jaegerin

I've been back on my bike again recently, aiming to cycle to work 2 days a week, but not beating myself up if I don't manage it. I feel lucky that the easier stretch, with a downhill tendency, is in the morning. If I had to face The Hill first thing, I'd probably talk myself out of it before I'd even had breakfast. This way I get the fun part in the morning, and then at lunchtime when I come home I no longer have a choice.

And it's wonderful. I get to meander through some beautiful fields, smile at the wild flowers and hedgerows, doff my hat to the storks in Walldorf (it makes me laugh that they have their nesting posts right near the little airfield), greet the dog-walkers and exchange grins with oncoming fellow-cyclists. I'm doing exercise that is not only enjoyable, but also has a practical use: once I'm on my way I'm highly motivated since I have to get to work, or home to cook lunch. No chance of stopping because I can't be bothered and I want to check my e-mail.

I'm logging my trips on Endomondo  via their mobile app. It's fun to see the route mapped out and the statistics. And to see how I'm getting a wee bit faster over time.

The other advantage is that I feel my mind calming down. Something about the fresh air and the exercise and doing a repetitive activity allows my brain to defragmentalise. Things fall into place, solutions reveal themselves and I feel more creative. And analogies! Cycling can tell us a lot about life...

1. Don't sabotage yourself. If, as we approach The Hill, my brain says "Oh it's that big hill again, you're not going to make it up there", I find I really can't. Whereas if my brain says "Look, there's that hill again. Take a sip of your water and let's see how far we get", I usually get all the way up.

2. Sometimes it helps to focus on your goal (the top of the hill), but at other times it can be overwhelming to do that, and it's more helpful to think about making it to the next drain/lampost/parked car.

3. Know yourself and be honest. Sometimes I need a kick to get out of the door. I have to tell my brain to shut up when it starts muttering about "Come on, it'll take too long to get your bike out of the shed, and anyway I don't know where your leggings are...". But if I wake up with a headache and have a meeting until 12pm so would have to rush home, and the weather is all muggy, well then it might be better to postpone cycling until the next day.

4. Having a long-term goal is beneficial, but it's also important to be flexible and enjoy the ride. It's ok to stop and take a photo, or to lose your momentum when you meet a friend along the way.

Those are some of the things I think about when I'm flying through the countryside.

As I now have a mobile device,
Nice and easy to use, I
Don't tend to sit at the laptop much anymore, but
Rather check LJ the smart way.
Obviously this has its advantages, but I'm not always
Inclined to spend hours poking at a small screen with one
Digit.

So excited: I've learnt the chords for Diamonds and Rust and can more or less play the verses with a simple strumming pattern and sing AT THE SAME TIME! Yay! I will now play it over and over and over and over... Next thing is to lose the dodgy Joan Baez impersonation I seem to be doing and sing in my own voice. One step at a time...

Busy busy again (always, actually), but I'm pleased that the boys and I got lots of fresh air and exercise during their school holidays. And I've managed to keep the momentum of that going a bit this week by cycling to work twice! Yay! I'm very lucky to have lots of nice cycle paths around, and kids who are big enough to be in the house on their own for a bit if I don't manage to leave work on time and/or cycle fast enough on the way home.

This is for G and K to listen to, but of course for anyone else who happens to be passing as well. I wrote the chorus parts as a poem while in India. My son's homework assignment was to write a poem about germination, and this was one of my attempts (his turned out well too!) The rest came later. And I sang the complete song at FilkContinental last year.

Seeds In My Pocket

( Lyrics here... )

And the last for this year. Although technically I can still post until 1pm tomorrow...

This is perhaps more of a poem than a song - we'll see if a tune presents itself. It was inspired by bardling  and jaelle_n_gilla and Leo Lionni.

( Great Uncle Frederick )

It's been a good weekend:

Yesterday evening S booked our flights for our trip to Toronto this summer :-) Hurrah! Both my brothers live there now and this will be our first time in Canada. Very excited!

In other news, we had a nice weekend with about the right amount of activity. I managed to get out again this morning for a walk by myself - nearly 8km - which was lovely even though I didn't find the geocache that the walk was planned around. I'm making use of my new smartphone not only for geocaching, but also for tracking my walks on an app called Endomondo. It shows me  how far I've walked, what my average speed was, and so on, and plots my route on a map. And it updates the info to the Endomondo website so my friends can see how amazingly sporty I am (*falls about laughing*). It's a fun toy and I do find it motivating.

As it was pretty cold we took the kids to an indoor play place this afternoon - they went off and did their thing while we had coffee and caught up on some reading. Including finishing "Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman. It's funny because tattercoats mentioned the book in a comment here recently and to be honest I had to google it. Then when I got to the next book on my reading pile (one that S. had read and recommended to me), there it was! I enjoyed it a lot. I have had a London-urban-fantasy theme going on, as my previous book was "The Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch. Loved that too. My enjoyment of both books was definitely enhanced by the fact that they are set in my home city. Am now going for a complete change of style and starting on "Dear Doosie" by Werner Lansburgh, which one of my English students has lent me. It's a story told through love letters in Denglish. I glanced at the first few pages when I first got the book, and I think the English/German mishmash is going to take a bit of getting used to (it's even worse than the way S and I speak to each other!) but I shall give it a try.

S and I had the cunning plan to use our date night this week for a bit of badminton. Unfortunately, when we got to the sports' centre we found that they'd booked us in for a squash court by mistake. Hmmm... hadn't played squash for about fifteen years and even then it was more for laughs, but since we were already there and they offered us free use of squash raquets and ball as compensation, we decided to go for it.

Fun! Once I'd got adjusted to the fact that my flicky-flicky-wrist-action badminton moves weren't going to cut it; and noted that there are walls and that the ball, y'know, bounces; and suppressed the "does my bum look big in my sports' trousers?" thoughts (not-yay for glass-walled courts and people sitting behind you but you never know, perhaps my bum didn't look big in my sports' trousers... or more likely they weren't looking anyway) we had a great time.

We got a good run-around, had a few laughs together, and even noticed a bit of improvement in technique over the hour we were there. My muscles are complaining this morning though :-)

Oh and then, Murphy-style, we were woken 3 times in the night by two of our darling offspring. TGIF!

So my mum bought the boys socks with the days of the week on for Christmas. Which they think are the bees knees. They're black, with the days in seven different bright colours.

Soenke was ill this weekend. As in in-bed-for-two-whole-days ill. Stomach bug. So lots of headless-chicken running around was done by me to get the children to their various events, get them fed in between, catch up on all the housework that we didn't manage during the week, bring S cups of tea, etc. and as always at such times I noticed how many household tasks he usually does.

I managed to keep the washing machine fed, but folding the clean clothes is not one of my strengths at the best of times, so we now have three washing baskets of clothes on the floor in my bedroom. It's fine. At least everything is clean, dry and upstairs. Until you come to the socks: in the morning before school we're no longer simply rummaging for matching pairs of socks but *specific* matching pairs of socks because wearing a Wednesday pair on a Tuesday is, y'know, illegal or something.

Thanks Grandma :-)

Just want to check in and throw a few thoughts down. Am loving the new year feeling - a clean slate, anything is possible again :-) And I ended up being promoted at the end of last year, so feeling up about work stuff too.

Had a lovely week in London - special birthday cake made by my special mum, watching morris dancing on New Year's day, day out at the Science Museum. Afternoon/evening hot date with S. Geeks as we seem to have become, we spent the afternoon geocaching - 8 successful caches - and saw some interesting spots we wouldn't have gone to otherwise (Waterloo Necropolis station and the Cross Bones graveyard come to mind). Once it started getting dark we headed across to Foyles to browse the books for a while. Found (among other things) "The Inner Game of Music", which is all about how we block ourselves and stop ourselves reaching our full potential. Right up my street and very interesting. Not just applicable to music. Dinner at Covent Garden then back to Mum and Dad's. Also... lunch out with Mum in Hertford (chance to get a proper conversation without being interrupted by small beings) and a trip to Paradise Park (animals, rides, indoor soft play...). Oh and the inevitable trips to M&S and Sainsbury's, lol.

Routine type stuff is going smoothly for now - must hang on to this feeling of being in control of it all.

And away from the computer :-) Tschüss!