A Good Day.

Today is a bank holiday for most of the UK, but not Scotland. Fortunately the air force take it as a day off. Most of the time recently I've wasted the extra days I've had, or got to the end of the day and thought "wow, I've done nothing." Okay, actually I think, "I've played a good amount of XBox and got a bit of exercise, which is not too bad." And then I've thought of the untold possibilities that each new day presented and realised that I've just walked down the same path I've been down countless times before. (For reference, yes I am paraphrasing the xkcd comic I've got hanging in my kitchen.)
Today was different; I'd told myself I'd use today and by gum I have! One of the guys in the mess recommended the mountain bike tracks at Fochabers so today I hitched my bike to the back of my car and headed over to the Fochabers Ring. I didn't know it was the Fochabers Ring until I got there, I just headed over and found a route. So off I went, along a nice gentle undulating track then hit the uphill section. I knew that I was following a route that had red or orange labels on the posts, followed it from the monument at the top of the hill and then turned back.
I have my limits, and when the route labels go from orange to black with a skull and cross-bones (seriously!), that's a good time to find the different route. Apart from a bit at New Year's, I haven't done much proper off-road biking for ages, used to do quite a bit in the summers with the activity camps so I wasn't sure what I could remember of the more technical side of biking. I reckoned I still had the basics but when the sign recommends expert biking, walking the route first and warns of tables, drops, jumps and moving see-saws; it becomes time for the better part of valour.
As it is, back up the hill to the monument and followed the long route through Rohan and into The Mirk Wood (yeah, there's a whole Lord of the Rings thing going on) and wow. It was absolutely wonderful, some lovely singletrack with nice flowing sections and some interesting bits that demanded concentration. Better, I think, than the bits we used to ride in the Forest of Dean. Aragon Alley was poorly signed and had a depressing amount of narrow uphill with lots of exposed routes which was much more difficult but in a rewarding kind of way.
So yeah, loved it. When I got back I looked up the route (and the page I linked to earlier) and found out that the route colour corresponds to difficulty, just like on the slopes. The red route I was on turns out to be graded difficult - for "proficient mountain bikers with good off-roading skills." Turns out I remembered more than I thought about biking. Will be going back (and if anyone fancies coming up with a bike, or wants to hire one, please feel free!), especially now I've found that map with the other routes in the area.
After that little adventure (mainly on hope, but with coffee for breakfast) I got home, cooked a very nice little chili (another major achievement), caught up with a friend's latest blog entry, did some more washing and watched some great TV (weather gadgets on The Gadget Show). Now I plan to read more of a good book (Xenocide in this case) and try to figure out how to write my next entry without quite so many phrases in parenthesis.
It feels great to look back on a day and think that I've done something different to my normal routine. Actually, yesterday wasn't a waste either, I tidied up and caught up with my ironing. Of the two, guess which day was better. Guess which one I'll be trying to do again.

Convergence

A lager advert on the TV has Violent Femmes as a sound-track, which made me pop onto iTunes and grab it, as it made me think about Grosse Point Blank, one of my 20 favourite films (come on! "I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork, how have you been?" Lines don't get much better). Riding back from Inverness today and the same tune came on my iPod, I think "must watch that film again soon" and lo and behold, right now on UKTV Gold, it's Grosse Point Blank.
*edit to add* just seen one of my favourite scenes on film. As a single guy I have a certain image to maintain as a climbing, boarding, kayaking, martial arts blokey bloke but the bit in the film with Robbie (at the reunion with Under Pressure in the background), it's just fantastic. If you've seen the film you'll know it. Just gets to me, you know. ;D */edit*
Score!
Tis a good day.

Also managed to get a few pictures of Scotland today as well, this is one of the better ones.

You know, I'm really lucky to live up here. I was faced with the dilemma of do I go snow-boarding, to the cinema, walking on the beach or walking on a snow covered mountain on my day off. Woosed out, went to the cinema, saw 21, not bad. Grosse Point Blank's better though. Mountains later, wine now.

Playing catch up..again

Sorry I've been lame at updating this thing, I'm rubbish.
And for Pippa, yeah, not sure why the instructions have gone all Danish...

So, what's been happening? Well, went down to see Swiral and EMB in Brum, also Dajousephine and Jules and Ulrich da dog. Was brilliant seeing them all again, and we went to a great rock pub in Birmingham. We need one of those up here ,there aren't any rock clubs up here as far as I can tell. I'm planning to get at least Matt, and preferably more of them, up here at some point in the near future, there's plenty of Scotland to share and I want to get friends up here. While I was down Matt gave me a memory stick, which was cool, and Sian filled it with mash up tunes, which was amazing. Was sat in a service station uploading from a laptop to the iPod then plugged it in and had the best trip north I've ever had. Motorways were pretty clear then the A9 was beautiful. Any slow traffic I came across moved out of the way, signaling nicely and the music was superb.

A couple of weeks later I popped down to see Tash and Chris. We're going to be going climbing in Inverness around New Year's with a few others and both Tash and myself wanted to make sure that we were good enough to supervise a friend.
Now the thing about climbing is that you can buy all the kit you want and go to a cliff and climb. There aren't any rules about who can and can't climb, it's your life, it's your responsibility. Indoors climbing is different, you're using someone elses place so legally they ask you to sign a bit of paper (or take a course) to show that you're good enough not to anything too silly. The course in Inverness has about 18 months of waiting list on it. I'm pretty happy that I can remember all of the stuff for wall climbing but it doesn't hurt to go back over things and get a refresher, especially as there's going to be a kid climbing with us after Christmas and with kids you don't take chances.
So Tash and myself went to the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena at Ratho.
Oh ye bloody hellfire.
I've seen big indor walls before, the Welsh International is big. Ratho is in another league. You walk in on the second floor and look through from the reception aera to windows going out onto the floor and think, "oh, that's big." Then you walk towards the window and realise it's not just big but you look UP and then you look DOWN! This place is huge! Pricey but massive. We had a great guy checking us over, running through the basics and suggested wrapping the ropes a couple of times at the top to add some more friction to stop Tash taking off when she's belaying me, always a problem. Almost worked as well, until we had an overhang, then she DID lift off, so Ewan (instructor) held her down and then we tied her to the wall for the next climbs. By this point my arms were pumped, the forearms solid and I managed most of a couple more climbs then just belayed Tash. It's quite depressing, she's less than half my weight, much shorter reach than me and is climbing over a grade higher than I am. Ahh well, she always was better than I was. Gives me something to work on.
Next day went swimming with Tash, found out I need to work on my stamina, but then I knew that anyway. Only really managed 32 lengths of a 25 m pool, need to get that better. Then later on had a go on Chris' bike, a lovely 600 ninja. As I've only got a CBT I was of course only riding on closed private areas, and not at all on any kind of by-pass, but even then it was great to get on a bike again. Makes me think I need to get my full license as soon as possible. But not that bike, the geometry is too short for me, would cripple me within two hours and I'm going to need something with more tourer than sports. Besides, the micky taking from the guys due to the ninjutsu training we did would be horrific, and perfectly justified. And it's green.

And that's pretty much me up to date, Tash is coming up next weekend, we're going to have a look at Inverness climbing, and possibly Aviemore as well; and I'm going to have a chat with a couple of car places, see if I can get a new (or different) car within my budget.

Reading - Greg Mandel series by Peter F Hamilton,
Listening to - Mash up mixes.
Watching - Long way down.

Leave, or holidays for the rest of the world...

Wine is a wonderful thing, especially when combined with the knowledge that you haven't got work for almost two weeks. It might seem like a minor thing but I had a bit of time off over Christmas (as the station was shut) but this time I haven't got much driving to do, unless I choose to.

Well, aside from that, today I have fixed the doorbell (ha, I am man, see me do DIY!) and
found links on Youtube for some of the best adverts made (except for the Guiness and Honda ones).
And here they are:
Snowman.
Goth holiday (current one)
and a classic one.

I'm not sure why, but they're not shown down in't far south in Ingerland. Mind you, Coke and Pepsi rank behind Iron Bru in most of Scotland.