4s head + memes

So yes, the weekend = 4HORR. Woo!

So all of CUW trekked down to London to have a play on the Tideway. This meant staying at our President's house, who's mother is a meat trader. I thought this was amazing and was expecting to find entire pigs in the fridge. I did get a little carried away when a beautiful ham came out and had to be restrained.

Yes. The memes begin here.

It's always a bit weird coming from either the Cam (small, narrow and windy and full of boats) or the Ouse (long, straight and completely devoid of other crews) to a fucking huge river full of boats and feeling about a mile wide. And with stream (what is this "stream" you speak of?) and tides and that (the sea? in a river?) and FUCKING MASSIVE BUOYS AND BRIDGES AND RAW SEWAGE.

Also, doors apparently, just floating down the river.

We also saw a tupperware full of what looked like mouldy chilli con carne floating past us as we marshalled. What an alien place the Tideway is.

One of the key lessons learnt this weekend is not to be an IM2 W4+ because then you'll have a number of the order of 400 (or 452) and will be sitting round for a badgering long time at the start. A small mercy was that it wasn't raining because a good 2 hours sat in a downpour before the start would be very much not fun.

I should also at this point mention a rather surreal conversation between our boat and a marshall:

Yes, I owed a mug to one of the marshalls. Very odd. He was also the only non-shouty marshall, going instead for a mix of politeness and sarcasm which made a difference from "452 MOVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEE IIIIITTTTTTTTTTT".

So we start the race with a general aim of OVERTAKING EVERY FUCKING BOAT ON THE RIVER. I mean, then we would win right?

However, the race itself proved to be a complete fucking disaster. Here is the sequence of events:

We hear a lot of "Nottingham! Move over!" type chat coming over the cox box coming out of Barnes Bridge. Uh oh.

Then the call to row light. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We row light but still move up on yet another crew.

We are then completely stuck between 3 crews and have to easy. To say there was rage at this point is a bit of an understatement.

We were supposed to be overtaking the slower crews, not crashing into them! GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

Since this was near Barnes we were therefore also near photographers.

Photo credit: Matt Byrne. Awesome photo! (Apart from the subject, obv.)

And then the natural follow up:

"RAGE". Izzi winning the best gesticulation award. If this photo came with sound, you would hear ONLY SWEARING.

We then (eventually) got on with the rest of our race. Ended up third in our category, 15s off the winners FUCKING HELL RAGE. Very, very annoying, given that when we were moving it felt pretty fucking sweet.

RAGE. RAGE. RAGE.

*sigh*


In other news, I got a very nice email from a track cyclist who was reading the back issues of my blog (the post about cereal specifically) and wanted to share his winter training diet.

Yes that is whey protein + budget cereal. I respect that, especially given how fucking disgusting that must have been (barf). He also explained this weird hidden message that used to be on Kelloggs bran flakes:

(Chris Hoy has a niece called Anna, fairly unsurprisingly). Mystery solved! Pleasing!

I also discovered deadmau5 this week thanks to my my housemate John. This has lead to some SERIOUS Trance consumption this week...

For those of you not initated, THIS is deadmau5 (pronounced "deadmouse"). You need to put some headphones in and turn up the volume VERY LOUD. This is important.

Or, even better, this:

OMFG WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW. I went to a very strange place listening to this stuff while doing maths.

 

After a while of this really very loud Trance my brain started going to weird places and I started imagining that I was in a very long room with very large speakers at the end and with very long blackboards that I was doing maths on. 

It turned out to be a very strange, very productive day of maths which left me mentally wrecked for a good couple of days afterwards.... Odd. Very odd. Christ knows what would happen if I ever took hallucinogenic drugs if this is what happens when I listen to loud repetitive music FFS.

John and I were also listening to it very loud on the sound system thingy at home and being general deadmau5 fanboys:

Then our housemate Harriet walked in, very not impressed:

(She did also say when she saw I had imbedded some videos in this blog post "Oh god, that's not the death music is it?" and gave me a disapproving look. I think this proves she has no taste :D)

At this point, I just put headphones in and turned up the volume. Wooooooooooooooo!

Night!

P.S. Gordon in love: