Think Thin Thursday

Think Thin Thursday

This morning my fellow masochist running partner and I failed to come up with an appropriate excuse to avoid effort managed to overcome our logistical difficulties (did I mention my ear! [1] [2] [3] [4]… ok maybe I did), and hit the pavement (as I have pointed out I am rather robust and my running partner is not ballet dancer either) for only the second time this fine year. [Wow that was quite exceptionally bad grammar. You can come up for air now.]

Lets say it was not the most enjoyable jaunt around the park I have ever had. I could feel every one of the runs I had missed, aching in my muscles, telling me that I had left it for far too long. More importantly I could tell that I may have been dragging around a little excess baggage in the form of chocolate / hot dogs / M&S Bread and Butter Pudding. Oh how I will miss thee 😥

Now I don’t want to get all Bridget Jones on you, but I have decided that enough is enough. Don’t get me wrong, I am unlikely to go on a Diet as such, but do I really need to finish the packet of sausage, just because they will get left in the fridge, and just because my wife is eating for 2, do I need to share this part of the experience. After all she will loose weight breast feeding, Moobs dont do that!

So I weighed myself and in this era of honesty and transparency, I will declare that I came out at 98.5kg. Not necessarily as bad as I had feared, but a good chunk over my wedding weight. Now in previous efforts to shed the pounds, I have struggled to maintain the focus (It was a mistake to mention the M&S Pudding … mmm … must resist) so I have decided that I will name and shame myself. I will do a check in every 2 weeks and publicly (well, to the 6 or 7 people that read this blog) declare my weight.

Right … I need to post this before I think this through.

She’s totally been airbrushed!

(http://www.xkcd.com/331/)

I now do this at every opportunity! Especially about people!

I love xkcd.

If it’s not reading, then what is it?

I am stealing inspiration again. I was reading a post on Book Mama’s blog, one of the blogs that I read regularly, which asked where do you like to read.

I love to read, but like most people in the modern world I find I have far too little free time. I enjoy reading to my kids at bedtime, and I will say there is nothing quite as relaxing as reading a good book whilst having a hot bath. I always used to read in bed, but I find that it is the most sure-fire way of falling asleep, which is ironic as I struggle to fall to sleep when trying (I know, I know … read until I drop off, but then I end up reading the same page over and over) so I usually just read short form stuff like the Jeremy Clarkson books and Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit, which whilst being very entertaining are unlikely to change my life in any meaningful way.

So here is where I declare myself as a huge fan of audiobooks. They are great! For the past few years I have been listening to audiobooks whenever I get the opportunity, be it going to the shop to get groceries, loading the dish washer, cleaning the car, I even listened to a book whilst laying the lawn in my last house.

When I talk to people about it I find quite a lot of “book snobbery” (usually Mrs Geek), as if because I have not literally read the text of the book then I have not READ it. This does not make a great deal of sense to me. It is not like watching the film, the heavy lifting is still done by the imagination and I pretty much always go for unabridged titles. It is as if the act of reading the actual text validates my claim to having read the book.

I have not stopped reading to my son now that he can read for himself; on the contrary, he would complain quite bitterly if I did, as there really is something quite luxurious about being read to. He likes to read, if given good material, but he also loves being read to.

Actually I read to both of my children every night. Now they have not literally read the book, but they know it’s story, they have enjoyed the books content, should they not be entitled to say that they have read the book, and if not how you label their experience. Maybe there should be a more generic word for having consumed a book’s contents.

The way I see it, audiobooks are not a replacement for reading or even reading literature, they do however provide me with an opportunity to read consume book content more often and at times when reading would be entirely impractical.

The book I am currently listening to is A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian which has been given very good write ups and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, however I was finding it rather slow paced, and would probably have given up on it were I reading it. However it has grown on me and I will pass further comment later.

Things I Have Learnt Or Been Reminded Of This Weekend

1. In a cosmic ray a proton can be accelerated to have the same amount of energy as a tennis ball traveling at 50 miles per hour!
2. No matter how simple the shopping list … I have the capacity to miss something
3. Pizza always lands topping side down 😦



4. 1 portion of Marks and Spencer Pain au chocolat bread and butter pudding contains 114% of your standard daily fat allowance
5. I still want it
6. I should not underestimate my team’s capacity to underperform
7. Do not feed a 4 year old cheese before bed time
8. A 4 year old can produce enough vomit to cover ~2 square meters
9. Vomit defies most logical assumptions about direction of spray
10. A 4 year old rarely vomits just the once
11. Whilst further rounds of vomiting may not produce the same quantity of mess, it still creates THAT SMELL
12. I really REALLY HATE THAT SMELL

Shameless Self Promotion

OK it is time for some shameless self promotion, so fee free to skip this if you are not interested in the mechanics of getting your blog noticed.

Quite a while ago Helen produced a simple guide to getting a blog noticed. A number of those steps reuire you to place a link on your site to ensure that you are who you say you are.

First of all, if I could get those of you that have a Technorati account to fave me!

For example ChangingLINKS.com requires the following

Changing LINKS

I have also signed up with walhello.com

And

more to come I’m sure…

Sexual Time

Today I had one of those, I can’t stop laughing, moments. As much as LOL may get banded about, it is quite rare that I actually do laugh out loud.

I was playing table football with my son today, and we were playing for ages, when he told me that we were going to be going into “Sexual Time”. Well I was stunned! Upon interrogation he told me … “You know like on Fifa Street Soccer” … Now I am rapidly trying to reassure myself that I have not given my son an entirely in appropriate game, so I investigate further and he tells me … “You have half time … Full time … and Sexual Time” and the penny drops that he means Extra time, so I am failing quite badly in trying to suppress my laughter.

I have no idea how this got into his head … but as my wife said … I am glad he said it when he did and not somewhere more embarrassing.

This Happy Amnesia

On friday I got to feel the new baby kicking for the first time.

Mrs Geek has been able to feel it for a couple of weeks now, but she is a little closer to the action.

Feeling your baby kick for the first time is wonderful, truly an experience to be savoured and I will admit to both of us sitting there for quite a while in quiet rapture.

However I am also aware that a good friend of ours, who is currently due any day now, has been complaining for a couple of months, that she is being kicked and elbowed and generally abused from the inside. So when does it turn from this quiet and charming miracle change into a cut scene from alien with this creature trying to escape from your body by kicking its way through your ribcage.

The more interesting thing is that this is not our first. So you would think that Mrs Geek would be a little more apprehensive, but she seems blissfully unaware of what is in store, even labour seems to have been quite charming when looked at through the misty rose tinted vail of 4 years. What is it about pregnancy that causes such an effective amnesia?

I am sure if I could bottle it there would be a market for it somewhere.

What a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me

When we found out that we were having our first baby, Little Miss Arts Student (Now Mrs Geek) was still in her final year of university, and I was living at the opposite end of the country for my job. Now I am not a person that pays much time to regrets, but this is one of my biggest regrets in life. It meant that I missed much of the day to day changes of the early stages of the pregnancy.

Fast forward a couple of years and we decide that we will try for a new baby also. Well as a red blooded young (ish) man having watched far too much TV on how difficult it was to get pregnant (Only Fools and Horses and the film Maybe Baby were my chief sources of information) I must admit I really was looking forward to the trying, only to find that we had achieved the goal within the first month. Bugger!Horay!.

However I got to experience my wife’s pregnancy from start to finish. Now I will say it now and I will try not to repeat it too much in any manner that can be used in evidence but my wife is beautiful. I see people thinking all too often, and have to admit it myself, she is a good way out of my league. However she was foolish enough or drunk enough or more likely both to fall for me so who am I to grumble.

But on top of this, and as cheesy as it sounds, when pregnant she glows. Not in the old ready brek kind of way you understand, but she just seems to have something very magical about her. It is bizarre. I don’t want it to sound like a fetish or anything creepy, it really isn’t anything course like that, it is just that some how between the nausea and the fatigue, she radiates something that I can not describe in anything other than gushy nonsense. Alas she married a crass rugby playing physicist rather than an artsy fartsy poet (proof by example), and so I again find myself falling short of what she deserves.

So fast forward another three years and the topic of having another child comes up for serious discussion. I would be lying if I told you that the thought of not seeing her pregnant again did not enter into my thought process when we were deciding whether to have another baby. Now don’t get me wrong I want another baby, but watching my wife blossom and go through this journey all over again also went a good way to sweeten the deal.

The thing is that this is one more than we had originally planned, I know that she does not like the idea of saying “no more”, and I believe that any sign that I might be willing to have more will one day be used against me, but that way lies people carriers and bankruptcy. So how do I convince myself that enough is enough and that I have been lucky to have witnessed this miracle twice (if not thrice).

Anyone got a spare philosophers stone

My little girl has just grasped the concept of death. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but she is now concerned.

This is the conversation we had the other day

Daughter : I’ll miss you very much
Me : Why, where are you going
D : When you die.
Me : What!?!?
D : Are you going to die soon? You have lines on your head ?!?!
Me : What (worried thoughts. is she psychic, can she sense death?)
D : The lines on your head … like Gran
Me : Oh you mean wrinkles (A bit harsh … but I’m not dying now so I’ll let is slide). No I’m not going to die, I want to watch you grow up.
D : When will you die (She is persistent)
Me : Never (in for a penny)
D : OK

So you see it would seem that I may have to up the anti on my training regime as I am now contractually* obliged to achieve immortality. Looking back though I’m still not sure I am happy about the “Lines like Gran” comment.

[* it’s a verbal contract … it’ll never hold up right …]

Looking inside the bump

Today marked the beginning of Week 20 and as if to mark the day we went in for the Second Scan. There is something really cool about going for the ultra-sound. I will admit, probably better for me than Mrs Geek, as I got to watch the whole time while the technician took all the measurements.

The image is incredible, you can see the hands and feet, you could to count the vertebrae if you had the inclination (and the time). However for some reason they only have 2D Scans with a very limited depth of vision. Why. I get that this is the NHS, but they could charge £10 for a DVD of their session and the machine would pay for itself.

I digress, As much as I may bitch and moan, it was a great experience. So here is a picture of inside the Bump.