I did it! I rode my bike to work! Ha ha, and you thought I was gonna say I’d completed my 30-in-30

Well, actually I’ve done both today, but lets start with the bike:

I have ridden my bike to work only once before, more than a year ago when I was young and naive. I hate hate hate town traffic. Cars all around me, traffic light and stop streets, it freaks me out. Almost as much as my fear of stalling my bike across an intersection. In fact, I think I’m more afraid of looking like an idiot on a bike than I am of someone actually driving onto me. Today vanity and pride won over those fears. I think I mentioned my new biking jacket? The one Hunny got me for Christmas that arrived end Jan. I just had to show it to the folks at work, but there was no ways I was going to drive it to work in my car, especially after all the flack I got last year for being the biker chick without a bike. So this morning I put on my new jacket and my big girl panties, hoped on my bike and rode to work (Safely accompanied by mother hen aka Hunny)

Whoohoo! This is big progress from me. A friend at work took these pics…

From the front: my butch pose

and from the back:

   
If you’ve been counting (I have!) today I officially complete my 30-in-30! There are 31 tags, but that’s because I posted twice in on day (can you imagine that?!) I promise not to disappear totally from the blogsphere just because I’m done with the challenge, but I am taking this weekend off.

Right back at the beginning of the challenge you might remember me saying that it’s hard for me to form habits. Well, I proved that to myself with this. At around 28 days I very nearly forgot to post. It slipped my mind for most of the day. If 27 days isn’t long enough to create a habit, then what is? Good thing I like my electric toothbrush so much or who knows what’d happen.

On a related note, I have found my next challenge: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Yeah, it’s more than 8 months away, but who’s going to do this with me? Common guys, it’ll be great! Go sign up! I always wanted to write a novel, this may actually get me started. I mean, if I can blog for 30 days straight, I’m halfway there, right?

Directions:
1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPod etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You MUST write THAT song name down no matter how silly it sounds (I’ve included the artists in brackets)

===================================================

1. IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY?” YOU SAY? Clint Eastwood (Gorillaz)
2. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?  Take the Power Back (Rage against the machine)
3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?  Radio Nowhere (Bruce Springsteen)
4. HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?  Sugarman (Rodriguez)
5. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?  What it’s like (Everlast)
6. WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?  I think I’m paranoid (Garbage)
7. WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?  Misery Business (Paramore)
8. WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?  Bonedriven (Bush)
9. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?  Hanging with the clowns (Racoon)
10. WHAT IS 2 + 2?  The Art of Self Destruction (ATFN)
11. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR EX?  Put the needle on it (Danni Minogue)
12. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?  Almost easy (Avenged Sevenfold)
13. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?  Gigantic (Pixies)
14. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?  9 Crimes (Damien Rice)
15. WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?  Amerika (Rammstein)
16. WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?  Baby (Serj Tankian)
17. WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?  Erase/Replace (Foo Fighters)
18. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?  Flames go higher (Eagles of Death Metal)
19. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?  Pure Morning (Placebo)
20. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?  Falling Away (Good Charlotte)

Now press “next” one more time and use it as your title.

Okay, so that was fun. I think my current playlist was way to broad to give an accurate reflection of my tastes. One song in there I don’t even know. I usually refine my playlists more to my mood, but I’ve been lazy recently, and just dumped my whole collection in there. SO while that probably is a reflection of my tastes, it’s not a reflection of my favorites

I love my music, most of my life is conducted to a soundtrack. I wish I was more skilled / creative in that regard, but the only tune I’ve ever been able to ‘play’ is “mary had a little lamb” on a telephone keypad. I remember crank calling when I was a teenager with a friend of mine. We came across an answering machine at one number. We phoned around 15 times in succession and played “mary had a little lamb” to the answering machine. Such rebels we were.

If you were wondering, you need a tone phone, and use the keys as follows
3-2-1-2-3-3-3  2-2-2  3-3-3. 3-2-1-2-3-3-3 3-2-3-2-1. Try it.

Red’s, Oranges, purples and blacks were my colours of choice. I have relatively dark hair so dying it lighter was always a problem. I did try to go blonde once. I spent 3 hours of torture under one of those drier thingies with peroxide eating away at my scalp, only to end up a vivid orange.

I’m 28 now. I have seen my natural colour only twice since I was 16. Both times I near-shaved my head to find that natural colour. Both times I discovered that it hadn’t changed much *a dirty looking mouse brown* and both times I dyed it again shortly after. Thankfully my hair is incredibly resilient. 12 years of dye and I still looks and feels very healthy.

The thing about dying your hair though is that’s so expensive and it requires constant upkeep to keep those roots hidden. I have a lovely hairdresser, she’s not pushy about getting you to buy expensive products to use on your newly coloured hair, and she doesn’t charge a fortune. Still, I have recently found a shelf brand that gives me just about the same effect as going to the hairdresser at a third of the price. It’s a dark red with pale orange highlights I’ve gotten quite handy at dying my own hair, so the two-step highlighting process is no hassle for me.

I’ve had so many complements on my hair colour recently that I’m seriously considering taking Hunny’s advice to stop telling the complementing folks that it’s a cheap home box-job and just saying “Thanks”.

This is all good stuff, but I still need to get it cut… Which requires a trip to my kind hairdresser, and I feel guilty about that. I’m doing her out of business. My hair is now more than a month overdue for a cut. I’ve had both my sister and Hunny trim my ends to keep it from looking too ratty, but it really needs a proper cut now.

So what do I do? Find another hairdresser because I feel too bad about showing up at my usual hairdressers with my home job? Thereby doing her out of my business entirely? I really like Bronwen. Most hairdresser freak me out because they are too pushy, too chatty or oh so sensitive if you don’t like what they’ve just done to your hair. Bronwen is not like that. She listens to me and does what I ask. Hard to find in a hairdresser. I’ve been googling, but I don’t find much advice on how to let your hairdresser down easy. “Lets just be friends do cuts from now on?”

*sigh*

Two summers ago I planted some of these little seedlings in some pots near my front door. They only last a season but they seed enough to grow fresh ones the following year. I haven’t planted any more since that first year and I cleaned out the pots over that winter, but two years later these little things still sprout up between the cracks of the paving.

What a way to start my week

Set the scene: My car is parked in the garage, Hunnys car sleeps in our visitors parking bay because the bikes take up the other spot in the garage. Our garage has a switch which disables the remotes from working on the electric doors. Not what you want in the daytime because you wouldn’t be able to open the doors from the outside, but it locks the garage up nice and tight at night. We also have a door leading into the kitchen from the garage.

Hunny left for work before me yesterday morning, as most mornings, so when I realized that I couldn’t find my keys he was already at his desk and starting his day. I turned the house upside down searching for my keys, everywhere that I could look which was the whole house except for the garage. My kitchen-garage door key is on the missing set of keys, and because Hunnys car doesn’t sleep in the garage, he doesn’t go in there in the mornings, so that door was still locked. The only place the keys could be was inside the garage, and I couldn’t get in there for that exact reason!

I sheepishly emailed my manager and asked if I could work from home, as I suspected I had locked my keys in the garage so it was holding my car hostage. Doh!

My guess was right though. When Hunny got home in the afternoon and I got into the garage with his keys, this is where I found them.

(Yeah, hanging onto the keyhole, out the way of Hunny locking up the house with his keys last night! Sneaky buggers)

By the way, I was going to post this yesterday, but I couldn’t because I’d left my phone-to-pc cable at work over the weekend – the one I need to get the pics off  – and of course I didn’t go in to work yesterday!

I do think it’s related to the 7 crime novels I have read over the last 2 months. The problem is that I’m so determined for instant entertainment these days that I can’t take the time to get into something a little more intricate and slower moving. I have chopped most of my entertainment down into bite size chucks. I have this vague feeling that 1 full hour TV show is to much time to dedicate to one story. Give me two half hour stories instead, then I can fill my head with twice as much junk in the same amount of time.

It seems I’m winding my whole life up to this pace. Everything must happen quicker. Dinner at a restaurant takes half an hour these days, home cooking is chosen at the fastest to prepare option and I’ve even taking to showering instead of a relaxing bath. What happened? I really need to slow down a bit before I totally ruin out of energy. I’m quite sure I’m not producing that at a faster rate.

And it’s already February! What’s going on here? Did God flick the fast forward switch?!

I’m been pulling my hair about my horse for the last week. Over the course of 5 days he went from his usual state of partially freaked out into total freak-out overdrive mode. He was almost unworkable, I had to spend 70% of our sessions just trying to get him to calm down enough so we could continue with what we were actually supposed to be doing. I was close to the end of my tether, contemplating giving him 6 months off just so I could have a break from him.

Then today I took him to a three-phase event. It’s not his forte: he’s usually two tense for the dressage phase and the cross country really rattles his brain cell. He’s a definite ‘look-before-you-leap type, and cross country requires a brave horse that’s willing to do things like plunge into water without knowing how deep it might be or jump off a bank without being able to see the landing until the last stride.

Once a year I take him to one of these events because all the galloping across the countryside does make him a little braver when he gets to his usual competition style: show jumping. I also have a theory that it makes him grateful for the bigger but less scary looking jumps in the show-jumping ring.

Well today he totally outdid himself. We arrived late and unprepared: I’d left my boots at home. Hunny raced back home to fetch them for me while I completed a very hurried warm up. Hunny arrived back just in time for me to put my boots on and trot into the dressage arena. He stayed calm *very unusual for him* and did his best dressage test ever. The judge wrote on out comment sheet “What an obedient and willing horse” – that’s a first!

We went out into the country a penalty score of 43.6, lying in second place behind someone with a penalty score of 38, and with two score of 44 right behind me. We had a great cross country round, he started out good and just got better. He trotted straight into the two water complexes on the course, stayed focused and obedient into the skinny (narrow) jumps and really opened out his stride across the long distances between jumps. When I pulled up at the finish I know I was clear for jumping, but I didn’t know if I’d incurred any time penalties.

The third phase is show jumping – his forte – so I was pretty convinced he’d do okay at that, especially considering it was about half the height he normally jumps in dedicated show-jumping competitions. I learnt just before the show-jumping started that after the cross country points had been tallied we were in first place. We were inside the ideal time, so we got no time penalties, and the person who was beating me had a couple of stops in the country, incurring extra penalties.

After finding this out I was so nervous I could hardly bring myself to warm up! No worries, Dartmoor did his job and gave a lovely clear round. It was only afterwards that I learnt that the guy I had beaten into second was only 0.4 penalties behind me! But we won! Amazing! My timid little show-jumper won a three-phase event and totally redeemed himself.

I suppose the highs are as high as the lows are low. That’s my boy!

*okay, I’ll stop blogging about my horse now*

He’s had some sterling moments and achieved a fair amount of success. When he’s relaxed and confident he is truly brilliant. He has such an outstanding jumping technique. He jumps clean and carefully. He hates to touch a pole. But his confidence is so precarious: a couple of wrong moves on my part and it can take weeks for him to regain it. He’ll also never do a derby course. Banks, ditches and water-jumps scare the living daylights out of him. We once spent over an hour trying to get him to cross a ditch, 5 people. We eventually physically pushed him through. His mind had gone totally awol, his body was still with us, but he’s face had gone completely blank, you couldn’t get any reaction out of him.

All of this adds up to a competition show-jumper that isn’t really worth the effort you have to put in. Part of me wants to give up on him, but I can’t. I’m still trying to prove to all his detractors that he can make it in the higher grades, I want to reach the limits of his talent, not just the limits of his mind / confidence. He’s also too expensive to just have hanging around and like I said, I couldn’t sell him. So I keep working with him.

Occasionally I train a couple of other horses, as I am doing at the moment, and I’m struck by how much easier they are to work with. It makes me start to resent Dartmoor. I feel like after all this I deserve something easier. I have dreamt before that I had killed him (well, somebody had, I think it was me). When I saw his beautiful though lifeless face I sobbed and told him how sorry I was, but even in the dream I was secretly relieved that I could now move on. While I wouldn’t kill him in real life, I imagine that’s how I would feel if anything did happen to him: Terribly sad, but guilty relieved.

Time passed, and we started getting more serious. People started to notice your raw talent. Not typically handsome, you have an elegance about you that is rarely found. Such talent from an unlikely source, we were itching to see how you would mature and grow.

Things ran quite smoothly for a while, but you never did truly settle down. As the going got tougher your anxiety increased. I didn’t know how to help you. Then we had the accident. I take full responsibility for that – I should have known better. I pushed you too far. We both took months to recover from the physical damage: your broken rib, my torn muscles, but those paled in comparison to the mental scars we probably still carry with us. Nursing you back to health helped heal the rift between us, slowly you started to trust me again, weather you have completely forgotten I’ll never know.

People still admired you and noticed how talented you were, but now they also started noticing your issues. You started to get a reputation as difficult. To be fair, there is nothing mean about you, but you just can’t ever relax. Others started to write you off as no good: all the talent in the world means nothing if you can’t realize that potential. I stood by you though. I was determined to help you realize your full potential. I did it as much for you as for me, I needed to prove to myself and the world that I wasn’t a quitter, that I wouldn’t bail out when the going got tough.

Over time I started to lower my expectations of you. I began to realize that whatever goes on in your head would always stand in the way of you being all that you could have been. Still, I was still dedicated to helping you achieve your best within these limitations.

Lately I’m not so sure. I need to start making other plans. I won’t abandon you ever, but there are things I want to achieve too, before I’m too old or life gets in the way. I love you like a child, a frightened and damaged child that I feel compelled to look after. I don’t resent that, but I also realize that things would be so much easier with another. One who is more confident, less afraid of the world around him. I feel like my time with you has earned me that. With you every victory is hard won, and there is joy in that, but nothing is ever easy.

When you are on your supplements life seems more manageable for you, but then there are days like today. Days when you are so wound up that even the air around you seemed to cause you distress, when I can do nothing to soothe you, and I grow frustrated with you, as well as with myself for not being able to help you deal with whatever it is that’s upsetting you.

I wanted to prove to everyone that they were wrong about you. I have spent so much time and energy defending you, I stand up for you because I’m afraid that if I don’t, no-one will. But then I have dreams where you die, and I’m sad, but I’m also relieved that I don’t have to do that anymore, I can stop swimming upstream, stop worrying about you, stop fighting, just relax for a while…

I’m not going to broadcast my every thought on this blog (maybe I would have where it an anonymous blog) so that cuts out a lot of potentially amusing stuff. I don’t want an on-line diary (today I went to the shops and bought a box of Oatees, a frozen dinner and a box of Easter eggs …) and because I have put my name to my blog, I can’t blog indiscriminately about work colleagues or family. If any of these people were to find my blog they’d quickly realize I was talking about them / their aunt / their friend. I need to be happy to take full responsibility for what I write here, so I’m not going to exploit anyone else’s life or say nasty things about other people. A long story short, my blog idea pool is a bit shallow at the moment. I expect if I keep this up I will get better at generating ideas but in the meantime BlackMakros gave me a suggestion to use stumbleupon to help me find some ideas.

My third click today took me here:

http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/member/birthdayno1.php

I entered my birth day / month / year thinking that it’s unlikely that I’d even know the song or artist that was number one more than 28 years ago. I picked the UK link to honor my British heritage and what do you know? It brought up The Boomtown Rats – I don’t like Mondays. I love that song! It was soooo me in high school, a morbid teenager who hated Mondays something hectic. Still don’t like them much, but I’m less morbid these days. I love Fridays. I have a little song & dance I do on Friday mornings when I get in to the office, but I dropped the “kill-me-it’s-Monday” vibe a few years back. Still, I think the song rocks, and I’m so glad it’s my birthday song.

Hunny got Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen – not bad either.

I tried a couple of more recent dates – 1 Jan 2000, our wedding day in 2005, my last birthday – but nothing good came up.

The irony is, because of leap years I’ll be waiting until August 14 2017 before I actually have a birthday on a Monday again, but that’s cool. Monday birthdays suck.

If you are bored go check out the site & let me know what your song is …

Me: Thanks for making me coffee every morning, but can you maybe make it a little less strong? (I recently swapped to coffee from tea)
Hunny: Okay… You don’t like it that strong?
Me: Nope
Hunny: I make yours strong because you make mine strong, so I thought you liked it like that.
Me: You mean you don’t like your coffee that strong?
Hunny: Nope
Me: Doh.

On a side note I have somehow managed to set winamp to repeat the current song only. It took me 20 minutes of the same song to pick that up. I have to click forward onto the next song each time, I’m listening to about 5 songs an hour at the moment. I tried rebooting, but that didn’t fix it. Will have to look through the settings…