alaimacerc

Eventually made it to The End of The Road. ( Well... )

The usual pattern of my "cycling season" is that I get started too late in the year (as well as in the day, often as not), but persist beyond weather and light conditions I'd have turned my nose up at -- or perhaps more accurately, not bothered m'arse with -- earlier.  ( Trundlin' on )

In the BBC coverage of the road cycling world championships, there was a (Jill Douglas) item on a proposal to introduce gender equality (in number of events, at least) to the cycling in the Olympics.  She had on both Pat McQuaid, and someone from British Cycling, both making largely positive noises about this.

To which I say "yay!"

( OTOH... )

Talking of cycling, I really ought to go make something of what's turned up to be a much nicer afternoon than was forecast...  (As against yesterday, which was forecast to be somewhat dull, and turned out to be exceptionally and unrelentingly so.)

Demise of the cycling season slightly exaggerated:  after (what I still laughing call) work, I went out the Lee Valley Road.  I thought about going straight on at Inniscara, but decided not to, on the basis that I didn't think I'd make it to Coachford and back, and I didn't fancy going out the Tower/Blarney direction.  After a stop-over at the regional park, went back Woods Road, and then -- fatefully! -- decided to turn right and go across the little bridge, which road I vaguely recalled decanted at Ovens.  What I was forgetting was how long, hilly, tortuous and dark it was. (I'd made a somewhat earlier start this time, but it'd become very overcast, and the the road is distinctly wooded.  And being the equinox, one would of course have to add that The Nights Are Fair Drawin' In at their maximal rate.)  When I eventually got over the top of the hill, I once again ended up walking, so dodgy was cycling under those conditions.  Bit frustrating to end up going down the hills even more slowly than one has gone up them.  Back the quick-but-boring route along N22.  Forgot my MP3 player when I left the flat, so no choons, either.

Didn't have high hopes of foing any cycling this weekend, as the weather was still in the "bleh" range on Friday, and the forecast looked to be getting worse from there -- though admittedly still much better than the rubbish we'd been having before the fabled high.  But there was a glimmer of sun by mid-afternoon, and by the time I'd started to think seriously about it, it was pretty much a clear sky.  Much the same route as last time, without quite going into Aherla, just immediately right at the crossroads just before.  Given a somewhat earlier start, some front lights with a bit more "juice" in them, and slightly less hanging around, I had a good deal less in the way of the "fumbling around in the dark" stuff.  Stars still very bright, though:  Milky Way clearly visible, even with my mediocre night vision (not to say vision in general).  Have a feeling this might be my last outing of the year.

Odd moment when I almost crashed into a large floofy dog on the Killumney-Aherla stretch: sufficiently large and floofy that for an instant I thought it was a sheep.  (OK, it was still *pretty* dark.)  It seemed an affable enough thing, perhaps even placid, but when I was taking a photograph of it (to follow -- how many sets is that I've long-fingered now?), a local in a small lorry stopped to tell me what a menace and vicious terror to the neighbourhood it was.  De gustibus, etc.

Well, legs, sinuses and weather all just about held up.  Not sure the rest of my head did, as there was a good deal of sleeping-in followed by several hours of procrastination.  Eventually got m'ass going west, and after an hour or so I'd struggled out the Curaheen Road as far as Killumney -- see previous murky photos of yon place at twilight.  Then I got a little ahead of myself and decided to push on to Aherla, which is just a few km further down the road.  By then it was starting to get rather seriously dark, and the road was getting a little tricky to follow, with only blinky-blinky LED front lights.  Nice conditions for star-gazing, though! By the time I'd reached Aherla I was seriously groping around for the connecting road -- actually went past it, and had to ask directions and backtrack.  Paused to take some piccies of the old church just out the other side of A. Walked a chunk of said side road just to be on the safe side.  Then back the N22 all the way, including the dual carriageway section -- didn't really want to linger on the byways at that stage.

Definitely a stronger-than-usual instance of my perennial "would have been better starting an hour or three earlier".

Too glum and pissed off at on-going developments at work to rant about 'em at all eloquently.

Soooo, after I'd bugged out of there, went off on a bike ride out the Lee Valley Road, stopped off at the Regional Park, then back via Woods Road and Ballincollig.  Hopefully I'll manage a longer run tomorrow, if the weather, my legs, and my sinuses all hold.

Were going to be more weir pics here, but flickr's not playing, once again.

Any other sort of cycling's still on hold, and the weather tomorrow's not looking half as decent as was originally trailed (surprise!), so in the meantime, here's a do-over of the entry I lost from last Tuesday.

( Trundlings. )

Amazingly, the talk of somewhat better weather today didn't turn out to be Evelyn Cusack blowing smoke up our asses as usual, but if anything rather understated.  Mid-20s!  Actual sunshine!  You'd almost think it was summer.  Didn't really make much of it until the evening, when I managed to haul my lazy arse out the road to Curraheen.  Rather than turning right at Kilnaglory, through a combination of navigational error (not a lot of signage for these sub-hamlets) and reckless ambition, I followed the road left, which it would be fair to say gets a tad steep.  I'm just nowhere near fit enough for these three-figure contour lines.  I struggled on, and after a painfully long haul, with several gasping pauses, I was rewarded with by the crest of the hill coming into view, just a Fleet Foxes came on my MP3 players, and the late evening sun made a final guest appearance in between a cloud and the hills.  Didn't get much further than that, and went back via the Grange crossroads, the Greenfields road, a bit of the bypass, and Bishopstown Road.  Oh yeah, and Tesco.  Nice melon.

I'd hate to turn this into BruiseBlog, but I must confess to having had a certain degree of alarm when I noticed my right knee appeared to have gone from having a deep purple 6cm bruise to a twenty cm (on long axis) yellow one ... and a 6cm purple one, perhaps slightly less "deep". Must have been somewhat pink before, and I didn't notice it; or else it's one of those "displaced" bruises. Or, it's gangrenous jaundice and said leg is about to fall off, I suppose.

In other mews, anyone else come across this story? It was Newsnight's "and finally" item -- things are clearly slipping while the regulars are away. And obviously that alynx introduction program is going well, then. One way of keeping the deer population down!

Here was me thinking the back wheel problem was a badly aligned brake block, and/or a tyre issue.  ( Not quite. )

Just had a bit of a prang cycling home.  Not quite sure what happened, but that increasingly dodgy back wheel may have been a factor, to which add in "carrying too much stuff".  Nothing broken on me, just the traditional diagonally opposite knee dinged and wrist sprained; bike pretty much intact too, except that the mounting bracket for my lock disintegrated -- this also being somewhat traditional, as I seem to have killed two or three of those by now.  Lucky I didn't do something worse to my hands -- for once I wasn't wearing gloves. Kudos to the young lad that doubled back at the next roundabout to check that I was all right.  Scoffings at the several pedestrians and motorists that went straight by while I was struggling to get back up off the road. Got back on after I'd caught my breath, but I was drenched in sweat by the time I got home, just a couple of minutes away.  I may be watching the remaining stages of the Tour de France from behind the sofa, if they have more stages in soaking wet conditions, and/or that look rather precipitous.

Not a good week for the knees: the desks in the new building are so low that the solid metal bar supporting it bangs right into them, smack dab in the patella.

(Or even moreso, I suppose one could say.)  See for example the BBC's take. That's as in "adult males" -- this route still relies on Y chromosomes, and is essentially "fast-tracking" embryonic sperm development by a decade or so.  Speaking hypothetically, since using it reproductively is presently illegal in the UK (and presumably most other places).

In other news, have another puncture.  Discovered this on my way home at stupid o'clock last night.  Just a slow(ish) one (for now), but it'll be a bugger to change the tyre -- it was infeasibly tight going on, and I doubt it's slackened very much.  Maybe those new tyre levers will make a difference...

Lazy Saturday watching some Wimbledon and Glastonbury.  Popped out to get rid of some recycling;  the tin cans have to go a short distance up the hill, so I decided to "turn my legs over" by continuing up Spur Hill, and back by Chetwynd and Bishopstown.  Gasp.  At some point it's supposed to get easier, I'm sure that's the theory...

Was going to rip my new Feeder CD (which must have arrived on Friday, unnoticed by me), and upload assorted pics to post here, but we seem to have fresh batches of technical hitches.  Ho hum.

For dinner, took a gamble on Mystery Meatsicle from the freezer.  Chili!  I really ought to get some sort of freezer labels, mind...

Which lyric reminds me that I should really have remembered to take a camera with me on recent cycle outings.  While my legs are indeed still bending in the middle, they're sufficiently "heavy" that another trip across the Passage ferry doesn't seem that likely this side of the end of the ten-day summer.  Just going the hillier way home yesterday via the Lough (bye, infeasibly large amounts of stale bread!) and Lidl was a bit of struggle, in fact.  Shame I didn't have the camera for Lough, too: a momma swan came over with four rather small, photogenic cygnets. And distinctly hungry ones (I resisted saying "peckish" -- until now, anyway.)

HQ went well enough, though with hindsight I'm not sure it was worth spending so much time on the Clan Questionnaire -- is this the fourth or the fifth version we've reverse-engineered for the same player group?  (Two different clans, admittedly.) I wanted to get it done because this seems to be the version with everything, including the kitchen sink..  Both both personal-level "virtue" tags, and clan resources -- now that there are proper rules in HQ2 for handling those, unlike the earlier version that generated the numbers all right, with a ruleset that had no way of handling them; or the subsequent versions that didn't even bother with them at all.  Hopefully these will pay off the (repeated) effort. Am very pleased that we seem to already be getting some mileage out of the new "mythlet" feat rules (admittedly we'd some advance wind of this, following the previous Tentacles' foreshadowing of where these were going).

Abortive half-game of Union Pacific at S'n'M's tonight.  Which reminds me I also should be cross-linking to Myles' results posts for those (at least when we get a result, and I'm finding some excuse to bang on about something anyway).  More fun TBH was the earlier trip to the park for a picnic with the same bunch, avec kids. Hummusy week continues.  Fortunately I like hummus.  Ask me again in another three mini-tubs' time. Shame I missed most of it due to on-going struggles with laptop, data wrangling, and quarts and half-pint pots.

Had vague thoughts of holding forth on the twin subjects of Nicolas Sarkozy ('having a go at Islamic dress isn't about religion') and Nick Griffin ('by Welsh I mean "has been living there since the last Ice Age"'), but am filing for now under 'the least said about ethnological shit-stirrers called Nik, the soonest mended'.

Random conversation with a fellow cyclist on the way home.  Very random, really, as it was about 2am, and I'd never clapped eyes on him. Yer man observed what a good "slipstream" I was -- I'd like to think that was a function of the excellent pace I was setting, but maybe it's more to do with the larger-than-ever "hole" I'm making in the air these days.  Assorted comments about seat pillars and the quality of various Cork cycle shops were exchanged before he peeled off.

This post is getting a bit random itself.  Should probably have LJcut for excessive wandering off the point (if point there actually was).

If I might go against the wisdom of Grant Nicholas (whose Comfort in Sound starts to sound even better whenever there's a glimmer of sunshine, I'm finding).

Around lunchtime I was wondering where the glorious sunshine I was promised was, but I didn't need to worry for long.  By the time I'd cleared out of work and cycled off eastwards, it was definitely off-with-shirt weather, much less the raincoat.  Out as far as Little Island, back past Fota and across the ferry to Passage West.  They must have been an audit there:  first time I've actually been charged a fare!  At Douglas I went onto the ring road.  Not very scenic, but by that stage I was thinking "path of least resistance".  Enjoy endorphin afterglow for now; hope the legs still bend in the middle come tomorrow.

Some encouraging noises about progress on both my intractable expenses and my wonky laptop.  On contract renewal past September, though, things are if anything murkier than ever.

Perilously close to "part 2" of previous post, but...

( More faffing around with gig-planning )

Token trundle en route to roleplaying (Judge Dee game dodged to Wednesday) up Summerhill North Road Silver Springs Lane.  Had thought to go on a longer cycle, earlier, but assorted digressions put paid to that.  More wheezing and gasping my way, though to be fair it's often a bit like that just going up Wellington Road, and that road is a couple of uphill turns from that, as I was reminded on the way down.

After the heavens had opened this afternoon, and then closed back up again, I decided to go for a "quick" cycle to Blarney.  I must remind myself more vigorously in future that there's a reason most of my runs are west-east.  The ride from Clogheen to Blarney and back by the Commons Road was very pleasant.  Nicely sunny, with the air feeling very clean and clear after the earlier "shower".  Getting to Clogheen in the first place just about killed me, though.  No bleedin' wonder, though, since a) the road goes up to 120m, in just a few k, and b) I have all the aerobic fitness of an overweight smilodon.  A fossilised one.

Junior hurling match in progress in Blarney. The red team with white shorts seemed to be playing the even-more-red team, also with white shorts.  (Welcome to Cork.)

At first I thought it was an entirely new road for me, but on reflection I think I might have cycled back that way in the other direction, or else perhaps from Tower to Cork, which road it joins back up with.  That might the saner way to do it, on future reflection: the main road and the one that more-or-less parallels it aren't nearly so CPR-requiring, I don't think.

Despite it being a HQ(2!) night.  That's the third time recently I've had a bike inner tube suddenly -- and loudly! -- blow up on me, and this time I was in motion when it happened.  This one seemed to be less spectacular, and doesn't seem to involve any massive tyre damage: just a delicate little hole with some innards dangling out.  Vexing!  Decided to abort that little outing around about Tesco, and just walk back from there, since it would have been a bit silly to try and patch the inner tube, with every prospect of it happening again (later if not sooner).

I'm resisting the temptations of the subject line "these strange explosions", on account of having used that one before (on a post with some actual Biffy content).

A quick -- OK, short but slow -- trundle to the Regional Park (which was technically closed by the time I got there, but no-one seemed to be paying that any mind). Still, it counts as "discretionary exercise", all the same.  My conclusions:  I'm about as unfit as I thought;  it's bleedin' cold out there (my own fault for leaving until after the showers earlier this evening); the Lee Valley Road to the strains of Foals rivals Le Guin + Biffy as a strange juxtaposition.  (Forgetting what exactly I'd put on my MP3 player, and having no idea what order it'd chucked them on in -- cheapo Technika thing that it is -- it took me a little while to work out what the heck it was that was coming on after Johnny Cash.)

I'm also trying to work out if I got barked at by two different Alsatians on either side of the corner of the road at Inniscara, or if it was the same one, prepared to commute a heckuva way to do it twice.  (Silly cursorial carnivorans.)