Anglesey Barracks with Nick

Nick suddenly had less in the way of caring responsibilities than expected, and wondered if he could come over. And I said yes. And the previous time we met he had said he would love to go and see the Anglesey Barracks. I figured that was within the realm of possibilities!

Anglesey Barracks (pic taken when I was there with Frank and Ilja) 

Before we got there, we agreed that we would give it a go as a couple. So it's official now I suppose! And I am aware that that means we took a rather quick decision, as this was only date number six. But it's clearly going well, and lurking around in limbo for a long time isn't ideal either. So there is officially a man in my life now. And we will do our best to make that go well! And we celebrated by taking some beer (alcohol-free and otherwise) and some nibbles, and consuming these in Dinorwic Quarry. An excellent celebration if you ask me…

Nick and me (pic taken in the grounds of Stokesay Castle)

The dangers of powdered breakfast

 I mentioned before I had shifted my breakfast away from dairy, and was now using oat milk powder instead. That means every morning I'm measuring 300 mL of water and adding that too a big scoop of powder. Every second day I use the same measuring cylinder measuring the 185 millilitre of water I need for my bread machine. I suppose the reader can practically guess what happened next.

One Saturday morning I was a bit distracted. During the week I always get the machine ready the night before, but in the weekend I often don't. And when I was doing some faffing in the kitchen and noticed that the bread machine had started its kneading, I saw that the dough looked very soupy. I quickly realised what I had done. Yes I had indeed accidentally thrown 300 mL of water into the bread machine.

I let the machine continue to see what would happen. It made a loaf, but it was not usable as bread! I will have to make bread soup or bread and butter pudding or something like that of it. I hope this will teach me to keep my head screwed on and never make that mistake again…

No running but eating on a Thursday

I had been mightily relieved when I came out of the run up Moel Eilio, and down in the dark, unscathed. I am always scared of injuring my ankles or knees! But all went well. I thought.

The next warning I woke up with a slightly sore ankle. I did not know where it came from. And that Friday I didn't run because I was on fieldwork, and that Saturday I didn't run because I was marshalling. On Sunday I did a pre-breakfast run. If I run before breakfast I am always very slow!

Next Thursday I was running again. I could feel my ankle, but I ran through it. That seemed fine. 

Later Dyfed, who runs this, put a call out to see who wanted to go for pizza after the next Thursday run. I signed up. And I started to notice that everybody else who signed up also a blog. I asked if women don't like pizza. Luckily, then some ladies also signed up.

That weekend I tried another run. But I aborted it! My ankle just didn't feel right. And that was a bit worrying. I had a race coming up! And I also hoped to do the Thursday run. And I also felt like I couldn't pull out of the pizza now I had made such a point about female representation. What to do?

After thinking about it I decided that I wanted to be prepared for the races I could be. And that would be not running on Thursday. I could imagine I wouldn't feel up for running at all on Sunday, if I would do another 12K on the road just a few days earlier. And I wouldn't be that prepared as I hadn't been running much now for two weeks. But I'd still rather run without a sore ankle!

I drove up to the usual parking spot for the Thursday run. I figured it would be nice to meet up there, as I imagined we would all walk up together to the pizza place. And indeed, a while after I had parked up I saw the first head torches arrived. But it seemed we were going to all drive to the pizza place. I could just as well have gone there directly! But that's OK.

I ended up on a table with opposite me a medical couple from Felinheli, and next to me a lady I had cheered on during the Peris Pedol race. It was really nice to have a chat with them! Albeit with difficulty; a whole herd of hungry runners can be quite noisy. But the pizza was nice. And there was a birthday card circulating; it turned out that the next day, Dyfed would be 50!

I hadn't run, so I was less hungry than almost anybody else (there were more who hadn't run but were joining for pizza, like the lady who had injured her knee a few weeks ago), and only ate half of my pizza. And found out the restaurant has a great policy! If you ask for a box, they write your name and some other information on it, so if you end up littering the place they know it was you. I think that's fab! My box will end up in the log burner.

Just when I intended to leave, a cake came out. We all sang for Dyfed. He is clearly very well liked in the group. Why wouldn't he be! But after the singing I wanted to go home. It was getting late!

Cake for Dyfed

The next week there would be an opportunity for pizza again. This time I won't sign up until I know how my ankle feels after the race. I really hope it's okay, and I can do run and pizza. It is quite nice sit down for a meal with this water welcoming group. But I'm not taking my ankle for granted at all! 

More bridge news

When I bike from home to the main campus, I often take the bike path. Close to where it ends on the outskirts of Bangor, it goes over two streams. There were narrow bridges there. A long time ago, the council decided they needed work. This distal part of the path then closed, obviously. With the bridges gone, the path doesn’t work. 

It took a lot longer than planned! I think it should initially have been finished in 2023, but that clearly didn't happen. And when it still wasn't finished in spring, when teaching stopped, I had a lot less reason to use that path. Outside term time I am not in Bangor very often. But teaching has obviously started again, and one day I decided to take the bicycle path to get to the main campus. This is not the most direct route, but it is the one that gets you to Bangor while avoiding the road practically all the way. And I suddenly noticed the fences were gone, and the path was accessible again, all the way to the end.

I was keen to see the new bridges. And not only were they in good nick, but they were at least twice as wide as they had been! I can’t find pictures of how narrow they were, though. But the change is good, as they had been bottlenecks. Overtaking, or meeting people coming the other way, was always a bit of an issue there. But no more!

First bridge

Second bridge

I also realised that probably meant the Bangor 10k would go over them. The first time I had done the race, it went over the old bridges, and last year it had to avoid that bit of the route. But now we could go back to the original route, and we would have all the space in the world! I don't know when the work was actually finished, but I am glad it is. I'm sure I'll be taking that route on a regular basis in the coming months!

First marking of the year done

It was day three of term and I finished a batch of marking. It wasn’t really day three for me, of course. Our fieldwork starts two weeks earlier. And the students are expected to keep a field notebook with their notes and results. At the end of the field trip, they hand it in. And then, of course, we need to mark them. This is the only marking on paper I still do. Everything else the students submit electronically.

The thing with marking on paper is that only one person at the time can do it. So every year it is difficult to get this done within the four weeks we officially have for a task like that. So over a week after the field trip, when there still had been no mention of the notebooks, I asked Martin what the situation was. And of course that meant the sleeping dog woke up, and not much later I had a crate full of notebooks in my office.

I knuckled down to make sure I finished quickly! After me, four other people need to get it. I finished it on a late Wednesday afternoon. And Jaco would be next. But he wasn’t in on Thursday, so he wouldn’t start until Friday, almost two weeks after the trip. Oh well! I did my best. It’s out of my hands now! I can go back to more stereotypical activities for the first week of term. Like preparing and recording lectures… 

Progress on the bridge

Almost two years ago, the bridge I bike over twice a day suddenly closed. Its structural integrity had been questioned; the bridge deck is held up by steel hangers, and these apparently needed to be replaced. And that is a sizable job! Soon that work started. And that meant traffic lights, as only one lane of the bridge would be open to traffic. Not an enormous deal, but inconvenient.  And I had no clue how long it would take. 

What happened was that all hangers were festooned with auxiliary steel cables, and fences were put up between the pedestrian path on the outside, and the lanes for cars and such. The steel cables would only come off when the hanger was replaced. 

Recently I started to notice the fences starting to come down. And now the entire eastern side of the bridge has both been cleared of auxiliary cables and of fences. And the northern part of the western side too. Would work be coming to an end? I hope so! It would be great if traffic could just flow over that bridge unimpeded again…

Notice fences and auxiliary cables only on the other side! 

View from the mainland side

Term starts for real

We the fieldwork crew already started teaching two weeks ago, but now term has really kicked off. On-campus teaching has started again. Summer is over! And from experience I know that in a day or two, it becomes the new normal. 

Term means seeing students every day, and travelling to and from Bangor a lot, and short deadlines. Instead of having a load of things that need to be done by the start of term, it will now be lots of smaller things that need to be done by tomorrow. That’s different! And I’m afraid I work more efficiently this way. I suppose that teaches me I should manage myself better in summer; if I could just work at the manic speeds of term time then, I’d have more time for fun stuff. 

I didn’t start particularly well, as I had made a show and dance of publishing the module website of the dissertation module, and then completely forgot to do the same with my other modules. Oops! But the students seemed very forgiving. Let’s hope that stays the same, but that my performance improves! Stay tuned…

My bike parked at Brambell building, where my first lectures took place. I wasn’t keen on its looks initially, but it grew on me…