The revenge of the mugs

OK, so I slightly underestimated how popular these things were going to be and I have already run out (in fact my excel spreadsheet says I have -3 mugs...BAAAADDDD). In less than 24 hours. Impressed!

So I was going to order some more, as that seems a sensible thing to do given that -3 mugs is a pretty bad number of mugs to have.

Maybe it's like having an anti-mug particle so when it comes in contact with an actual mug they both annihilate! What an exiting thought!

Exploding!

 Anyway, yes. So I was going to order a bunch more of the life/tea ones but but BUT there is now the exciting opportunity of putting WHATEVER DRAWING YOU WANT ON A MUG for exactly the same amount of money. (My brother wants one of the dog staring at me....). Which is exciting.

These things take about a week to be made and get to me, so I'm setting a sorta deadline for this Saturday (22nd Jan) for any random other mugs you want made up. Seriously, anything. I'll probably draw something for you if you ask me nicely :-) Email meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :-)

Ooo ooo ooOOoOOOOOOO. I got excited today because this turned up!

Fucking bike jousting, people. On a t-shirt. Epic

I also discovered how hard it is to operate the timer function on your camera without looking like a tool. Although to be fair,"photogenic" is not a word that would describe me anyway, it's just looking like a bit of a twat in photos is somewhat amplified by having to take the photo yourself. At least I didn't fall into the facebook-profile-taking-a-photo-of-yourself-in-the-mirror bollocks *shudder*.

Here's a selection of me looking like a twat for your amusement anyway.

Thumbs up retard!

I-have-no-idea-what-I'mdoing-here retard

Hat AND thumbs up retard.

 

Hat, thumbs up and jumping in the air retard!

What can I say, the camera loves me darling.

Hmm. Yes.

Here's the flowchart again for the mugs. Because as I said yesterday, flowcharts are important :-)

Interviews, running and mugs

I went to Leeds the other day for some PhD-y interviews. Now, I'd not had an interview since my Cambridge one ooooo 4 years ago, where I cried the during the entire meal my mum took me for afterwards and for the two hour journey home. I also seem to remember having 2 bottles of cider when I got home and feeling much better. But anyway, the old fear was re-awoken like some sort of subterranean troll being poked by a hobbit upon receiving this:

So three hours of interviews with four different professors, all of whom completely kick ass in their field? Oh sweet badgering Christ, I was screwed.

So, train tickets booked, thermos flask full of life-giving (i.e. fucking strong) coffee packed but no Leatherman multitool this time (I didn't deem it appropriate), I headed up norf to almost certain doom and intellectual embarassment.

I had a nervous start:

  Over lunch it transpired that they were all mathematicians from Cambridge in a previous life, so they all told me how hard all my exams were going to be. Thanks guys.

Also, free lunch ftw!

Maths-free introduction to the solar dynamo here if you're interested. 

Although our sun is incredibly run-of-the-mill in the the universe, it is still does some FUCKING COOL STUFF. The magnetic fields churning away under the surface cause all manner of interesting things to happen, the most impressive of which are things called "coronal mass ejections ", i.e. the sun kicks out a tonne of stuff into space.Video-ness! (Sorry for lack of dramatic music/explosion sounds :-<)

Here's a picture of a (quite small) mass ejection with the earth next to it for scale.

 Or, as I like to think of it:

If one of these things is coming towards earth, at this point you should thank your lucky stars (geddit?!?!) that the earth has a magnetic field too to deflect the bugger:

This is where the aurora comes from btw.

 

SO. AWESOME.

Anyway, the interviews went on. (Heck, I'm good at getting side-tracked.)

So the core of the earth is a solid sphere of iron right. New theory out is that it's continually melting on one side and crystalising on the other, with the effect that it's continually moving sideways. Now it might just be me (it probably is and no one is reading at this point), but I think that's pretty cool.

The winds on Jupiter are interesting too - you know how Jupiter is really stripey? Well each different colour stripe is a channel of wind going in alternate directions - completely different to the winds we have on earth (can you imagine sailing in wind that just kept changing its direction by 180°?).  So I actually enjoyed myself and didn't have to have a little cry on the train home, which was nice. Woo!

ANYWAY RAILTON. ENOUGH SCIENCE.

Not even a little bit more?

NO.

Sorry guys, got a little carried away there...

In other news, I made the grave mistake of going on a run with two lightweights who were (a) obviously much lighter than my fat self, (b) fitter than me and (c) much better at running than me. For a 10 miles. I shit you not when I say my heart rate was above 180 for a good hour. There were patches where I couldn't get it below 190. On what was supposed to be a nice UT2 run. Oh dear lord.

Yes, I was in a very un-fun place.

I eventually said when we had about 40mins to go, in what sounded brilliantly poignant and dramatic in my head (but what was probably just a lot of incomprehensible wheezing in real life), "Just go on without me!".

And they did, thank God.

I walked around Coton for a bit convinced I was going to die then manned up and a third ran, third walked and third limped home. In my defence I was a little bit ill (and not in my defence I knew 10 miles was too far but I just said "Oh, it'll be FINE" in stereotypical me fashion). I had spent most of Christmas sounding like the gingerbread man from Shrek (and I really did!) and still haven't really got over it.

I don't know why, but since I've stop training an insane amount my body seems to have become über pathetic and exceptionally prone to breaking.

LAME.

Anyway, the thing is when you try and swear at your siblings for laughing at you because you sound like the gingerbread man from Shrek, you only make it worse.

 It's a downward spiral, which will only lead to your siblings having tears streaming down their faces with how much a of twat you sound like while you look for something to throw at them.

A life lesson there people. If you've lost your voice, don't go on sweary rants because you'll sound ridiculous.

Finally, I need some help. I foolishly have brought a bunch of these.

Oooo!

 Quite a lot of them in fact...

Oh fuck. That's quite a lot of mugs isn't it?

Basically, I few people wanted them, but the ones on Zazzle I did turned out to be something ridiculous like £18 each with postage and I thought that was fucking stupid. But now my room is full of mugs and I need to get rid of them.

Nothing says insanity like a very small room fulled with lots and lots of the same thing.

So, I do hate to sound like a massive douche trying to sell you stuff all the time, BUT MY ROOM IS FULL OF MUGS and they are pretty cool anyway. And £7 is pretty bargainous. I also made you a flowchart. Because I like flowcharts. And I'm a mathmo and FLOWCHARTS ARE FUN. And why just say "Hey, if you want a mug, drop me an email", when you can do a flow chart to say the same thing!

P.S. I will try and learn how to write less long and windy blog posts one day, sorry.
P.P.S. MY ROOM IS FULL OF MUGS.

How to make coffee

OMG T shirts!

Ooo ooo ooo ooo I finally pulled my finger out and scanned a few drawings to turn into t shirts and things.

For example (here):

 

The one I most want to get myself is this (here):

There's even a mug! (TBH I was a little disappointed with how pricey it came out to be. If there's enough call for it I might try and find somewhere in Cambridge that will do it cheaper - drop me an email if you're keen.)

So there you are. Don't worry, I'm not going to go all douche-y on you and try and sell you stuff all the time. There just appeared to be a (small) demand (and there is a massive lack of vaguely nerdy rowing t shirts out there) so I thought "what the heck" really. 

If you want any designs altered a bit or have any requests, drop me an email and I'll see what I can do :-) Knock yourselves out people!

>>>>>STORE HERE<<<<<

Oh and Frankie, this one's for you:

Happy New Year (and all that)

Hello everyone! Hope you all made it though the Christmas holiday unscathed!

I think the following picture sums up my festive holiday:

 

Oh. My. God.  This combined with the fact I'd not been rowing for a while due to stupid ice everywhere now means I have a slightly "was once athletic but has recently put on a load of weight really fast" look about me. It is not a good look.

And I know I should have done and ergo instead. However, between writing this post and Christmas I have been very much library bound, and to be perfectly honest, a bit of a slob. I have consumed a lot of cake. I am not proud. 

If there hadn't been so much fucking snow around I would have gone out on t'Bianchi for a blast or headed out to Ely for a date with the boat. But not being able to do either of those things I just though "Fuck it" and returned to the inviting warmth of the department. I think I needed a little time anyway to sort my head out. The important thing though is that I'm over the "being a slob" hump now and want to train again (though with a strict limit of one session a day to prevent degree fail-age...).  Including running Monday, Wednesday, Friday in a bid to be less fat (my rather boring New Year's resolution).

The one time I did go out when there was ice out it was minus six (shit that's cold) and there were pieces of broken up ice floating around that were TWO INCHES THICK. 

HOW FUCKING THICK THE ICE WAS, as modelled by Charlotte :-)

 So, with a great amount of trepidation and layers of kit, I headed out into the great unknown. It didn't take long for me to hear the horrible crunch of ice hitting my bows. Then I caught a c. 3 metre square bit with my blade. Now, I maybe one for hitting the catch too hard, but not even my aggressive catch placement can get through two inches of ice.

I got to the closest you can get to falling in, without falling in. Now if you've never been out in a single scull, you won't be able to relate to the terror of this.

 You're instantly full of adrenaline and time does that weird thing of slowing down (that happens when I crash my bike too). However, unlike crashing your bike when you know what's coming to you (i.e. the fucking hard ground at a rate of knots), in this situation you have the sickening unknown ahead of you. Are you going to rescue it and sit in your boat for the next five minutes gripping your blade handles very tightly and saying "Shit that was close shit shit shit" over and over again? Or are you going to fall in the river and, given the ambient temperature, very quickly die of exposure?

Seriously, I'd given this dying thing some thought. Some background on rowing in Ely: it's got a 5K long straight (yessssss), with about 1.5K of wiggly river to get to the stretch with the boathouses on (illustrated below).

OK, so let's say, hypothetically, that it's below freezing and I fall in 3K up the straight. I'd have to get back in my boat in the middle of the river (it's got tall corrugated iron banks/banks of reeds on either side so no dragging your boat to the side) which is pretty hard in itself (especially if you've just been winded by how cold the water is). I've then got three options:

1. Row the best part of 4.5K back to the IoERC. Only there's no boathouse there, and no source of warmth at all. I do have dry (cold) kit though. I get changed into that then cycle as fast as possible to the station to get a train home. Result = I die on the platform waiting for a train.
2. Row 5.5K to the CUW boathouse. Break in (I know the code, it's fine. And it's my old club, so no worries). Perhaps boil a kettle? However, I'd have no warm kit to change into. Still very likely to die.
3. Row the 5.5K to CUW, but then walk to the left a little to the CUBC boathouse. They have hot showers in there and a changing room full of Xchanging kit and I can see coffee and a kettle in the kitchen bit! I'm saved! However, being a girl and therefore not hugely eligible for rowing for CUBC, I don't have the means of getting in. (I could smash a window I suppose, if I have the energy...). Result = I die, staring at the means of getting warm and clawing at the door to the boat bay.

This is why I decided that rowing when there's ice out is stupid.

EDIT Apologies, I completely missed off the Cambridge Lightweight men. They boat from a car park a few hundred meters down from CUBC and win the prize for having the worst facilities ever. (But they are closer to the train station, Tescos and Costa coffee than all of the rest of us). Only in Cambridge could you get such a huge discrepancy in the facilities between different university boat clubs. But I'm not bitter. Not at all. (I should mention, for the record, that CUBC do let CUW and CUL use Goldie boathouse for ergos.)

Oh oh oh! I did do something active in my six week cake holiday (as it shall henceforth be known). I played squash for the first time AHAHAHAHA.

Now, I have the hand-eye coordination of a quadriplegic, blind elephant. There was a fucking reason I was always "wing defence" when we were forced to play netball at school and that reason is that I am a badgering retard whenever there is a ball around. I was therefore not expecting great things from my first ever game of squash, but I went into it anyway with a sort of cheerful resignation that I was going suck just a little bit.

I am a fan of honesty. Brutal, brutal honesty.

I was right.

One of the problems with squash is the walls thing. I ran into a few.

Even when I concentrated really hard on serving and was like "Yeah, going to totally nail it this time". NOPE.

However, when I finally hit the ball, overzealous celebration was required, nay necessary.

I probably won't be invited again to be honest. But anyway. I digress. Christmas. Yes.

Cool presents included a MARMITE TEAPOT

 

And and and this little firesteel striker thing. For making fires :-)

This is the reason why me and my brother spent a good two hours on Christmas day setting fire to a box of tissues on the hearth.

The fire-making joy loop.

Good times :-)

There were also awkward conversations with grandparents to be had...

 

...and AS Level Maths to teach to my brother. I have a rather interesting teaching style, namely aggression.

Sorry Toby. But you really should write neater.

And you'll never guess what sneaked into my luggage for the return journey to Cambridge :-D

 Ooooo! Look at this! An interesting treatise on stellar structure!

But I have rambled on in a very incoherent fashion for far too long now. And it's Friday, which means running time.

With that I bid you goodnight.