Caught some grief from a falling leaf
As she tumbled down to the dirty ground
Said I shoulda put her back there if I could
But everyone needs a better day
And I’m trying to find me a better way
To get from the things I do to the things I should
~ Counting Crows, All My Friends
Just a few random photos taken on a run last week. You can tell from the fact that I was able to stop and take photos during a run that I was doing a lot more walking than running: my running schedule has been totally out of whack for most of this year, and by that I mean “I’ve hardly ever been doing it, and the people at the gym have forgotten what I look like”. I have lots of excuses why this has been the case, of course, but that’s exactly what they are: excuses. Now that we’re on the long, slow slide towards winter, though, I’m going to do my best to get out more often (I say that every week), if only to make sure I get as much sunlight as I possibly can. I know I joke about hating winter, but I genuinely get really depressed by the lack of light at this time of year, and the sad lamp doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, so I’m hoping some fresh air and exercise will. Even although my town looks a bit like a prison camp:
I’m always impressed by how Instagram filters can make things that are really very dull and dreary look beautiful. Someone should make Instagram filters for you EYES, seriously. Just think how popular they’d be!
When I was a kid, we used to call these things “Itchy Coos”:
We’d open them up and put the seeds down people’s clothes. It was ace. Terry tells me that, round here, they called them “Itchy Poos“. Which is just WRONG, really.
Also on my walk run, I found this mysterious piece of paper on the ground, and obviously I had to stop and investigate it, because it could totally have been a treasure map, or had some dark secret contained within it. Isn’t that always the way of it? It was for Nancy Drew. And the Famous Five.
I saw it as a prison at the foot of some mountains, and thought it was an interesting insight into how the children from this town view the place. Then Terry pointed out that it’s actually a submarine surrounded by OMGSHARKS. Which isn’t an insight into anything, really, but is still pretty cool. I mean, that’s a LOT of sharks, you guys!
In other news, as the clocks went back on Sunday morning, I downloaded a “countdown” app for my phone, which informs me that there are 143 dark days to get through until the clocks move forward again. DAMN. I wish I could just hibernate…
Tagged running
So, I decided to start running outdoors again. Yeah, I know: been there, done that, got the washed-out Nike t-shirt (actually it’s a tank top, but whatever) to prove it.
If you’ve been reading this blog since God was a teenager, however, you’ll know that I don’t tend to have much luck with running outdoors. Or even just being outdoors. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to say my last experiment in this area was a complete and utter failure. You see, I was afeared. I was scared in that way that I think most women are when they find themselves out in the middle of nowhere, on their own and with no-one to hear them scream should something bad happen. “What if someone tries to kill me?” I would think, as I plodded up some lonely woodland trail or other. “I bet they wouldn’t find my body for YEARS out here!” And so the fear drove me away from those pretty woodland trails and towards the streets near my house, around which I would circle endlessly, passing the same, suburban scenes over and over and over again, seeing the same people multiple times, and getting the same looks of shocked disbelief from them every single time. (If someone’s running in this town, it normally means the police are after them…)
This got very boring, very quickly. Eventually, it got SO boring that I headed back to the gym, and the treadmill. At least people don’t stop what they’re doing to stare at you on the treadmill, you know? Well, not ALL the time, anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the treadmill. It’s my “thinking” time. And sometimes it’s my “not thinking” time, where I just put on some good music and let my mind go blank. Or blanker than usual. Other times, though, it’s my “Damn, but this is BORING!” time, and when that started to be the case more often than not, my mind once again turned towards the idea of running outdoors.
This time would be different, I thought. This time I would not be afraid. I would run where I wanted to run, and I would ignore the incredulous stares. It would be ace!
So, one fine day in July (it was literally the ONE fine day in July, seriously), I pulled on my running shoes and headed out into the great outdoors. What could go wrong, I thought? I had a phone with GPS on it. If I got lost, all I had to do was pull up a map, and I’d be found. (Also, it’s a PHONE. That you can use to speak to people on). And if someone tried to kill me, why, I was a RUNNER! I would RUN AWAY. Fast. Or I would poke them in the eye with my keys. It would be fine!
And actually, it was fine. Our town didn’t really exist before the 1960s. It was one of the “new towns” that were built in Scotland around then, and it has a very 1960s look to it: lots of concrete, buildings like boxes, strange bits of “street art” that have long-since become so thickly coated with graffiti that they’ve actually started to look better than they originally did, in that grim, urban kind of way. There is, however, also a river, and the area around the river is rather lovely. Lots of woodland trails that make you feel like you’re out in the country, even although you’re smack-dab in the centre of town, water rushing, birds chirping, flowers, er, flowering… I even saw a group of bunnies, people, and what could be better than that? (Oh, and every now and then, dotted in amongst the foliage, will be some graffiti-coated concrete edifice from the 60s. It’s awesome, seriously.)
Well, I finished my run, and I LOVED it. I actually don’t know this town very well, or not on foot, anyway. In the car, I could take you anywhere, but I’ve never really walked around it, which is a shame, because there are so many little interesting footpaths and trails that it was like a little adventure. I was converted. I was going to be running outside ALL THE TIME from now on, I decided. It would be my “thing”. I would be Fearless Adventurer Amber! I couldn’t wait!
A couple of days later, then, I set out again, with the adventuring. Once again, I headed to the river, and I was having a fine old time. So I ran on. And on. And on. It was great. The trees! The river! More bunnies! And then, in the middle of nowhere, under a random bridge… a tramp! Um, OK. I stopped at this point. The Fear returned. It seemed obvious to me that this man would try and kill me. I mean, why else would you be hanging out under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, if not to kill the next random runner girl that went past? Well, no problem, I thought, I would just double back a bit, and pick up the trail further along the river.
You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? And I’m glad YOU can, because I certainly couldn’t see where I going. Leaving my country trail, you see, I found myself in a network of streets. This town is full of such networks. You get into them, and you can wander around for weeks, until someone stumbles across your poor, emaciated form and takes you in. Ironically enough, I knew exactly where I was. It was a part of town I’ve been to many times in the car, and a couple of times on foot, although on those occasions I was with Terry, who is a native of the town and knows its many secrets.
So I knew where I was: I just didn’t know how to get from there to where I wanted to be. Not on foot, anyway. If I’d had my car there, I could have driven straight home. That route, however, would take me along busy main roads, and wasn’t one I really wanted to take on foot, so I turned and plunged back into the woods, determined to work it out. Well, I ran and I ran. I ran for about a mile, and then the path I was on returned me abruptly to the same street I’d started from, having apparently taken me in a large loop. I turned around and set off again, this time taking a different route… which took me to slightly further along the same street I started from. Hmm.
Once again, I set off into the woods. There are lots of different routes through these woods, I discovered. You set off down one track, only to find it splitting into three more tracks a little way along it, with no clue where each of them leads. If only I’d been prepared, like the Famous Five, and brought a ball of string to unwind as I went, I might have had even the slightest clue where I was going, but alas, no. I knew I’d gone wrong again, when I encountered these:
What was disturbing about this was that I took this photo with my phone camera, which means I was just as close to those sheep as it looks. I was in a field with sheep! Sheep were in a field with me! This was ALL KINDS OF WRONG, and by now I was starting to get a little annoyed, mostly because it was getting close to lunchtime, and if I didn’t get home soon, I’d miss Neighbours. That right there tells you all you need to know, really, doesn’t it?
Well, I turned round and I retraced my weary steps. Arriving back, once again, at the street I’d started from, I encountered a woman in a car, who slowed down and asked me directions to the mall. “If I knew where I was, I might be able to tell you,” I said, which was actually a total LIE, because I am absolutely useless when it comes to giving people directions. I couldn’t direct you from my front door to the bottom of the driveway. I can’t read maps, either, which was why I now realised that when I’d come up with the whole “I can’t possibly get lost because I have Google maps on my phone” thing, I’d obviously been smoking crack:
The map, then, was no good to me, and time was a-wastin’, so I decided to admit defeat, call Terry and ask him to come and get me. This would be humiliating, sure: I mean, I was “lost” in a place I knew well, and which I could have driven home from in a matter of minutes, but I figured walking back along that route would be a) dangerous and b) time-consuming, so I sucked it up, got my phone back out…
… and it had no credit on it. OF COURSE NOT.
This has long been a bone of contention between Terry and I. When I got my iPhone, you see, Terry insisted we go for a Pay-as-You-Go tariff, his reasoning being that as I never, ever phone anyone anyway, it would be a waste of money to pay a monthly fee for it. “You could put £10 worth of credit on the phone and it would last you all year,” said Terry, little knowing that I would burn through three times that amount in the space of ten minutes at Gran Canaria airport just a few short months later.
We argued about this for a while. My fear was that, with Pay-as-You-Go, I would always run out of credit at the exact moment I most needed it. It was inevitable, I said. AND WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT, TERRY, HUH? HUH?
So I had no credit. I couldn’t phone Terry, or, indeed anyone else. And I had no money. Of COURSE NOT. Because when you go running in the middle of nowhere, you don’t take anything with you that could conceivably be of any use, do you?
So I sent Terry an email. The phone allowed me to do this, luckily. (Actually, the more I think about it, the more grateful I am that emergency calls are free on these things. Because if they weren’t, and I got into an ACTUAL emergency, I’d have to send the police an email saying, “Help! Am being attacked!” And, knowing me, because I really detest text speak, and can never bring myself to use it, I would type it all out totally correctly, and then spell-check it before hitting send.) Unluckily, however, Terry is not like me, and doesn’t spend all day hovering over his email like a giant bat. So it took him ten minutes to read my message, during which I had decided to embark upon the long road home, using the only route I knew would definitely take me there, and not send me back to the sheep.
Now, imagine you get an email from your wife saying that she is lost, and needs your help. What do you do? Do you call her, say? OF COURSE NOT. You simply send her an email in response, and you do this because YOU DO NOT KNOW HER PHONE NUMBER.
No, Terry and I do not know each other’s phone numbers. In fairness, we don’t really need to, because we have them programmed into our phones. This is of no use to Terry whatsoever, though, because when he got my email, his phone battery was dead. OF COURSE IT was. Terry’s phone is almost always dead, and when it’s not dead? It’s lost. He’s not big on the whole cellphone thing, either, you see.
Just to recap, then: my phone has no credit, his has no battery life. He doesn’t have my phone number, I don’t have a brain. WE FAIL. At everything. GOD.
To bring this lengthy story to an end, though, I emailed Terry my number, he called me, and a few minutes later, came to my rescue. And all the way home, he pointed out the routes I COULD have taken. Which is really the story of my life.
(I now take spare change with me when I go running. Terry keeps his phone charged, and I always have credit on my phone. Not all of these statements are true…)
Tagged phones, running, sheep
Anyone play Tetris? I’ve been playing it a lot this week. A LOT. I’ve been playing Tertris on my phone, in fact, every time my laptop has crashed and had to be rebooted. Which has been… A LOT. I’m seeing something new and shiny, and possibly red, or maybe white in my future. But until then, I’m playing Tetris on the iPhone non-stop. And when I play a lot of Tetris, this thing happens to me at night. I’ll go to bed as usual, I’ll close my eyes… and my brain will start to show me lots of little Tetris blocks, falling, falling, always falling. And rather than sleeping, I’ll lie there and try to play Tetris in my own fool head. It’s like I can’t switch it off.
The same thing used to happen to me at my first job. (Well, my second job, really, but those two weeks in McDonald’s don’t really count.) I worked in a call centre (Yes! I was one of THOSE people! How may I help you?) and the job was hugely repetitive, involving me typing more or less the same commands into the computer over and over again. And every night, after my shift, I would go to bed and when I closed my eyes, my mind would start repeating those same commands, over and over again. My hands would even twitch, as if trying to type on invisible keys.
Then I got a job working for the local paper as an “editorial assistant”, which was just another way of saying “typist”. My job was to type up the community news pages. It took me two full days per week, and must have involved the typing of thousands and thousands of words, to a deadline. After THAT job I’d go home and try to go to sleep, but every thought that went through my head, I’d feel like I should be typing it out, because my brain couldn’t seem to accept the fact that NO, there was no more typing required.
And now it’s running. I did a lot of running this week, all of it on the treadmill at the gym, because it was cold out and I can’t seem to find any routes near the house that don’t involve massive hills. (This will be changing next week, though, because honestly, The Others are going to land me in some serious trouble soon if their habit of clinging to my side like leeches doesn’t stop. And it won’t.) Then, last night, when I went to bed, I closed my eyes and saw… the front of the treadmill and the view out of the gym window. And my legs suddenly felt like they should be moving: left-right-left-right, runrunrun. No matter how many times I tried to think about something else, my brain would be all, “uh-uh. It wasn’t enough that we ran for an hour today. I’m going to make you relive every last step of that run, and I’m going to do it now. Unless you feel like playing some Tetris, maybe?”
I’m taking a couple of days off from running. And Tetris. (Well, maybe not Tetris, actually…) I think I need it…
Tagged running, tetris
Yesterday, Terry ran his first 10km. Everyone say “Yay, Terry!”
It was a proper race, too: with hills, and other people and stuff. Not like the 10ks I run in the gym. He got a t-shirt and a banana at the end of it and everything, which, quite frankly, is begging for some kind of “I ran for 10 kilometres and all I got was this lousy banana” joke, but I will refrain. (I don’t think he even ate the banana, either.)
Anyway, as I said, Yay, Terry! You rock! And also: roll. And that’s why last night we decided to go out to dinner to celebrate. I wore The Dress. You know, the one that was lost, and then was… well, was still lost, so was re-purchased, after huge amounts of whining on my part? THAT dress.
What I failed to consider, though, was that the dress is question has a huge skirt. And it was a very, very windy night. Which meant that, the second I stepped out of the car, the wind snatched up the skirt of the dress and pulled it right up over my head. Like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, only much less classy and my whole head was covered by it.
Just to make matters worse, when I finally managed to tear the fabric away from my head, I saw:
a) Terry doubled up laughing next to me
b) An entire balcony’s worth of people outside the restaurant, all just sitting there watching me as if I was the floor show. One man in particular stood and blatantly stared as I walked the rest of the way to the door with my skirt clutched between my knees and the wind still trying to drag it up around my face. That man was NO GENTLEMAN, let me tell you.
We had a nice meal, though. And I managed to keep my skirt in the proper place for the duration of it. I’m starting to think that dress is just unlucky, though…
Tagged missing green dress, running, Terry
Today I did my first ever 10km run. 10km!
And OK, I did it on the treadmill rather than outside, and I didn’t exactly break the land speed record in the process, but I did manage to run for the full 10km without stopping or walking, AND I did it without having my own choice of music to listen to, thanks to my iPhone deciding to reach critical battery when I still had two kilometres to go. I knew that if I reached my goal, I’d want to take the photo above (featuring a guest appearance by the enormous head of Lily Allen), so I had to turn off the phone and resort to watching the only music station available on the treadmill, which was called FLAUNT. And which played the most depressing video I have ever seen in my life. Evereverever. Seriously, it was by someone called “Just Jack” and it was called “The Day I Died.” Can you guess what it was about? CAN YOU?
“Now we have a song about a man who gets run over by a taxi,” intoned the disembodied voice-over man on FLAUNT. “And dies.”
And sure enough: the man got run over by a taxi. And died. We, the viewing audience, were treated to this event in all its heart-breaking misery. We saw the man get up, and have a jolly breakfast with his loving wife and cute little kids. We saw him kiss them goodbye, and leave for work, taking a quick moment as he opened the door to look back on his loving family and reflect on how very lucky he was to have them. The family, meanwhile, looked back at him, all smiles and thankfulness. And the whole time this was happening, we, the audience, knew that the man was about to be run over by a taxi. It actually made me want to die. I ran the whole of the last kilometre thinking “OMG! OMG! His wife! And those kids! It was just an ordinary day, but then he… he… DIED! Wah! What if that happens to me? Or Terry? Or my parents? What if, on this very ordinary Wednesday, I am, in fact, about to be run over by a taxi? And I’ll have spent the last 72 minutes and 38 seconds of my life running on the spot, on this stupid machine?”
What a total downer.
Seriously, if you run, and you’re looking for music to motivate you, don’t choose “The Day I Died”. Because at the end of my run, as happy as I was with the achievement, all I could think about was that poor, poor man, and his wife and kids. I hate FLAUNT. I’m charging my iPhone as I write this, so I never have to watch FLAUNT again. Then I’m loading it with songs called “Fluffy Bunnies Who Totally Don’t Die During the Song” and “No Taxis in This One!”
Anyway. I ran 10km, but I had the weight of the world on my shoulders for the last km, and was so depressed it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, so it was more like 12km. It was like FLAUNT actually wanted me to fail, you know?
I also have another milestone to celebrate this week, as The Fashion Police had its 3rd birthday yesterday. So I’ve spent three years now writing about how much I hate Crocs and harem pants, which I guess is quite an odd thing to spend three years doing when you could get run over by a taxi at any given time. Still, it pays the bills, so happy birthday, Fashion Police, here’s to three more taxi-free years! I hope.
Tagged just jack, running
It hasn’t been a good week for my clothes. No, I haven’t lost any of them, but…
First of all I managed to dye my running shoes grey. Yes, grey. They WERE a kind of beige colour, but all of that running I’ve been doing recently had turned them the colour of mud, basically, so when I got back from Wednesday’s run, I decided to throw them in the washing machine, so they’d be nice and clean for my planned trip to the gym the next day.
“And I will throw a bunch of BLACK clothes in with them!” I thought. “Because THAT won’t be a disaster at all!”
But of course, it DID turn out to be a disaster. Because the running shoes came out of the machine GREY. And that’s how I came to find myself making the Least Exciting Shoe Purchase in the Whole World Ever:
 running shoes, yesterday (Yes, I have noted the irony of the fact that I replaced my dyed-grey shoes with a pair of naturally grey shoes…)
In fairness, I had been planning to buy new running shoes for a while. It had become clear to me that if I intend to keep up the running, I would need two pairs of trainers, one for the gym and one for running outside. Because the gym will probably throw me out if I keep trailing mud across their nice clean floors, and it’s not exactly practical to keep washing them all the time. (The shoes, that is. Not the floors. I’m definitely not washing the gym’s floors, no way.) So I bought these, put the old trainers back into the machine for another spin (on their own this time), and, of course, they came out looking totally pristine and back to normal, so I really didn’t need the second pair at all, except I totally did. Whew!
Anyway, as I said, when I washed the shoes, I washed a bunch of other stuff at the same time, and one of those things was a black sports top of mine.
And when I tried to iron that black top? I burnt it, so now it has a giant iron-shaped mark, right in the middle of the chest. Excellent!
And when I let out a shriek and ran to switch off the iron, lest I damage something else with it? I caught the leggings I was wearing (for yes, readers I WAS WEARING LEGGINGS AND I DON’T EVEN CARE, SO THERE) on the back of Rubin’s “den”, and I ripped those leggings to shreds. Well, shred.
Total damages for the day: one pair of running shoes (now thankfully restored to working order), one top, one pair of leggings.
Not bad for a day when I only actually left the house once!
Tagged running, shoes, the gym
|
|
|
