Odd Thomas Odd Blog

After the events of last week and the rather late night at work on Friday*, I figured on pretty much sleeping the whole of last weekend.  My body, on the other hand, had other ideas and decided to wake me at the unhealthy hour of 9:30am, my bladder nagging at me to shift my backside in the same way women nag their men: incessantly. With my body still not quite in gear, I headed back to bed, scooping up my not-so-white-any-more MacBook on the way so I could log on to see who was online.  Since it looked like the weather was going to be the best so far this year, it was time to make an effort to get out somewhere, even if I was supposed to be on call**.  Luckily, my mate Foshie was online, in the middle of getting ready for heading down to Brighton and invited me along.  Bingo! Despite this being a great photo opportunity, I was really keen on just chilling out, so pocketed my funky little camcorder, the Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA9 : Photo from the VPC-CA9 product page...

After the frustrations of work this week - and every other week since the beginning of March, if I were to be completely honest - taking Friday off for a day trip to London was a very much needed break. This wasn't a spur-of-the-moment trip as I can do that any weekend.  This was a trip with my cousin to the London Diving Chamber down at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, St John's Wood, in order to undergo our Fit to Dive medicals as we both suffer with asthma , and ready for returning to diving this year along with an intended trip back to Sharm El Sheikh with Emperor Divers in October - Icelandic volcanic ash permitting! * As per the medical back in 2008, it was a general discussion about our asthma and a few tests, such as spirometry tests , pee tests and nervous tests, the last of these being to ensure I have no problems with musculature control, not to see how I react to the doc shouting "Boo!" at me from various angles.  In case you were wondering...

When I first announced back in February that I had gotten through the general ballot for this year's Great North Run , the first question I was asked - with distinct undertones of irony - was when I would start training.  Still bouyed by getting through the ballot and raring to go, my immediate response was, "Next month!" Hmmmm.  I guess the person who asked the question knows me better than I thought as the next month came and went in a bit of a blur and the most I was able to do was repeat, "Next month" to myself whenever I thought about starting. Well, April is the next month and I finally took the opportunity provided by the Easter break to crack open the new Nike+ kit and don my rather grubby trainers* for the calibration run.  I figured a nice one mile run followed by a 500 metre walk would sort the new kit out.  Well, it did, but it nearly sorted me into the back of an ambulance at the same time. It's been two years since I last ran anything mo...