I just entered myself for the Melbourne Half-Marathon on 12 October. I’ve never previously run more than 8km in one go, but I’m running The Tan in 18 minutes (best time four years ago was 15.30), so I figure with a bit of training I’ll make the distance OK.
Stay tuned … but note that most of the updates will be on martinjy.com.
(P.S. If you read martinjy.com and this blog sorry for the double post. I decided it was relevant to both blogs!)
Ages since we’ve written anything. Did you miss us?
We’ve been working, sleeping, working, sleeping during the week, and gardening most weekends. I’ve started on the front garden, while Jayne has been concentrating on planting out the side part of the back garden now that the balcony’s done.
The plan with the front garden is to preserve all our beautiful shrubs, trees, bulbs and groundcover whilst completely remodelling the whole thing to create a more welcoming streetscape and an obvious entry. As you can imagine, those two goals are at odds with one another, so some of the plants have gone to the big skip in the sky, and we’ve moved others to the back garden.
I’ve almost finished removing the weird half-fence but I still have 4 fenceposts to pull out and they’re like icebergs: 2/3rds of them are underground. It takes about an hour to get each one out with the sledgehammer and the shovel. Last weekend I seriously considered hiring a mini digger to ram them instead. Anyway, when that’s done I’ll move some earth and put in some simple retaining walls to create some levels, put up a new fence that follows our boundary, and probably remove some lawn and replace it with shrubs and paths. Haven’t decided for sure on that last bit though.
It looks much better without the half-fence, and it’s easier to picture it finished. Glad I decided to take that out first before putting in the new one. It means we can’t let Maxy out there to do his business but he goes in the backyard instead. That’s not ideal because he tends to go find a bone and forgets all about going to the toilet. But never mind.
More pics when we’ve made more progress ….. but here are a few to be going on with.
My old friend Saul is cycling the Tour de France route for the next few months and he’s keeping a journal of his adventure. Follow his trip at http://saulfollett.wordpress.com/.
Yep, the fluff-monster is 4.
Apparently the age-old rule about one human year equalling 7 dog years isn’t true. Wikipedia says:
No one formula for dog to human age conversion is scientifically agreed, although within fairly close limits they show great similarities.
As a rough approximation, the human equivalent of a one-year-old dog is between about 10 and 15 years.
The second year is equivalent to about another 3 to 8 years in terms of physical and mental maturity, and each year thereafter is equivalent to only about 4 or 5 human years.
If I roughly approximate the rough approximations for Max, he’s 28. Which is 4 x 7. But never mind.
I worked from home today, which was great news for him as it meant that I could take him to the beach after dropping Jayne at the station.
