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April 29th, 2008 22:26
So! Me & the two lovely ladies signed up. Rush Hour Adventure Race.
Zaubi found a guy from work and the girl we did the Teva race with 1.5 years ago to do it with him, so we will both be doing it, which is great! Now I just have to figure out the rogaining bit. I always thought rogaine was something men rubbed on their heads to make their hair grow, but apparently it means navigation. Learn something new every day.
It should be a blast. Only 2 weeks away now – I have to say I’m paranoid. I haven’t gone running in a couple weeks! That will be remedied tomorrow. And we didn’t go mountain biking at all last week, even though there was a long weekend. Ah well, this weekend is a long weekend too. Autumn in Oz is great for public holidays 
I’m glad I don’t work tomorrow. I’m reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaly sick of writing SQL statements.
April 28th, 2008 18:43
Really not psyched today. have been trying to write the same abominable SQL statement for about a week. No satisfactory results. Maybe I’m a perfectionist.
On a brighter note, my book (ha ha) is now 10 pages long. I can’t tell if it’s decent or flat-out bad. I’ll probably never know.
April 25th, 2008 22:29
Yeah yeah, I forgot again.
Anyway, I wanted to announce that it is a great relief to hear that Switzerland will NOT be outsourcing the creation of its Swiss army knives to China. They had considered it, but the Swiss put up a stink and made a petition against it and so they changed their minds. And thank goodness! Who would want a Swiss Army Knife marked MADE IN CHINA???
So I also wanted to tell you all the story of the cake. So a week ago it was Zaubi’s birthday, and I spent about 6 hours making him this special German Bienstich cake. You know, yeast dough, custard, caramelized almonds, etc. I’d never made it before, absolutely everything went wrong while I was making it, but finally, agonizingly, I produced something that was tolerably similar to a German Bienstich.
So Zaubi ate some of it and liked it, and then the next day was Friday and he was going away for the weekend on a Men’s Retreat for church, and he wanted to take the rest of the cake with him. So I packed it all up in a heavy-duty plastic container, gave it to him, he left. Then some time later, I’m practising sax in my furry slippers, and I get this phone call: “Um… can you go outside and see if the cake is there??”
Huh?
“Can you go outside and see if the cake is there? I put it on the back of the car, and it must have fallen off, because I don’t have it anymore.”
Duh!
So I went running down the street in my furry slippers, holding the phone, my neckstrap swinging wildly, and I found the cake. Only, someone else had found it too: in fact, someone else had run plumb over it. What a disaster.
My plastic food thing (which was EXPENSIVE mind you) was in about 5 pieces, pieces of cake were spread out like an explosion, crumbs, custard, and almonds ground into the pavement for about an 8 foot radius. I seriously nearly cried. My beautiful cake! I picked it all up (because it seemed like sacrilege to leave it lying there, violated and exposed), brought it home, custard dripping down between my fingers, pitched it in the wheelie bin (which felt like murder).
I can tell you it took me a whole day to get over being mad. I was actually very glad that I had a weekend off from wife-ing. That was the crowning incident on what had already been a very frustrating week.
April 21st, 2008 23:07
I owe a proper entry, I really do, and I will, I swear (you all have to hear about the fate of The Cake) but I just wanted to briefly say…
So I was doing a wee bit of pseudo-research on ancient tattooing methods for my writing and I came across: Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volume II
Encyclopedia?? Volume II?
April 5th, 2008 0:35
So my story/book/whatever has been haunting me for this past week. Because I have a really hard time writing about something when I don’t have a highly detailed picture of it in my head, I decided to create a map. (Besides, creating maps is fun.)
Found this fantastic little linux app which generates fractal planets and played with it for about an hour before it generated a planet that had an area of a continent that suited my fancy. Spent another couple hours in Gimp tweaking it, adding an extra mountain range, drawing in rivers, roads, cities, lighthouses, and so forth. I still have to work out how to make the center part of it look like a desert. It came very green. And define some borders for countries/states. And I have to add some bridges, and I suspect some of my rivers are demented… ah well. Geology/climatology has never been my strong suit!
Anyway, here it is – click for larger version!
I need to name the following:
8 rivers
1 sea
1 ocean
2 bays
5 big lakes
3 small lakes
4 lighthouses
2 mountain ranges
1 lone mountain
3 marshes
2 deserts
7 islands (or 3 island groups)
3 grasslands/plains
1 huge forest
1 huge jungle
1 small forest
1 soggy forest
Suggestions?
April 1st, 2008 22:57
THIRD PERSON.
And now the new dilemma: chronological, or flashback-style?
April 1st, 2008 22:25
So I guess I’ve been slack in my LJing, hey?
For the past two weekends I’ve been doing a bunch of mountain biking. Well, of course we have no mountains here (hah) so lets call it non-trivial trail biking instead.
My friend L. signed us up for an adventure race which took place on march 30. This adventure race to be specific: the Beerburrum forest one. So Easter weekend Zaubi and Iwent mountain biking at Mt. Coot-tha 3 days of the 4 day weekend so I could practice. The trails are fantastic! SO many of them my pathetic, heavy tanker bike simply did not have low enough gears to go up, so i had to push it. But the narrows trails, the mountain bike only trails were amazing fun. There were piles of logs to go over, heaps of rocks, deep gullies, hairpin turns between narrow trees. More than once we went flying off into the brush. I met my nemesis: a steep hill which pulled a hairpin turn and continued down a little gully into a tree: if i’d been careful enough I could have gone down around the tree, but both last weekend and this one I went straight over the handlebars and *into* the tree instead. My knees haven’t been this scabbed up since I was about 10.
The race itself was fantastic. It didn’t start well, given that the first thing we had to do was run to the top of Wildhorse mountian and then back down, and that is steep. Moreover, we completely screwed up a couple of the nav points.
The first we screwed up because I didn’t judge the trails on the map accurately [there were trails on the map that weren't in the forest, trails in the forest that weren't on the map, trails marked as big 4WD tracks that were completely overgrown to disappearing, trails marked as small bike tracks that were in reality giant well used wide 4WD tracks...], the second because we tried to take a shortcut over a river instead of going around, ended up bushwhacking (initially in the wrong direction), and when we found the river, nearly pansied out because it was deep. Very deep. In fact, when we got up our guts to actually carry our bikes into it, we sank into muck over our knees and water over our chests.
It’s hard to carry a mountain bike over your shoulder when you are knee deep in sticky mud, almost neck deep in water, and wearing a backpack, shoes, etc. And the mud was warm, just to make matters more disgusting.
Anyway, the mountain biking sections were pretty easy [aside from that river crossing and one other long stretch which first went over a massive field that acted as a wind tunnel, and then went through a swamp where the water was halfway up our tyres]. There was alos a point where we had to swim across a sizeable river in full gear (thank goodness no mountain bikes) and then kayak down that same river to find a certain tree, and kayak back. And in between it all was running. lots and lots of running.
The running section would actually have been the most fun had I actually *enjoyed* running, which I do not. it was certainly the most interesting, what with many river crossings, some wide and shallow, some narrow and very deep, all of which we had to bushwhack through the thick spidery forest to get to; what with having to creep through a long dark tunnel (which was thigh deep in cold, black water) underneath the Bruce Highway – it put me rather in mind of the sewer scenes in Les Mis; what with running up and down deep rutted red 4WD tracks and through green pine forests – well, it was an experience all right.
We came in 5th out of 12 female teams; 96 of 11 teams total (male, female, mixed). I was not in shape, having done no exercise in the past year and a half (I can count the times I’ve been running in the past 2.5 years on my hands): moreover, during the swampy bike leg I because hypoglycaemic and started seeing black spots. I have a tendency to get really hungry really fast, but I have never felt this bad/weak from sugar lows before. I nearly collapsed, to my chagrin. Happily, L. had packed some lollies and so after eating about 12 gummy thingies i recovered quickly. Moreover, we lost quite a bit of time on the two messed up nav points.
And I must admit I was loathing my cheapie bike by the time the thing was done. I so wish I could afford to buy a better one.
Even though we came in badly, we still won a door prize! In fact, we won it I think because we came in so late, since they pulled a bunch of the last ones out of the hat. L. got some zip pants and I got something I’d desperately wanted but was too stingy ever to buy: a spandex/wicking bike shirt with an open neck, short sleeves, and snappy white stripes up the sides. it’s cool.
Anyway, we’re both thoroughly addicted. And adventure races happen regularly in Brisbane! I’m even tempted to go running on a semi-regular basis to train up for the next one. And because I feel flabby :-/ There is another, harder, race coming up in a couple weeks but I think the next one we do will be an 8-hour race on May 11, this one being 3 person teams, so Zaubi can come with us. He’s good at navigating, which will be a blessing.
The moral of the story by the way is this. If you wish to adventure race:
1) Train beforehand. Do not go into it on 2 years of non exercise
2) Eat a proper meal the night before
3) Purchase and learn how to use a compass well beforehand
4) Do not trust your map. Check *every* trail you go on with your compass to make sure it really is the one you think
5) Eat small numbers of lollies every 30 min or so. (chocolate, granola bars, and Gu make you ill and give cramps)
6) Do not waste time being pansy. Make fast decisions to do something or not, and stick by them!
7) Get a good bike  )
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