First ash, now snow

Perhaps this is the end of days. I don't know.

The volcanoe in Iceland has apparently caused all manner of problems for lots of people who are stuck somewhere that they don't want to be. There are some exceptions such as the group of fat sunburned Danish holiday makers who are stuck at their all inclusive holiday resports in Spain getting fatter and more lobsterish by the day.

Yesterday I was in Jutland and whilst driving home had to contend with a pretty heavy snow storm that lasted for about 40 miles. It has just hit us in Copenhagen today as well. IT*S THE MIDDLE OF APRIL FFS.

Anyway, I have decided to skip the bike race this evening, part of my bike is broken and I simply haven't had the time to get it cleaned and fixed before getting out the house this morning. I also need to pack for our trip to England. Thankfully we made the very unusual choice of taking the ferry instead of flying which seems to have been very good fortune indeed.

Windscreens

Apparently a left hand drive Mazda 6 has a different windscreen than a right hand drive one. That rather irritating fact is the difference between getting one fitted in Shustoke next week for 1740 DKK and getting one fitted in Denmark for 4-5000DKK. That is rather annoying.

I suppose we'll drive around with a cracked windscreen until the car insurance needs to be renewed and then take the optional windscreen cover next time to get it replaced. Thankfully the crack is along the bottom of the screen so it is not in the line of sight.

Tomorrow is the Dust Cup round 1. I hope my somewhat broken front deraileur manages to get me through the race without failing completely, I don't have time to replace it before the race.

Photography fail

This weekend has been fairly busy. I managed 2 decent bike rides and we went of rht tradtional spring forest trip with MKs family yesterday. I took the camera with me and took lots of photographs, but haveng put the memory card into the computer today to download them, I can see that there are no new pictures on it, I have no idea what I did wrong, but this is the bestof what I already had.

Vacuuming:

Pilates

Whilst I was riding my mountainbike in the foreste yesterday morning, I was surprised to see quite a few people running around with maps. The first half dozen or so were middle aged women and then it dawned on me that there had probably been an orienteering race on saturday in another forest somewhere and these were the ones who hadn't managed to find their way back to the car park. No wonder they all looked hungry and tired.

Dinosaurs

MK and the boys have gone to see some dinosaurs at an exhibition in Copenhagen today. It is funny to me that there don't seem to be any permanent exhibits of full dinosaur skeletons or fossils in Denmark and we had to wait for this Argenitian exhibition to come to town.

As spring is well under way here, we are planning a weekend of outdoor activities hopefully including some bikes, a radio controlled boat and the anual Anemone walk in the forest with the family. I need to get some mountain biking practice in before my race on Wednesday because when I went out on it last week I sucked in a big way.

Finally we have been re-branded at work this week. We are no longer green, but orange. I think MK likes it.

Boring cycling photos

Me pulling a really large group - if i'd know it was so big I think I would have worked less!

That's me sitting in second position in a reduced group

Finally the small group who did the last lap together...

Disctict 9

This week we had another pair of films from LoveFilm, one of which is District 9 which is set in Johannesburg. The general story is that an alien space ship arrives and hovers over the city for a while. Eventually the people decided that they need to have a look inside it and they find a load of rather revolting malnourished aliens who then have to come and live in a township whilst looking rather unpleasant and being treated like animals.


The film is a pretty thinly veiled metaphor for racism, apartheid and lots of other nasty stuff that is done to one race by another.

The film was pretty good, interesting and a change from the usual Hollywood guff, but frankly I don't think it was quite as good as the reviews had led me to believe.

6 out of 10 from me I think.

Spring is happening

There is a hint of green about on the hedges, there is a hint of blossom on the apple tree outside the kitchen window and the forest floor is beginning to turn green as well.

Added to that, I was cycling with the club after work last night and it was sort of almost warm in the sunshine. I love this time of year.

The next job is for J and I to take out our winter present which looks like this and is about the same size as DK. It will no doubt be something of a dissapointment, that's the way it is with large plastic toys!

Race analysis

The thigh that you can see on the far right of the picture above is me. It's funny how it seems that I was racing a load of fat old me, it didn't seem like it at the time.

I have installed the new Garmin software for my new bike computer which is in a different league to the old one that was installed on your PC. This now runs on the web and is much easier to use, looks much better and actually seems worth bothering with. I'm afraid that you may have to see some more of this in the future.

Apparently my unsuccessful uphill sprint finish topped out at 48.9km/h and that coincided with a heart rate of 197 bpm. That surprised me because I didn't think I went that fast and I didn't think my heart could still get up there either. Next time I need to start the sprint a bit later and probably also to remember to get out of the saddle. I still have a lot to learn about this stuff.

Bike race success at last

Saturday was the first bike race of the road season in our area. It wasn't a real race for points, but an arranged race for several clubs to get their racing legs, bikes and pseudo-pro gear out in the fresh air for the first time of 2010. There were 6 separate starts for the younger guys - U11,U13, U15, U17, the fast guys (A,B,C, over 40s, and Juniors) and the not so fast guys (women, D, over 50s and over 60s). As this is my first season racing and I am overweight undertrained I have to be in the D class which used to be called Beginners to give some context and I started with the other numpties, one woman and the old men. We rode 7 laps of an 8 km (approx 5 mile) course with a pretty strong wind blowing in our faces for around 2/3 of the lap.

My last experiences of road racing had ended with me getting dropped by the group about half way through the race, but as I think I am in slightly better shape, it was only a semi serious race and I now have a better bike (racing wheels aside...) I was able to stay with the group to the end and was in fact about to win when 2 guys sneaked past me in the last 5 metres thus relegating me to 3rd.

I was really happy with the result, but I am not 100% certain that the 5 of us in the group at the end were the only ones left of the group at the end of the race and that there weren't others who had gone up the road ahead of us. I can't find the results on line at the moment, maybe I'll never know, but I was happy to get through it and our average speed of >35kmh was high enough to allow me to believe that I will be able to hang with the group when the real racing starts in a few weeks for me at least). Next up for me is the first Dust Cup mountainbike race on 21st April.

Yesterday I was mostly cleaning, washing and waxing the car - boring.

Surprising week

It has been a few weeks since MK first mentioned the idea of having her eyes corrected instead of getting new glasses. Prompted by one of her political buddies who had been treated for free based on his severe short sightedness, she visited an ophthalmologist only to be told that here eyesight wasn't quite bad enough. Apparently -6.5D is enough for free treatment, but -6 isn't. This seems like an odd and rather arbitrary line that is drawn in the sand in terms of who is handicapped and who just has to man up to the problem or cough up for the treatment.


Anyway, having found out about both the procedure and the costs, MK decided to find out if she could have the treatment on the grounds that it would pay for itself with one pair of glasses and 2-3 years of contact lenses so the deal didn't seem so bad.

After putting up with wearing glasses for a few weeks in preparation, her initial appointment was cancelled because the specialist was sick, but then she got to see him on Tuesday this week and immediately made an appointment for Thursday to have both eyes done. Most people have one done at a time with a break in the middle, but not MK - she doesn't have the time or patients for that.

Amazingly, by last night it seemed that she could see pretty well and this morning she declared herself to be 100% back in action so she is going on the train to take DK to his baby gymnastics in Roskilde and then on to Copenhagen for a checkup and to meet me at the office.

Having seen how it works, and knowing how much glasses cost (especially in Denmark of course) I am amazed that more people don't have it done and also that someone more enterprising that I hasn't created an easyeyesight clinic here that can crank out the patients even cheaper. In total there seems to be about 1 hour of consultation and 1-2 minutes of treatment for the whole thing so the price tag is pretty amazing on an hourly basis. I bet you could make a packet.

All OK

MK's lasik suregry seems to have been a success. She has had to sit with her eyes shut all afternoon which has been a struggle, but when they are open, she seems to be able to see really well. So far so good.

Lasik surgery

MK had an appointment with the eye doctors today to find out if she can have lasik surgery to correct her dreadful short sightedness. It turns out that she can and immdeiately booked to have both eyes done on Thursday !

I just did a quick google image search to find a picture to post here, but it was too stomach churning to examine in any detail. Now I have to look forward to helping her about with 2 eye patches for a short while and think of all the fun things I can do whilst she can't see properly

Sushi

I had a go at making sushi at the weekend. It was no surprise to me at all that it was harder than it looks. The main challenge seems to be making the stuff small enough to fit in your mouth. Only MK and I acutally ate any, but it tasted pretty good and we'll try it again.
If you are interested, the rolls are avocado, egg, cucumber and orange pepper. The normal looking sushi is smoked salmon which is a little wierd.

Easter Hols

We have a breadk from Thursday to Tuesday in Denmarkland so there isn't much blogging to be done. On the other hand, a rather relaxed approach has been taken to the consumption of Easter eggs and here is the evidence...

Please note that there are no pictures of me eating an egg becuase I haven't been given one... yet