared at this point to try new things, and running might just be one of them.
It might even come to be a pleasure.
Oh and finally, talking about the metal in my ankle, it occurred to me this morning that it's fifteen years today since it entered my life and my body, in the wake of that mugging I mentioned a couple of days ago. It's been through a lot since then, carried me at twenty stone or more. Time to see whether it can be trusted to take me, at this lesser weight, through the pounding of a run, maybe?
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