How Many Halves Make a Goal?

It is a sad fact that as you get older you tend to run more slowly. It does depend on when you start training, mind. I started at 40 and did my best times a few years later. I might have further PBs in me if I worked harder at it, but I have other priorities just now. I mainly just run for health and for fun these days; anything else is gravy.

As I understand it, the muscles can cope with the stresses and strains of hard training for about 15 years before they lose the ability to incorporate more muscle fibre (or something like that). I must admit to being a bit grey on all the specific physiology. One can still run perfectly well, but just not at appreciably faster speeds. We have 60 year olds in the club that used to crank out 6 minute miles and still easily do 8. At my best a few years ago I never got below 8 minute miles for a ten mile race, so it is more genetic than anything; but age does tell.

The thing is, once you aren’t improving your race times and you accept that you aren’t going to, there has to be another motivation. Most of us need some sense of making progress, of improving in some way. Many people just discard all their PB (personal best) race times before a certain age and start over chasing best times since age 50, or some such. Others go over the top with mileage, plodding on for 2 or 3 hours at a time. One guy, Ron Hill, aged 72, has run every single day for the last 46 years, or something crazy like that. Some runs only have lasted 10 minutes, but he hasn’t missed a day even when practically on his death bed. Impressive, but mental.

Then there are the traveling runners. I mentioned, a little while back, the 100 marathon club. This isn’t so much about mileage, I don’t think, as it is about travel. One marathon, 26.2 miles, a week is nothing for your average road runner if that’s all you do. The point about this, besides wearing the t-shirt to the pub, is getting out and seeing the country with your friends. These folks tend to be retired and whilst they are by all means fit, they are just plodding through the miles.The running part sounds hopelessly boring to me, not to mention really expensive for the quality of travel experience one would have.

Our friend, Bob, recently set himself the goal of running 100 half-marathons. This makes a lot more sense to me as a half generally only takes 2 or 3 hours and if you are fit you can have a shower, a good lunch and go back to normal life. Already having 70 under his belt, this is a very realistic goal. I’m guessing he’s been running about 25 years now.

I got to wondering if a person ran 200 half-marathons, would that be the same as being in the 100 Marathon Club? Halves are my favourite race distance, but Bill remarked the other night that he was beginning to favour 10Ks (6.1 miles). I’ve only done 13 half-marathons so far, so 200 is a long way away! Maybe I could just add up the miles on my race log (986 race miles in 14 years) and aim for 2,610 miles, the equivalent of 100 marathons? That might take a while, too.

We runners can spend endless hours poring over running logs and playing with numbers. We really are a boring lot. Good job we have each other to inflict ourselves on.

Female Detectives

I’ve long been a lover of detective stories. I grew up in a house with stacks of paperbacks and cut my teeth on Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and (writing as A.A. Fair) Donald Lam stories. Mom introduced me to Dick Francis and I inherited her collection of his books, which I’ve kept topped up ever since; sadly, I've just learned that Francis died only recently, on the 16th of February (yesterday as of this writing).

I’ve mentioned previously that Bill and I both love Peter Wimsey books, particularly the later ones which were incomplete until finished by Jill Paton Walsh, whose other books I keep meaning to hunt. Sadly, while the Campion TV shows starring Peter Davison are quite good, the original books by Margery Allingham were a bit disappointing. I've read her biography; she had quite a difficult life.

It turns out that my friend, Vivien, also likes detective stories, but she has two criteria: they have to have been written by a woman and the detective has to be a woman. She has discovered two series that she quite likes and has generously been loaning me these in installations each time we meet up.

One is a rather daft but amusing series by Elizabeth Peters, an amazingly prolific author whose other titles I've yet to explore. It's about a family of Egyptologists, written from the perspective of the journals of the main character, the wife, Amelia Peabody Emerson. Set in Victorian England (and Egypt), they are written very tongue in cheek and one could not really enjoy these without a wry sense of humour. It took me a while to appreciate this, but once I did I found them quite a good laugh. I’m not too fussed about Egyptian stuff, but the adventures do catch you up in the mysterious foreign-ness of the place and the plots are tricky enough to pull you through. I don’t particularly identify with any of the characters, per se, but neither do I have any trouble finishing once I’ve started.

The other series I’m in danger of having to buy myself, I’m afraid. I re-read these books 2 or 3 times before returning them. Sue Grafton titles her books in alphabetical order; she's up to U and I do hope she doesn't stop at Z! I’ve just finished F and G. Grafton writes about her 30-something year old, twice divorced, California dectective, Kinsey Millhone in a rather terse style that reminds me of my beloved Donald Lam/Bertha Cool books and something else. Never mind that I become Kinsey when I'm reading just as I move into and practically live whatever film I'm watching (Heaven help anyone who interrupts my viewing). Remember the cop-speak of the TV series Dragnet? Sort of like that. She’s even a runner (3 miles every day), how cool is that? The books can be read in any order, you get a precise of the main characters in each, but the stories are sequential and linked, so I recommend that approach.

In return for such rich reading, I have introduced Vivien to Phryne Fisher; I do hope she’ll enjoy them even half as much as I’ve enjoyed Peters and Grafton.

Writing this has reminded me that I also I love the Mrs. Bradley TV series with Diana Rigg. It has just occurred to me to perhaps look into the books it originated from, by Gladys Mitchell! See how useful it is to blog?!

Organising Time

When I was at work, my time was pretty much organized for me: everything had to fit in around going to work. If you work away from home, I would imagine your situation is much the same, but I’m retired now. I think occasionally about looking for a very part time job, just to have another outside interest and a bit a money trickling in, but nothing comes of it.

One would think that, given all my free time and energy, I would accomplish major feats, but no. I have a long list of things I would or might like to do. This is 21 pages long, thanks to Getting Things Done which proposes you write down every passing thought onto a list. It probably says more, but I’ve not actually bought the book. The list doesn’t seem to shrink much because new and urgent things pop up daily. I’m not getting to all the things I’d like to. I will freely admit that this is in part due to laziness and the only cure for that of which I am aware is enthusiasm.

I’ve looked for role models in my life, but I’m different to them. Mom could cook for Heaven and she had creativity in every fibre, but the house was a tip. Grandmother kept a large busy household running and ran her own business, but I never saw her crack a book. My Aunt Rita was the queen of sewing and DIY, but frugal was a foreign language. Grandma ran a house where there was a place for everything and that was where it could be found, but she was senile by the time I was 12 so I don’t know what else she could do, other than knit wash cloths.

There are any number ideas about how to organise one's time on the internet. There are the Flylady routines, where one makes the bed upon getting out of it, wipes the bathroom down before leaving it, wears lace up shoes, spends 15 minutes a day uncluttering, some other amount of time finding 27 things to throw away, dresses in PJs after dinner and keeps the sink shining. Some of this is excellent and the ideas are copied widely. The ‘How to Unclutter’ principles are platinum, but I dunno, I’m hoping there is more to retirement than housework. If you really did all those routines to the letter I’m not sure there is.

Pleasantview Schoolhouse has a day for this or that: laundry, baking, kitchen cleaning, etc, etc. She sews a lot and has a great Etsy shop with good turnover, she’s a sometime lawyer, has regular church functions and social events. She’s also got 2 teenaged daughters who are home-schooled and I’m thinking fairly helpful.

The time honoured routine would fall down for me from the first, as we need to do a load of laundry most days to take advantage of our clothes drying rack; we nearly never use the tumble dryer. Home Ec-101 and many other sites have allocated tasks for each day and presumably these are also aimed at women who work full time; we can’t all be lounging around the house all day!

I had a routine before Christmas that sort of worked, except that I tend to run out of steam after Wednesday. In addition to an hour of housework each day, which just kept things picked up, washed and laundered, I aimed to spend at least an hour taking care of other matters:

Mon: Finances, correspondence & office tasks, run 1 hour
Tues: Sewing/crafting, do errands
Wed: Write for blog, ironing, run 1 hour
Thu: Etsy, Amazon, genealogy
Fri: Ebay, work in kitchen, special cooking, run 1.5-2.5 hours
Sat: Work in garden & house, visit museum, etc. with Bill
Sun: Rest, putter, hang out with Bill

Each day has a long list of things under each category. In my former job, I could manage a lot of diverse tasks by just inching each project forward a little each day. Ebay and Etsy don’t inch forward very well, though. They eat time like the dinosaurs in the old movies ate towns and there isn’t much to show for it. Then Christmas crafting took over and I hardly moved from the chair that was surrounded by fabric and sewing tools. The floor looked like an abstract painting and my fingers stayed sore. That was familiar territory again: making lists and chasing deadlines.

I noticed that I didn’t get much dressmaking type sewing done last year and this is something I’ve wanted to learn for a very long time. If I don’t acquire those skills now, when will I? And if I don’t perhaps I should just accept that it’s not my thing and get rid of all that stuff I’ve been collecting for years until I had this time. I decided that I would try to make it a priority to do my sewing for an hour each day, whether I ‘felt like it’ or not. Aiming for every day, I get there maybe 3-4 days a week. A friend remarked that this was ‘terribly disciplined’ but I know she has loads more discipline in her life than I do; it’s just so routine to her now she doesn’t notice it.

That’s what I need: a routine. What’s yours?

A Corking Good Gift

Vivien gave me this, partly as a joke, she said. The joke part was the little knitting doll that "Keeps our little ones busy," but then she worried I wouldn't know what to do with the product, so she gave me a booklet for children with a ton of ideas, though many of them involve making larger versions of this loom. I was intrigued to find that the booklet calls it 'corking', which I'd never heard of.

I thought it was brilliant! I did this as a child on a thread spool with little nails in it (as did, apparently, everyone else who sees me doing this), only we called it ‘French knitting’. Once I finally figured out the instructions again, it has been almost compulsive. The box fits neatly in my purse. I French-knitted in the car all the way to Middlewich and back; I sit in boring committee meetings for the running club and knit.

This is a child’s kit and so the tool for moving the yarn is a very blunt piece of wood that doesn’t work very well. I immediately replaced with a small metal crochet hook. I’m thinking that the original stick should make it through airport security in a pinch and I could try other pointy objects – e.g., the tine of a plastic fork – to pass the time on any flights we might take in the coming year. I’m really excited about being able to do crafts on an airplane again. I know that the US TSA allows knitting needles, something I’ve never understood; I wouldn’t try that one on here in Europe.

So, what am I going to do with the first resulting tubes of yarn? Cover hangers, of course.

My Funny Valentine

Well, Bill went and got a new car; not a new, new car, just new to him. He traded a 2005 Citroen C-4 for a 2008 Citroen Loeb, also a C-4, but a sportier model. The strange thing about this is that it is a diesel sports car. Bill said he’d always laughed at the idea of a diesel sports car until he rode in Simon’s diesel Mini-Cooper. It moves.

I’m not wild about this, I’ll admit; though I’d be the first to say it’s his money and he’s at perfect liberty to do with it exactly as he likes. I just haven’t figured out what was wrong with the last car. I thought Bill was enjoying having an automatic transmission for his hour-or-so commute down to Stockton, on the A-19, a rather nasty highway often with stop-and-start traffic.

However, Bill has changed cars every couple of years since I’ve known him. I can’t begin to list them all. I remember a white Vauxhall when I first met him, which was pretty quick, a big estate car (known in the US as ‘station wagon’), a bouncy Jeep-like thing called a Daihatsu, and the last but one before this, a Citroen C-3 which was very cute but a cross between a standard and an automatic transmission that was weird, maybe even dangerous, to drive.

This car is a funny shape – even Bill says that – and it is fire engine red. I was used to charcoal grey, racing green or a dignified burgundy. I don’t know whether Bill likes it better for the colour or not; I suspect he does as he mentioned to me that it had red seats as well. I notice it also has something like charcoal coloured suede on the upholstery and part of the door panel and it appears that I can choose the temperature of the air that comes out of the vents on my side, which is nifty.

Another of the stranger things about these cars is that they are numbered, like collectable china, and that you can join a club and put a picture of your red Loeb Citroen with its particular number on the internet beside everyone else’s red Loeb Citroens. It’s just about the silliest thing I ever heard of….boys and their toys… mumble… grumble.

All that said, I gather Bill is pleased with his car; he said he was looking around for an ‘interesting’ diesel and these are relatively rare. He will get excellent gas mileage (instead of just really good) for his long commutes. I think the thing that really convinced him that having this car was kismet was finding it mentioned in the Peter Wimsey book he was reading the night before he went to pick it up:

“Well, that’s all, except a fragment consisting of ‘oe’ on one line…”

“Yes, well?...

“Well, I don’t know. Poet, poem , manoeuvre, Loeb edition, Citroen – it might be anything.”

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetie!!!

Hope you really enjoy your funny new red car!

Sunderland Glass Museum

Vivien and I had a day out at the Sunderland Glass Museum (actually, it's called the National Glass Centre, but neither of worked out why). Sadly I forgot my camera, but you all know what glass looks like, right? If not, you can take a tour at the link above.

It was an interesting combination of science and art, this museum. Parts were aimed at children (I got those) and others at scientifically minded adults (Much was over my head. I got my only-ever "D", in junior high physics. I struggle to grasp 3-dimensional ideas, never mind invisible forces).

We visited the featured art exhibit and whilst I mainly thought the artist was having us on – a frequent experience when looking at modern stuff – it did demonstrate the similar qualities of glass and water and that was sort of interesting. I knew it, of course, but hadn’t thought about it like that before. So I guess it qualifies as art, but this art wasn’t useless…you could actually water your horse or your dogs at those metal troughs.

Then there was the science. First of all, glass is made from heating of sand (silica), lime (for stability, else it would melt in water) and soda. There were interesting samples of naturally created glass: obsidian (from volcanos), tektites (from meteoritic impact) and fulgurites (formed when lightning strikes sand).

Glass and time could be said to have a relationship, in that we can measure time in an hourglass, freeze time using a camera lens and see the distant past in space using a telescope.

The science room had many hands-on exhibits to play with. I would love to have had a camera to snap a picture of Vivien and me in the carnival mirror, both about 2 feet tall. We fiddled with some glass and coloured lights; the principles of colour and light are quite different to those of colour and paint. (For an almost comprehensible explanation of this, and a cracking read, see Dick Francis’s book, Reflex). There were exhibits about how the eye works (We actually see everything upside down, our brains just turn it around for us); about optical correction and how things look through a microscope; about how prisms refract light. There was an exhibit that talked about the speed of light and another about how the brain can read some words backwards and upside down but not others, which was amusing.

There was one exhibit that shows you as others see you, an interesting concept. As an aside, I sometimes look in the mirror and see (sober, even) a likeness to my beautiful mother. Most of the time I see Timothy Spall's older, but slimmer, sister. This mirror showed me the latter, but more importantly it demonstrated how used we are to seeing our reverse in the mirror. I looked in a regular mirror and raised my left hand, then stepped around the corner and was completely confused because it looked like I had my right hand up. It was the kind of confusion where your brain gets a bit dizzy and your stomach flips. I didn’t really understand it until later at the house, Vivien demonstrated this for Bill and I saw that yes, when she sits across from me and raises her left hand, it looks to me as though she has her right hand up because it is on my right hand side. The penny dropped; of course all this paragraph isn’t worth even a penny. We were talking on the way down about how differently our brains seem to work after retirement (more clumsy, less decisive); this was a defining example for me, but I’m not going back to work just now, in spite of it.

Then we made our way to the glass blowing exhibition. We got side-tracked by some students, a boy and a girl, who were working, poking the long metal tube into the orange-hot furnaces and handling the blob of glass either by rolling the tube on two horizontal bars to keep the force of gravity even, or manipulating the blob with huge tweezers, thick gloves or asbestos pads. They were clearly learning as neither seemed to make much progress. Then we heard a voice though a microphone and realized the presentation was in a room at the end.

Between the Mackem accent and the poor acoustics I didn’t understand a great deal of the woman's explanation, but watching the young man work was magic. He had the muscles and the very large glass of drinking water that I expected of a glass blower, having read Shattered, another Dick Francis book. What I hadn’t read about was that he moved with the elegant confidence of a dancer. I can imagine that working with something so dangerous and potentially disfiguring as mobile, molten glass and the extreme heat of the ovens, this would be a life-saving grace. Thinking back to the students, the girl still moved around like she was any old where, but the young man was beginning to develop his Astaire style.

When we first arrived I would have said the demonstrator was making a vase, but then it was a wide mouthed bowl and finally a lovely fluted plate. It was placed in an annealing oven, just as I expected, as glass that cools too quickly can shatter, and if the Francis book is right, even explode. Even if not, it still made a great story.

After that we browsed in the shop. Some of the glass jewelry there was gorgeous and I read about an exhibit of sea glass jewelry. I only recently heard about sea glass from surfing the net a while back and have collected any suitable pieces (mostly green, white or pale blue) from beaches near and far. Chris, Jane’s husband, now faithfully collects it for me from his beach at Avoca, bless him. According to the artist whose work was in the museum shop, glass workers in this area used to fling their leftover glass into the sea; the glass works around here closed down in the 1930s. She says she finds all her own, so I'm thinking I may need to go beach combing south of the Tyne or around the Wear more often. I find sea glass a fascinating subject all by itself: trash becoming treasure!

In the shop I also saw and recognized this girl’s work. I say girl, I’ve no idea how old she is, only that she is the niece of a friend from the running club. I managed to resist it all. I need more jewelry like I need warts to wear.

Then we had lunch overlooking the River Wear and the Port of Sunderland. We hogged the table long after we finished our food and tea, chattering away. Finally we made our way back to my house and Vivien came in for a cup of coffee until Bill came home from work and she made her way home for dinner.

There is nothing really remarkable about all this to you, I know, but it is to me. For one, we laughed like girls all day. I don’t laugh out loud very often, so this is great fun. We don’t see each other more than once a month on average, if that, so we never run out of what to say. Also, this is a lady who used to be my boss off and on through the vagaries and misery of my employment in the NHS. She was a tough cookie but a good boss, and somewhere along the line we became friends. She, and her husband, retired about a year after I did. That friendship is one of the valued gifts that moving to this soggy island with its complicated culture has given me.

I’m looking forward to our, as yet unplanned, day out!

Saving Photos

The combination of getting a digital camera for my birthday -- gosh, is it two year ago already? -- writing this blog and wanting to illustrate it, and finding distant relatives with whom I want to share family photos has made me conscious of how much easier it is to enjoy computerized photos.

One can share them on a photo website such as Photobucket, email them individually, put them on a CD or memory stick to wrap as a gift, use them as a slideshow screensaver or just browse them at leisure whilst waiting for the computer to do something else. Whilst I’ll always keep my Mom’s and Grandparent’s tattered leather and ribbon photo albums with their rough black pages and stick on photo corners, I'm not inclined to be doing much with book-like photo albums and my holiday snaps any more.

Not that I ever did. I have a large box full of Kodak envelopes from holidays gone by that never made it into albums. For the first years of living here in England I always tried to take a selection of pictures in a small album to share my most recent adventures with friends and family back in the States; this blog has obviously taken over from that in a big way.

My current big project is to scan all my photos, to discard any that are just scenery and then figure out what to do with the ones I keep. I’m not alone in this. This project got started a long time ago when I was still thinking about albums. I put the photos into big envelopes I collected from the incoming post at work. They were grouped by a) the decades of my life (50’s, 60’s etc), b) before I was born (Mom and Dad were professional photographers and took loads of photos of family members), c) after I came to England in 1995 (my first major travel experiences as well as life in England). That’s as far as I got for ages.

When I first came over, all my stuff was in storage waiting for me to have it shipped. I lived in hospital accommodation provided for foreign doctors. It was a three bed roomed flat with a sitting room, kitchen, toilet and bathroom. My first flat mate was a man, which was a very odd experience to me, sharing a flat with a stranger and a male. Nikolaos was junior registrar neurosurgeon from Greece. He was married with a small daughter, but his family was still in Athens, as his wife was a psychiatrist and her English was not sufficient to allow her to practice in England. The opportunities to further his career unfortunately did not exist there. He was about my age and rather attractive, always smartly dressed, and friend but in a polite rather than familiar way, if that makes sense.

On the rare occasion when he wasn't on call at the weekend, he would sometimes invite me to accompany him on an excursion. I don't think I took up his offers very often, but on one occasion we ended up taking the Metro to the coast at Tynemouth. He may have been the one who introduced me to the flea market there, come to think of it. Anyhow, I remember he handed me his camera and asked me to take his picture with the various landmarks (abbey, castle, church) of Tynemouth beach in the background. Nikolaus was full of opinions (being male, Greek and a doctor would apparently incline one in that direction) and one that he shared that day as stayed we me ever since: “A picture without a person is just a postcard.”

So, now anything that is ‘just a postcard’ is scanned and binned. Photos of people I no longer remember don’t even get scanned. Photos of people I remember but don’t like anymore might or might not get scanned depending upon how significant they were or how nice the scenery is. They may get deleted later, I don’t know.

The main question is what to do with the photos I keep? They come in all shapes and sizes, so were I to put them in a photo, it would have to involve those same stick on photo corners, I think. The peel back and cover plastic albums become more permanent than I would wish. So I’m still looking for solutions. I’m inclined towards a shoe box or two and a notebook with pockets for the larger photos, to be honest!

How do you store your photographs? Is it different for family photos than for holiday snaps?