Giving the lawnmower some maintenance

I inherited my lawnmower from Rose. I have no idea how long she had it. It might have had quite some years under its belt. 

Sometimes I accidentally run it over a stone. That’s not good for it, obviously. The blade must be getting a bit of a battering. 

If my garden shears suffer a bit of wear and tear, I sharpen them. I had never done that with the lawnmower! I figured it was about time. But I figured the tools needed to be a bit clunkier. I got a file out. 

It’s not much work! I hope it made a difference. I will find out next time I use it. Which will probably be soon. It’s early summer and everything is growing like cabbage, including the grass! 

Blitzing the garden

Before our trip to the Netherlands I was too busy marking to give much attention to the garden. While I was away, it was quite sunny, which is great for photosynthesising plants, so when I got back, the garden had gone from unkempt to veritable jungle. It needed work! And Neil was willing to help. He is a machine. 

I had to cut the grass before he arrived, as there was rain forecast, and I had to get in before that happened. And then we did the rest together. He is so fast! We basically only worked until lunch. But what a difference it made.

As is not unusual with this sort of thing, I did not take ‘before’ pictures. You will have to imagine what it looked like then! But here are some after pictures. I am quite impressed. Let’s hope I can keep things at an acceptable level now…

On the left this raised bed was collapsing; on the right it was overgrown. Sorted now! 

Tidy borders!

Neil attacked the stairs. Tidier than ever now! 

Mission InPossible

There is a world record attempt going on. Right now. And it is 2026, so a lot of time has passed in which people can set world records. The easy ones have been done. What is left is the really hard ones.

This world record attempt concerns 200 marathons in 100 days. And the person attempting this madness is Jacko, who has already featured several times on this blog this year. He is clearly taking a few months out of doing his breath coach work. If he is running some 85 km per day I assume that is enough to keep him busy.

You had guessed it; this project is called Mission InPossible. He is doing it in order to raise money for brain injury charities. He used to be a professional rugby player, and these are infamous for bashing their heads all the time; he was no exception. And he had to quit his career because he had had too many knocks, and ended up having a seizure on the field.

He is doing his running all over the country. He spends four days at every location. And he is doing 5 or 10k routes, again and again. He started in Caernarfon. And on his second day, I decided to run a lap with him.

He is carrying a gps tracker, so you always know where he is. I just showed up at a random time, and checked where he was. He was on the bicycle path north of the town, so I decided to sit on the quay by the river for a bit, reading a dissertation, until he got closer. Then I put the dissertation away, took off the T-shirt I was wearing over my club vest, took a quick last convenience stop, and ran in the direction where I expected him to be. When I didn't spot him I checked the gps tracker again. He must have run past when I was on the loo! So I quickly ran into the other direction.

Soon I found him. He was just having a snack. And he was about to head north again. I thought he would do a north lap, and a south one, et cetera, but maybe he was focusing on the northern one as that was closer to the sea. It was a hot day, and any sea breeze would be a blessing! The southern one would be more inland.

Two blokes appeared who also turned out to be running with him. One had already done one lap, and the other one had been running with Jacko since he started in the morning. He was aiming to do a marathon. And hopefully, even set a PB!

We trundled off. If you want to do 85 km you are not going to go fast. We had a nice little chat. I was wondering, for instance, well he needed to do to make sure that if he indeed did the 200 marathons, the Guinness book of records would accept the record. That was less faff than I thought. But it was conspicuous he was wearing two fitness tracker watches, and a gps tracker. Belt and braces!

We happily trundled north. About halfway. An additional bloke caught up and joined. 

And when we got close to the turning point, we walked for a bit. The path emerged from the trees, and we were in the blazing sun. But as soon as we were under the trees again we started running again.

Sometimes we just ran, sometimes we chatted. The guy doing the marathon was trying to summon the courage to join Thursday Night Hill. The bloke who joined later on had registered for a rather hot race this summer. The companion of the marathon runner was into iron man races. Jacko had been running with his sister, my former colleague Suzie, that very morning.

Then we come back to Caernarfon. Marathon man had reached his goal! It was a marathon, and a PB. Excellent! He and his companion could now go home. There was mention of a celebratory beer. 

Jacko wanted to have a break, and lunch, before he would continue running. I had a little chat with his wife. She was very nice! And seemed very relaxed about the whole thing. The bloke who had joined later was going to join for an after lunch lap as well, so he hung around.

I wished them all the best and headed back to my car. I had witnessed only the very, very beginning of this epic endeavour. I hope he pulls it off. And raises a lot of money for charity. The link to the world attempt website is in the text above, so if anyone feels tempted to support him, they can!

Deganwy dash 2026

There still are so many races I haven't done before! This year I heard of the Deganwy Dash. And registered. Obviously.

It had been blisteringly hot, but for the evening of the race, the forecast was nice and cold. Optimistically I headed for Deganwy. I parked by the station, payed at the wrong ticket machine, got stroppy, made a note of the number of the correct parking lot, and headed for headquarters to get my number. It wasn't cold at all! Quite the contrary. 

When I had my number I sorted my parking by app. And was found by Neil. And we socialised a bit with the other runners. Then it was time to line up at the start. Emma was there. She said she wasn't feeling it. I remembered her having said that last year, at the Breakwater race. She would end up winning it. I wouldn't put it past her to do something similar here.

At the start. Pic by Neil

 

We set off. I was happily trundling along. Soon I spotted Katie, the Cybi Strider. She warned me against a bottleneck in the course. I had imagined it as one location where the path was narrower. That was wrong! The whole path just became narrow. There was a bit of jostling for space. I tried to jump sideways to give Katie space, and accidentally jumped straight into Richie, who I hadn’t spotted yet. He was back from having been injured! That was great to see. 

We trundled on, on the bike path. So we were right next to the sea. And then we had to take a sharp right; we had to get to the other side of the A55 before it emerged from the Conwy tunnel. Then there was another sharp right; we crossed most of the estuary, only to loop back, and run over the railroad, using the footbridge, to the Conwy Estuary trail. The bridge over the road was the only bit of elevation we would meet. On the ascent, fellow Harrier Robin came storming past. 

On the trail we did a U-turn. Then it was back to the rail bridge, over most of the estuary, and around the sharp bend. I hadn't been feeling very fast. That was fine! But on the way down from the bridge I accelerated a bit. And started picking people off.

I was sort of fine until I hit the gravelly bicycle path again. After the nicely grippy asphalt, it was a bit of a negative contrast to run on something that gave way. And I was starting to feel the heat. And I was also starting to feel slightly uncomfortable in the stomach. But I knew I only had a kilometre or two to go. I tried to keep it up.

I came past Emma, who was running with her mate Nick. I've never overtaken her! Normally I can't even see her. She must have meant it when she said she wasn't feeling it.

I also overtook Robin. He had peaked too soon! I was wondering if I was doing the same. I was uncomfortable, but kept plodding. And a bit later I ran past a bloke I wasn't paying much attention to. He saw me and shouted “not again!” It turned out it was a man who had told me in Rhostryfan that I always overtake him in the same stage of a race. He is a North Wales Road Runner called Adam. He had also been serious…

Close to the finish there was a bloke I didn't recognise overtaking me. That's fine. I'm not competitive about blokes. And then I was in! While Neil was shouting encouragement at me. I had done it in 35:16. Quite some distance from my personal best at just under 34 minutes. But this clearly hadn't been my night. And I figured I might still have my category win. 

Flying towards the finish. Pic by Caitlin Faye Photography 

And done. Pic by Caitlin Faye Photography 

After I had finished I went back to Neil, but I quickly had to reconsider. I could feel my stomach content coming up! I needed water. So I quickly went back to grab a bottle. That sorted the problem. Fortunately! I didn't want to spoil anyone's fun by vomiting all over the seafront.

I suppose it might have been a combination of the heat and eating too late. I had made sure to not eat less than 2.5 hours before the start. Maybe that should've been three hours. I would keep that in mind for the next race.

We hung around and cheered on the other runners. And waited for the ceremony. That took place quite shortly after the last runner finished. I knew I had a category win! 

They did the categories first. I got a nice trophy. And the overall winner was an Eryri Harrier! 

When it was done we could go home. It had been fun but also heavy. I was tired now! 

Presentation. Pic by Neil

Academic integrity officers meetings

When I became the academic integrity officer of the School, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Initially, I was just dealing with students who had copied and pasted fragments (or more) of text from the sources they had used, or worked too closely together. Things are different now.

The majority of cases I deal with are cases of suspected inappropriate use of AI. And that means that ideally, I can tell my fellow staff members exactly what to look out for when marking, and then when they report something, ask the students exactly the right questions in order to find out if they are indeed guilty as charged. And then do the documentation that I have to do as efficiently as possible. 

I don't have to do all of this on my own; especially when it comes to what to tell the fellow staff, we have been thinking about that with a bigger teaching team. It is not straightforward. And I know that the University is full of people in the same function as me, trying to do these things as well.

I figured we were all inventing the wheel. And that shouldn't be necessary. So I asked the lady who often sends out request to join University panels if she knew who all the academic integrity officers in the University were, and if she could tell me. And she could! So I sent out a message to all of them (which is not as many as there should be; the paperwork showed three vacancies. I'm not sure how the schools that don't have an academic integrity officer deal with this sort of situation.) And I called an online meeting. I figured that we should start low-threshold. If we want, we can always meet more often, and do it in person if needs to be.

I already had been in touch with the academic integrity officers of the School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, and the school of Law, History and Social Sciences. The actual meeting only attracted one more school: Health Sciences. The lady who holds the academic integrity officer job there I still know from a Welsh course I did years ago. The three other invited people were unavailable. One at least explicitly asked to be kept in the loop, so we knew he was interested.

We had a chat about how we deal with our caseload. Do we have specific guidance to the staff, do we provide lectures to the students about what not to do? How do we document our cases? Do we have administrative support? How do you check if references are fake? Could we ask for more documentation of use of artificial intelligence?

It was an interesting discussion, and we decided to share the documentation we have. So I set up a shared folder where I put my lecture to all students, the guidance to all our staff, and my draft guidance to students of how to prepare for being invited to my office to discuss suspect case. Two of the other schools had already shared documents in the actual meeting, so I put these in there as well. And everybody got editing rights, so people can add more. The idea is that we can look at what the other schools are doing, and steal their best ideas.

We have decided to meet again before term starts again. I hope that if we use our combined brain power, this will make us better able to deal with this increasingly widespread issue. You could argue that we are running after the facts, but now at least we are running together now…

Grass success

In April I spread grass seeds on lawn I had reclaimed from ivy and other encroaching plants. That did precisely nothing. It has been too old! But then I was in a shop that sold grass seed in mid May, and just tried again.

I sometimes had a look at the grass was coming up yet. And generally, the answer was no. But then I left for five days, and that changed things.

When I came back I had a look in the garden and there was grass! It was still a little bit thin, but it was clearly grass. I will spread a bit more of the seed, and water if needed, if we have more dry days. I have faith that these bits of lawn will totally blend into the background in a matter of weeks! That feels good.

Veritable grass! 

Back to frantic marking

When I came back from our trip to the Netherlands, my working week only had three days left. And in these days, a lot needed to happen. By the Monday after, all marking of work by students who might be graduating this summer needed to be finalised. So that means that all dissertations had to be marked by two different people, and they would have had to agreed a mark by then too, and documented that mark. Exams had to have been marked and moderated. That is a lot!

I also have the other burden of being the academic integrity officer, and the module organiser for the dissertation module. And the first thing means I'm spending a lot of time meeting students under suspicion of cheating, and documenting these cases. The second one means that firstly, I have to set a good example, and secondly, I have to keep track of whether other people have done what they need to do, and kick them in the bum if they haven't. 

When I left, I had marked all the dissertations by my own students, but hadn't started yet on the dissertations by other people’s students. And I had marked one of the two exams. So now I needed to do that second marking, and second exam, in three days. And the agreeing marks. That was full on!

With the pressure I was glad I would have a race on Friday evening, so I didn't mind not going running in the hills on Thursday. I could just keep marking that evening. It was a bit sad that the house was, but didn't stay, really tidy; I had cleaned up for the cat sitter, and the cat sitter had cleaned up for me. But now I wasn't keeping that standard up. There was marking to be done.

I just managed to finish marking the second-last dissertation before I got into my car to go to the race on Friday. And I would be able to use the Monday for that last pesky one, and for trying to agree the last marks, and trying to get all the other staff to document their marks. That felt good! But I was a bit tired by then…