tallpoppy

onward! let 'em have it!

ious June 30, 2004

Under a week until this year's Tour starts. Can't wait. It'll be interesting to see if Armstrong can do it. My pick is for Armstrong to win, with Ullrich second and either Mayo or Hamilton third. Virenque for KoM, and probably one of the Aussies for the points jersey. And I'd say at least three stage wins from Petacchi, and no more than one from Cipo - he's on his way out, really. Gonna be a good one to watch either way, mind.

Matt Seaton did a nice little interview with Tyler Hamilton in the Guardian the other day.

Other fun fact: there were as many Australians in last year's tour as Belgians. Can't be too long before we see an Antipodean winner... though as far as I know, the only Kiwi was Julian Dean.

I do hope that it isn't an omen, but the goldfish that we'd named Lance Armstrong had to be put down the other day. We'd named him Lance because he was missing a fin when we got him. A day or two later, we noticed that this was because he had finrot, and it was starting to affect his other fins. Hastily isolating him in a quarantine bucket, I dosed him with salt. This didn't seem to help. At the weekend, I bought a quarantine tank (so we could see him laterally) and dosed him with antibiotics. It didn't work, he was too far gone. Finally we decided on Sunday that he wasn't going to make it and that the kind thing do to would be to euthanize him. Poor wee bugger. It's odd how attached you can get to a goldfish.

Had an odd moment on Saturday, on the way to the pet shop. I could have sworn I'd seen a roadkill wallaby. Looping back around, I got a closer look at the ears and realised that it was probably a muntjac deer. I'd have stopped and picked it up, except that one of my coworkers did this a year or two back and really didn't recommend it. Basically, due to the internal injuries from the impact, bile had contaminated the entire body cavity, making it smell foul. And apparently they're a right sod to butcher.

So I'll stick to just picking up the odd roadkill pheasant, then.

Saturday morning, I knocked off a quick 35-miler - a wandering route to Newmarket and back. It's quite a boost seeing that "Welcome to Suffolk" sign, innit? Not a long one, admittedly - you're back in Cambridgeshire pretty sharpish. If you look at the county outlines on the map, Suffolk extends a tentacle into Cambridgeshire to encompass Newmarket and stuff all else. Good ride though. Ended up passing through Six Mile Bottom, which I've been meaning to see for a while. It is, funnily enough, a very quiet wee village. Also looped through Dullingham and a few other places, and can confirm that there's some very nice undulating country roads around there - very much enjoyed the up/down on offer. Newmarket itself remains a complete hole, though quite busy with Saturday morning shoppers. Many of whom seemed slightly nonplussed at the taut, powerful - well, at the least, clad-in-skin-tight-lycra - body powering through their midst. And then back through the Swaffhams, pausing only for a "nature break" just by the Devil's Dyke. I very much enjoy these Saturday morning bike runs in the summer. Now I'm tempted to try and put together a Cambridge-Newmarket-Ely loop - I reckon a quite reasonable 50-60 mile loop should be pretty straightforward to set up. Might get up very early next Saturday and see what I can do, eh?

Speaking of Six Mile Bottom, tip o' the keyboard to Steve for sending me this link: Find amusing places close to you (requires UK postcode). It popped up Six Mile Bottom for me, and we're under 30 miles from Nasty. I'm quite tempted to set up an informal Cambridge-Nasty Bike Ride and see what happens.

You walk into Tescos and you know precisely what you're going to get. You're going to get a pleasant shopping experience. You wander around a series of aisles, carefully designed to lure you into walking around more than you need to, maximising impulse-purchase time. Tinned music is piped in. Little LCD televisions run adverts. You feel in control of your shopping experience.

You walk into Aldi, on the other hand, and it's a whole different ball game. Everything's stupidly cheap - Galahad Lager, highly rated by the BBC's Food Program (and by me), is 50p a tin. There's a floating, highly seasonal stockpile of odd useful stuff: I picked up a pair of 25x binoculars yesterday for £6. And they're a German chain, so the bratwurst is tremendous (and the stollen is great at Christmas). OK, so the rest of the clientele is pretty rough, and it's not the plushest shopping experience, but it's wonderfully bullshit-free. You walk into Aldi, and there's a lot of stuff on pallets. You pick stuff up off the pallet, bung it in your trolley. It's very much like a cash and carry, or Moore Wilsons (for the Wellie crowd) warehouse shopping. Might want to find somewhere else for the fresh produce, though.

structural June 26, 2004

Quick note, couple of minor structural changes. I've moved the list of baby names from the right sidebar off to Rebecca's own page, which is now linked off the family links on the right. In the place of the list of baby names is a plea for all your money, in the form of a sponsorship request for the London to Cambridge Bike Ride. Please consider sponsoring me [click here to sponsor me!]- it's for an excellent cause, and the online form lets you donate in a few minutes via credit card. Think of it like buying something from Amazon, but possibly helping save someone's life. Chances are you know someone who's had breast cancer; my mum had it. She's now officially in the clear, and I'm doing this ride to help other people get that same prognosis. Gissa quid to help the good fight.

By the way, I've also just got my entry pack for the Oxford to Cambridge bike ride. I am, amusingly, rider number 69. Woo hoo!

June 23, 2004

solsticious 23 june 2004

First off, many congratulations to Jim and Jo for the safe arrival of wee Evelyn. Nice one - now where's the photos, eh?

Happy summer solstice for a day or two ago, all you northern-hemisphere types. Yet again, I completely failed to make it down to London for the Solstice Ride - the notion of pedalling from dusk 'til dawn has a certain strange attraction. Maybe next year. Heck, if I get particularly motivated, maybe I'll have a crack at the Dunwich Dynamo. How hard can it be?

Speaking of which, I am once again safe to ride through Devon. The buzzard that was attacking cyclists has graduated to attacking vans, with predictable results.

Good weekend. Went out to the garden centre on Sunday, and was slightly taken aback to run into the Cambridge Raptor Foundation, who were having a display of their owls. One of those "Hey look, a cuddly stuffed owl! Blimey, it just turned its head!" moments. Very cool, especially the Scops owls (small, irritable-looking, and with beautifully soft feathers).

Also at the weekend, we were slightly disconcerted to walk past our old local, The Granta, and discover that it's now "Under New Management!". Said new management apparently FOTB (Fresh Off The Boat - i.e. very recently arrived), as they've rebranded it as a Kiwi theme pub. Complete with chalked lists of NZ slang behind the bar, and sample usages ("The pakeha doctor took a tiki tour around the wop wops..." etc etc). We know that this rebranding definitely had at least one New Zealander involved, because the sandwich boards outside the pub now feature a well-known NZ icon: the Goodnight Kiwi and Cat! At this point, anyone who grew up in NZ during the 70s and 80s should be laughing incredulously, and no-one else will get it. Suffice to say, it was a bit disconcerting. We may pop in for a drink, but since they're making a big deal of selling Steinlager, maybe we won't. One of the reasons we're living over here, after all, is that the beer is better.

Today's theme tune: The Bromley East Roller by Salmonella Dub. Apropos of the NZ expat experience.

June 17, 2004

16mm M5 16 june 2004

Blimey, and here was me thinking that I only had to worry about dodgy drivers - turns out I've got to start watching out for buzzards when I'm on my bike. What next? Asteroids?

No more USPS! From next season, I'll be happily supporting the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team! Because, fundamentally, those highly-trained professional cyclists ain't nothing but mammals, are they?

One for the calendars: we'll be back in NZ from the 18th October or so until around the 4th November. Visits to various locations, probably all in the North Island, are on the cards. Tickets have been booked and paid for, so we're definitely on the go. We haven't been home for the better part of four years. We can't wait.

June 15, 2004

eyebolt slow 14 june 2004

Went to see Bill Bailey at the weekend. Lisa and Paul very kindly didn't run away when we pinned them down and offered them a no strings attached chance to spend an evening in Rebecca's company, despite her deciding to have a crack at the world screaming record starting from five minutes before we left. The gig itself was brilliant: if you get a chance to see the man live, take it. The blend of stand-up and musical parody worked brilliantly, particularly the piss-takes of Chris de Burgh, U2, and the BBC News theme. I was the only person to yell "yay!" when he said he was about to do a Kraftwerk homage, mind.

There's been quite a wildlife theme over the last few days. In no particular order, I've been encountering:

Sparrows - we've got a small hole in the coving around the back of our house. We weren't quite sure what it was for, but it seems custom-made for a house-sparrow nest. And lo, it has been adopted as such. The sparrows love it, and we've got a nest full of fledglings at the moment. The hole is about 2 inches across, and the parents keep flying back and forth with food. When the parents aren't there, the chicks poke their little heads out, beaks wide, chirping frantically. From the ground, you can just see these little necks and v-shaped yellow beaks gaping wide. About four of the chicks can poke their heads out at once. It's most sweet.
Frogs - I had a hack back at the ivy yesterday, and managed to disturb various members of our floating population of frogs. We have several common or garden frogs, lurking in our common or garden. I like having frogs around, and we shall shortly have some more.
Tadpoles - yup, they're growing voraciously. Legs are starting to develop on some of the larger ones. I've put some wood in the bucket for them to climb out on; some of them spend their time chewing it. I'm also occasionally feeding them tubifex worms, which they love - a big mass of tadpoles forms around the block of worms, chewing away, causing the block to spin. It's like watching a cork not quite going down a plughole. The tadpoles also gain points for "playing well with others", as they've now got company in the bucket.
Mosquito larvae - who are cohabitating with the tadpoles. They're about 8-10mm long, wormlike, and bright red. Very disconcerting to see. I'd dangled some cucumber into the bucket on an old length of gear cable, and the mosquito larvae seem to love it. They swarm all over it, chewing away happily. They love it enough that I can quite happily lift the whole thing out of the bucket, complete with larvae in situ. Which is great, because it means I can just take it inside, bung it in the fishtank, and give the goldfish some good live food. The goldfish are looking well on it.

Quite apart from being babysat by Lisa and Paul, Rebecca had a very eventful weekend. She got her first rash, which worried us quite a bit. She seemed unphazed, and the doctor reckoned it wasn't anything much, so we chilled back a bit, but still rather fraught for a bit there. She was also the happy recipient of a very lovely quilt, hand-made for her by our friend Mike's mother, and lost in the post for the last two months. It arrived at last over the weekend, and is most splendid. She hasn't thrown up on it yet, but it's just a matter of time.

Phew, that Dauphine Libre, eh? Right thrown the cat among the pigeons and no mistake. Lance has won it two years running, then comes fourth - and Iban Mayo not only wins, but breaks the record for the ascent of Ventoux (averaging 16mph the whole time, which doesn't sound like much until you realise it's up a 7% gradient). And Tyler Hamilton coming second... looks like this year's Tour could be very, very interesting indeed. Especially since the Team Time Trial format has been rejigged to de-emphasize its effect on the overall rankings - looks like the Big Blue Train won't help Lance out much this year. Roll on July 3rd!

Today's theme: Absurd by Fluke.

June 11, 2004

the lounge revival must die 10 june 2004

Updated Rebecca photos for June now available.

I reckon Whipsnade Zoo must have some new livestock - I keep hearing lots on telly about these Tree Lions.

More seriously, the deluge of football coverage is getting a little wearying. And the bloody competition doesn't start for another two days. I'll admit to a faint surge of support for England - not out of any nascent English patriotism (if I'm supporting any regional UK side, it'd be Scotland by virtue of descent), but solely because I've drawn them in the office Euro 2004 pool. If they win, I make a tenner. Go that local sports team!

Although I have a strict rule against gambling, I justify this because a) it's just a bit of fun in the office, and b) there's no way in hell that England's going to win. I reckon that France will va-va-voom the buggers right off the pitch. Anyway, how long until the Tour?

Today, I have been mainly deriving intense satisfaction from writing documents using the acronym DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency), simply because Savage Love uses the acronym DTMFA (Dump That Mother-Fucker's Ass) when dispensing relationship advice. Dan Savage is an interesting bloke for whom I have respect.

June 08, 2004

the shell game 7 june 2004

The anatomy of an odd coincidence. Follow along now, class:

I am good friends with one of my coworkers named Alison, who use to flat with...
Martyn, who is a keen rollerblader. As a rollerblader in Cambridge, he knows...
Jez, also a very keen rollerblader (and afficionado of most things with wheels) who now lives in New Zealand, and was "taught everything he knows about trick unicycling" by...
Paul, who ran into Jez when he was back in the UK recently, and got on well with one of his other friends, and ended up offering her a place in his flat, so he now flats with...
Suraya, who's a mate of ours from university back in NZ.

This is why we were surprised, but not absolutely gobsmacked, when Suraya - an old mate from Wellington whom we haven't seen for about four years - turned up at the barbecue we were at on Saturday. It's a small world. Cambridge has a fairly self-contained social circle, and everyone knows that there's only really six New Zealanders in the world (that's why we all know each other, and why it's perfectly acceptable to ask if we know your Auntie Mabel from Alexandra - chances are we do). Made for a nice catch-up session at the barbecue, mind.

Rebecca has slept through for the last four nights running. Bliss is seven hours uninterrupted sleep. She's even stopped screaming when she wakes up - I was woken this morning by the melodic sound of her cooing at the mobile in her cot.

June 02, 2004

flensing 1 june 2004

A nice bank holiday just happened. Much mellowness, a lot of time in the garden, and surprisingly good weather for a British bank holiday weekend. Sunday was particularly interesting. After a slow morning, we spent a very nice afternoon browsing a local garden centre, and then spent a lovely late afternoon/evening at Lisa and Paul's place. This was notable for several reasons:

Wonderful hospitality and amazing food. By gum.
Lisa and Paul have a pond which currently contains a dozen or so fish, several frogs, a newt, and a surfeit of tadpoles. They very kindly let me have a big jar of tadpoles and pondweed for my own nefarious purposes.
I managed to sit down a little heavily into a canvas director's chair, causing me to overbalance and topple over backward. While holding Rebecca on my lap.
She was shaken and stirred, but not harmed - the fall was relatively slow, and I kept her pretty well cradled. Still rather frightening all around, and she certainly didn't seem to enjoy the experience. Heads were screamed off.

Food, fun and fright: a good day out. And we've all learned a valuable lesson.

When I was a child, one of my mother's friends had a largish property with a decrepit pond on it. The pond hadn't been used for several years, and was full of rainwater. I think she'd actually given up and bunged a couple of water lillies in as well - why fight it? During spring and early summer, the pond was a seething mass of tadpoles, as all the frogs from the local bush sections used it to breed. And I mean seething: there were probably several thousand tadpoles in the pool. One morning, she came out and noticed that a hedgehog had fallen into the pool overnight and drowned. She noticed this because there was a huge mass of tadpoles in the middle of the pool, surrounding something. She only realised it was a hedgehog a day or two later, once they'd picked the skeleton clean. I'm not kidding here. From then on, she made a point of occasionally picking up a cheap offcut of meat and dangling it in the water. The meat was always the epicentre of a squiggling mass of tadpoles, all frantically nibbling away. Hungry little buggers.

And now I'm getting a chance to re-enact this on a smaller scale. Having blagged some tadpoles from Lisa and Paul, I've bunged them into my rainwater bucket. They seem happy. I've also put in some pondweed, and the water's murky enough that they should be able to find food in there. And when I made dinner last night, I cut a small piece of fat and gristle off one of the cuts of meat, threaded it onto a spare offcut of gear cable that I had lying around, and dangled it in the water. When I came down this morning, they were swarming around it. Life is good.

Much of the rest of the weekend was spent gardening. We'd got a few plants over the last week or two, and we spent a fair bit of time potting them up, or planting them out. The planting was fun, as the target was a very overgrown border. A fair amount of the traditional old machete gardening was in order - it's more fun than it looks, folks! After a hard afternoon of threshing, pulling stuff up, and then digging the border over, we managed to plant out a variety of herbaceous shrubs. As we've now got overfriendly neighbours on our right side (hey, it's a step above crack addicts, but it's still a bit annoying), we erred on the side of tall and screening. I also went for stuff with cool blossom, as I like having stuff that attracts bees. And just to add the patina of respectability, we put in a blackcurrant bush. Planting stuff is great fun: you feel really nurturing. We also transplanted a peony from directly in front of our back door, into the bed on the right. One large rhizome was carefully split into two, and lovingly planted. All the spare bits that came off the large rhizome when we were levering it out of the ground were then also reburied, and should hopefully come up nicely too. Home propagation, kids!

In related news, I've got an interesting project soon to be on the go. Gert big tree ferns are becoming quite trendy over here at the moment, as they're gorgeous architectural plants and go bang well in the shadier bits of the garden. They're even pretty hardy (notably thriving on the southern coast of Ireland), such that larger specimens can overwinter outside in the UK with minimal protection (to stop the growing crown from freezing). The most common species that are being sold are Dicksonia antarctica and D. squarrosa, better known to our NZ readers as ponga and wheki (although there's a heck of a lot of confusion over the mapping between scientific names and Maori names - "ponga" seems to cover at least three species, as far as I can tell). These command stupidly high prices - a 4ft ponga trunk in good shape, with three to four well-formed fronds, can set you back from £100 up. This may astonish the kiwis out there, as ponga is pretty cheap. I have vivid memories of using ponga trunks as cheap decorative fenceposts in my grandparents' garden. Anyway, most of the fully grown trunks available for sale in the UK are from Tasmanian lumber forests - the ferns grow up around the lumber trees, and are harvested separately and shipped over here. This bumps the cost up, in conjunction with which is the naked profiteering that is so much a part of the wonderful world of gardening. I was browsing around the other day, and discovered that Silktree Nurseries sell packets of D. antarctica spores for a couple of quid. So I'm going to have a crack at growing my own from scratch. Heck, I've grown ferns from spores before - by accident, admittedly (they just keep sprouting up in my tropical plant tanks) - how hard can it be? Further bulletins as events warrant.

Of course, since Dicksonia are supposed to only grow by about 1-2cm per year, I may end up cracking and buying a trunk or two of D. fibrosa. I can feel a bit of a theme to the end of our garden coming on.

Of course, not all the time outside was spent gardening. It'd be a shame to spend most of a weekend outside without once getting me hands greasy. I took the chance on the Saturday to put my mountain bike back together. Having taken the drivechain entirely to pieces a fortnight ago, and then discovered that the front mech was knackered, I finally got the time to replace the mech and put everything back together. I took the chance to replace my gear cables as well - I banged on a set of Transfil's Mud Lovers sealed cables (which work fine except that the sealed outside bit is too big to fit through the first cable guide on the rear mech - ah well, it's mainly sealed). Took about two hours all up, about 30 minutes of which was spent recovering from a minor problem quite early in the piece. I casually threaded the new gear cable through the shifter unit, then tried shifting. Noticing that the action was very hard, I pushed quite hard... and then realised that I hadn't checked that the cable-end nipple was seated correctly. Sure enough, it wasn't in properly, and I'd just shoved the mechanism around so that a) I couldn't reseat the nipple and b) it was wedged firmly in place, preventing the ratchet mechanism from returning to a point where I could reseat it. Ar-se. I ended up disassembling the shifter (the manual for it has in big letters that it is NOT USER SERVICEABLE), and fiddling around with a pair of needlenose pliers. I can confirm that it's user-serviceable enough to de-bugger it after this sort of problem. Thankfully, after that scare, the rest of the drivechain reassembly went well - and I know have a fully functional mountain bike, with the gears shifting like butter. It's nice to get things working properly again.