Random Superbowl thoughts

So I decided for no reason whatsoever that I would stay up to watch Superbowl XLV which saw the Green Bay Packers take on the Pittsburgh Steelers. Please be clear - I know nothing about American Football. I tried to watch it once, the year that I lived with American Girl and Boy in Manchester and  American Boy tried valiantly to explain the game to me but I refused to listen (I was most likely drunk and/or tired). Oh how I wish I had, this game is nuts.


What follows are the random thoughts that I decided to write down as I watched the game to a) document this hilarious night, b) keep me awake. These were in no way meant to be coherent.

...Man those Quarterbacks really are a huge deal. Their names are pretty much the only individual names you hear...

...It's hard to actually figure out what's going on when you're not paying proper attention and writing blog posts that  don't make any sense. Bad spectator...

...Some of these guys are seriously just fat...

...They don't appear to catch the ball anywhere near as often as they miss it - it seems to be more about just hoiking it down the field...

...The Coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers is some kind of boy-child...

...The drop goals (or whatever they're called in this game - see I'm not concentrating!) are amazing. They have to kick those balls in a straight line through a goal while very angry men run right at your face...

...Field goal! They're called field goals!...

...Loving the Black Eyed Peas. Let's get my energy levels up by having a little dance....

...Actually. Black Eyed Peas are a little uncomfortable to listen to live. This is what happens when your voices get manipulated too much in a studio...

...OMG Slash is on stage playing guitar. Why doesn't this happen in the FA Cup final...

...Woah...and Usher. Man I need to start going to those street dance classes at the gym, I could totally look that cool. No really I could...

..They keep saying numbers that mean nothing to me, what does 2nd and 15 mean?! Why do I never listen when people are trying to tell me things?!...

...Oh my goodness a player just ran full tilt into a camera-man. I'm a terrible person, I nearly choked laughing at it. I believe the world is split into two kinds of people, those who laugh when people fall over/get knocked over/trip etc and those who are kind and goodhearted...

...I must be getting tired. I just took the following photograph to post on American Girl's wall to show her that I was watching the game over here...

...I can sense that this is getting to be a tense game. It's 17 - 21 to Green Bay but Pittsburgh are coming up from behind (so to speak). I feel like I should be excited and I am but I don't really know why...

...Oooh does 1st down refer to the 1st man tackled to the ground? Could I be learning something?!...

...No I don't think I am. I thought that sounded too similar to Rugby League...

...No. Wait. I just asked the internet and I think it really is similar to rugby league...

...Hahaha there's a man on the sidelines called Dick LeBeau. How can you not laugh at that? No? Really? Well it's funny at 2.06am let me tell you...

...Haha penalty for "unnecessary roughness". Bless their little cotton socks...

...Life would be much easier if both teams weren't wearing yellow pants...

...Aaaah I see. You just have to be standing in the touchdown zone and be passed the ball for it count as a touchdown. Veeeeeeeery interesting...

...Oooh this IS exciting, the score just went from 17-28 to 25-28 in the blink of an eye. And we're in the last quarter. I feel I'm witnessing a good game here...

...Hurray!! Green Bay has won, I was unofficially supporting them. I am pleased although I am a) incredibly tired because it's now 3.10am and b) grossed out by the Gatorade Shower they gave the Green Bay coach. A whole massive barrel of juice? Sticky.

...Staying up for the trophy presentation - hang on...the Quarterback for Green Bay won MVP (Most Valued Player - I guess the equivalent of Man of the Match) and he doesn't just get the honour of being named MVP. Oh no no no. He's just won a car. Yes you read right. A shiny, red, sports car. Officially bizarre...

...3.31am. Time to call it a night. Ha I'll be walking into work in 4 hours. Note to self: you have one year to learn the rules of American football.

I have absolutely no idea why I wrote this post.

When I embarked on Project 365 I heeded the advice of Lucy who said that there would be days when you struggled to take a photo at all and days when there were too many to choose from.

So far I've had most of the former situations, desperately scrabbling around for a photo. But this weekend was different and I wanted to put up a montage. This was weird for a few reasons, not least because I found myself with a rare day off this Saturday. A day where I didn't have anything planned or anyone to see, a day where I could legitimately sit on my behind and do whatever I wanted to do.

So whilst I sulked about having to choose just one picture it suddenly occurred to me that I have a blog where I could put up as many freaking pictures as I want to.

So I'm gonna people. I'm just gonna.

What does a girl do when she has a whole day of nothing ahead of her?

She crochets people. She gets her hook out. She gathers together all her left over scraps of wool and she embarks on a project. The latest project is a cushion cover. Mainly because I've been wanting to do one for ages and also because I wanted to do something that required little brain power. I worry sometimes about the ease with which I reach for things that don't require much brain power - I can feel my cells atrophying sometimes.

At the moment the cushion is going to have 9 granny squares on one side and I'm thinking about doing something different for the other side. See? See how my brain is dying? "Something different" I'm just so articulate sometimes.

There are 6 squares made up so far and I am most definitely feeling the love. I think that something strange happens when you edge your squares in white, it seems to instantly add some kind of vintage feel to the squares. Everything begins to look kind of kitschy and cool. I'd explain better but clearly the power of speech has escaped me at the moment.

The only downside of sitting on my backside all day is that I get a severe case of the guilts once it gets to the evening. I try to be lazy I really really do but I will just never be that good at it. I'm not properly built for lazing. The guilts hit on Saturday night and I knew I had to do something to stop me feeling like too much of a lazy bint. Lucky I have a fallback for such situations...

I get my bake on.

It's easy and quick and the results always look slightly disproportionate to the effort you put in (at least if you bake like me and don't pick anything taxing). So after one hour and only one major incident involving a flour explosion I had managed to create the last Mincemeat Cake of the season, using up the last of the mincemeat from Christmas and also some Snickerdoodles from Rachel Allen's 'Bake' book which I decided to bake on a whim because I had the ingredients already in (loved that feeling, I felt like a real-life baker for a moment. Until the flour explosion.)

And now I've written all this and I've realised that really there weren't that many pictures to choose from for Project 365 and I have absolutely no idea why I'm writing this post.

Don't be too mean to me. I've decided to stay up to watch the Superbowl and I think I'm delirious with lack of sleep.

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There's a link to my photostream on the sidebar. You can see what picture I did actually go with for 5th February. (Note. It wasn't one of the ones in this post.)

On your marks

I’ve never been particularly good at running. The mere mention of the words “cross country” can still set off a feeling of low level nausea in the pit of my stomach and send me looking for the nearest bush to hide in (anyone else do that during cross country at school?). When I first joined a gym back in June 2009, things weren’t much better. I was in terrible shape, had no stamina, and my tricksy knee would plague me if I managed to run for more than 10 minutes.

However since joining the new gym last year and becoming a proper “gym goer” (i.e. someone who actually turns up regularly to the gym, rather than someone who pays someone £20 a month for no reason) my stamina has slowly improved. And since losing the weight, my knee seems miraculously better – frightening proof of how much just a few extra stone can affect your joints.

And so came my decision that I would run a 5km race this year.

The reasons were few but nevertheless important;

1) Just something to do

2) Get over my fear of running – I am not still the same awkward teenager who would want to cry at the prospect of running the 1500m

3) Help maintain my weight loss

I am signed up to the Race for Life in Hull on Sunday 17th July. This is brilliant because not only does it give me something to aim for but it’s absolutely ages away so I have plenty of time to get training.

The only problem?

An all encompassing fear of running in public.

“Nobody’s looking at you!” I hear you say. But hear me. I know that I have seen people running on the streets and said to myself “My god they run weirdly.” Whilst I accept that people might not be as judgemental as me I know I’m not the only one who’s watched someone in lycra jog past and had a giggle to themselves.

I told myself that I would take it in stages. I would keep running on the treadmill until I knew that I could run 5km on that. At that point I would suck it up and take it to the streets because I would have the knowledge in my head that I could do this. And we all know the importance of that positive mental attitude.

I was quite pleased with myself, I had managed to legitimately put off something I was scared of doing. Until...

...This weekend I went to visit The Person (sorry, I just can’t think of a better name for him right now) and took advantage of a “Bring a friend for free” pass to get some running in. I gave him strict instructions to not communicate or even look in my direction whilst we were in there (there are certain times when it is ok for your boyfriend to see you red and sweaty. These times do not include the gym.) and I set myself up on the treadmill.

I started jogging away nicely and thought that I would push myself and aim for 3km, the furthest I would have ever run before.

I jogged and I jogged and I listened to tunes on my I-pod and watched the Coronation Street omnibus on the TV and realised that I was almost at 3km and wasn’t drop down dead tired yet. My problem tends to be that I stop well before I need to, mainly because I get incredibly bored and have to get off – my usual limit is 20 minutes on a treadmill before my brain implodes.

“See if you can make it to 30 minutes” I told myself.

I jogged and I jogged and I realised that I was almost at 30 minutes and that I was well into 4km.

“Might as well keep going then lady. Let’s see what you’ve got.” I told myself (in the style of a Bootcamp leader. A nice one though. Not one that makes you exercise until you vomit).

I jogged and I jogged...

And after 35 minutes and 27 seconds of jogging I ran for 5km. No stopping, no slowing down (and not speeding up either admittedly) just jog, jog, jog.

Cue tumultuous applause. Cue me almost hugging the stranger on the cross trainer next to me. Cue me stumbling across the gym to tell The Person that I’d completed a 5k and why hadn’t he looked at me so I could get his attention so he could come and witness it (contrary? Me?!). Cue a call to my Mum to tell her so she’d be proud of me (she didn’t get it). Cue a status update on Facebook in testament to my triumph. Cue general excitement and feelings of pride.

Until I realised that I don’t have any more excuses and have to go running in public.

Where’s the nearest bush?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Thank you everybody for the lovely comments on my last post. I can assure that I am a 12/14. I'm 5'10" which means that when I was big I didn't look that big (someone who was 16 stone and 5 inches shorter than me would look much different!) and also means that I look a lot smaller than I really am now that I've lost the weight. I can see the disappointment in people's eyes when I tell them I'm still a size 12/14, but that's why we shouldn't really pay too much attention to those pesky numbers...

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At the beginning of the year I was round at my Dad’s and mentioned that I had made a pledge to read at least 12 Classics this year. He asked me what I meant by the word “Classic” and I have to say that I’d given it little thought other than that terrible lazy definition of “Old”. I decided that’s the loose definition I’m going for.

Dad then produced a very thin book called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and said I should read that because after all “It’s only one day so it’s not going to take you long to read is it?”

I have to admit I was a little unsure. I’d never even heard of this book, can I call it a classic if I haven’t heard of it? Thankfully, Mooncalf and Helen both separately and coincidentally recommended exactly the same book. Phew. Drama solved.

So this is officially the first classic I’ve read this year. (Let’s not talk about Midnight’s Children ok?)

For those of you not in the know, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the story of, well, Ivan Denisovich, prisoner working in a gulag in Russia in the 1940s and known as Shukhov to the other prisoners. He has served 8 years of a 10 year sentence for who knows what crime (he has been sentenced for treason but was forced into signing the false confession), but has little hope that he will see the end of his sentence and frequently refers throughout the day to the tendency of ‘them’ to add another 10 years on to your sentence for no reason at all.

We’re with Shukhov from when he rises at 5am, through breakfast, through the day at work, through dinner and final roll call.

This is a grim book. Very grim. And whilst you’re reading about his just plain horrible life all you can think is that this day is like every other day for 10 years. This book doesn’t need to be any more detailed, one day is the same as every day. Same routine, same faces, no changes at all – everything, down to the way the guards are going to react can be predicted by Shukhov after his 8 years.

Food is in the form of gruel, if they’re lucky, thin fish water if they’re not. There’s a bread ration of 200g a day which is rarely full after various people down the chain have taken their cut. In a life this miserable, Shukhov can gain pleasure from relatively small ‘wins’ in the form of successfully hiding some of his bread in his mattress and managing to save the final crust of his morning portion until lunch.

When the gangs head out to work you realise the full chaos and nonsense that was the very premise of the Soviet regime at this time. Men are in gangs, led by a foreman. They’re not kept on the same job until it’s finished but hop between unfinished jobs. On this day, Shukhov’s gang is sent to work on a power station which was started some time ago but has never been finished. Not only are they expected to work for 11 hours a day, but they have to do it without access to suitable tools. The gangs resort to stealing materials from one another in order to get their jobs done. It is sheer, terrifying lunacy.

And let’s not forget the conditions they’re working in. We’re in Russia in the middle of winter. Zeks (prisoners) are not allowed to work if it gets below -40c. Shukhov declares -18c as a “great day for bricklaying”. They are allowed to dry their boots out every third day and the guards can, and do, make them strip off for searches whenever they see fit.

What struck me most about this book though is that it turned on its head my notion of prisoners all rallying together. The idea that they might be in this situation but at least they’re in it together. Not in this place. It is literally every man for himself. There is vague allegiance to your Gang and for your foreman (a fellow zek) but no sense of comradeship with any of the other workers.

“Who’s the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict. If zeks didn’t squabble among themselves the bosses would have no power over them.”

You would think that Shukhov would be looking forward to his release but it’s not necessarily the case,

"He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not. To begin with he'd wanted it very much, and totted up every evening how many days he still had to serve. Then he'd got fed up with it. And still later it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but packed off into exile. And there wa no knowing where the living was easier - here or there."

He’s no fool is Shukhov, although it might seem like he’s given up hope I don’t feel that he has done so in a negative way. Rather he’s learned to not look too far into the future, if ever there was a person who took one day at a time then it’s Ivan Denisovich. And in a strange, and almost unbelievable way, he’s not unhappy with his situation, maybe it’s just that he’s used to it but there is no pitying tone in the book. Shukhov isn’t asking the reader to feel sorry for him, he’s just relaying the facts of his day and the facts of life in a camp. In fact at the end of the book he declares,

“Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day.”

It was brilliant. And proof in quality rather than quantity (something which I can’t say about Midnight’s Children at the moment). Thank you to Mooncalf and Helen and of course my Dad for recommending it to me.

Go and pick up a copy today – if you don’t like it? Well. You won’t have wasted much time reading it will you?!

Good points:

- It is thin thin thin. If you had a full day of nothing ahead of you you could easily settle down and get this read and I actually think you should read it in a day, I would imagine it works even better when you don’t have gaps in your reading time.

- You cannot help but feel better about your life. Work might be crap but at least you’re not building a power station in -18c.

Bad points:
- There are no pauses. Of course there isn’t, it’s one long, relentless day, the prisoners don’t get any pauses so why should you? This does make it difficult if you are putting it down and picking it up like I was.
- In a way, you do want to know more about Denisovich – you want to know what led to him ending up in there, you want to know what happens to him afterwards, if he ever does get out. All signs of how brilliant this book really is.
(My copy was published in 1991 by Everyman's Library and is Translated from the Russian by H.T. Willetts. Just so you know.)

Numbers

It's taken about 9 months, 266 days to be (more or less) precise.

I have gone from weighing 16 stone 3lbs to 11 stone 10.5lbs.

Or if you prefer it all in lbs that's 227lbs to 164lbs.

Or 103.18kg to 74.55kg

If you're good at the mental arithmetic you will have worked out that I have lost 62.5lbs altogether (which is 4 stones 5.5lbs, or 28.18kg)

My BMI has gone from 32.6 (anything over 30 is classed as obese) to 23.5

My clothes have gone from a size 16/18 to a size 12/14.
The last time I was that size was about 9 or 10 years ago.

But who cares about the numbers when really a photo can show you all you need to see...

Me in January 2010 and Me in February 2011. 

(The top is the same, the belt in the left is a thing of the past, got too big, ditto the jeans.)

Project 365: Look back at January

Can someone explain to me where January went?

How is it possible that it’s February already?

Coming back to work at the beginning of the year sucked. It sucked hard. And actually at times it felt like the month dragged on forever and ever, I don’t know why I suddenly think it’s gone past quickly.

It’s been comforting in a way, the end of the month has seen the return of things familiar to me – pay day arrived and the monthly book review is back, it’s made my heart feel a little better. Life hasn’t gone completely off the rails (although it does feel like it at times), it’s still chugging along.

And now, I have something else I can do at the end of each month. News to my ears at the moment because I’m still finding blogging hard work for some reason and as long as I have review posts like this to do I know there’s going to be something to say at least twice a month.

So. Project 365. One of my Not Really Resolutions for 2011.

It is definitely tricksy. Especially if you’re not a professional photographer and work 9-5 five days a week. But I’ve been determined not to let it get the better of me.

I think people choose to do Project 365 for many reasons but for me it’s just simple. I don’t want to prove I can take amazing photographers (I can’t). I don’t want to prove how terribly arty I am (I’m not). I don’t want to do anything other than just take a photograph that represents something that I’ve done that day.

This is just another medium of keeping a diary as far as I’m concerned. I have this blog and now I’ll have some photos too that I can look back over at the end of the year and go “Oh hey yeah, that’s when that happened.”

For instance, looking back over January I can see that I’ve only been to my Dad’s once this month. Not good. Bad daughter.

So I’ve picked my January favourites (descriptions read from left to right from the top)

07/01 – Having said I don’t want to take photos to prove how arty and awesome I am I have to say I like this photo because it is arty and awesome. (Man it’s like I’m in a record for how quickly I can contradict myself in the space of one blog post.)

08/01 – My nephew playing. I’ll be honest, I’ve had some troubles bonding with my littlest nephew, mainly because I just hardly ever seem to see him despite him only being in York which is just over an hour away. He’s incredibly shy and for ages wouldn’t even play with me which made my heart break a little bit. However he’s getting better now and I’m trying to see more of him, this afternoon with him was lovely because we actually had a little play about together. Oh yeah and it was the day he vomited all over the place. Classic.

09/01 – What can I say? I love my Fred and Lily. It’s hard to get a photo of them because they rarely stay still long enough and even rarer to get one of them both together. But thanks to their obsession with food they stayed still long enough, scouting out Mum’s plate for leftover bacon, for me to get this one.

17/01 – I love this photo, there’s something about seeing a book and a cup of tea that instantly makes me feel warm on the inside. God I love reading. This photo also makes me smile a cheeky grin as I remember my sneaking skiving powers and reading illegally at work. Illegal reading. It should be an Olympic sport.

21/01 – I’d been planning this photo for a loooooooong time. It still makes me laugh because I had to wait for my boss to go to the toilet, quickly scribble this down and take the photograph, praying that no-one saw me doing it.

29/01 – The Person and I don’t get to behave like a normal couple very often, when you only see each other once a month, if that, simple things like getting to sit next to each other become majorly important.

There is a long, long way to go I know. But considering that about four days in I was starting to panic that I wouldn’t be able to do this I’m feeling pretty good.

All the other photos can be found HERE.

Group vs Clique

If I had believed when I was at school that those were going to be the best days of my life I would probably have given up there and then. They were most certainly not the best days of my life. (Incidentally, if you’re interested, I believe that any time I spent at university were the best days of my life.)

By the time I left school at 18 I had had enough. I couldn’t cope with any of it anymore and longed to be free and to not have to think about or see anyone or anything that was associated in any way with that place (which is probably why I’m one of a rare breed of people who isn’t actually in any regular contact with people from school, apart from the all encompassing Facebook).

This was a feeling that gradually crept upon me of course; when I was wee whippersnapper I was pretty happy at school. I had my little group of friends, I did my school work, I played some sports and everything was fine. But things seemed to change overnight, or rather over the summer holidays of 1999, after we’d done our GCSEs. We came back to school in September as sixth formers and nothing was ever quite the same again.

To be fair I was pretty fortunate. I had my little group of friends, I wasn’t a complete loner. We were comfortably sandwiched in the middle somewhere, not the most popular but not the most vilified either. Years later I found out that people referred to our group as “the nice girls”, a name I’m pretty happy with. We consisted mainly of senior prefects, the Head Girl, high educational achievers, members of the sports and music teams. But not much drama, especially when compared with some of the other social groups in our year.

Not much drama? Only if you were on the outside.

To everyone else our group was one of harmony. There were about seven of us in our merry band which should be a nice enough number, not so big that people got lost but not so small that we got on each other’s nerves. In theory anyway.

If you were within the group, life was a different matter. There were inner tensions and rivalries going on, battlelines were constantly being scratched in the sand, only to be smoothed out and re-drawn a couple of days later. People would pick sides, only to change halfway through the war.

It was exhausting. And I could never quite keep up with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a paragon of virtue in this story, I was still a 17/18 year old girl, make no bones about it I could be as big a bitch as the rest of them, but I just didn’t appear to have the stamina for it that everyone else did. I would find myself entering the common room each day wondering what had unfolded since leaving school at 4pm the day before and trying to figure out who was speaking to who and which side I was supposed to be on.

I know I could have told them all to stuff it, but being on the inside and hating it was infinitely better to being on the outside and alone. For me at least. When I was inside I was part of the group, one of the gang, if I accidentally found myself on the outside, cast out for not commiserating with someone’s break-up enough or for walking to a lesson on my own instead of with others, I was all too aware of how cliquey the whole situation could be.

Once you were on the outside it was difficult to get back in. And you couldn’t get into any other cliques because they were...well...cliquey.

It was strange because when I was on the inside I just thought of us as a nice bunch of girls who all got along, a group of friends, I would have been horrified if anyone had suggested we were a clique. And yet looking in from the outside I could see how closed off we were from everyone else. Of course we were, we had the ability to eliminate one of our own for periods at a time, before graciously allowing them re-entry.

I don’t know how I didn’t realise it. Probably because I was only 18 and I thought that was what life was like.

But I’m beginning to notice that the same rules still apply, nothing appears to have changed in the last 10 years. You can be in a group, harmonious as can be, but once you put a step out of place you can find yourself in the freezing atmosphere of girly bitchiness, desperately trying to punch your way back in to join in the in-jokes and be part of the camaraderie again.

I was asking myself the other day at what point a ‘group’ becomes a ‘clique’ when it hit me in the face.

It’s all just a matter of perspective. When you’re on the inside you’re part of a group, it’s only when you’re on the outside that you find yourself battering at the iron-clad doors of a clique.