easter miscellany

Gosh, doesn't feel like only a week since I last posted. So much and yet so little seems to have happened. Most of it in the realm of the mundane, but a few items stand out as blog-worthy...

An old friend with whom I'd lost touch contacted me this week, and brought with the contact a bombshell: Now Jenn, my old friend now lives as a woman and is undergoing hormone therapy, with the aim of having a sex change op in the coming year. She has decidede to start up a website and blog to help her friends and family keep up with the transition and her new life, and also as a resource for other transitioning transexuals and the wider community in general. I think it's really brave of Jenn to come out and contact all her old friends in this way. And she looks really good as a woman. So I've blogrolled her site, transjennder.com. Please go visit, especially if, like me, you don't have much experience or understanding of the transsexual community. Good to be back in touch, Jenn.

Things are going really rather well with CIB. After the original 11-hour marathon date, we haven't yet run out of things to talk about, which is useful. It's nice to meet someone with similar tastes and perspectives as me. We have lots of the same taste in music, movies, we are both rather 'green' - I pretend to hate hippies when I am actually really a bit of a tree-hugger, while CIB is a full-blown 'out' hippie boy. We both like cricket. We both run. We both have had problems throughout our lives with tonsilitis (how weird is that?). Our parents are scarily similar, right down to physical appearance. I'm not holding my breath, it's still very early days, and to be quite frank, I really haven't got the time or the money to be considering a relationship, but what the hell, you only live once, right? This time, I'm going to take it slowly, because taking it too quickly always spells trouble. One step at a time. Small steps.

The half marathon last weekend was good, but marred by a rather worrying bout of symptoms which could only be described as stomach ulcer-like. I suffered from about mile 3 with painful cramps that felt like my stomach (not my abdomen, like my proper stomach, just below the sternum) was balling into a fist and screaming at me. At times it was excruciating, and after the race I was doubled over in pain, and was unable to drink even a sip of tea without burning and pain, and orange juice - well, suffice it to say I had one sip and it brought me to tears. So now I'm a bit worried I'm giving myself an ulcer, so I'm trying to cut down on my coffee consumption, which I know is excessive. So far I've not had any more problems, so hopefully it was just a one off. But it really spoiled the day for me at the Half. I was aiming for 1:40 though, and even in the circumstances, I still made 1:38:34 - I think I actually ran harder towards the end because I just wanted the pain to stop!

PhD woes - argh! I just can't seem to get myself motivated at all, but I have to, because I have my first ever poster presentation at a conference in Oxford next Thursday/Friday, and so I have exactly 6 days to enter my data collected so far, do preliminary stats on the data, write the poster, make it look nice and then find somewhere cheap to get it made into a shiny bright A2 poster, and then practice my 'talk'. Not to mention get my suit trousers taken up, get a train ticket, and find someone to take over my bar duties at the club next Thursday. Yikes. So blow the glorious warm sunshine outside... I need to get down to work here!

OK, have a wonderful 4 day weekend everyone, and if you're not lucky enough to be able to thank God that Jesus died so we could have a long weekend, then you might want to consider a move to the UK ;-)