Indeed it has!… A lot has gone by since I last wrote something longer than a couple of lines in here – my last “big” post dates back to December 2013! (coincidentally, the title of that post sounds quite similar to the one in here!)
Christmas came and went, 2014 is now in full swing with the days getting longer and longer and considerably warmer as well (no need to wear pogies anymore when having an early morning practice on the river, yay!).
Things have been pretty quiet, I must say – between my research, my teaching and a paper which finally got through after tens of revisions I haven’t got opportunity to do much more. Oh well, I still managed to cram a wonderful day out in France back in February, and I’m currently finishing my week-long holiday in Porto (it was quite a blur!), heading back tonight to England, where a lot of work awaits.
Fortunately, the weather has been quite mild! Unlike everyone living in the south-west of England (and even on the south), in east Kent things were nowhere near as bad, and actually it wasn’t that cold – from mid-February onwards I was already able to run outside wearing barely anything more than a T-shirt and a pair of shorts! (quite a stark contrast from what we had last year, as we had snow all the way until the end of March!)
This means I’ve been able to either run or scull almost every single day, which has been great for my psyche (and the physique as well, although I’m not probably putting half as much effort as I should… 🙂 ).
And these upcoming months are going to be interesting – between work, conferences and a few visits, with the weather getting increasingly better, I’ll never have a dull moment! 🙂
Hopefully I’ll be able to update this a bit more frequently – but then again, I keep saying that and a few weeks (sometimes even days!) later breaking the promise. Will see!
Here we go!… time to get out the warm stuff out of the wardrobe. And maybe get some weights inside my pannier bags, otherwise I think I might fly away! 😛
Anyway, I can’t really complain – last weekend I had an amazing outing on Sunday morning! No wind, and the temperature was such that I actually had to take out layers! We even had a BBQ in the evening here in the house (and this time we had proper coal! 😉 ).
Yep, that’s me leaving the M25 at 1:30 AM… not by my choice though! And from that point on until I was able to return to the motorway an hour passed… :/
Speaking of Sunday, it is a wonder how I managed to do so much during that day having arrived quite late the night before (~ 3:30 AM), due to the combination of a dinner in Slough which ended up quite late (but went quite well! 🙂 ) and a closure of the M25 just before my exit (talk about luck…) which forced me to face a massive traffic jam on a A-class road running parallel to it at 2 AM (absolutely surreal!).
Anyway, to my astonishment I managed to wake up on my own at 7:30 AM, not feeling sleepy or anything! (not a chance of that happening during the week… 😛 )
Yep, indeed – sadly, my holidays are over! 🙁 Hard to believe that exactly one week ago I was still melting under the Portuguese late Summer, especially after spending this whole morning at the University’s boathouse under an overcast sky and with a cold wind continuously blowing…
The holidays, though, couldn’t have ended better: the 2013 edition of the Douro descent (actually this year we had an ascent/descent!) was awesome! Lots of rowing (~64k overall), good company, great scenery and excellent food, what can I ask for more?
(there are a lot of stories to tell, along with some excellent photos, but those will have to wait for a later time, as I’m writing this in a hurry now! 😛 )
I can do this in England, although only a couple of days per year! 😛
Anyway, in retrospective, these 3.5 weeks I spent in Porto were great, albeit they went past very, very quickly – I managed to mentor 5 high school students, train towards and run a half-marathon, work on my ^”!$!^*! paper (which is still not ready – every day we uncover new things that need to go into it, it is the sad life of a researcher!) and do lots of rowing and running (and even some cycling, which didn’t end the way I wanted to, though…).
Yesterday was not a good day. While servicing one of our old PCs, hoping to make it able to scan our old negatives, I managed to blow a power supply (there were a lot of sparks and loud noises, followed by smoke and the characteristic pungent aroma of burnt electronics…), and apparently the hard drive of that computer as well (which had been reinstalled recently). Ended up having to reinstall XP in it on a slower, smaller drive than I wanted, argh!…
Then I went for a bike ride. All was well, I rode from my rowing club in Gaia down to Valadares, following the coast (didn’t have a tracker, but it was probably something like 15-20k). Then we pulled out, and got out of the bikes to stretch our legs, and that’s when a loud pffft was heard, and my rear tyre went from full to completely empty in about 2 sec!
We took the tube apart (not before breaking a brand new set of spanners my friend had) and realised nothing could be done on the roadside – no patch could save a 3 in long tear on the tube!
Ended up pushing the bike back towards the car, but fortunately I had the presence of mind to jump on the other (working) bike and sprint like crazy against a head wind to fetch the car… 😛
And now I should head to bed, ’cause this weekend I have a 60k row waiting… 🙂
Mostly recovered by now, two days later! Well, I was never *that* bad, which was quite a surprise – compared to my very first race (S Silvestre 2010) when I couldn’t go down a flight of stairs without considerable pain for a few days, this wasn’t too bad. A lot more training (and a lot more miles) went on these last races, though…
This guy was photographing most runners as they passed, he has tons of photos on Facebook scattered over multiple albums. Unfortunately, the only photo where I do appear is this one, and he almost missed me! Tough luck… 😛 For those who don’t know my club’s colours, they are dark blue and white. Have you found me now? 😀I definitely think I had a curse on me that morning! The only image I actively participated in turned out massively out of focus because I forgot to disable the macro feature on my phone’s camera… 😛
Still, it wasn’t enough! I mean, I completed my goal (finished under 1h50, with a time of 1h47m36s), but now I’m hungry for more – I have something to improve for next year, and perhaps even consider running the “full” 42k at some point.
Two things that, I suspect, had a negative impact on this particular event: I hit “the wall” too soon (about 10-12k into the race, and I was going at a very conservative 5:00-5:10/km!), that caught me red-handed (I kept going, but by the time I crossed the finish line I wasn’t too steady for a while, at least until I ate something! Should have eaten more in the morning, but I was fearing getting too full…), and the temperature!
Sure, I should be used to that given that this is my hometown 😛 (and it wasn’t as warm as it normally is…), and I’ve been training for 2 weeks here (in Kent I had typically 10 degrees C less, which was a lot better to deal with dehydration), but the fact that they initiated the race at 10h20 in the morning meant that we were running when the Sun was at its tallest position, which isn’t pleasant at all (with the addition of new, lovely, unisuit tanlines! 😛 ). I mean, couldn’t they have initiated it at 9h or even 8h30? Good thing that the next one I’ll be doing (S Silvestre 2013 hopefully, if my flight doesn’t get affected by snow in December) is in December & at 6 PM!…
Anyway, that’s the only negative point I have for the organisation of this event. It was quite a fun morning, even though my running mates ditched me half-way through (apparently I’m too polite when overtaking other runners, hence I tend to get stuck and unable to follow them! 🙂 ), just seeing that massive orange mass advancing over the riverside was quite spectacular. And 10 euro for all that the event contemplated… absolute bargain!
For the past week that’s what I’ve been doing! 🙂 (well, sort of…)
After “getting rid” of my students – I had one more year mentoring the Robotics project on the “Escola de Verão de Física 2013” Summer School – I entered vacation mode for a little while.
With regards to the School, everything went well! Once again I had good, motivated students, and at the end of it I was feeling great, that I had made a difference and taught something useful to young(er) minds. (I was feeling quite tired as well…)
On the meantime, I still found time to cram a few training sessions for the Porto half-marathon (which will take place tomorrow, hoping to finish it under 1h50!) and work on the several-times-mentioned-but-still-not-finished paper of mine (getting there!…).
Just to let you know that I’m still here, anyway!… 😀 (and having a good time…)
This has been one hectic week, I can tell you! 🙂 Glad it is over!…
It was a very interesting experience, though – I got to experience the nitty-gritty issues of organising a conference, how to perform under pressure (still have a lot to improve in there!), and how important team work is (not that I wasn’t aware of that already! 😉 ).
A shame that I couldn’t make the best usage of the scientific program in there, though – with too many things to sort out, I barely saw any posters, and I had to miss some of the sessions to help out elsewhere. But I can’t really complain, as I attended the conference for free… 🙂
And now, it is time to get back to the UK… and work like crazy in the lab, as I need “publishable” results before I can actually go on holidays! And also make up for the time lost in terms of trainings, as I have an half-marathon to run and this past week was a big step backwards in my progress (no time for anything!), I ended up bringing my gear home just to fill my suitcase… 😛
Via Flickr:
Yesterday I signed the contract to my new place – I’m moving in next month!
Found myself a nice little house with a gigantic garden and at a 5-10 min walk from campus – what else can I ask? 🙂
It is June already around these shores, but it does not feel “summery” at all! 🙁 As I’m writing this, the wind is blowing very strong outside, with a white sky covering everything and feeling very cold (I regretted not having put my gloves on when I took the bike out to the shops to get some milk… brrr, that was cold!).
Anyway, let’s update this! Took me a while to get to the WordPress admin interface, since some stupid hackers decided to launch yet another brute force attack against WordPress self-hosted installations. This time, my provider blocked the login script (wp-login.php) but by renaming everything I was able to get in. Whew!, I thought I’d be locked out for a couple of weeks again! 🙂
And since I’m basically trying to keep my posts a bit more lightweight, text-wise, let’s start with some images!
Tasty bruchettes at one of the parties I’ve been to in the last few weeks… Mnham!
Beginning with the series of dinners and parties I’ve been having for the past two weekends – between house-warming parties, BBQs (thankfully the weather was nice that day), picnics and more BBQs, this has been a very busy life (not that it is a bad thing, mind you! 😉 ). And then there was the rowing – I was very lucky, there was a period of 2-3 weekends a couple of weeks ago when the weather was really great! So great indeed, that I started to develop my “onesie tan” – it is not as bad as it is in this picture, but it is still quite noticeable. Non-rowers seem to think that I am a lorry driver, I don’t know why, given that lorries are not usually convertibles! 😛
As you can see, the rolling stock is really small! I’m not a very big fellow (1.77m tall), so I had no trouble getting in or out, but bigger people were struggling a bit! 🙂 Anyway, as soon as you were inside it felt quite spacious…Puffs of black smoke billowing out of the locomotive as we pulled out of Dungeness!Dungeness power station at a distance, as seen from the train station. And yes, the blue car is mine – I only noticed how badly I parked it when I took the photo, but then there was no time to rectify it, otherwise I’d miss the train!View from the seafront in Hythe. It was a really sunny day, then!
During the Late May bank holiday, me and a couple of friends from the lab decided to go on a day trip to Dungeness. Initially we were wanting to visit the nuclear power station there (Dungeness B), since they now host guided tours around the plant, however they require a 3-week pre-booking and they only do them during the week, so we gave up on that. Instead, we took the miniature train (Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, apparently the world’s smallest public railway, with a 15-inch (~38 cm) gauge!) all the way to Hythe and back, stopping at New Romney to see a model train exhibition (I always get really excited by these exhibitions – must be the little kid in me! 😀 ). It was really great, we had a good time and I managed to drive more than 50 miles in one go for the very first time since I got the car here… 😛
Moving on, lately I’ve been quite busy with both work (papers, proceedings, changes in the system, lab reorganisation), while at the same time I’m preparing to move house. Yes, I’m moving! Life here in St Stephens is good, but I always knew it would be a short-term thing. I found a lovely bungalow in a nice little village which is located ridiculously close to the University campus (5-10 min walk!), I’m moving in next month if everything goes well!
Right then, this is going to be a very peaceful Sunday, as I’ve had my share of things to do (and money to spend) yesterday – between the week’s groceries, car servicing (£95 – outch! But it got the full treatment: oil & filter, air filter, spark plugs, and also the exhaust back box had to be welded back…), work and a nice little run in the afternoon, I am pretty run down, I think I’m going to cook myself a nice, tasty lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon with a good book. Oh, simple things! 🙂
