Starting on ceiling repair

When the workmen started to put in the second round of panels in August, they had to put the wires somewhere. The logical place is in the ceiling, but that means having to get into it. This involves a lot of making holes in the plasterboard. Some small ones, where they just made a hole and left it; or big ones, where they basically cut a part of the ceiling into bits, and sort of stuck them back in more or less the same position when they were done. Both is not very pretty, and needs to be sorted.

Now that they are done it is up to me to sort out the damage. I have never really dealt with this before! I started out with a little instruction video on YouTube. The obvious place to start! And it spoke of backboards and joint tape and all sorts of things. I was learning.

I have now tentatively started. I ordered some repair patches. Plasterboard normally comes in enormous sheets, but of course there are people who take leftovers and sell them on eBay. Suits me fine.

I just started by tracing the outlines of the holes on paper, so I would be able to transpose that onto the plasterboard, and cut out (sub-)patches of the right shape and size. I also started to think about the backboards. The idea is that if you have a hole in your plasterboard, you make sure that you fix something above the hole, and you stick the repair patch to that. That's the backboard. That might be substantial if the hole is big. With small holes you might not need it; maybe the filler you need for putting it in place will just hold it in position.

I didn’t take chances. I screwed some small pieces of wood into the first small holes, and cut a beam to size for a big hole. I didn’t have screws long enough to put it there, though. I will need to buy these. 

I didn’t get very far. But there is a start! That is always the hardest part. It will take a while, but I have faith I will get there. I don’t know how seamless (or otherwise) it will look in the end, but I’m sure I’ll manage to improve it from what it is now! 

Preparatory artwork

Two small holes in the bedroom

Mini backboards fitted

A big hole that needs a big backboard

Adjusting to my 50+ hair

As hair maintenance I tie bits of string around the base of my dreadlocks. It keeps them together, and it makes new hairs join a dreadlock. You don’t want them to grow freely in between! And the idea is that your maintenance is so good to that when you put a new bit of string in, you take the previous one out. But sometimes I'm a bit late, and I choose to keep the old one in. My hair is not naturally inclined to be configured into dreadlocks, so if I have left it a bit long I might have a little interval of normal hair between the bits of string. Quite a lot of my dreads have more than one bit of string in.

I have traditionally used black thread. Not that my hair is black, but it’s dark enough to make the thread blend into the background. But that is changing.

On New Year's Day, Dean pointed out that I should probably be moving to grey. I figured he had a point. My hair is grey! So the next time I went to buy strong thread, I indeed went for that colour.

I first used up all the black I still had. But then I made the switch. It indeed blends in! And hopefully, one day I will move to white thread. But that is still quite some time away!

Symbols of time moving on

I suppose you can’t see the difference in this pic! But the lowest piece of string is grey…

Holyhead mountain and breakwater

Sometimes scampering off to Anglesey can keep you out of the rain. And there was quite some rain forecast further inland. So Neil and I decided to go to Holy Island. We first had a look at the brickworks, which have been turned into a sort of educational garden. Then we did a walk over the flanks of Holyhead Mountain, to North Stack. And then we walked the breakwater; I had only been on it once, during a race. It was nice to take some time to enjoy it. And we stayed largely dry! Success… 

The brickworks 

Artefacts

Glassless sash window

From the old railroad that took the building materials to the breakwater

View from North Stack to South Stack

View back to land from the far end of the breakwater 

5 year cat anniversary

It’s been five years! Five years since an unsuspecting little cat was carried into my house. She wasn’t even one year old. And now we’ve been together for five entire years. She’s such a fixture of my life. She welcomes me when I get home. She sleeps by my side. We often start the day with some play with the fishing rod toy. The best relaxation is when she is relaxing nearby. I’m sure she has changed in that time. She is not a youngster anymore! But I don’t really see it. She is still sweet but on her own terms, she is still a skilled killer but easily startled, she is still keen to greet everyone at the door but hates tradespeople, never thinks I feed her enough but never tries to steal food. She’s the best cat there is. Someone who I miss and worry about when I travel, but without whom I really don’t want to live if I have that choice! 

End of a utensil

Flasks are important! If you are away from taps and kettles you can still have a hot beverage when you have a flask. Vitally important when hiking and camping. Very important underground. Quite handy in home and office. 

I had some in the Netherlands: first a green one and a silver one. Then the silver one ended up elsewhere and I replaced it with a black one. They came with me on all sorts of hikes. 

Then I moved to Norway. The flasks came with me. Now they served me on kayaking trips and ski tours. Then my life took me to Britain. The flasks had to get used to underground trips. They ended up a bit battered. 

Recently I poured me a cup from the green flask. Something floated in the cup. A piece of plastic! Where did that come from? It turned out to be the bottom of the flask top. The plastic had gone too old and had become brittle, and had now crumbled. You looked straight at the styrofoam providing the insulation. 

I checked if I had another intact top that fit, but I didn’t. I wasn’t happy using it on the road with that top anymore. I’ll have to buy another one. 

It’s just an object! A piece of kit. But it has made do, so many of my adventures comfortable. I figured it deserved a little obituary on my blog! Thank you, green flask. You really deserve retirement now. 

The damaged top

The battered base

In the University Academic Integrity panel

I’ve been the Academic Integrity Officer for the School now for several years. Most cases we can sort within the School. Some cases, however, have to go one level up: especially repeat cases, or cases in particularly heavy-weighing modules, like entire MSc theses. The university then calls together an ad hoc panel to adjudicate on these matters. The people in these panels are drawn from the pool of Directors of Teaching and Learning and Academic Integrity officers of the various Schools. So it was a question of time before I would get the call. 

I got the call now. We were a panel with Peredur the Linguist chairing, a lady from the International Student Office (maybe because the case involved an international student), an observer from Quality Assurance, a representative of the Student Union (there is always one there, unless the student under investigation specified they don’t need one), a University secretary, and me. 

The procedure is that there is an open and a closed session, both on Teams. We start closed; that’s only with the panel, and not the student (defendant) or the AI officer of their School (prosecutor). We established everyone knew what’s going on, and we talked through what questions we wanted to ask. Then we went into the open session. 

This open session was unusual; the student had chosen not to attend, so we couldn’t ask them questions. We could ask the person bringing the case. It wasn’t a long session. 

We then went back to the closed session. And then we decided under what definition we decided this case fell, and what penalty (if any) we had to therefore apply. 

From there on, the secretary would take over. It was her task to communicate the outcome to all relevant parties. 

This was my debut! And only three working days later I would have the second already. You’re never bored if you work with academic integrity! 

Borders League Pensby

It was time for another Borders League race! This one organised by the Pensby running club. That meant going to the far end of the Wirral. That's quite far! I was really hoping someone would be willing to car share with me. I find driving 1.5 hours in order to run for 35 minutes, and then driving back another 1.5 hours, a bit frustrating; especially when I am highly inefficiently only transporting one person in my car, and on the other hand, not getting the advantages of good company. Unfortunately; I was not in luck. They weren't that many of us going, and it is not unusual for people to tag on some additional activity at the end before they go home.

The good news was that I got there without problems, that it was dry when I got there, and that I found a tiny little parking space for my modestly sized car. The bad news was that my legs felt a bit wobbly when I got out of the car. I wondered if that had something to do with my fatigue the day before. But I was going to be ok!

I soon I bumped into other Harriers. Most of them were men! I figured we, as the ladies, were probably going to incur a lot of penalty points for not fielding enough athletes. But so be it.

I did a little warmup run scouted start was. It seemed to have been in a different location from the previous time. And then it was time for the race briefing, and lining up for the start. I was on my new running shoes for the first time. So far they felt good.

I wanted to take it quite easy in the beginning. I clearly wasn't at my best. And I wasn't chasing anything like a category win or something like that; firstly, they don't exist in the Borders League, and secondly, if they did; I wouldn't stand a chance. The field is so strong! And also; we only had three ladies running. That meant 600 penalty points! That basically meant that how fast we would be going to make any difference whatsoever.

We first ran land-inwards, and then turned right onto the main road that had got me there. I had seen it from the car. We weren't on the actual road; we had to run on the cycle path annex pavement on the side. That was basically only one runner wide. And next to it was grass. So if you wanted to overtake anyone, you had to get onto the grass. And I was in hybrid shoes! A lot more grip on muddy grass than proper road shoes. So I did a fair bit of overtaking.

After a while, we turned right again, to head back in the direction of what undoubtedly was an old railway line. That road was in a bad state. I had already seen that on Google Maps. I was being careful! I saw a bloke misstep a bit in one of the potholes, and hurt himself. He did decide to continue, but his face looked pained. I did not want to share his fate.

Then we came off that road, and hit what was the home stretch. I tried to keep my speed up and overtake people. And I was keeping an eye on my watch. To the best of my knowledge, this route was exactly 8 km. I need to last to the end! But then suddenly the finish was there. The route was 150 m shorter than I thought. Not a problem! I suppose I could have had a go at overtaking one more woman if I would have known. But as I said before; it didn't matter.

After I finished I went to get my jumper from one of the Harriers support team, and went to cheer on remaining club members. I was just on time to shout Arwel over the finish. And I shouted at everyone else as well while I was at it. And then it was time for a picture. And then we could go home. Another long drive!

When the results came in I saw I had done it in just under 35 minutes. That's not very fast, but I think this was just not a very fast day for me. The one thing that struck me was that I was only 30 seconds slower than Anna, our star runner. By now she was quite obviously pregnant, and it must be slowing her down! There was only one woman between her and me, and I would've had a chance of outsprinting her. Crikey we were almost consecutive. And I had come in as 29th woman overall; I was happy with that. 

Im not sure what the situation is regarding the next fixture! But first things first: the next race will be Nick Beer. Just after a blood donation! That will be hard…

Club pic

Almost at the finish

Even closer