"BRCA status" is not so long and clunky that you should feel the need to say "BRCA-ness", as in "property X is probably related to the BRCA-ness of the cell line".
If you absolutely must say "BRCA-ness", pronounce it "bracka-ness", not "bee are see eh-ness"
Please.
Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TMI. Show all posts
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Steepness in Seattle
Treebeard was wrong:
going South does NOT feel like going downhill.
(Well, except for the bits that actually were downhill. But some of those bits were really hard, too).
But let's start at the beginning...
(BTW this is a really long post. And those of you who donated will have already received an abbreviated version by email, edited and sanitised for the sake of my parents and assorted other relatives. So feel free to skip to the video at the end).
DAY ONE
My friends showed up at my house at 5:30 am on Saturday, put my bike on their bike rack, and drove me to the start of the ride in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. As we got closer we saw more and more cars with bikes on them, and by the time we reached the parking lot, there must have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of bike within sight. We loaded our bags onto a truck, ate a little food, covered ourselves in Chamois Butt'r, and tried to find constructive uses for all our nervous energy. In my case this mostly meant chattering like a monkey and checking that I had my passport about once every five minutes as we waited for the 7:00 am opening ceremonies. The crowds built up around us, and after the arrival of some Mounties carrying a Canadian flag and the singing of O Canada, we learned from the first speaker that there were more than 2,200 riders, and that between us we'd already raised more than 9.2 million dollars!*
The speeches were short and to the point (although a little bit too Bravehearty for my taste in parts - there was a bagpipe sound track and everything), and off we went! It was a slow and wobbly start as 2,200 riders tried to squeeze through the official start gate, but we were soon pedalling smoothly on the closed-off roads (with the exception of the poor soul I saw fixing a puncture within ten minutes of the start). As expected, I lost my faster, fitter, better-bike-owning friends (who were sprinting for the border to avoid the line-ups) within a couple of minutes, but I was happy enough to go at my own pace and enjoy the atmosphere as riders chatted to each other and supporters waved signs and cheered and rang cow bells and blew vuvuzelas from the side of the road.
The first 28 km to the border went by quickly, although the head wind that hit us on a nice long gentle down hill section was a bit of a bugger; I hate that disconnect where your eyes and brain go "wheeeeee! Down hill! Yay! Let's go!", but your legs go "whyyyyyyy is this sooooooo haaaaaaard????". I also quickly realised that I had omitted something crucial from my training: steep downhill rides! I grew up in an extremely flat place and literally never went up or down a hill on a bike until I was 22. Steepness and speed are very scary things for me, especially when surrounded and being passed by so many other people (almost all of my training was done solo).
The border itself was the only organisational weak spot on the whole ride. People like my friends who got there early went straight through, but by the time I got there the official queue area was full, and people were forming a wide, ragged, and basically stationary line behind the official area. I stood in this line for over 15 minutes before the DJ announced that anyone not already in the official queue area was supposed to have been given a coloured sticker, and they'd call everyone up by colour so we didn't have to stand in line for so long. It then took me 5 minutes to find someone giving out stickers (pink). As I was sitting down 15-20 minutes later, I saw someone else handing out red and orange stickers; those were the first colours called, with pink following quite a bit later. The DJ's tune choices didn't help much - as he played "Born in the USA", people around me started singing "We're not in the USA, not in the USA", and the follow up ("Highway to the Danger Zone") was an even worse choice. At least it was sunny, with lots of food and drink on offer! Once I was in the official line it moved quite quickly and I was through and into Washington State with a minimum of fuss. And waiting so long at the border left me with fresh legs for the remaining 101 km of the first day.
The next bit of the ride was gorgeous - so much nicer than blazing down the I5 like we usually do when we drive to Seattle. It turns out that Blaine is a really nice little town, and lots of the locals came out to cheer us on. We then went through a gorgeous State park by the ocean, and through some really pretty countryside, although the head wind came back with a vengeance at times. The first real hill of the day was in Bellingham, but it wasn't any worse than any of my training hills, and there were lots of stops at red lights that offered short recovery periods. Once through the town there was a very gradual but very, very long hill up to the lake where we had lunch - again, that disconnect between your brain seeing a nice flat road and your legs dying a slow death on the hill! As I said to a fellow rider, "this hill sucks. If you're going to be a hard hill to climb, you could at least have the decency to actually look like a hill. This hill is just mean". (This may have been the beginning of the "incoherent ramblings" stage that lasted for most of the rest of the ride).
Sitting down at lunch time was niiiiice. The lakeside setting was lovely, and the lunch was tasty and full of carbs. There was another section of the long gradual hill immediately after lunch - not fun on a full stomach - but that was essentially the end of the climbing for the day.
The probable shooting incident happened with about 35 km still to go. We'd just passed an interesting section of road, featuring a gun range and a huge speedway with hundreds of people camping by the side of the road, and I was essentially riding by myself** down a hill being a bit wussy and scared by the steepness and the speed. There were quite a few vehicles on the road, and many of them weren't giving us much space (it was one of the few sections of road with no shoulder or bike lane at all), so I wasn't entirely happy to hear another one approaching from behind. Then, just before the vehicle entered my field of vision, there was an almighty sharp BANG!!!!!!!. I was startled and jumped a bit, but didn't lose control of my bike, and the vehicle (a gunmetal grey pickup with no license plate on the back) came blazing past me. I didn't see the source of the noise, but my first thought was "OMG GUN!!!!", because that's totally what it sounded like. I was already thinking "or maybe his engine backfired, although that's really unlikely when going down a big hill, or maybe he did it on purpose, although I don't even know if that's possible, or maybe..." when another cyclist came up alongside me from behind. She said "oh my god OH MY GOD, are you OK???!!!" I said that I was, and she said "that was REALLY. FUCKING. SCARY", but then she rode off ahead of me before I could ask her what she'd seen that had freaked her out so much.
I still wasn't sure what had happened, but then at camp that night a colleague told me that he'd seen someone at the gun range testing out a scope on a rifle by looking down it at a long line of riders in a really scary way. And then - the clincher - a volunteer who'd been riding one of the escort motorbikes told me the next morning that another rider had been hit with a pellet gun on the same stretch of road, and they'd had various reports of guns seen and shots fired (from vehicles and from the side of the road). So I think someone almost certainly fired a gun, either at me or into the air behind me. Either that or they launched a firework at me, although I didn't smell a firework, and that's hardly any better than being shot at, anyway. Several drivers on this section of road also apparently shouted "GO HOME!" (or ruder variations thereof) at riders and volunteers. Nice, eh?
Given that I wasn't sure what had happened at the time, I actually wasn't that traumatised. There was an incident towards the end of the next day that scared me much, much more - coming down a steep hill in the rain and needing to make a left turn off the main road halfway down the hill, I got totally freaked out by my speed and hit my brakes quite hard. I was freezing cold and exhausted at this point and not making terribly good decisions, so I didn't think to look behind me before I braked, and the car behind me (that I hadn't heard) almost hit me - there was a screeching of brakes and tyres and a swerve and a lingering smell of burning rubber. Mostly my fault (I'm really sorry, dude, whoever you are - I'm sure I scared the bejeezus out of you), although I'd say he/she was maybe a little too close behind me (again, no shoulder or bike lane). I had to pull off the road and wait a few minutes before I could calm down enough to continue.
Anyway, I'm still supposed to be describing day one. After surviving the putative shooting incident there were a couple more downhill sections and then the rest of the ride was flat. It was painful, though, and not helped by what I'm sure was some inaccurate distance marking. I seemed to get from the 110 km to the 120 km mark really quickly, but then the final (alleged) 9 km into camp took for-bloody-ever. I think the 120 km distance sign was accidentally put up at around the 115 km mark, and a few other riders I talked to agreed, because the last hour was just awful. The road was also quite rough in texture, which didn't help the sore hands, wrists, and other parts, and the added friction made us pedal harder than if we were on a smooth road. This part of the ride was purely about survival, and I have to say that when I finally turned the last corner just before 4:00 pm and saw the Mount Vernon camp site and the welcoming committee of cheering volunteers, I almost cried with gratitude!
CAMP
Camp was great! I grabbed my bag, set up my sleeping gear, had a lovely lovely hot shower, found my friends, ate some tasty if slightly lukewarm food, and drank some free beer. I ran into a few other people I know, and got one of my colleagues to do a bit to camera about how the money from the ride benefits his research (see video at the end of the post). I love how PIs can snap into this mode at a moment's notice, and then snap straight back into "normal guy drinking beer and shooting the breeze" mode just as quickly. It was great to get everyone else's perspective on the ride (and, if I'm honest, nice to see so many people arriving well after me. I'd been worried about being one of the slowest riders after seeing all the amazing bikes people had, and indeed most of my friends and colleagues finished 2-3 hours ahead of me on both days, but I passed loads of people on some really high-end bikes, while people on fat tyre mountain bikes passed me several times).
There were speeches, clips of the day's media coverage, and then two bands - the first one good, the second one fabulous. We went off to bed at 9:30 pm, looking forward to a really good sleep before the second day's ride.
Unfortunately...
Some idiots decided that the best way to prepare for the second day was to get wasted and whoop and holler and run around. It went on for ages. The security guards were trying to make them go to bed, but they were unsuccessful, and the sounds of rowdiness carried all over the campsite. I hate that maybe 5 or 6 people got to decide that hundreds of other people shouldn't get any sleep; this has happened at every music festival I've ever been to, but I really wasn't expecting it on the ride. However, I love that some of them apparently ended up throwing up and passing out drunk - ride 120 km on THAT, mofos! (I'm assuming they were riders. If they were non-riding volunteers, I'm even more pissed off that they kept everyone up). They finally shut up at around midnight... just in time for a train to come by the camp site, blowing its horn for what seemed like full minutes at a time. At this point the only people getting any sleep at all were the loudest snorers in camp; my tent mate and I were awake almost all night, getting maybe an hour of sleep, two max, in short ten minute bursts, until another train came through at 4:45 am and everyone around us apparently said "screw it" and started talking and rustling their bags as they got up and started packing.
The early start had its benefits, though - we were pretty much first in line for the excellent cooked breakfast (although the coffee sucked and the tea was barely even yellow after steeping the bag for two minutes - hotter water next time, please, guys!). By the time we'd put our bags back on the truck and gone to retrieve our bikes, the line was huuuuge and hundreds of people were still waiting for breakfast when we were allowed to start riding shortly after 7:00 am.
DAY TWO
Once again we started the day in a town, with the roads closed by the police and people riding four or more abreast. In contrast to the previous day's sun and cloud mix, we started with a fine misty drizzle that didn't even warrant a waterproof jacket and actually felt quite refreshing. I was amused to see a humongous queue of riders at the first coffee stand we passed - apparently lots of other people were unimpressed by the caffeinated options at camp!
The route was nicer this second day, with much of it on off-road bike trails through the woods. It was heavenly to be away from the traffic; this relief completely mitigated the increasingly heavy rain fall...
... at least for a while.
By the time I got to lunch I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. I'd put on my waterproof jacket as soon as the drizzle turned to rain, but the elements defeated anything that I (or any of the other riders) could throw at them. There was some cover at the lunch site, but it was all taken up by other soaked riders, so I sat on a cold, wet, wooden bench and ate my cold lunch and drank my cold drinks out in the open, with my sandwich getting more and more soggy with rain. I was shivering at this point, and would have given anything for a hot (or even a warm) drink - but there was only water and Gatorade. I got out of there as fast as I could, only noticing as I left the lunch site that they were handing out those metallic emergency blankets you see at the end of marathons. Too late for me, I was on my way and didn't want to stop moving!
Now, I'd been told at camp by several people (including someone who shall remain nameless but who one would expect to have accurate inside information) that there were "no hills after lunch!!! Downhill all the way!!!". When I got onto the first hill after lunch I was so grateful for the (relative) warmth provided by the extra exertion that I didn't think much of it...
...but then the hill just did.
not.
stop.
It was hard. Really hard. Really, really, hard. We'd seen hardly any supporters that day, just one or two people honking horns or waving from cars, and the one group who did brave the rain to stand and wave signs and cheer us on literally had me in tears of gratitude. I was miserable. I kept thinking of why I was doing the ride, and reminding myself that whatever I was feeling was nowhere near as bad as the cancer treatments my friends and relatives have been through. This helped - quite a lot, actually - but I was still suffering.
This part is all a bit of a blur; long slogs up hills, occasionally steep enough to force me off my bike for a few hundred metres of walking, followed by short and terrifying downhill sections (this is where I made the aforementioned mistake and almost got hit by a car), followed by turning corners to see yet another massive climb ahead. My phone rang a couple of times during this stage, but I knew I couldn't get to it in time to answer, and that I couldn't pick up my voicemail or even see who was calling without turning on the prohibitively expensive data roaming option; this only served to piss me off more. I followed Mermaid's advice of eating something if I started to feel pissed off, but it really didn't help at all (and this was within an hour of eating lunch), and I started to think that exhaustion / hypothermia / near-death experiences / PMS were viable alternative hypotheses.
At one point, turning yet another bloody corner to see yet another bloody hill, I said loudly "OH FUCK. RIGHT. OFF, you bastard hill", and the rider ahead of me started giggling. This really seemed to lift my mood, and everything after that point seemed easier to deal with, even though the long climbs and steep terrifying descents and pouring rain were much the same as before.
At the final pit stop, I called Mr E Man and my good friend from high school who lives close to the end of the ride. Hearing their voices was an amazing boost to my spirits, even though my friend said she wouldn't be able to see me cross the line because her baby was just starting his nap. I learned that my friends had finished the ride and that one of them was waiting for me with his wife and baby Morgan, and that there was beer and hot food and dry clothes, with only 15 km of very pleasant, flat, smooth, off-road riverside bike trail standing in my way. At this point it stopped raining and I jumped on my bike for the final time, still soaked, still freezing, but no longer miserable!
The last section was a pure pleasure. Everyone was so excited to be near the end, and there was much chatter and laughter and discussion of whether we should have a beer first or a hot drink first. And then, at about 2:45 pm, I saw a sign for Marymoor park - the end of the ride - 1.5 miles away! The joy! The euphoria! The hooting and hollering among the riders!
There were people lining the whole of the rest of the route, cheering and yelling and waving signs. Coming into the park, I could hear the music and the announcer... getting louder and louder... and then I turned the final corner and saw a field full of people... and then I was in a muddy field and crossing the line and people on my right were yelling "CATH! CATH! CATH!"
I have honestly never been so happy in my life to see my husband and friends. I'll spare you the over-emotional details, but there were hugs and tears aplenty, and not just from me.
The beer was so delicious. The food was so yummy. And the atmosphere was so amazing. But we were soooo cold (you'll see me moving from side to side in the video below - I didn't need the loo, I was just trying to generate some warmth and also stretch my muscles out a bit). When we got to our nearby hotel I had a long hot shower, but as soon as I got out, I started shivering again. So I got in the hot tub, but when I got out after 5 minutes to go and grab my camera, I started shivering again. I didn't feel properly warm for about another half hour, but by that time I'd had a couple of beers and was incredibly happy, so it didn't really seem to matter all that much any more. And then I got to have dinner with my hubby, my Vancouver friends, and my high school friend! And then fall asleep about ten minutes after we got back to our room!
Muscle-wise, I felt better than I'd expected. Much better, actually. My quads were pretty tight, but I was fine as long as I kept moving. Stopping was bad, though - I could barely get out of my chair after dinner on Sunday, and the next day was rather painful, especially when I first got up and then again when I got out of the car after the drive home. (It was depressing how quickly we blasted through all the landmarks from the ride - the lunch site, the campsite, the first day's lunch site, the border. It's really not far at all in a car!). Back home, I woke up at about 4 am on Tuesday with all kinds of weird back spasms going on, but that problem fixed itself with an almighty CLICK during a meeting later that day, and on Thursday morning I was back on my bike. My regular commute felt so short, and I stormed up the hills like they weren't even there - but where were all the people cheering me on, and welcoming me into the bike room with signs and pom poms and vuvuzelas?!
My arse still hurts a bit, but that'll pass soon enough.
Overall, it was an amazingly positive experience. I'm immensely glad I did it***, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who donated and/or supported me in any other way.
I maded you guys a video! (With some beer in it!)
And then I drinked it! (The beer, not the video!)
THANK YOU, EVERYONE!
YOU ROCK!
Video: Part I (I sure wish YouTube would have told me the original all-in-one version was too long before it spent 21 minutes saying "uploading"):
Part II:
-----------
*I got some more donations after the ride started, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so the total will be higher by now!
**having just passed one group of cyclists, and on my way to catching up with the next one (yes, I passed people! Quite a lot of people! Although lots of groups were passing me, too). This was my pattern for most of the ride. I think my speed fell somewhere between the average for the recreational riders and the average for the actual good cyclists. Or something
***I'm also immensely glad it's over! It's been hanging over me for months, and the training combined with 7 weeks of hosting friends and family over the last 2.5 months means that I feel like I've had no time to myself, literally since the Olympics. I haven't had time to get a hair cut, or buy new clothes to replace the ones that are literally falling apart on me - I'm a shaggy-headed, scruffy-clothed ragamuffin! But this weekend I get to do whatever I want! Like, watch every single World Cup game! COME ON ENGLAND!!!
going South does NOT feel like going downhill.
(Well, except for the bits that actually were downhill. But some of those bits were really hard, too).
But let's start at the beginning...
(BTW this is a really long post. And those of you who donated will have already received an abbreviated version by email, edited and sanitised for the sake of my parents and assorted other relatives. So feel free to skip to the video at the end).
DAY ONE
My friends showed up at my house at 5:30 am on Saturday, put my bike on their bike rack, and drove me to the start of the ride in Surrey, just outside Vancouver. As we got closer we saw more and more cars with bikes on them, and by the time we reached the parking lot, there must have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of bike within sight. We loaded our bags onto a truck, ate a little food, covered ourselves in Chamois Butt'r, and tried to find constructive uses for all our nervous energy. In my case this mostly meant chattering like a monkey and checking that I had my passport about once every five minutes as we waited for the 7:00 am opening ceremonies. The crowds built up around us, and after the arrival of some Mounties carrying a Canadian flag and the singing of O Canada, we learned from the first speaker that there were more than 2,200 riders, and that between us we'd already raised more than 9.2 million dollars!*
The speeches were short and to the point (although a little bit too Bravehearty for my taste in parts - there was a bagpipe sound track and everything), and off we went! It was a slow and wobbly start as 2,200 riders tried to squeeze through the official start gate, but we were soon pedalling smoothly on the closed-off roads (with the exception of the poor soul I saw fixing a puncture within ten minutes of the start). As expected, I lost my faster, fitter, better-bike-owning friends (who were sprinting for the border to avoid the line-ups) within a couple of minutes, but I was happy enough to go at my own pace and enjoy the atmosphere as riders chatted to each other and supporters waved signs and cheered and rang cow bells and blew vuvuzelas from the side of the road.
The first 28 km to the border went by quickly, although the head wind that hit us on a nice long gentle down hill section was a bit of a bugger; I hate that disconnect where your eyes and brain go "wheeeeee! Down hill! Yay! Let's go!", but your legs go "whyyyyyyy is this sooooooo haaaaaaard????". I also quickly realised that I had omitted something crucial from my training: steep downhill rides! I grew up in an extremely flat place and literally never went up or down a hill on a bike until I was 22. Steepness and speed are very scary things for me, especially when surrounded and being passed by so many other people (almost all of my training was done solo).
The border itself was the only organisational weak spot on the whole ride. People like my friends who got there early went straight through, but by the time I got there the official queue area was full, and people were forming a wide, ragged, and basically stationary line behind the official area. I stood in this line for over 15 minutes before the DJ announced that anyone not already in the official queue area was supposed to have been given a coloured sticker, and they'd call everyone up by colour so we didn't have to stand in line for so long. It then took me 5 minutes to find someone giving out stickers (pink). As I was sitting down 15-20 minutes later, I saw someone else handing out red and orange stickers; those were the first colours called, with pink following quite a bit later. The DJ's tune choices didn't help much - as he played "Born in the USA", people around me started singing "We're not in the USA, not in the USA", and the follow up ("Highway to the Danger Zone") was an even worse choice. At least it was sunny, with lots of food and drink on offer! Once I was in the official line it moved quite quickly and I was through and into Washington State with a minimum of fuss. And waiting so long at the border left me with fresh legs for the remaining 101 km of the first day.
The next bit of the ride was gorgeous - so much nicer than blazing down the I5 like we usually do when we drive to Seattle. It turns out that Blaine is a really nice little town, and lots of the locals came out to cheer us on. We then went through a gorgeous State park by the ocean, and through some really pretty countryside, although the head wind came back with a vengeance at times. The first real hill of the day was in Bellingham, but it wasn't any worse than any of my training hills, and there were lots of stops at red lights that offered short recovery periods. Once through the town there was a very gradual but very, very long hill up to the lake where we had lunch - again, that disconnect between your brain seeing a nice flat road and your legs dying a slow death on the hill! As I said to a fellow rider, "this hill sucks. If you're going to be a hard hill to climb, you could at least have the decency to actually look like a hill. This hill is just mean". (This may have been the beginning of the "incoherent ramblings" stage that lasted for most of the rest of the ride).
Sitting down at lunch time was niiiiice. The lakeside setting was lovely, and the lunch was tasty and full of carbs. There was another section of the long gradual hill immediately after lunch - not fun on a full stomach - but that was essentially the end of the climbing for the day.
The probable shooting incident happened with about 35 km still to go. We'd just passed an interesting section of road, featuring a gun range and a huge speedway with hundreds of people camping by the side of the road, and I was essentially riding by myself** down a hill being a bit wussy and scared by the steepness and the speed. There were quite a few vehicles on the road, and many of them weren't giving us much space (it was one of the few sections of road with no shoulder or bike lane at all), so I wasn't entirely happy to hear another one approaching from behind. Then, just before the vehicle entered my field of vision, there was an almighty sharp BANG!!!!!!!. I was startled and jumped a bit, but didn't lose control of my bike, and the vehicle (a gunmetal grey pickup with no license plate on the back) came blazing past me. I didn't see the source of the noise, but my first thought was "OMG GUN!!!!", because that's totally what it sounded like. I was already thinking "or maybe his engine backfired, although that's really unlikely when going down a big hill, or maybe he did it on purpose, although I don't even know if that's possible, or maybe..." when another cyclist came up alongside me from behind. She said "oh my god OH MY GOD, are you OK???!!!" I said that I was, and she said "that was REALLY. FUCKING. SCARY", but then she rode off ahead of me before I could ask her what she'd seen that had freaked her out so much.
I still wasn't sure what had happened, but then at camp that night a colleague told me that he'd seen someone at the gun range testing out a scope on a rifle by looking down it at a long line of riders in a really scary way. And then - the clincher - a volunteer who'd been riding one of the escort motorbikes told me the next morning that another rider had been hit with a pellet gun on the same stretch of road, and they'd had various reports of guns seen and shots fired (from vehicles and from the side of the road). So I think someone almost certainly fired a gun, either at me or into the air behind me. Either that or they launched a firework at me, although I didn't smell a firework, and that's hardly any better than being shot at, anyway. Several drivers on this section of road also apparently shouted "GO HOME!" (or ruder variations thereof) at riders and volunteers. Nice, eh?
Given that I wasn't sure what had happened at the time, I actually wasn't that traumatised. There was an incident towards the end of the next day that scared me much, much more - coming down a steep hill in the rain and needing to make a left turn off the main road halfway down the hill, I got totally freaked out by my speed and hit my brakes quite hard. I was freezing cold and exhausted at this point and not making terribly good decisions, so I didn't think to look behind me before I braked, and the car behind me (that I hadn't heard) almost hit me - there was a screeching of brakes and tyres and a swerve and a lingering smell of burning rubber. Mostly my fault (I'm really sorry, dude, whoever you are - I'm sure I scared the bejeezus out of you), although I'd say he/she was maybe a little too close behind me (again, no shoulder or bike lane). I had to pull off the road and wait a few minutes before I could calm down enough to continue.
Anyway, I'm still supposed to be describing day one. After surviving the putative shooting incident there were a couple more downhill sections and then the rest of the ride was flat. It was painful, though, and not helped by what I'm sure was some inaccurate distance marking. I seemed to get from the 110 km to the 120 km mark really quickly, but then the final (alleged) 9 km into camp took for-bloody-ever. I think the 120 km distance sign was accidentally put up at around the 115 km mark, and a few other riders I talked to agreed, because the last hour was just awful. The road was also quite rough in texture, which didn't help the sore hands, wrists, and other parts, and the added friction made us pedal harder than if we were on a smooth road. This part of the ride was purely about survival, and I have to say that when I finally turned the last corner just before 4:00 pm and saw the Mount Vernon camp site and the welcoming committee of cheering volunteers, I almost cried with gratitude!
CAMP
Camp was great! I grabbed my bag, set up my sleeping gear, had a lovely lovely hot shower, found my friends, ate some tasty if slightly lukewarm food, and drank some free beer. I ran into a few other people I know, and got one of my colleagues to do a bit to camera about how the money from the ride benefits his research (see video at the end of the post). I love how PIs can snap into this mode at a moment's notice, and then snap straight back into "normal guy drinking beer and shooting the breeze" mode just as quickly. It was great to get everyone else's perspective on the ride (and, if I'm honest, nice to see so many people arriving well after me. I'd been worried about being one of the slowest riders after seeing all the amazing bikes people had, and indeed most of my friends and colleagues finished 2-3 hours ahead of me on both days, but I passed loads of people on some really high-end bikes, while people on fat tyre mountain bikes passed me several times).
There were speeches, clips of the day's media coverage, and then two bands - the first one good, the second one fabulous. We went off to bed at 9:30 pm, looking forward to a really good sleep before the second day's ride.
Unfortunately...
Some idiots decided that the best way to prepare for the second day was to get wasted and whoop and holler and run around. It went on for ages. The security guards were trying to make them go to bed, but they were unsuccessful, and the sounds of rowdiness carried all over the campsite. I hate that maybe 5 or 6 people got to decide that hundreds of other people shouldn't get any sleep; this has happened at every music festival I've ever been to, but I really wasn't expecting it on the ride. However, I love that some of them apparently ended up throwing up and passing out drunk - ride 120 km on THAT, mofos! (I'm assuming they were riders. If they were non-riding volunteers, I'm even more pissed off that they kept everyone up). They finally shut up at around midnight... just in time for a train to come by the camp site, blowing its horn for what seemed like full minutes at a time. At this point the only people getting any sleep at all were the loudest snorers in camp; my tent mate and I were awake almost all night, getting maybe an hour of sleep, two max, in short ten minute bursts, until another train came through at 4:45 am and everyone around us apparently said "screw it" and started talking and rustling their bags as they got up and started packing.
The early start had its benefits, though - we were pretty much first in line for the excellent cooked breakfast (although the coffee sucked and the tea was barely even yellow after steeping the bag for two minutes - hotter water next time, please, guys!). By the time we'd put our bags back on the truck and gone to retrieve our bikes, the line was huuuuge and hundreds of people were still waiting for breakfast when we were allowed to start riding shortly after 7:00 am.
DAY TWO
Once again we started the day in a town, with the roads closed by the police and people riding four or more abreast. In contrast to the previous day's sun and cloud mix, we started with a fine misty drizzle that didn't even warrant a waterproof jacket and actually felt quite refreshing. I was amused to see a humongous queue of riders at the first coffee stand we passed - apparently lots of other people were unimpressed by the caffeinated options at camp!
The route was nicer this second day, with much of it on off-road bike trails through the woods. It was heavenly to be away from the traffic; this relief completely mitigated the increasingly heavy rain fall...
... at least for a while.
By the time I got to lunch I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. I'd put on my waterproof jacket as soon as the drizzle turned to rain, but the elements defeated anything that I (or any of the other riders) could throw at them. There was some cover at the lunch site, but it was all taken up by other soaked riders, so I sat on a cold, wet, wooden bench and ate my cold lunch and drank my cold drinks out in the open, with my sandwich getting more and more soggy with rain. I was shivering at this point, and would have given anything for a hot (or even a warm) drink - but there was only water and Gatorade. I got out of there as fast as I could, only noticing as I left the lunch site that they were handing out those metallic emergency blankets you see at the end of marathons. Too late for me, I was on my way and didn't want to stop moving!
Now, I'd been told at camp by several people (including someone who shall remain nameless but who one would expect to have accurate inside information) that there were "no hills after lunch!!! Downhill all the way!!!". When I got onto the first hill after lunch I was so grateful for the (relative) warmth provided by the extra exertion that I didn't think much of it...
...but then the hill just did.
not.
stop.
It was hard. Really hard. Really, really, hard. We'd seen hardly any supporters that day, just one or two people honking horns or waving from cars, and the one group who did brave the rain to stand and wave signs and cheer us on literally had me in tears of gratitude. I was miserable. I kept thinking of why I was doing the ride, and reminding myself that whatever I was feeling was nowhere near as bad as the cancer treatments my friends and relatives have been through. This helped - quite a lot, actually - but I was still suffering.
This part is all a bit of a blur; long slogs up hills, occasionally steep enough to force me off my bike for a few hundred metres of walking, followed by short and terrifying downhill sections (this is where I made the aforementioned mistake and almost got hit by a car), followed by turning corners to see yet another massive climb ahead. My phone rang a couple of times during this stage, but I knew I couldn't get to it in time to answer, and that I couldn't pick up my voicemail or even see who was calling without turning on the prohibitively expensive data roaming option; this only served to piss me off more. I followed Mermaid's advice of eating something if I started to feel pissed off, but it really didn't help at all (and this was within an hour of eating lunch), and I started to think that exhaustion / hypothermia / near-death experiences / PMS were viable alternative hypotheses.
At one point, turning yet another bloody corner to see yet another bloody hill, I said loudly "OH FUCK. RIGHT. OFF, you bastard hill", and the rider ahead of me started giggling. This really seemed to lift my mood, and everything after that point seemed easier to deal with, even though the long climbs and steep terrifying descents and pouring rain were much the same as before.
At the final pit stop, I called Mr E Man and my good friend from high school who lives close to the end of the ride. Hearing their voices was an amazing boost to my spirits, even though my friend said she wouldn't be able to see me cross the line because her baby was just starting his nap. I learned that my friends had finished the ride and that one of them was waiting for me with his wife and baby Morgan, and that there was beer and hot food and dry clothes, with only 15 km of very pleasant, flat, smooth, off-road riverside bike trail standing in my way. At this point it stopped raining and I jumped on my bike for the final time, still soaked, still freezing, but no longer miserable!
The last section was a pure pleasure. Everyone was so excited to be near the end, and there was much chatter and laughter and discussion of whether we should have a beer first or a hot drink first. And then, at about 2:45 pm, I saw a sign for Marymoor park - the end of the ride - 1.5 miles away! The joy! The euphoria! The hooting and hollering among the riders!
There were people lining the whole of the rest of the route, cheering and yelling and waving signs. Coming into the park, I could hear the music and the announcer... getting louder and louder... and then I turned the final corner and saw a field full of people... and then I was in a muddy field and crossing the line and people on my right were yelling "CATH! CATH! CATH!"
I have honestly never been so happy in my life to see my husband and friends. I'll spare you the over-emotional details, but there were hugs and tears aplenty, and not just from me.
The beer was so delicious. The food was so yummy. And the atmosphere was so amazing. But we were soooo cold (you'll see me moving from side to side in the video below - I didn't need the loo, I was just trying to generate some warmth and also stretch my muscles out a bit). When we got to our nearby hotel I had a long hot shower, but as soon as I got out, I started shivering again. So I got in the hot tub, but when I got out after 5 minutes to go and grab my camera, I started shivering again. I didn't feel properly warm for about another half hour, but by that time I'd had a couple of beers and was incredibly happy, so it didn't really seem to matter all that much any more. And then I got to have dinner with my hubby, my Vancouver friends, and my high school friend! And then fall asleep about ten minutes after we got back to our room!
Muscle-wise, I felt better than I'd expected. Much better, actually. My quads were pretty tight, but I was fine as long as I kept moving. Stopping was bad, though - I could barely get out of my chair after dinner on Sunday, and the next day was rather painful, especially when I first got up and then again when I got out of the car after the drive home. (It was depressing how quickly we blasted through all the landmarks from the ride - the lunch site, the campsite, the first day's lunch site, the border. It's really not far at all in a car!). Back home, I woke up at about 4 am on Tuesday with all kinds of weird back spasms going on, but that problem fixed itself with an almighty CLICK during a meeting later that day, and on Thursday morning I was back on my bike. My regular commute felt so short, and I stormed up the hills like they weren't even there - but where were all the people cheering me on, and welcoming me into the bike room with signs and pom poms and vuvuzelas?!
My arse still hurts a bit, but that'll pass soon enough.
Overall, it was an amazingly positive experience. I'm immensely glad I did it***, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who donated and/or supported me in any other way.
I maded you guys a video! (With some beer in it!)
And then I drinked it! (The beer, not the video!)
THANK YOU, EVERYONE!
YOU ROCK!
Video: Part I (I sure wish YouTube would have told me the original all-in-one version was too long before it spent 21 minutes saying "uploading"):
Part II:
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*I got some more donations after the ride started, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, so the total will be higher by now!
**having just passed one group of cyclists, and on my way to catching up with the next one (yes, I passed people! Quite a lot of people! Although lots of groups were passing me, too). This was my pattern for most of the ride. I think my speed fell somewhere between the average for the recreational riders and the average for the actual good cyclists. Or something
***I'm also immensely glad it's over! It's been hanging over me for months, and the training combined with 7 weeks of hosting friends and family over the last 2.5 months means that I feel like I've had no time to myself, literally since the Olympics. I haven't had time to get a hair cut, or buy new clothes to replace the ones that are literally falling apart on me - I'm a shaggy-headed, scruffy-clothed ragamuffin! But this weekend I get to do whatever I want! Like, watch every single World Cup game! COME ON ENGLAND!!!
Monday, May 31, 2010
Dream trippin'
When we bought our house (four years ago today!), one of the best things that Mr E Man and I did was to invest in a really good bed. We'd been sleeping on a queen-size futon, and although it was a good fit for our small rented apartment, we decided that our larger space and newly-acquired grown-up status were worthy of a better place to lay our heads. So we found a beautiful cherry-wood bedroom furniture set on Craigslist, including a king-size sleigh bed frame, and bought the best mattress we could afford to go with it. Memory foam pillows and a lovely heavy duvet complete the set, and we both now (usually) sleep better than we ever have before in our adult lives. We like to cuddle up when we first go to bed, and again when we wake up, but we separate to sleep - and in our lovely lovely bed, there's plenty of space for us both to move around and get comfy without ever touching each other!
The problem comes when we go on vacation. We've spoiled ourselves rotten at home, and have a terrible time sleeping in inferior beds. Anything smaller than a king-sized bed has us tossing and turning and fighting for space in an extreeeeeemely mature way ("stop touching me!!!" "I'm not! YOU'RE touching ME!!!"), and back in November The Most Uncomfortable Bed In The World forced us to abandon our otherwise wonderful accommodation in Cienfuegos, and upset our gracious hostess in the process.
Hotel beds are usually fine, but our budget is better suited to B&Bs and friends'/relatives' spare rooms. And so it was on last week's trip. With my parents in tow, we didn't even get the best spare room in each case. We slept on a pull-out sofa bed at my sister-in-law's, an old and not terribly comfortable queen-size bed in the condo we rented in Whistler, and then foam pads on the floor of the computer room at my mother-in-law's. (The latter was actually the most comfortable bed of the three - or at least the one that offered the most space). These inferior beds meant that I got little sleep on our "vacation", typically waking two or three times during the night and waking up for good by 6:30 am at the latest. We always relish sleeping in our own bed for the first time after a trip, but last night's return to home base was particularly welcome.
There was an upside to last week's inferior sleeping arrangements, though: I got to experience two new categories of dreams!
I love dreams. I find them fascinating. Where do they come from? What are they for? (And do my cats' dreams serve the same purpose as my own?) So whole new dream categories are extremely welcome, even if the dreams themselves suck.
Category I: The Boring Dream.
I had Boring Dreams twice on the trip. I can't remember what they were about - because they were really, really boring - but I woke up with a huge sense of relief - "thank God that's over with". This made waking up at 6 am on a vacation day feel much more welcome than it would have done otherwise.
Category II: The PMS Dream.
I woke up (early, of course) one morning to find myself really, really mad at Mr E Man. The reason? Well, you see, he'd been put in prison for something or other, but I knew that he was innocent, and I worked my ass off for six months to prove it. When I finally got him out of jail - having lost my job and several friends in the process - he wanted to see his friends instead of just spending time with me all the time, and I turned into Super Bitch. In my dream, I knew I was hormonal and wasn't being entirely rational or reasonable in my anger, but I couldn't stop myself from escalating the situation, until I ended up screaming at him in front of all his friends - at his prison release celebration party, no less! - and storming off down the street in a dodgy neighbourhood in the middle of the night.
I'm not quite that bad in real life when I have PMS*, but the sense of "oh this is because I'm hormonal but oops I don't seem to be able to stop myself even though I've now realised that I'm overreacting" was uncannily familiar. First time in a dream, though - but not the first time I've stayed mad at someone in the morning after "they" pissed me off in a dream!
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*although I did once storm out of a restaurant in a huff because Mr E Man kept tickling my knee after I'd asked him to stop it - TWICE. I already felt silly by the time I got home, about two minutes later...
The problem comes when we go on vacation. We've spoiled ourselves rotten at home, and have a terrible time sleeping in inferior beds. Anything smaller than a king-sized bed has us tossing and turning and fighting for space in an extreeeeeemely mature way ("stop touching me!!!" "I'm not! YOU'RE touching ME!!!"), and back in November The Most Uncomfortable Bed In The World forced us to abandon our otherwise wonderful accommodation in Cienfuegos, and upset our gracious hostess in the process.
Hotel beds are usually fine, but our budget is better suited to B&Bs and friends'/relatives' spare rooms. And so it was on last week's trip. With my parents in tow, we didn't even get the best spare room in each case. We slept on a pull-out sofa bed at my sister-in-law's, an old and not terribly comfortable queen-size bed in the condo we rented in Whistler, and then foam pads on the floor of the computer room at my mother-in-law's. (The latter was actually the most comfortable bed of the three - or at least the one that offered the most space). These inferior beds meant that I got little sleep on our "vacation", typically waking two or three times during the night and waking up for good by 6:30 am at the latest. We always relish sleeping in our own bed for the first time after a trip, but last night's return to home base was particularly welcome.
There was an upside to last week's inferior sleeping arrangements, though: I got to experience two new categories of dreams!
I love dreams. I find them fascinating. Where do they come from? What are they for? (And do my cats' dreams serve the same purpose as my own?) So whole new dream categories are extremely welcome, even if the dreams themselves suck.
Category I: The Boring Dream.
I had Boring Dreams twice on the trip. I can't remember what they were about - because they were really, really boring - but I woke up with a huge sense of relief - "thank God that's over with". This made waking up at 6 am on a vacation day feel much more welcome than it would have done otherwise.
Category II: The PMS Dream.
I woke up (early, of course) one morning to find myself really, really mad at Mr E Man. The reason? Well, you see, he'd been put in prison for something or other, but I knew that he was innocent, and I worked my ass off for six months to prove it. When I finally got him out of jail - having lost my job and several friends in the process - he wanted to see his friends instead of just spending time with me all the time, and I turned into Super Bitch. In my dream, I knew I was hormonal and wasn't being entirely rational or reasonable in my anger, but I couldn't stop myself from escalating the situation, until I ended up screaming at him in front of all his friends - at his prison release celebration party, no less! - and storming off down the street in a dodgy neighbourhood in the middle of the night.
I'm not quite that bad in real life when I have PMS*, but the sense of "oh this is because I'm hormonal but oops I don't seem to be able to stop myself even though I've now realised that I'm overreacting" was uncannily familiar. First time in a dream, though - but not the first time I've stayed mad at someone in the morning after "they" pissed me off in a dream!
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*although I did once storm out of a restaurant in a huff because Mr E Man kept tickling my knee after I'd asked him to stop it - TWICE. I already felt silly by the time I got home, about two minutes later...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Well, this ought to help...
In the last week or two, I've started training in earnest for the Vancouver to Seattle Ride to Conquer Cancer I'm doing in June. I've taken some nice hilly detours on my way to work some mornings, and on Saturday I did a good solid 55 km (I chose the route I did for the MS Society 60 km ride in 2008, although I didn't use the official start/finish line). It went well in that I finished feeling sore and tired but not overly so, and my 13 km ride the next day (to get my body used to riding while in pain) was much better than I thought it was going to be. In fact I felt stronger the more I rode on that second day, and if I'd had more time to spare I might have gone further.
The biggest problem so far has been the frustration of stop-start city riding. During the first quarter of my ride on Saturday I had to stop every couple of blocks or so for lights, stop signs, pedestrians, roundabouts, idiot drivers, reversing trucks, you name it. I got in a good, long uninterrupted stretch around UBC (including one long, long, evil hill) and then along SW Marine Drive as far as Granville Street, but then I hit the cross traffic again. And the third quarter of the route I'd chosen zig-zagged all over the place in order to cross the main streets at intersections with stop lights; I found it hard to memorise more than four or five turns at a time, so I had to keep stopping to check the map on my iPhone. At least I'll be able to remember the route next time!
The friend who's doing the ride with me had offered to show me a route around Richmond and Steveston that has much less cross traffic, but a lot of it is on highways. My friend assured me that the highway's shoulders are nice and wide, and I agreed to try his route, but then he bailed on me because he thought it was going to rain (what a wuss! It didn't rain in the end, but I had my waterproof jacket in my bag and would have kept going if it had).
I was quite encouraged by my first week of full training, and felt even better after chatting to one of the PIs at work who did the ride last year and who is also just starting his training for this year's event. He was really happy to have hit the 28 km mark at the weekend, which obviously made me feel pretty good! He told me that his most extreme training sessions last year were one double and one triple circuit of the same hilly 28 km route, which made me feel even better...
I also learned that there's only one significant hill on the first day of the ride (although apparently it's really annoying because it's in the middle of the town of Bellingham, and you keep losing all your momentum due to stopping at lights and stop signs), and four or five "rolling hills" on the second day.
Now, you might think that this would be good news; training on hills for a flat course should give you an advantage, right?
Well, yes and no: I'm sure the hills I do encounter on the ride will feel relatively easy as a result of my training, but I've been caught in this trap before. When all your riding is on rolling hills like Vancouver's (or Glasgow's), you get used to resting your legs and lungs as you coast down hills, and when confronted with the need to keep constantly pedalling on a flat route, you can really struggle.
So, last week, I put out a call on Facebook and Twitter to see if any of my Vancouver buddies had an exercise bike they could lend me. In an example of perfect timing the likes of which I've rarely experienced, one friend was in the process of emptying her house before starting renos, and donated her old bike to the cause!
Mr E Man borrowed a friend's truck and picked the bike up for me yesterday, and I've already got a couple of short rides in. It's noisier than I'd expected, meaning that my idea of riding it while watching hockey games and other TV shows of interest to Mr E Man has been vetoed. But it's a great addition to my training; the constant pedalling gives me a really good workout (one thing that surprised me is that you get much sweatier when you don't have the airflow you get when you're riding a real bike outside! Phew!), and I can alternate between the flat and intervals modes.
The static bike won't replace my training on my real bike, but it's definitely adding a whole new dimension to the enterprise, and will also increase my overall hours and kilometres; it's easier to get motivated to train when I can read a book, watch TV, or enjoy my podcasts while pedalling!
Things I still need:
The biggest problem so far has been the frustration of stop-start city riding. During the first quarter of my ride on Saturday I had to stop every couple of blocks or so for lights, stop signs, pedestrians, roundabouts, idiot drivers, reversing trucks, you name it. I got in a good, long uninterrupted stretch around UBC (including one long, long, evil hill) and then along SW Marine Drive as far as Granville Street, but then I hit the cross traffic again. And the third quarter of the route I'd chosen zig-zagged all over the place in order to cross the main streets at intersections with stop lights; I found it hard to memorise more than four or five turns at a time, so I had to keep stopping to check the map on my iPhone. At least I'll be able to remember the route next time!
The friend who's doing the ride with me had offered to show me a route around Richmond and Steveston that has much less cross traffic, but a lot of it is on highways. My friend assured me that the highway's shoulders are nice and wide, and I agreed to try his route, but then he bailed on me because he thought it was going to rain (what a wuss! It didn't rain in the end, but I had my waterproof jacket in my bag and would have kept going if it had).
I was quite encouraged by my first week of full training, and felt even better after chatting to one of the PIs at work who did the ride last year and who is also just starting his training for this year's event. He was really happy to have hit the 28 km mark at the weekend, which obviously made me feel pretty good! He told me that his most extreme training sessions last year were one double and one triple circuit of the same hilly 28 km route, which made me feel even better...
I also learned that there's only one significant hill on the first day of the ride (although apparently it's really annoying because it's in the middle of the town of Bellingham, and you keep losing all your momentum due to stopping at lights and stop signs), and four or five "rolling hills" on the second day.
Now, you might think that this would be good news; training on hills for a flat course should give you an advantage, right?
Well, yes and no: I'm sure the hills I do encounter on the ride will feel relatively easy as a result of my training, but I've been caught in this trap before. When all your riding is on rolling hills like Vancouver's (or Glasgow's), you get used to resting your legs and lungs as you coast down hills, and when confronted with the need to keep constantly pedalling on a flat route, you can really struggle.
So, last week, I put out a call on Facebook and Twitter to see if any of my Vancouver buddies had an exercise bike they could lend me. In an example of perfect timing the likes of which I've rarely experienced, one friend was in the process of emptying her house before starting renos, and donated her old bike to the cause!
The cats are intrigued when it's stationary, but terrified when it's moving
Mr E Man borrowed a friend's truck and picked the bike up for me yesterday, and I've already got a couple of short rides in. It's noisier than I'd expected, meaning that my idea of riding it while watching hockey games and other TV shows of interest to Mr E Man has been vetoed. But it's a great addition to my training; the constant pedalling gives me a really good workout (one thing that surprised me is that you get much sweatier when you don't have the airflow you get when you're riding a real bike outside! Phew!), and I can alternate between the flat and intervals modes.
The static bike won't replace my training on my real bike, but it's definitely adding a whole new dimension to the enterprise, and will also increase my overall hours and kilometres; it's easier to get motivated to train when I can read a book, watch TV, or enjoy my podcasts while pedalling!
Things I still need:
- Attractive padded shorts of the kind that triple the size of your arse
- Gel saddle? (I think the current one might be OK. I'll decide after some more long rides)
- CamelBak or similar hydration pack. Stopping to drink water a) slows me down and b) subjects me to the pick-up lines of creepy old dudes. On Saturday, one such fella stopped while I was drinking water to say "Nice day for a ride". I agreed, with a smile, but unfortunately that must have encouraged him because he followed up with "Are you good and sweaty? You look nice and sweaty". Yeah. I could do without that experience!
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Head beats heart in overtime: home fans "devastated"
The events described in this post took place several weeks ago. I am only just able to bring myself to write about them...
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My hilarious soon-to-be sister-in-law, K, owns a float home. (Not a house boat, which is an actual boat that you live on, but rather a log cabin-like home that floats, and that you secure to a dock. You can't drive it like you can with a boat, but you can have it towed. Carefully).
I saw it for the first time on a cold and rainy night a couple of winters ago. We'd been invited for dinner, and showed up at the North Vancouver marina clutching flowers, a bottle of good red wine, and very complicated instructions to go to Gate E, enter a code on the security pad, go down the ramp, turn right at the hand rail covered in Christmas lights, then take the second left at the blue sail boat, and so on.
By the time we'd navigated the maze of floating walkways and found the right home, we were soaked through and freezing cold. But we were welcomed into a floating haven of light and coziness that made me fall in love at first sight.
Before I'd even taken my coat off, I turned to K and said, "if you ever decide to sell this place, CALL ME. Seriously".
Well, we got the call in September. K and my brother-in-law are selling her float home and his condo so they can buy a house; between them they have two grown-up kids, two almost teenaged boys, and a couple of large dogs, so it's time.
Mr E Man and I were very excited by this news. We both love being in, on, and around the ocean, so this would be perfect! We could buy kayaks and tie them up to the back of the house! I would even be able to commute by boat, FFS!
We started discussing how much we could afford to pay in additional mortgage payments, factoring in the rent we could charge for our current place.
But then we heard the asking price, as (finally) calculated by the rather lazy realtor. I was devastated; it was way more than we'd expected, and completely out of our price range. We briefly discussed selling our current place instead of renting it out in order to finance the deal, but the thing is that a float home is a depreciating asset, and there's no way we're going to give up the appreciating asset of our house*.
However, after the float home spent a few months on the market attracting very little interest, the realtor told K that it was time to drop the price. We got another phone call; at the new price, it would make more sense for K to sell the place to us directly at a further discount than to go through realtors and pay the fees on the revised price.
The excitement built again. I was all for going straight to the bank to renegotiate our mortgage, but luckily Mr E Man is much more sensible than me, and suggested that we spend a weekend at the float home before deciding. K agreed, and that's how we spent our first post-Olympics weekend.
When we walked through the door, it was just as lovely and cozy and warm as I remembered. I fell in love all over again.
The kitchen space is right by the front door
Laid-back neighbours
Back deck. No doubt Saba, our ever so "special" cat who often falls off the sofa, would fall off this, too. But Kyrsten, who has lived on a boat with a cat, had already suggested that a fishing net would be a functional and economic investment.
Main living space. The stairs lead up to the sleeping area. The bathroom is behind the wall with the painting on it. This information will be important in a TMI section later on in this post. You have been warned...
Extreme coziness inside...
...and extreme beauty outside, even on a cloudy day
We found a great brew pub within walking distance and had a lovely evening of good food, great beer, and awesome hockey on the TV. We then strolled back to the lovely float home, threw some more logs on the fire, and snuggled together on the sofa to re-watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on DVD.
At this point, we were ready to call the bank.
The problems started when we went to bed. The Queen sized mattress only just fit into the sleeping space; we have a King size, and can't imagine switching back. (Yes, I'm spoiled!) But worse was to come (and here comes the TMI...)
Mr E Man went to the loo while I was in bed, and, well, the privacy of the situation left a lot to be desired. For both of us, but especially for me. The bathroom is really nicely designed inside, but as you can see in the fourth photo in this post, it's separated from the sleeping area only by a wall of rough planks. Planks with gaps between them that let out far, far too much sound. And fumes. (Did I mention all the great beer? The brew pub does a very hoppy IPA that is delectably delicous... but dangerous).
A married couple can get used to these things, but what happens when you have guests?!
We had already highlighted the lack of a guest room as a problem. There's plenty of room for a sofa bed, but the whole space is open plan.We don't have guests all that often, but when they do come, they come for a long time (we have some British friends arriving on Thursday for nine days, then we have a couple of weeks off before my parents arrive for a month). Things can be frustrating enough in our current house, which has plenty of distance (and walls!) between the main and guest bedroom, but only one bathroom. My Mum in particular has a bad habit of taking very long showers without checking if anyone needs to get in ahead of her, often when I was just about to go and get ready to leave for work. In the float home, we just wouldn't be able to have long-term guests, and after that night, we were completely put off the idea of having any overnight guests at all!
Another con manifested itself at 1 am. And 2 am. And 3:30 am. And so on throughout the night. Yep; the railway tracks run right by the marina. You don't notice the sound during the day, but you sure as hell notice it when a train whistle suddenly wakes you from a deep sleep! This wouldn't be a deal breaker in and of itself; you can adjust to new noises over time. But on top of the other cons (and the smaller living and storage space; we'd be back to our apartment dwelling days of having bikes in the kitchen and skis and golf clubs in the living room), it was just a bit too much.
We agreed over breakfast at the awesome and OH, SO HEARTBREAKINGLY CLOSE! Lonsdale Quay Public Market that we should get over our state of denial and realise that we are in fact responsible grown-ups, who need to think clearly and rationally rather than basing major financial decisions on love at first sight.
But I could still feel the love.
The news a few days later that K had hired a new, less lazy realtor who was able to almost immediately sell the float home for way more than the original September asking price, came almost as a relief. I was still in two minds, and having the decision made for me made things so much easier. And the higher price really helps out our wonderful family members, who we love truly and dearly.
But.
But but but.
There will always be a little part of me that regrets not following my heart and buying K's beautiful, cozy float home.Given enough time and money we could have closed up the gaps in that bathroom wall; we could have built some kind of private space for guests; we could have built an extension to the sleeping space that would accommodate our King size mattress; we could have got used to the train whistles.
My head knows we made the right decision. But that doesn't stop me from thinking that being a grown-up really, really sucks sometimes.
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*or rather the land it's built on; the actual house is old and depreciating, and according to our last property tax assessment now makes up something like 8% of the total value of the property. That's Vancouver for ya; with the border to the South, ocean to the West, and mountains to the North, the only way to build is either up or East, making land in Vancouver proper extremely valuable. This is why Mr E Man insisted we buy a house with land rather than a condo or townhouse. He really is much more sensible than I am, and also much better at pretending to be a responsible grown-up.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Memes as mental fibre
Right after EcoGeoFemme pointed out that there haven't been many memes circulating recently, Amanda went and tagged me for one! The assignment is to write about seven things that I've never talked about in my blog.
This is a tricky one for me, because like in real life, I talk/blog too much and with too few filters. It's easy enough to find seven things I've never written about, but that aren't meaningful to me: porcupines, ravioli, WWII tank design, the history of ten pin bowling. My other initial reaction was to go too far in the other direction, into TMI territory, but luckily I decided to tone those ideas down (there still might be TMI for some people). So I present to you a mix of subjects I just haven't got around to, and subjects I've tried to blog about before as a full post but couldn't find the right angle, or that otherwise caused a severe case of writer's block.
1) I have a rather impressive scar on the inside of my left arm.
I got it in a rather embarrassingly cliched middle class way, by falling off a pony at a riding lesson when I was seven and breaking my arm just above the elbow. Contrary to everyone's first reaction, the main scar isn't from the bone breaking through the skin (although I do have a much smaller scar from that - just barely visible in the photo, slightly above and to the right of the mole). It's actually from the multiple surgeries I had to have to repair the blood vessels and nerves that the broken bone cut through at the point where they all bunch together at the elbow joint. My arm swelled up after one surgery, bursting a couple of stitches and stretching the scar tissue out, and it stretched further as I grew. I'm lucky to still have my arm at all; during one surgery that was supposed to last a couple of hours but was well into its seventh (my parents were freaking out at this point, as you can imagine), the surgeons discussed amputation as the best option. Luckily, they persevered and saved my arm. I was in traction for two weeks (apparently there's a published case study about how they set up the traction apparatus - I remember them videoing it - but I can't find it in PubMed), and it took a year or so of intensive physio before I could use my hand properly again. It still sometimes spazzes out on me and I lose my grip on whatever I'm holding with no warning: this is good in that it got me out of playing the viola in high school (the position I had to hold my wrist in seemed to aggravate the problem), but bad in that I once dropped an open 2L bottle of conc HCl while doing my undergrad research project, destroying my lab coat and a patch of the flooring. I've never held anything that scary in my left hand since, even though these incidents are much less common than they used to be.
I remember freaking out when I first saw the scar emerge from inside the cast I'd been wearing; it was hideously red and swollen and flaky and gross. I cried. A lot. However, I soon realised that I could use it to scare younger kids and chase them around the playground, and I almost always win "biggest scar" competitions. It's in such a discrete location, and it's faded and flattened so well, that people sometimes know me for years before they notice it, and it's such a normal part of me now that I barely even remember it's there. Also, the position of one of my moles makes it look like a winky smiley face.
Funnily enough, I have two friends with similar scars in the exact same place, following motorbike accidents. Motorbikes are much cooler than ponies.
OK, that one went longer than I'd intended... I'll try to be more concise in the remaining six points!
2) I sometimes have dreams about people I know that make me think about them in a completely different way. Usually just for the next day, but sometimes permanently. These dreams are sometimes the first conscious sign of something going on subconsciously, e.g. that it was time to let one friendship fizzle out, or that a formerly platonic friendship was heading in a new direction that had to be addressed. But other times they're just completely from left field and make me giggle with their weirdness.
There's a episode of Friends where Phoebe finally remembers why she's mad at Ross:
3) Being around my friends' babies has had a complicated effect on me: it's made me feel very secure in my own decision not to have kids, but also made me less scared of an accident. We had a scare just before last summer's baby boom (my previously 100% reliable record of years of 27 day cycles suddenly disappeared with an unprecedented 42 day cycle) and I totally freaked out. We had another scare in November, and I freaked out considerably less. Although there was still some freaking, obviously.
4) I always used to say that if I won the lottery, I'd still want to work. But the older I get, the more I think I'd just want to bum about, living on a boat (summer) and in a ski cabin (winter) and maybe dabbling in a little writing. I think this is the opposite of how you're supposed to change as you get older.
5) I believe in ghosts. Well, I don't not believe in ghosts. I don't believe in the usual way; I don't think there are self-aware / conscious spirits floating around, trying to avenge their own deaths or otherwise deliberately haunting the living because of unresolved issues from their lives. I cycle through the local cemetery in the dark all the time: I aint afraid of no ghost! (Campfire stories are another matter entirely). But too many people I know and trust have told me too many, too convincing stories. There are also too many examples of multiple people seeing the same thing in the same place and/or at the same time.
The most convincing stories are where the person sees a ghost that doesn't interact with them. "This white apparition rose out of a grave and waved at me" doesn't cut it. But the other stories do. For example, my Dad has a story about a fellow student from his hall of residence who died after breaking his neck in a rugby scrum. A few weeks later my Dad was walking past this student's room (which had been emptied and locked up for the year; no-one else wanted to live there), and saw the dead guy open the door, walk out into the corridor, lock his room door behind him, and walk away without acknowledging my Dad, who was standing a few inches away with his mouth wide open. He says it was unmistakably, undeniably, definitely, the dead guy (in the dead guy's clothes). This student definitely did not have a twin or any other similar looking relatives (my Dad knew him well enough to go to the funeral and meet his family).
Now, I'm no physicist, but I do try to read the complicated physics articles in New Scientist, and I know that our understanding of time is incomplete and there are some unresolved problems with the current theories. Is it possible that we might sometimes catch a glimpse of someone or something from the past? That my Dad, and other people I know and trust who have similar stories, somehow watched a play-back of a moment from this guy's life, like watching a video?
I can almost hear Massimo (and any other physicists who read this) laughing at me right now.
Possible alternative explanations:
a) cognitive dissonance
b) my Dad is crazy
c) my Dad has repeatedly lied to me about this experience (I don't think he his. You should see his face when he tells this story).
d) lots of other people are either crazy or lying
e) I'm crazy
f) I've watched too much sci-fi
6) Um. Baby porcupines are cute?
7) The sad demise of Mad Hatter's blog had really got me thinking. I totally understand her reasons. Don't worry / celebrate, I have no intentions of shutting down my blog. But blogging really is a trigger for wasting lots of time on the internet, time that would be better spent reading, writing, playing my guitar, and hanging with Mr E Man and the kitties. I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on blog posts, and I don't want to stop completely, because I love it. You guys are my friends, and I want to know what you're up to! Also, you can't / shouldn't be a blogger without also contributing to the community by reading and commenting on other people's blogs.
I think the solution (for me) is to try and be more selective. I went through my Google Reader account yesterday and deleted some feeds. I pruned way back to the bare bones, i.e. I unsubscribed from eight blogs (and resubscribed to three of them this morning). It's so hard! There are too many good blogs out there! So I think rather than reading fewer blogs, I need to read fewer posts on each blog. Almost every blog contains a mixture of things I'm really interested in, and things I'm less interested in (speaking of which, I do apologise for the recent flood of posts about Canadian politics. Please bear with me). For example, it's now five years since I last held a pipette, and I really don't have any useful, current advice to contribute to conversations about lab work and related aspects of the grad student / postdoc experience. Similarly, not being a prof or lecturer, I have nothing useful to contribute on posts about teaching methods and such.
So, if you see fewer comments and page hits from me, please forgive me! I'm still skim-reading in Google Reader, but applying more filters to my thorough reading and commenting. And I'll always click through to celebrate your highs and commiserate with your lows.
Unless they're about breaking a pipette while teaching.
-------------
I tag: anyone willing to post their own scar photo!
This is a tricky one for me, because like in real life, I talk/blog too much and with too few filters. It's easy enough to find seven things I've never written about, but that aren't meaningful to me: porcupines, ravioli, WWII tank design, the history of ten pin bowling. My other initial reaction was to go too far in the other direction, into TMI territory, but luckily I decided to tone those ideas down (there still might be TMI for some people). So I present to you a mix of subjects I just haven't got around to, and subjects I've tried to blog about before as a full post but couldn't find the right angle, or that otherwise caused a severe case of writer's block.
1) I have a rather impressive scar on the inside of my left arm.
I got it in a rather embarrassingly cliched middle class way, by falling off a pony at a riding lesson when I was seven and breaking my arm just above the elbow. Contrary to everyone's first reaction, the main scar isn't from the bone breaking through the skin (although I do have a much smaller scar from that - just barely visible in the photo, slightly above and to the right of the mole). It's actually from the multiple surgeries I had to have to repair the blood vessels and nerves that the broken bone cut through at the point where they all bunch together at the elbow joint. My arm swelled up after one surgery, bursting a couple of stitches and stretching the scar tissue out, and it stretched further as I grew. I'm lucky to still have my arm at all; during one surgery that was supposed to last a couple of hours but was well into its seventh (my parents were freaking out at this point, as you can imagine), the surgeons discussed amputation as the best option. Luckily, they persevered and saved my arm. I was in traction for two weeks (apparently there's a published case study about how they set up the traction apparatus - I remember them videoing it - but I can't find it in PubMed), and it took a year or so of intensive physio before I could use my hand properly again. It still sometimes spazzes out on me and I lose my grip on whatever I'm holding with no warning: this is good in that it got me out of playing the viola in high school (the position I had to hold my wrist in seemed to aggravate the problem), but bad in that I once dropped an open 2L bottle of conc HCl while doing my undergrad research project, destroying my lab coat and a patch of the flooring. I've never held anything that scary in my left hand since, even though these incidents are much less common than they used to be.
I remember freaking out when I first saw the scar emerge from inside the cast I'd been wearing; it was hideously red and swollen and flaky and gross. I cried. A lot. However, I soon realised that I could use it to scare younger kids and chase them around the playground, and I almost always win "biggest scar" competitions. It's in such a discrete location, and it's faded and flattened so well, that people sometimes know me for years before they notice it, and it's such a normal part of me now that I barely even remember it's there. Also, the position of one of my moles makes it look like a winky smiley face.
Funnily enough, I have two friends with similar scars in the exact same place, following motorbike accidents. Motorbikes are much cooler than ponies.
OK, that one went longer than I'd intended... I'll try to be more concise in the remaining six points!
2) I sometimes have dreams about people I know that make me think about them in a completely different way. Usually just for the next day, but sometimes permanently. These dreams are sometimes the first conscious sign of something going on subconsciously, e.g. that it was time to let one friendship fizzle out, or that a formerly platonic friendship was heading in a new direction that had to be addressed. But other times they're just completely from left field and make me giggle with their weirdness.
There's a episode of Friends where Phoebe finally remembers why she's mad at Ross:
"Oh, come on! Yes... remember that time on the frozen lake? We were playing chess, you said I was boring, and then you took off your energy mask and you were Cameron Diaz! Okay, there's a chance this may have been a dream"I couldn't find the clip on YouTube, but it sums up the latter category of dream perfectly.
3) Being around my friends' babies has had a complicated effect on me: it's made me feel very secure in my own decision not to have kids, but also made me less scared of an accident. We had a scare just before last summer's baby boom (my previously 100% reliable record of years of 27 day cycles suddenly disappeared with an unprecedented 42 day cycle) and I totally freaked out. We had another scare in November, and I freaked out considerably less. Although there was still some freaking, obviously.
4) I always used to say that if I won the lottery, I'd still want to work. But the older I get, the more I think I'd just want to bum about, living on a boat (summer) and in a ski cabin (winter) and maybe dabbling in a little writing. I think this is the opposite of how you're supposed to change as you get older.
5) I believe in ghosts. Well, I don't not believe in ghosts. I don't believe in the usual way; I don't think there are self-aware / conscious spirits floating around, trying to avenge their own deaths or otherwise deliberately haunting the living because of unresolved issues from their lives. I cycle through the local cemetery in the dark all the time: I aint afraid of no ghost! (Campfire stories are another matter entirely). But too many people I know and trust have told me too many, too convincing stories. There are also too many examples of multiple people seeing the same thing in the same place and/or at the same time.
The most convincing stories are where the person sees a ghost that doesn't interact with them. "This white apparition rose out of a grave and waved at me" doesn't cut it. But the other stories do. For example, my Dad has a story about a fellow student from his hall of residence who died after breaking his neck in a rugby scrum. A few weeks later my Dad was walking past this student's room (which had been emptied and locked up for the year; no-one else wanted to live there), and saw the dead guy open the door, walk out into the corridor, lock his room door behind him, and walk away without acknowledging my Dad, who was standing a few inches away with his mouth wide open. He says it was unmistakably, undeniably, definitely, the dead guy (in the dead guy's clothes). This student definitely did not have a twin or any other similar looking relatives (my Dad knew him well enough to go to the funeral and meet his family).
Now, I'm no physicist, but I do try to read the complicated physics articles in New Scientist, and I know that our understanding of time is incomplete and there are some unresolved problems with the current theories. Is it possible that we might sometimes catch a glimpse of someone or something from the past? That my Dad, and other people I know and trust who have similar stories, somehow watched a play-back of a moment from this guy's life, like watching a video?
I can almost hear Massimo (and any other physicists who read this) laughing at me right now.
Possible alternative explanations:
a) cognitive dissonance
b) my Dad is crazy
c) my Dad has repeatedly lied to me about this experience (I don't think he his. You should see his face when he tells this story).
d) lots of other people are either crazy or lying
e) I'm crazy
f) I've watched too much sci-fi
6) Um. Baby porcupines are cute?
7) The sad demise of Mad Hatter's blog had really got me thinking. I totally understand her reasons. Don't worry / celebrate, I have no intentions of shutting down my blog. But blogging really is a trigger for wasting lots of time on the internet, time that would be better spent reading, writing, playing my guitar, and hanging with Mr E Man and the kitties. I spend a lot of time reading and commenting on blog posts, and I don't want to stop completely, because I love it. You guys are my friends, and I want to know what you're up to! Also, you can't / shouldn't be a blogger without also contributing to the community by reading and commenting on other people's blogs.
I think the solution (for me) is to try and be more selective. I went through my Google Reader account yesterday and deleted some feeds. I pruned way back to the bare bones, i.e. I unsubscribed from eight blogs (and resubscribed to three of them this morning). It's so hard! There are too many good blogs out there! So I think rather than reading fewer blogs, I need to read fewer posts on each blog. Almost every blog contains a mixture of things I'm really interested in, and things I'm less interested in (speaking of which, I do apologise for the recent flood of posts about Canadian politics. Please bear with me). For example, it's now five years since I last held a pipette, and I really don't have any useful, current advice to contribute to conversations about lab work and related aspects of the grad student / postdoc experience. Similarly, not being a prof or lecturer, I have nothing useful to contribute on posts about teaching methods and such.
So, if you see fewer comments and page hits from me, please forgive me! I'm still skim-reading in Google Reader, but applying more filters to my thorough reading and commenting. And I'll always click through to celebrate your highs and commiserate with your lows.
Unless they're about breaking a pipette while teaching.
-------------
I tag: anyone willing to post their own scar photo!
Monday, November 30, 2009
Daytripper: La Habana
We'd already decided to head South after our week in the resort, making the compulsory visit to Habana / Havana easiest to accomplish as a day trip West from Varadero. A couple of friends who'd been to Varadero before had suggested approaching our resort staff and asking whether they or someone they knew could drive us there, the theory being that this would work out cheaper, and with a more personal touch, than taking the official tour. We tried to follow this plan, but the first three people we talked to referred us straight back to the official tour, saying that this would work out much easier and more comfortable, and give us more time in "the good parts" of Habana. (I wonder if they were on commission...) We obviously talked to the wrong people, as we met a couple of groups of tourists later that week who had succeeded in finding a private driver and guide in this way.
In the end, the official tour had its advantages and disadvantages. On the pro side, our tour guide spoke excellent English, and gave us lots of insights into local industries, agriculture, history, and social issues, both on the drive and in the city itself. And the bus was very comfortable and clean, with air-con and a toilet on board. The cons: being herded like cattle around the prime tourist hotspots, with 45 minutes here, an hour and a half there, and a mere five minutes for photos in a rain-soaked Plaza de la Revolucion;
time wasted in places we had no real interest in, such as a slow drive through a very wet cemetery and a half-hour stop at a cigar shop; no choice in where to go or where to eat lunch (included); not enough time in general. If we were to do the trip over again I'd spend more time trying to find an alternative option, but overall I'm very happy that we made it to this beautiful and interesting city.
Habana is a UNESCO world heritage site, and that worthy organisation has been providing funds to help the Cuban government renovate the older parts of the city. I do hope this money continues to flow; the areas that have already been fixed up are just gorgeous,
while other areas of the city have such obvious potential. Gorgeous facades and intricate plaster work crumble sadly away, crying out for a coat of paint, or try in vain to mask the sight of water from a tropical rain storm cascading through the hollowed out rooms and down a stone spiral staircase.
It must have been something to see in its heyday. At the moment, though, it's obviously still a work in progress!
The workmen we came across were very happy to let us photograph them at work, and shook hands with Mr E Man when he identified himself as a carpenter. I saw a glint in his eye that made me think he might be dreaming of swapping Vancouver's dreary grey gloom for a life spent restoring Habana's buildings to their former glory!
We'd been warned before we left Canada about constant harassment from beggars and hustlers. There was a wee bit of that in Habana, but really, Paris and Rome are far worse (and so are other parts of Cuba - stay tuned!) And I never once felt unsafe, even when we ventured into the teeming, hot, sticky side streets, and had to duck into a wee bit of a seedy bar to shelter from a sudden downpour, before making a mad dash back to the bus along cobbled streets suddenly flowing with a couple of inches of water! A steamy bus full of wet shoes, oh joy!
One warning, if you go: take your own toilet paper! Habana was a great introduction to this most important rule of Cuban travel. In our two weeks in Cuba, I only saw the magic combination of paper, seat, soap, running water, and paper towels or hand dryer once or twice outside of the resort (and not always inside!) Even in nice restaurants and hotels, packed full of Western tourists, you have to either get your TP at the door from the ubiquitous attendant (they hand out 2 or 3 sheets max of the local sandpaper), or supply your own. Some loos didn't even have a flush mechanism, meaning that the attendant would have to come in after you and fill the top tank with water from a bucket. (Needless to say, I did not enjoy this aspect of the authentic local colour!) I quickly realised that, in the absence of a good-sized bag, it was best to stuff the pockets of my waterproof jacket full of small change for tips (required even if you take your own paper), a roll of TP (brought from home after reading the guide book very carefully), and hand sanitiser. I got some odd looks (and snarky comments from Mr E Man) for always carrying my jacket, even on hot sunny days, but really, such discomforts are very minor, and well worth the inconvenience.
In the end, the official tour had its advantages and disadvantages. On the pro side, our tour guide spoke excellent English, and gave us lots of insights into local industries, agriculture, history, and social issues, both on the drive and in the city itself. And the bus was very comfortable and clean, with air-con and a toilet on board. The cons: being herded like cattle around the prime tourist hotspots, with 45 minutes here, an hour and a half there, and a mere five minutes for photos in a rain-soaked Plaza de la Revolucion;
Viva la Revolucion! (Unless it's raining)
time wasted in places we had no real interest in, such as a slow drive through a very wet cemetery and a half-hour stop at a cigar shop; no choice in where to go or where to eat lunch (included); not enough time in general. If we were to do the trip over again I'd spend more time trying to find an alternative option, but overall I'm very happy that we made it to this beautiful and interesting city.
Habana is a UNESCO world heritage site, and that worthy organisation has been providing funds to help the Cuban government renovate the older parts of the city. I do hope this money continues to flow; the areas that have already been fixed up are just gorgeous,
while other areas of the city have such obvious potential. Gorgeous facades and intricate plaster work crumble sadly away, crying out for a coat of paint, or try in vain to mask the sight of water from a tropical rain storm cascading through the hollowed out rooms and down a stone spiral staircase.
You missed a bit!
It must have been something to see in its heyday. At the moment, though, it's obviously still a work in progress!
The workmen we came across were very happy to let us photograph them at work, and shook hands with Mr E Man when he identified himself as a carpenter. I saw a glint in his eye that made me think he might be dreaming of swapping Vancouver's dreary grey gloom for a life spent restoring Habana's buildings to their former glory!
A Canadian connection from more capitalist times
We'd been warned before we left Canada about constant harassment from beggars and hustlers. There was a wee bit of that in Habana, but really, Paris and Rome are far worse (and so are other parts of Cuba - stay tuned!) And I never once felt unsafe, even when we ventured into the teeming, hot, sticky side streets, and had to duck into a wee bit of a seedy bar to shelter from a sudden downpour, before making a mad dash back to the bus along cobbled streets suddenly flowing with a couple of inches of water! A steamy bus full of wet shoes, oh joy!
One warning, if you go: take your own toilet paper! Habana was a great introduction to this most important rule of Cuban travel. In our two weeks in Cuba, I only saw the magic combination of paper, seat, soap, running water, and paper towels or hand dryer once or twice outside of the resort (and not always inside!) Even in nice restaurants and hotels, packed full of Western tourists, you have to either get your TP at the door from the ubiquitous attendant (they hand out 2 or 3 sheets max of the local sandpaper), or supply your own. Some loos didn't even have a flush mechanism, meaning that the attendant would have to come in after you and fill the top tank with water from a bucket. (Needless to say, I did not enjoy this aspect of the authentic local colour!) I quickly realised that, in the absence of a good-sized bag, it was best to stuff the pockets of my waterproof jacket full of small change for tips (required even if you take your own paper), a roll of TP (brought from home after reading the guide book very carefully), and hand sanitiser. I got some odd looks (and snarky comments from Mr E Man) for always carrying my jacket, even on hot sunny days, but really, such discomforts are very minor, and well worth the inconvenience.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Divangelising
Yes folks, it's another post full of TMI. Especially for the guys. I know that at least one of my readers will be happy, but others among you may wish to go and read something else instead.
Why not join the hockey pool while you're waiting for normal service to resume? You have until 7pm EST today to make your first picks.
----------------
I first read about menstrual cups (specifically the Moon Cup) on an advert posted on the inside of a toilet door in Heathrow airport. I remember the occasion because it made quite the impression; I was in my late teens, and my nose wrinkled with disgust as I read the text. When I came out of the stall, one of the girls I was travelling with said "did you get the same advert as me? GROSS!!!" I had to agree - crazy dirty hippies!
However, I am now well and truly converted. A growing unease about the environmental impact of disposable products, combined with my discovery of green bloggers such as Ruchi, convinced me to look into the Diva Cup a few months ago. It took several posts by Ruchi and other trusted bloggers to get me to the stage of reading the product's testimonials and FAQ pages, and I gradually realised that it wasn't such a scary thing after all. So off to London Drugs I went*, and after reading the instructions very thoroughly, I made the switch.
And I aint going back.
Seriously, it's an amazing, life-changing product. You put it in, and just forget about it for the day. I've never had to empty it more than twice a day, and never at work or while out and about - just once at home before leaving for the day, and then again before bed. I no longer have to worry about having the right number and kind of tampons stashed away at home, at work, and in my various bags. I also don't have to worry about disposing of used tampons in friends' houses or other places with no sani-bins. I can vouch for the safe and comfortable use of the cup while running, cycling, swimming, circuit training, doing yoga, and skiing**. And you know what? No string. On the one occasion that I got caught out without my Diva, I broke out the aforementioned handbag tampon stash, and found the string to be more inconvenient and gross than I'd remembered, and much worse than using the Diva.
It did take a bit of getting used to. The first couple of days were a little uncomfortable, but once I got the hang of inserting and (especially) removing it, I had no other problems. You really do need to read the instructions - there's a right way and a wrong way to put it in. If it doesn't open up fully, it will leak - but luckily I was using back-up that night (I highly recommend doing this until you're comfortable with the cup). I also had a couple of spills while learning how to remove the cup - maybe wait until a lighter day before using it for the first time! I will confess to standing in the bath to remove the cup until I was sure I'd got the hang of it, somewhere near the start of my second cycle.
Is it gross? The first time was... different, but I got used to it very quickly (again, starting to use the cup on a lighter day might help to mitigate that initial reaction!) Now that I'm used to it, (and because I'm such a biology geek), I actually appreciate having a more detailed insight into my cycle, not that there's any real practical benefit to this!
As I mentioned above, it took multiple positive reviews over a period (ha!) of years for me to even consider switching, so I'm not expecting anyone who reads this to go rushing out to the store THIS INSTANT. But I do hope that I can be one influence among many for someone who's already somewhere along that same path.
Viva la Diva!
----------------
*For Ruchi's benefit: the French text on the bilingual packaging says "coupe menstruelle" (menstrual cup, obviously) and "protection d'hygiène féminine" (feminine hygiene protection, duh.)
**Not until Day 3, obviously. Incidentally, the Diva is also fully compatible with moaning, whining, lying on the couch, eating chocolate, and trying to calculate the maximum tolerated dose of ibuprofen.
Why not join the hockey pool while you're waiting for normal service to resume? You have until 7pm EST today to make your first picks.
----------------
I first read about menstrual cups (specifically the Moon Cup) on an advert posted on the inside of a toilet door in Heathrow airport. I remember the occasion because it made quite the impression; I was in my late teens, and my nose wrinkled with disgust as I read the text. When I came out of the stall, one of the girls I was travelling with said "did you get the same advert as me? GROSS!!!" I had to agree - crazy dirty hippies!
However, I am now well and truly converted. A growing unease about the environmental impact of disposable products, combined with my discovery of green bloggers such as Ruchi, convinced me to look into the Diva Cup a few months ago. It took several posts by Ruchi and other trusted bloggers to get me to the stage of reading the product's testimonials and FAQ pages, and I gradually realised that it wasn't such a scary thing after all. So off to London Drugs I went*, and after reading the instructions very thoroughly, I made the switch.
And I aint going back.
Seriously, it's an amazing, life-changing product. You put it in, and just forget about it for the day. I've never had to empty it more than twice a day, and never at work or while out and about - just once at home before leaving for the day, and then again before bed. I no longer have to worry about having the right number and kind of tampons stashed away at home, at work, and in my various bags. I also don't have to worry about disposing of used tampons in friends' houses or other places with no sani-bins. I can vouch for the safe and comfortable use of the cup while running, cycling, swimming, circuit training, doing yoga, and skiing**. And you know what? No string. On the one occasion that I got caught out without my Diva, I broke out the aforementioned handbag tampon stash, and found the string to be more inconvenient and gross than I'd remembered, and much worse than using the Diva.
It did take a bit of getting used to. The first couple of days were a little uncomfortable, but once I got the hang of inserting and (especially) removing it, I had no other problems. You really do need to read the instructions - there's a right way and a wrong way to put it in. If it doesn't open up fully, it will leak - but luckily I was using back-up that night (I highly recommend doing this until you're comfortable with the cup). I also had a couple of spills while learning how to remove the cup - maybe wait until a lighter day before using it for the first time! I will confess to standing in the bath to remove the cup until I was sure I'd got the hang of it, somewhere near the start of my second cycle.
Is it gross? The first time was... different, but I got used to it very quickly (again, starting to use the cup on a lighter day might help to mitigate that initial reaction!) Now that I'm used to it, (and because I'm such a biology geek), I actually appreciate having a more detailed insight into my cycle, not that there's any real practical benefit to this!
As I mentioned above, it took multiple positive reviews over a period (ha!) of years for me to even consider switching, so I'm not expecting anyone who reads this to go rushing out to the store THIS INSTANT. But I do hope that I can be one influence among many for someone who's already somewhere along that same path.
Viva la Diva!
----------------
*For Ruchi's benefit: the French text on the bilingual packaging says "coupe menstruelle" (menstrual cup, obviously) and "protection d'hygiène féminine" (feminine hygiene protection, duh.)
**Not until Day 3, obviously. Incidentally, the Diva is also fully compatible with moaning, whining, lying on the couch, eating chocolate, and trying to calculate the maximum tolerated dose of ibuprofen.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Holy pap!
WARNING: this post may contain Too Much Information for some readers. Especially the guys. You may want to skip it and wait for my next post, which will probably be about the Canadian citizenship test, with hilarious examples of really easy questions. Or maybe I'll remember to charge my camera batteries and get a couple of shots of amusing things I see on my ride to work every day. I think I've now typed enough waffle to fill the truncated post you see in Google Reader; keep reading at your own risk!
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One of my distinguishing characteristics is that I always go for the laugh. In awkward situations, that goes double. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with that, but hey, it makes for good blog posts.
However, I really need to learn that there are times when I don't need to make someone giggle. Take my pap/smear test yesterday, for example.
While my doctor was in the middle of the exam, she asked whether I'm in a monogamous relationship. When I said yes, she said "oh, that's right, you got married, didn't you? I remember you changing your name. How long ago is that now?"
"Two years - today, actually!"
"Oh, congratulations! Are you doing anything fun?"
Now, this is where I really should have stifled that instinct. But the words were out of my mouth before I even consciously knew what I was going to say:
"What, you mean even more fun than this?"
This situation wouldn't be at the absolute top of my list of times you don't want to hear the words "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to wait to continue until my hands stop shaking". But it's pretty close.
At least this was with a doctor I actually like. Until a few years ago I was seeing a male doctor who, although a good physician, did not have the most warm and welcoming personality. While preparing for a similar exam, he squeezed the bottle of lube a bit too hard, and a great big glob shot across the room, hit the wall, and gradually slimed its way down to the floor. If he'd just laughed it off, I would have chuckled and moved on. But he was known for being formal and uptight, and actually got incredibly embarrassed. Like, completely mortified, and apologising profusely.
You know how the urge to laugh gets stronger in situations where laughter would be inappropriate? Yeah. I really felt like I couldn't laugh out loud. So when he tried to start the exam, my entire body was shaking with suppressed laughter, and he had to leave the room and come back five minutes later when I'd calmed down.
Cancer screening is no laughing matter, really*, but it's good to know it can occasionally involve a good chuckle.
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*the Test of the Flying Lube Glob actually came back abnormal, and I had to go for a colposcopy. Luckily the results came back normal, as did all subsequent pap tests. If yesterday's is clear, I'll be moved back from annual to biennial check-ups from now on (all free - yay, socialised healthcare). This is part of my reason for (over)sharing these stories - I'm quite evangelical about getting my friends and family to keep up their regular testing schedules. And it's amazing how many of my friends have also had an abnormal result and colposcopy - but never told me about it until I recounted my own experiences. We need to get the word out there!
------------
One of my distinguishing characteristics is that I always go for the laugh. In awkward situations, that goes double. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day with that, but hey, it makes for good blog posts.
However, I really need to learn that there are times when I don't need to make someone giggle. Take my pap/smear test yesterday, for example.
While my doctor was in the middle of the exam, she asked whether I'm in a monogamous relationship. When I said yes, she said "oh, that's right, you got married, didn't you? I remember you changing your name. How long ago is that now?"
"Two years - today, actually!"
"Oh, congratulations! Are you doing anything fun?"
Now, this is where I really should have stifled that instinct. But the words were out of my mouth before I even consciously knew what I was going to say:
"What, you mean even more fun than this?"
This situation wouldn't be at the absolute top of my list of times you don't want to hear the words "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to wait to continue until my hands stop shaking". But it's pretty close.
At least this was with a doctor I actually like. Until a few years ago I was seeing a male doctor who, although a good physician, did not have the most warm and welcoming personality. While preparing for a similar exam, he squeezed the bottle of lube a bit too hard, and a great big glob shot across the room, hit the wall, and gradually slimed its way down to the floor. If he'd just laughed it off, I would have chuckled and moved on. But he was known for being formal and uptight, and actually got incredibly embarrassed. Like, completely mortified, and apologising profusely.
You know how the urge to laugh gets stronger in situations where laughter would be inappropriate? Yeah. I really felt like I couldn't laugh out loud. So when he tried to start the exam, my entire body was shaking with suppressed laughter, and he had to leave the room and come back five minutes later when I'd calmed down.
Cancer screening is no laughing matter, really*, but it's good to know it can occasionally involve a good chuckle.
------------
*the Test of the Flying Lube Glob actually came back abnormal, and I had to go for a colposcopy. Luckily the results came back normal, as did all subsequent pap tests. If yesterday's is clear, I'll be moved back from annual to biennial check-ups from now on (all free - yay, socialised healthcare). This is part of my reason for (over)sharing these stories - I'm quite evangelical about getting my friends and family to keep up their regular testing schedules. And it's amazing how many of my friends have also had an abnormal result and colposcopy - but never told me about it until I recounted my own experiences. We need to get the word out there!
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