Monday, December 19, 2011

Goals and adventures

Several months ago a girlfriend and I were walking and she told me that every year she does the MS Stair Climb (link is refusing to work http://www.stepupforms.org.au/event-information.html ) which is a vertical challenge event involving 53 stories, 1096 stairs and lots of sweat and tears. She asked if I would like to do it with her next year and I said yes, of course, why not???

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaah wtf was I thinking??? lol

Seriously, I am looking forward to the event since I've never actually set myself this kind of goal before. Yes I've said I'll exercise to lose weight or get fit but fitting into a smaller dress size has always been the goal, not the doing of the activity itself.

Now I am unfit. Soooooo unfit. And lately it seems every time I start to motivate myself to start training again, something happens, I get sick or there's a family emergency or my mental health goes down the drain. There always seems to be one excuse after another. But if I am to do this stair climb, I am going to have seriously start training and soon.

In King's Park in the city there is a flight of stairs up the hill called Jacob's ladder which is roughly 240 stairs and the place to start training.
Unfortunately everyone else knows this and wants to be there at the same time and so it's crowded and busy and you get pushed along at a pace that is much faster than an unfit person should be pushing themselves. Also it's in the middle of the freaking city and is a bitch to get to through traffic.
And so I've found a set of 51 stairs down by the river up to the highway overpass and will start my training there. A couple of months ago I had started and got up to 11 reps (I need to reach 22) but now I doubt I could do 5. It's only five months till the climb though so I need to get this fat arse moving!

On Saturday night we were hanging out with our good mate Brooksey and he asked me if walking the Bibbulmun Track (and again blogger is not being cooperative http://www.bibbulmuntrack.org.au/ ) would be something I would be interested in. Obviously not the entire way since it's roughly 1000kms and takes about 8 weeks but walking it for about a week. He said it was something he has been thinking about doing for a while and he would feel a huge sense of achievement by doing it.

I was very vague about it, wasn't non-committal but didn't say yes; the idea intrigued me but we were off sky gazing and I had other things on my mind. The thought has been niggling though and the more I think about it, the more I think I'd really enjoy doing that. The first part of the track is about 75kms and it goes down to Canning and I think that would be a really great starting point. It would only take about four days to do that and it would be a great test to see if we were up to going further.

Obviously I really need to start getting my fitness levels up if I'm going to achieve my new goals but I think it's going to be a blast along the way! I shall keep you all posted!

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Nerd alert!

I know, I know, don't scold me for being gone so long. I've been busy dammit! Not with anything in particular, just busy with work and the lead up to Christmas and being sick and you know, life.

So today is mainly a photo blog but there will be words as well, just to keep everyone happy!

Last week we had some amazing thunderstorms. One lasted ALL day and it was lucky I was off sick because Molly was so scared that if she had been wearing pants, she would have shit them. Every few minutes for most of the day there were huge peals of thunder, some close enough to make the house shake.
And with the thunder came some rain.
Actually, a little bit more than just some...

The pond in the park across the road flooded. It usually has an island in the middle. That day, it did not.





This sign is usually about three meters out of the pond.


I had most of the week off work. There's several things going round at the moment and God only knows which one I had. The doctor ran a barrage of tests but couldn't find anything wrong. It was probably a virus as there was no infection. I'm feeling better now, not 100% (maybe about 70%) but that's still better! He did find a 14mm mass in my lung but he thinks that's a lymph node or something. In another week I'll be having another x-ray to see if it's gone.

This weekend has been the nerdiest, funnest weekend I've had in a while. Yesterday we began the day by going to our friend Tiho's place and playing board games and having a bbq. We played Barbarossa and Scotland Yard, neither of which I had played before but both were fun.

Then we headed off to Mel and Jann's place for our annual friend Christmas dinner. Brooksey also came but unfortunately Chiaki and their baby Kenji are in Japan at the moment so our little group wasn't complete which was sad.
Mel has also been sick so instead of our normal Christmas fare we ordered pizza and took it easy. I had bought all the boys a pump action Nerf shotgun and so the fun began after present unwrapping time.
The grins on their faces were priceless when they unwrapped their boxes. I should have known then that the grins were slightly evil and I would spend most of the night getting pinged with discs.
We spent the next couple of hours shooting, running and hiding and trying to find the discs all over the garden. It was immense fun and the next time I get to the shops I shall be buying another two guns so Mel and I won't be defenseless and also some extra ammo.

As you can see the boys enjoyed their guns...just don't tell them I posted their pics...they only posed cos I promised I wouldn't post them on the webbernet. This is payback for taking a disc to the throat! It fucking hurt!

Let's play Boondock Saints!


Soon it was eclipse time and we set up the telescope. There was a bit of cloud so we missed some parts but it was amazing to see anyhow. We didn't have any luck attaching the camera to the scope so we just took pics with my camera on the tripod.


I'm not too sure what happened in this next photo that Christian took but I think it looks awesome.


This morning I got up and gave MadCarlotta a call and it was great chatting to her again. There was so much to catch up on that emails (even 10 a day) just don't cover!

Then this afternoon we took FPos out to a track day. FPos started out as PosCar (Piece of shit car) that Christian and Brooksey have been working on but turned into FPos (Fast piece of shit) by the time they'd finished as she's quite gutsy! We finally got her finished this week (by we I mean all of us - I helped even if that help is just 'pass me the 14 socket' or 'tighten this nut' or 'thanks for the coffee babe') and we were all looking forward to seeing how she'd run.

The take off was a bit hard to get right. The fly wheel is very light so the guys either spun the wheels and she bogged down or didn't give her enough revs and she bogged down but hey soon made up time. She understeers quite a bit so they were spnning her quite a bit but the beauty of these track days is the guys go out to have fun, it's not a comp so there's no competing for the fastest time. Kind of takes the pressure off.

So Christian was driving down the long track and was preparing to take quite a hard left corner and the car didn't under steer like he thought she would but instead, over steered. The back end came around and before he knew it he was sliding up over the curb, clipping one tree before coming to a very hard stop against another tree.

In this photo you can see where he came over the curb on the left, nicked that tree and the white tree to the right (at the end of the skidmarks) is the tree he hit.


Luckily he wasn't hurt, although he'll have quite a sore neck tomorrow I'm sure. He gave me a bit of a scare though but all ended well.

Except for FPos...she's rather banged up...


Now we just have to decided if we'll get another shell and move everything into that or try and fix the door and front bumper of this car. Either way I guess now we have another project to work on!

Overall though it was an extremely nerdy, extremely fun weekend!