jayneandmarty.com

I’ve been slack with the blog posts but that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing. Far from it. It’s just that we were on holiday and I wanted to stay away from the laptop as much as I could.

Besides, I can’t remember what we did on which day.

So for now just enjoy the photos of tenpin bowling with the kids and the Great Ocean Road with Jon and Bethany. I’ll have a think and try to write some stuff down.

Bowling (click for album)

Great Ocean Road

Just posted 40 photos of yesterday to our Picasa page.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jayneandmarty/ChristmasDay2008

Let us know if you want copies at more than 1000px ……

…Rob called me on Saturday to see if we wanted their MASSIVE Sony stereo for “next to nothing”. He said he’d tried to offload it to Cash Converters but they wouldn’t take it because it was too big (!). They’re useless, those guys. (Cash Converters, not Rob and Nic!!)

I wasn’t really sure where we’d put it but we have a big house with some spare rooms so I was pretty sure we’d make use of it somehow. So I ditched my Saturday arvo plans for roofing our balcony and drove up to Wezza to pick it up.

While I was there they offered me all sorts of other junk and I came away with a pumping stereo and 5 speakers, 15 CDs of dubious quality, and a party light. That made Jayne laugh when I got home.

Anyway, I got everything home and proceeded to spend plenty of time trying to decide where to put it. We’ve been thinking about buying a TV stand thingy to suit our new plasma for a few months now, but it’s been difficult finding a corner unit. Nobody sells them anymore, which is a shame, as the unit that sat under our old CRT telly just looked crap with the plasma on it.

Enter Stereozilla.

The thing is in two sections, one of which is supposed to sit on top of the other one to form a skyscraper the size of the Eureka Tower. But I noticed that the sections were the same size, so there was a chance they’d sit next to each other … under our telly.

And they did. The only problem was the two front speakers, both of which could easily pass for the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (below).

Luckily, our corner-unit configuration lent itself to placing the monoliths BEHIND the telly, and the centre surround speaker on top of them. Hooray. Besides, that’s the only way Jayne would let me have them

I had to buy a few extra metres of speaker wire to get the left and right rear speakers where we wanted them, but now we’re set up with a kicking home cinema, in my humble opinion. Rob and Nic told me that after the Cash Converters rejection they tried to give the whole thing away out of the boot of their wagon. Well, we’re glad there were no takers. It works great for us.

Here’s Jayne in front of the setup. Should work nicely at Christmas for Singstar and/or Guitar Hero!

P.S. For bonus points, what is the film we’re watching? (too easy!)

Georgia and Lindsay came to stay on Saturday night. It was just a short stay this time, but we found time to take the boy to the beach for a swim. He’s strained the cruciate ligament in his right knee somehow (like footy players do), so we’re not supposed to walk him but we can swim him, so he’s been spoilt for the last few weeks with frisbee throwing/swimming in one of the channels near the bridge at Barwon Heads. Lucky boy.

Here are some Polaroids from that afternoon. They’re a bit dark but that’s my fault – I had the exposure setting on the camera set to dark.

Georgia throwing the frisbee.

I like Max’s face in this one. He is not amused.

Max fetching the frisbee for Lindsay.

The sun came out for this one.

A great one by Lindsay.

Max is not amused in this one either.

As usual the girls were very good. They even made their bed properly in the morning!

Well yesterday was great and crap at the same time.

To get the crapness out of the way first, it didn’t really hit me how much I wanted to be out there running until I went into the MCG at about 8.45am and saw all the half-marathon competitors successfully finishing. (Their start was 7am) They’d reached their goal and I hadn’t. Nuff said.

But Jayne had fun, so let’s talk about her.

We’d arranged to stay at a friend’s house in Alphington the night before, so we had the luxury of a semi-lie in and a small breakfast before driving down Hoddle St to park in East Melbourne. We found a spot at the top of Fitzroy Gardens, which gave us a nice shady walk through them towards the G. That took around 10 minutes and soon after reaching the ground we found the competitor section and the spectator section, then met up with the work friend Jayne has been training with.

Jayne outside the G

The starting line was across the footbridge down by the Yarra, and walking over there it quickly became clear that there were loads more people around than the Nike+ race last month. Plenty of bods stretching, hydrating and eating bananas.

Jayne near the start line

The start was pretty chaotic. Your personal time doesn’t start until you run under the starting arch (you get an electronic timing thing to attach to your shoe), so the entrants who planned to walk the 10km could have done the right thing and started at the back. But no. Selfishness or perhaps just plain stupidity saw plenty of walkers right at the front of the 7,000-strong field walking 3 abreast and not caring one bit who they were holding up. The organisers could have arranged that a little better, no doubt, but there’s no substitute for actually using your brain.

A section of the entrants at the start

This guy fair dinkum sprinted the first 100m – clearly he wanted to be able to say he led the field at the start

Notice the Warwick Capper lookalikes not far behind him. And not far behind them were the first of the thicko walkers

Back to Jayne. Her route took her up to Fed Square, down St Kilda Rd and along The Tan in reverse to the top of the Anderson St hill, then back along the same route to the southern bank of the Yarra, along it and across the Anderson St bridge, back up to the tennis centre and then to the G, where all runners completed a lap before crossing the finish line. And when I say The Tan in reverse, I don’t mean she had to run it backwards, Rob and Kate.

Running under the Swan St bridge, about 6.5km in

Jayne crossing the line

Ignore the empty MCG stands in the background – where I was sitting was chockers. Probably 5,000 spectators.

In that last photo the clock says 1:13:33, but that’s the gun time. Her actual time (i.e. from when she crossed the start line to the finish line) was somewhere around 1:09:30, which is a PB by two minutes. I reckon that’s fantastic given how slow and congested the start was, but she’s disappointed she didn’t break 1:05! Clearly she’s hooked on the running.

After the race with her finisher’s medal

All up it was a great day out. She’s already talking about a 15km event at the end of November and we’ve been looking at race calendars to find other events we can be a part of. I don’t see running becoming a huge part of our lives but we both enjoy it, it’s (mostly) free, it feels good after a run (even just a short training run), our fitness is improving (especially Jayne’s – three months ago she found it tough completing 2km), and there’s a strong sense of camaraderie at the events, so we’re both hooked for now.

On Sunday’s wet and cold morning we joined the throng of runners clad in red Nike t-shirts to run 10km through the streets of Melbourne in the Australian leg of the Nike+ Human Race, a global event with 25 participating cities including London, LA, Taipei, Buenos Aires, Vancouver and Munich. Each city’s run started at a different time, but all races were run on Sunday 31 August.

Despite the chilly weather there were heaps of people lined up at the start line, all ready to either run a PB or just finish without assistance from the St John’s Ambulance guys. We saw entire families running together, groups of friends helping each other up the hills (perhaps only running so they could get into the post-race Hilltop Hoods/Faker gig?), and of course the serious runners effortlessly bouncing along like gazelles. It’s amazing how they can run so fast for so long.

The course took in most of The Tan (including the infamous Anderson Street hill) before heading to Fed Square, up Russell Street and Collins Street, around Fitzroy Gardens and up the Lansdowne Street hill, then back past Flinders Street station to for the big finish in Kings Domain. The course seemed thoughtfully planned, taking in a bunch of landmarks whilst still challenging us with some good hills and long straights.

For me, this race was part of my training for the Melbourne half-marathon in October, so I was planning to take it pretty easy, run my own pace and finish inside 60 minutes without hurting myself. Jayne had two goals: to run the whole way and to finish in less than 1hr 20min. She hadn’t done 10km in training, so just finishing would be a PB anyway!

We thought it would be tough to avoid being swept along by the crowd at too fast a pace for the first few kms, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was burn all our energy in the first half of the race and fall in a jelly-legs heap with 500m to go, so our plan was to just maintain our rhythm and let others pass if they wanted to run faster. We weren’t running together (as we run at different speeds), but the plan worked pretty well. Jayne was zoned out to her iPod and both of us had done enough training runs to pace ourselves properly.

I crossed the finish line after a big sprint finish (had to pull something out of the bag for the crowd) in 54m16sec, a respectable time but not as quick as I’d run in training. Must have been the hills. After monging down a couple of free Powerbars and some Gatorade I walked back to the finish line and a few minutes later cheered Jayne through. She finished in 1hr 11min (official race time 1:16 but that included a 5 minute toilet stop!) and she was ecstatic that she’d achieved all three of her goals.

All up it was a great morning out. If they organise another one next year we’ll definitely be there.

Next stop for me: the 22km Melbourne half-marathon on October 12, and Jayne’s entered herself for the 10km race on the same day. She’s busting to beat her time now!

This blog post is for Kate, mostly, as her blog is where I’ve seen this most. Maybe it’s a NSW thing.

The word “Muppet”, for me, has always been, and always will be, those likeable Jim Henson puppets from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show – shows I grew up with.

Now it seems that “muppet” is gaining acceptance as some sort of derogatory term used to describe morons. (See wikipedia article here).

I, for one, am not going to buy into that. Muppets are the friendly characters on the afore-mentioned shows.

The end.

I’ve almost finished editing the video of Georgia and Lindsay’s first day ever at the snow (but can’t finish yet as there’s another 15 minutes of footage on a tape somewhere … can’t find it). It’s pretty good so far but it ends abruptly (!).

I wasn’t going to put it on YouTube as it’s 23 minutes long, but if enough of you want to see it then I will. Otherwise I’ll just cut a DVD for Paul and Catherine.

Over to you guys…….do you want it on YouTube or not?

We’ve signed up for the Nike 10km “Human Race” on August 31, and although I’m already running that distance for my half-marathon training, Jayne really needs a way to train during the week for the next few weeks.

So is there a borrowable treadmill anywhere …….. ?

Just asking before we go down the joining-the-gym route.

We’ve been too busy this week to post about last Sunday’s snow trip with Georgia and Lindsay but with a spare half hour today I thought I’d at least put the photos up! (The video’s still to be edited).

We left VERY early (4.30am) as the plan was to get there for the 4 hour kids ski school lesson at 9.30 but a minor delay in Mansfield to hire their gear did us in. We passed the ticket box at Mirimbah at about 8.15 but hit a big traffic jam about 5kms from the car park that delayed us for nearly an hour. I’ve never seen anything like it. I even got the girls to get ready in the car while we were stuck in the jam but it made no difference, and we didn’t make it to the ski school until just before 10.

With the 4 hour class missed, our only option was to put them into a First Timer’s lesson for 2 hours on the gentle beginners slope, which we thought would be a bit tame for them given their slalom waterskiing exploits. But actually that turned out to be pretty good, even though by the end of the lesson they were itching for the bigger slopes.

The instructor started by getting them to put one ski on and scoot around, then they swapped legs and scooted some more. When he was satisfied that they’d learnt the basics of balancing, they clicked into the other ski and learnt how to stop, sidestep up the hill and stop themselves from sliding down backwards (although Georgia had a bit of trouble with that one and kept sliding into the safety fence).

Then it was off to the magic carpet for their first run and some proper skiing. The video tells the story a bit better from here, so I’ll try to cut that tonight and publish it for you all to watch.

If Jayne and I had also been skiing, and if we had more time, after the lesson finished we’d have taken them up to Burnt Hut or one of the other green runs. The weather was OK (well, for Buller, which means it was better than the normal pea soup 20m visibility), but we were just watching today so after a brief snowball fight in the village we decided to head back to the car park, make a snowman and get off the mountain before the craziness at 4.30.

Here are the girls just before their lesson.

All in all a great day, but a bit rushed. Next time I think we’ll stay for the weekend. Jayne and I have done our fair share of day trips over the years (although never with kids before) and whilst they’re three times cheaper than a weekend trip, they’re three times as crazy!!

Lots of photos on our Picasa page.