Dull and boring

I have had a cold this week, it has mostly gone but I still have an annoying cough. Especially annoying when I am trying to sleep. Now my knees are (I believe) suitably recovered from Expo, I want to go running again, but if I am coughing lots it seems a bit foolish.

I am continuing to look for suitable postdocs / jobs, this week a job in New Zealand has come up which I will apply for. I suspect that I stand even less chance of getting it than I did with the Cambridge one, but I figure I should apply anyway, just in case. The job does sound really interesting, and New Zealand would be a very cool place to live (skiing, caving, 'tramping', cycling...). This time I plan on not waiting till the deadline to apply...

Morecambe Bay

We have just got back from a week at Morecambe Bay with Olly's parents. We stayed in Saltcotes Annex in Arnside towards the north-east of Morecambe Bay. It was a lovely place to stay, a nice cottage, amazing views and lots of nice walking. We managed to see quite a lot of the surrounding area, which was good because we are contemplating moving up there at some point.

When we got back I had an email from Cambridge telling me that I hadn't got the postdoc. Although it was what I expected, I am still a little disappointed, but I am glad they told me as I was getting impatient to know.

More Cooking

I have recently been trying to cook new and different things, with generally better success than I expected. Here are the things:

Pineapple Upside down cake - not bad at all
Lemon Cream flan - really nice, will make this again!
Strawberry and balsamic vinegar Ice cream OK, but not worth the effort (especially without an ice cream maker)
Pineapple Sorbet - really nice, will make again but with less sugar

Lemon and poppy seed drizzle cake

I made a cake, and it tasted nice!

It was a lemon and poppy seed drizzle cake to use up the lemons I got for 5p from Asda the other day. The recipe only uses two lemons per cake, so I was forced to make a second cake today :) it is currently in the oven, hopefully it will taste as good.

There are still a couple of lemons left, so I think I will look for another lemon recipe, and see if I can make something else nice.

Old House

I walked to Tesco this morning (and they did sell poppy seeds, horray!), and on the way spotted that the house I lived in the first year I was here is for sale.

Sadly there is no photo of the room that I rented (it was the 'rear reception room'), but generally little appears to have changed. I will be interested to see what it sells for.

Asda

I am undecided whether I love or hate Asda at the moment. I hate that they no longer sell Smart Price basmati rice, poppy seeds, or normal orange lentils. I love that if you go at the right time in the evening you can get great reduced stuff. This week I have got: mangos for 10p each, a whole pineapple for 10p, bag of 5 lemons for 5p, a bag of 5 kiwifruit for 10p, melon for 12p, 4 x little gem lettuces for 10p, loaf of bread for 16p, big bag of stir-fry vegetables for 12p, 3xcourgettes for 10p and a few other bits and pieces. It is nice to be able to fill a whole rucksack with nice food for less than a fiver. Amazing!

We made very nice smoothies from some of the fruit, bread+butter pudding with the bread, and if I can find somewhere that sells poppy seeds, I hope to make lemon+poppy seed cake...

No news on the postdoc yet, they contacted at least one of my referees on Monday, but not heard anything since. I suspect that I haven't got it, but it will be nice to find out for definite.

Postdoc Application

A very interesting sounding post-doc came up in Cambridge, so I applied last Friday. I got a nice email this morning saying that they received my application. I guess now I have to wait patiently to hear back...

Turns out that I am not very good at waiting patiently.

I don't think I will get it unless I am the only applicant, but I decided that that wasn't a reason not to apply. Interesting post-docs don't come up very often, let alone in a city we where we have a house. At least I do now have an up-to-date CV and a covering letter (thanks to the help from people on EH and at The CBB.).

Remote Places

I watched Mountain on BBC1 last night, it was really good, but I was disappointed that it was the last in the series. Hopefully it will be repeated soon!

The stuff about how even Everest has footprints all over it (and needs littler to be collected from it) got me thinking about how few places there are that hundreds of people haven't already visited. It made me realise how lucky I am to be able to explore caves in Austria that no-one else has ever been in. Even the caves that we are re-exploring were visited by only a handful of people in the 1970's and 1980's, commonly less people than have been to the moon! And within these caves, many of the passage we walk/crawl down, and the pitches we descend have never been seen by anyone, and quite possibly never will be seen by anyone else.

It certainly is very exciting to be crawling/wriggling along a passage with no idea what will come next because no-one has ever been there before, will it stop? will it get larger? will there be pretty formations?

Caving is great :)

Back from Austria

Got home from Austria on Tuesday having had a great caving expedition.

We found quite a lot of new cave, mostly in a cave that was explored in 1987. We managed to connect this to another cave via a huge ice formation, at the bottom you could see layers in the ice. Presumably the white ice corresponds to winter, and the thinner dark muddy layer from summer. The ice at the bottom must have been at least 40 years old!

We got to the top of the ice via a different passage, here the entire chamber had an icy floor, and some very cool curved icicles. I guess the ice must have flowed slightly to create them. I will try and post some photos later.

Despite finding lots of cave there is loads and loads more to be found, so hopefully we will be back next summer!

Green dust and chocolate...

... but fortunately not together.

The woodwork in our house (skirting boards, door frames, banisters, etc) are a range of colours, mostly darkish brown downstairs and darkish green in the kitchen and upstairs. The green is a horrible colour and they are all really tatty (you can see bits of white, pink and purple), so I am on a mission to re-paint them white. This involves some sanding, currently I am working on the upstairs banisters, so sanding generates lots of nasty green dust which gets *everywhere*.

I've bought 676 chocolate bars this week, but they aren't all for me! They're for the caving expo in the summer. I bought them over three trips to the supermarket (so I could carry them home, and not buy all the shop had), I was kind of interested to see what the cashier would say each time. The first time she commented twice that I must really like chocolate, and when I said they weren't all for me, so looked quite unconvinced!

The second time, I got no comment at all on the chocolate, but the cashier seemed surprised that after putting through around 250 choc bars, the two "Healthy Balance" yoghurts were mine as well. I was very temped to say "well, you cant live on chocolate alone" but was too shy :)

The third time I got no comment at all which was rather dull. I think the cashier was still asleep.

Next I need to buy 250 packs of instant noodles...

Back from Cambridge

We finally got back from Cambridge on Tuesday, we ended up staying for over two weeks rather than the planned week, but we got lots more done. We:

*Replaced the rotten old front door with a nice new hardwood double glazed door with 5 lever lock
*Sanded down and painted the shed door
*Cut down the dead tree in the back garden, and got rid of all the wood
*Planted some new plants in its place
*Supported the fence
*Painted some of the fence
*Re-attached the back door frame
*Cleared lots of gunge out of the kitchen drainage

As well as some general gardening and cleaning, including the horrible job of removing the maggots that had accumulated in the kitchen waste bin. Yuck! At least the lodger should empty the bins more often now...

Stuff

I took a big bag of paper recycling to the banks by the park yesterday. There are loads of signs up in the park saying that they are going to restore a lot of the old features (bridges, and buildings mainly) which will be great. I hope they do it quickly, while we still live here!

We are off to Cambridge today for a week or so, so I am busy sorting stuff out in preparation. Olly seems to have infected me, and I now find packing boring and stressful, I am sure it used to be fun and exciting. Maybe I am just getting old?

Australia?

There is a postdoc advertised at Canberra, Australia. I have decided to apply for it and have spent most of the morning attempting to update and improve my hideous five year old CV. CV writing is hard! I got sufficient brain melt that I couldn't even remember the title of my M.Sc. dissertation...

I suspect there will be better qualified candidates than me, but decided that that wasn't a reason not to apply. Canberra sounds a nice place, Australia sounds a nice country, and the postdoc sounds great. It will be useful to have updated my CV as well.

This should also motivate me into finishing of the paper based on my PhD, as it will be my only publication!

This Weeks Running

Here is this weeks fairly dull training update :)

TRAINING
Sun 6th May - Sat 12th May
Number of runs: 3
Running: 9.07 miles
Running increase: 10.7%
Walking: 11 miles

Increased my running miles by 10% which is what I was aiming at so I am happy. Apparently if you increase more than that you are more susceptible to injury. Hopefully I can manage a similar increase next week (which will be almost 10 miles).

Windows Cleaned

I managed to make the windows both clean and not smeary - I cheated and bought a window squeegee (I think that's the right word, kind of like the things you scrape ice off your car with, but longer and with a flexible silicon "blade"). It cost 99p but is well worth the investment.

To make you house seem bigger and lighter (according to lots of TV programs), you need to de-clutter, accessorise, clean and redecorate in neutral colours. I have discovered a quicker, easier and cheaper alternative - just clean the windows! It is amazing how much brighter the room seems. The windows were filthy, especially considering that we've only had them for 18 months, and I have cleaned the frames a few times, and maybe the glass once before, and they get cleaned when it rains, and the front ones when kids throw water bombs, and we don't live on a main road. Must be the great polluted Liverpool air, makes me wonder how much ick gets into my lungs when I breath...

New Front Door

We had been undecided for ages as to whether to get a new front door or not, the old one is quite tatty but not totally fallen apart. New doors seem quite expensive, and unless you get one with a frame (which costs even more) it can take a while getting them to be the right size. Then you have all the painting to do as well.

Then we found a front door (plus frame) reduced in B+Q from £304 to £30, it was quite dirty, and the packaging damaged, but except for a slight dent on the inside at the bottom it is fine. It is the right size for our house, and is composite, so although it doesn't look quite as nice as a real wooden door, it wont need all the painting and matches the white uPVC windows.

It came with the frame and sill and some bits and pieces, but we needed to a new handle, letter box and frame-fixers. Despite shopping around for the best prices, we actually spent more on this than the door!

I think we will be fitting the door today, having got (hopefully!) everything ready last night. Fingers crossed that it wont be too epic.

Window Cleaning

Our dirty windows have been annoying me for ages, so I finally decided to attempt to clean them. Cleaning windows isn't as easy as it looks, or else I am missing something obvious. I must have got them a lot cleaner, because I tipped away a lot of dirty water, but now they are either smeary, or still look dirty :(

I guess I will have another go today, probably just using water, and not the Tesco Window Cleaning Spray I found in the cupboard.

Exercise

I haven't got as much done this week as I would have liked, partly because it was a shorter week (we got back from a weekend away on Monday evening). I have finished re-plastering the holes in the front bedroom wall, and I think it looks pretty good, certainly an improvement :)

I decided to keep a weekly recorded of how far I have ran and walked. The running miles are measured much more carefully than the walking ones. Hopefully the number of running miles will increase a little each week.

TRAINING
29th April - 5th May
Number of runs: 3
Running: 8.19 miles
Walking: 18 miles

Weekend away

Having spent the last couple of weeks redecorating the room martin had been renting we went away for a long weekend to the Dales. There might be "before" and "after" photos of the bedroom soonish.


We went away on Friday afternoon, and stopped off on the way near Caton to go for a walk along the River Lune. Olly took some nice photos. We did a circular walk along the river bank and an old railway line that is now a cycle path. From an early bit of the riverbank footpath, we noticed some translucent looking boulders on a rock promontory. We went down to have a look and it turned out that they were glass boulders attached to the rock! They looked a lovely translucent green colour. Very unusual, but very cool!

We stayed at the usual caving hut, and saved £5 quid for volunteering to be duty hut wardens for the weekend which was nice (it usually costs £2.50 a night).

We went cave surveying on the Saturday which was fun, but got a bit cold as it was so slow. On Sunday we went for a walk from the caving hut to Easegill Beck GPSing a few useful points for the cave survey. Again Olly took some nice photos.

On Monday Olly wasn't feeling up to caving, so we set off home, stopping at Morecambe to go for a walk along the seafront. I have never been to Morecambe before - it has amazing views towards the Yorkshire Dales and across Morecambe bay to the Lakes. All in all, a nice weekend, though we didn't do as much caving as I had hoped for.

It is Spring!

Helped Martin-the-lodger mover out this morning. He wont be totally moved out until next weekend, but wont be staying here till Thursday night, and has moved lots of his stuff out. Soon there will be a whole new room to paint :)

I went for a run this afternoon, round Stanley Park. It felt really spring like, lots of daffodils and the sun was really warm, even though the air was a bit chilly. There were "Thin Ice" signs on the trees round the lake which seemed a bit incongruous on such a warm day! I saw a squirrel, swans, ducks, ducklings (I think, they were the other side of the lake). and what I think are coots. Not bad for a city!

My knee hurt a bit (first time since skiing), so I had to have two 1 minute walking bits in the run. First time I have walked in the middle for a run for over a year. Hopefully my knee is just a bit sore from helping Martin-the-Lodger carry his stuff up lots of stairs this morning, and will recover soon.

Back From Skiing

We actually got back 2 weeks ago, I was just too lazy to post anything until today. Today I am planning to re-plaster a crack in the kitchen wall, and procrastinating because plastering is scary.

The skiing was really good, and I was silly being stressed about it beforehand. Although it didn't snow while we were there, the conditions were much better than I expected, and we even managed to do a reasonable amount of off-piste skiing the first half of the week. As ever, I wish I could ski faster and better. I am getting a bit faster I think, but nowhere near as fast as Olly and Howard. The Three Valleys is HUGE with loads of skiing to do, I would like to go back there one day, but there are also lots of other ski resorts I would like to visit.

Today I have been gloss painting stuff, mainly the skirting board in the bathroom, and a few other bits and pieces. I hate gloss paint: it smells bad, takes an age to dry, and is harder than emulsion to use. I *think* that this time there aren't any runs, but you can see the brush strokes still. I am hoping that they will go as it dries. Fingers crossed!

Skiing

Been really busy the last couple of days. We are going skiing in France tomorrow (to a chalet in Reberty, between Val Thorens and Les Menuires in the Three Valleys). So partly been busy packing, partly been busy stressing and partly been busy finishing off kitchen painting type jobs, so it isn't too half-finished while we are away. The photo to "set the scene" is of me skiing in Canada.

I realised that the last two times we have been on holiday I have been stressed beforehand - worrying that we don't have the time/money to go away, and that I wont enjoy it. The last two holidays were great (even with the dreaded PhD hanging over me). This one should be better, because the PhD is finished. Oddly I have been more stressed not less, which is just silly.

Packing and all the other jobs are very nearly done, so I am feeling a lot happier and starting to look forward to it. I wish I didn't let myself get so wound up and stressed about stupid things though.

Weirdly I have had Oh Come All Ye Faithful in my head all day, definitely the wrong time of year!

Ceiling painted

Finally painted the kitchen ceiling, it looks a lot brighter. It took two days to clean it fully - it wasn't especially dirty, except above the cooker, but with the thin layer of dirt came the top layer of paint, leaving behind a dirtier layer. Once that was cleaned the remaining coat of white paint was fairly minimal and you could see grey underneath, so it looked pretty bad... At least that made it easy to see what bits I had been painted :)

Two coats of white paint and it is done. My neck is really achy now, from looking up all the time, I guess I need a floor to paint now to counteract it!

Things I have learnt:
1) Expensive sand paper is worth the money (you use less and it is quicker)
2) A roller on a long pole makes ceiling painting much easier
3) Cheap crap paint brushes should be thrown away

Kitchen Painting

My current project is doing up our kitchen. We are probably going to get a new kitchen after Martin-the-lodger moves out. So far we have been fixing the walls and painting. There was a section of wall I had re-plastered, and fortunately it looks pretty good once it is painted :)

I think we will get the units from Ikea - the Arlig Beech effect ones, and a medium or dark grey worktop from somewhere else. Ikea seems to be the best place for the units, but not the extractor hood, worktop or taps.

The first photos shows what it did look like, and what the new kitchen may look like (using the Ikea Kitchen Planner, and then Gimp for the paint and tile colour). Currently it is somewhere between the two photos!

Thesis Submitted!

I realised that I hadn't updated this in ages and ages. When we came back to Liverpool at New Year time, our internet was dead, and by the time we had it fixed I was really busy finishing off my PhD and going skiing and such like.

I finally got the changes to my thesis done, and then the changes to the changes that Richard wanted. It is now printed out, bound, and submitted! The final word count came in at a bit over 49,000 words, significantly higher than my initial prediction of around 30,000!

Except for filling in the graduation form next month, I have done everything I need to do to become Dr Jenny. It doesn't seem very real yet, I guess when I have the actual certificate it might.