lazyotter

Today I’d intended to try and run up Moel Siabod (872m) in Snowdonia, but having driven all the way there I was denied this challenge by dreadful weather (see below photo). And that’s not fog - it’s rain being driven by high winds. Somewhere in there was a mountain, but common sense prevented me from finding it today.

Somewhat disappointed after this setback, I walked into Joe Brown’s in Capel Curig and bought my first pair of fell shoes :). I chose “inov-8 mud claw 330” as they were light and looked like they had lots of grip.

While driving back from Snowdonia I was itching to try the new shoes out, and so I stopped off at Moel Famau for a consolation run! By this time I was also starving as I’d only had a light breakfast. But he who dares…

Of course it was sod’s law the weather had started clearing by this time and the sun was out, but there was still very strong winds. I did this route in reverse, ascending around the south-east side of the forest, then up a very steep track to the summit. The new inov-8’s were ace! The fell shoes didn’t have as much cushioning as trainers, and so I could really feel the surface under my feet. I was amazed at how much grip there was - the copious rubber grips really performed well on forest track, mud, grass and scree. At the summit the wind was gusting at probably 70 mph and I was bent double just trying to stay on my feet. I descended down the steep south facing trail on very loose scree and onward through the forest. The grip from the inov-8’s was outstanding and provided extra confidence for hurtling down the mountain at high speed.

On Sunday evening I went to watch Madama Butterfly at Llandudno’s Venue Cymru, presented by Ellen Kent Productions. This has been the third opera I’ve seen so far and it was certainly as unique and individual as the others.

In brief the story is a tale of a wealthy American sailor, Pinkerton, who marries a beautiful girl, Butterfly, when visiting Nagasaki. From the beginning it is clear he is not really serious about her and soon leaves for America promising to return to her. Butterfly waits for 3 years faithfully, turning down offers of marriage from wealthy men, but still she hears nothing. It is revealed that Butterfly gave birth to a child shortly after Pinkerton’s departure. Eventually Pinkerton returns, but he has remarried an American lady and brought her with him, and they intend to take the child away to America. Butterfly is rightfully distraught and ends her own life with a knife in a dramatic scene.

Like many operas it is a sad story, this one being about a particularly untrustworthy and scandalous man and the sadness and pain he inflicts on a selfless and trusting Butterfly. However, in contrast to the tragic nature of the story, the set and costumes were wonderfully colourful and detailed. I was also very impressed by the lighting effects, as the scenes changed between day to night.

I am getting to like opera more and more now that I am acquainted with it’s many quirks. I cannot confess to being a connoisseur just yet, but I can appreciate what it means to me - the blend of music, singing, acting and visual effects, and the feeling it distills within.

I ran in the Parbold Hill trail race today (6.75 miles). This race has been going every year for 38 years.
There was a good turnout of 456 and as always it was good to see a huge mix of people - young/old/small/big/short/tall!

I came 103rd - the results are here and there is a map of the course here. My time works out at 7.43 average min/miles which isn’t too bad at all considering the undulating terrain. The course was mostly on tracks but there were a few road sections. There were also quite a few hills that climb 300ft or so rather quickly. The biggest and most challenging of these was Parbold Hill itself which just kept going on and on! At one point I thought I was nearing the top and sped up a bit, only to find another false summit… There were also a number of sections through muddy fields, over styles, and also on muddy tracks… Did I mention the mud? I’ve really got to get some proper fell/mountain shoes as my poor trainers were sliding all over the place. Towards the end there were a few hurdles too (nearly slipped over the second one).

In the races I’ve done so far I’ve tended to go quite quickly at the start (to get into some space) then go at a steady pace trying to pick people off where possible, before a sprint at the finish. However today I started off fairly quickly and just kept going, only slowing down for the hills! I was certainly pretty tired by the end and felt like I’d pushed it more than usual. It gives me even greater respect for everyone in front of me, as I certainly came close to finding my limits. Guess I just need more practice!

Got 4 x 500GB disks for my broken Terastation this week and managed to fit all its pieces back together to get it working again. The disks I got were Seagate Barracuda 7200 11ms which should be fast and reliable. With RAID 5 configured (following 12 hour disk check) there’s now roughly 1.4TB of space and of course the safeguard of RAID 5 being that any one of the 4 x 500GB disks could fail and all my data would still be perfectly safe. I did consider using 750GB disks but read somewhere that the operating system wouldn’t take anything larger than 500GB. However, as there are 4 x IDE ports potentially it would be possible to just get some new cables and add another 4 x IDE disks as slaves, meaning a potential 2.8TB :). To do this though would require rigging up some kind of external caddies to house the new disks and also cutting a seriously large hole in the TS to get the cables out. And it would also need an additional power source.

As soon as the TS was back online I got round to hacking it. The following links were extremely useful in doing this…

1. gain root access by flashing modified firmware
2. install essential and useful packages - in order… busybox, libraries update, samba 3.0.25 (gains nice performance boost), openSSH (to gain SSH access, then disable telnet) and Joe editor
3. ctorrent/ctcs binaries - thanks to Herbert Marcus for excellent info and binaries (ctcs is a web interface that lets you monitor active torrents and manage the ctorrent client)
4. complete guide on configuring ctorrent and ctcs - how to auto run the services and a script that starts any torrents dropped into a specific folder automatically
5. TwonkyVision media server - UPNP server for music, movies, pictures etc.

So now my TS is serving as a (very quiet) torrent box and media server :).

It was very foggy outside when I got up this morning - couldn’t even see past the trees in the field. Thought I’d get back into the swing of things after my holiday and went for a run up Moel Famau. Was expecting it to be completely in the fog, but was pleased to find that upon approaching the car park the fog dissipated and I was in lovely bright sunshine!

Took a new route which ended up being 4.75 miles, and the most direct to the summit and some 800ft of climbing with no breaks… The weather was absolutely gorgeous at the top, and the view from the top was that of a sea of fog with odd hill tops poking through like islands.

Did some of those domestic chores today like washing the car and cleaning up. Spent the afternoon doing extensive research into a place I’m interested in. Also tried to get Gallery2 integrated with iPhoto and Wordpress, and at the same time set up an Ubuntu linux box on RAID1.

Just got back home from Austria and am experiencing that sickly feeling of reality, as it washes me with a sobering wave of melancholic reverie. However, I am still feeling somewhat freed from my regular routine. Just somewhere in my head are some rather inspiring thoughts which I hope I can nurture into something definitive over the remainder of the weekend, before I get caught up and trapped once again in the river of routine and work.

Oh well, it has been good to ski again and my skiing confidence has definitely improved since last time.

To sum the whole week up…

Best points

• being up in those snowy mountains with the sun beating down…
• the feel of the snow still gliding under ski’s at night when I shut my eyes…
• sipping an ice cold beer at the end of each day with that “been doing stuff outdoors” feeling…
• fantastic (really amazing) food at my hotel - the Impul Tirol. This has been the best food I’ve eaten in years by far.

Worst points

• being too dumb to check my ski boots out and adjust them properly…
• sitting alone every evening in a busy restaurant full of couples and groups, awkwardly trying to feel natural…
• not being able to share this experience with anyone… (although on a couple of occasions I did cross paths and drink beer with a nice chap from Oxford who was good company - thanks mate).
• should have gone to ski school too…

Maybe I’ll try snow boarding next time.

And the pictures… Click the image below to see more.

Determined to have a full day’s skiing today and make up for my day off yesterday, I was up the mountain a little earlier than usual. Tightening my boots up and putting my ski’s on at the top of Schlossalm I was dismayed to find my left ankle still hurt like cr*p. Then I made a startling discovery… While fiddling with my ski boots trying to make them less uncomfortable by losening them I found a sort of screw-in plug located in each boot’s heel area. A few twists on this and… no pain in the ankle. WTF!!

It appeared that the heel screw made the internal heel area (supporting the ankle) wider. What had been happening was that my ankle had been squashed in the over tight heel and caused a lot of bruising and painful rubbing. I losened this off rather a lot (and did the same for my other boot while I was at it) then continued down a nice wide red run.

It was amazing - no more ankle pain (apart from the damage already done). I couldn’t believe that I’d been so naive as to not examine the boots more closely on day 1, instead of day 6…

There then followed my best day’s skiing of the week. Stayed out until the very last lift, at which point my brain was sending out control signals to my legs to turn, but my poor little legs had by this time given up and only cared for going in straight lines. I completely wiped out about 30m from the bottom of the run and ended up going sideways/backwards/spinning on a huge patch of lethal ice which offered no purchase for tired legs. Luckily I wasn’t injured (gosh that would have been a great way to finish up the week!) and made it to the bar to savour a well deserved last pint of Stiegl as I watched the sun setting over the mountains.

Decided not to ski today. This was partly due to me having a painful ankle, and partly due to me having a horrible stuffy relapse of my cold, which in turn could have been due to drowning my sorrows with several glasses of Stiegl last night. After all, there wasn’t much point in torture and I figured that having a day off today might allow my legs to heal enough to enjoy the last day of skiing tomorrow.

Today I made excellent progress with my current book - Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials, so much in fact that I got through over half of it in one sitting (which at 1016 pages is quite a lot of reading!). Also found time to fully explore Bad Hofgastein on foot and grab a pizza for lunch in a nice little cafe in the centre of town.

Today I took the free ski bus to Dorfgastein, some 15 mins away. Dorfgastein doesn’t have quite as many runs as Bad Hofgastein, however it is linked to GroBarl and together it’s probably got more.

The snow in Dorfgastein was ace! Hardly any moguls, superb fresh powder that was a joy to turn in, and few patches of ice.

On the downside, my left ankle was done for. As soon as I put the boots in the morning on I knew it, but just hoped it might go away and wouldn’t hurt too much…

When I got out of the lift at the top of Kreuzkogel (2027m) and got onto my ski’s I knew it was going to be a short day skiing, as the pain was like having a hammer knocked into my ankle bone :(. I literally couldn’t turn at all without grimacing through the pain. As a result my right leg became completely exhausted too as I was favouring it most of time to try and get the weight off my left ankle…

It was very frustrating but a difficult choice had to be made. I was very much enjoying exploring Dorfgastein and it’s wonderful runs, but the pain I was experiencing meant I wasn’t able to enjoy the skiing. And so I had to call an early end to the day in the afternoon. :(.

Today I skied over two mountains all the way from Bad Hofgastein, down to Angertal and over to Bad Gastein. It was cool moving from place to place on ski’s and exploring loads of new runs in the process. I stopped for a nice coffee at Angertal and savoured it in the bright sunshine.

The snow on Stubnerkogel (2250m) - near Bad Gastein - seemed to be much better than on Schlossalm (2050m) and it was a joy not having to dodge as many moguls. The moguls have really been making things difficult for me as my turning still isn’t that great, and I keep going over the damn things instead of around them! And there seems to be loads of them here too, probably as lots of the soft snow is artificially created (especially lower down the mountain) and it’s quite busy, hence lots of people carving them out.

By the end of the day I was totally knackered, and I’ve also started to experience a longer than should be normal pain in my left ankle. It feels like something isn’t right with my boots which is making them hurt quite a lot. This was confirmed later in the evening when my left ankle was feeling quite bruised, and also my right knee a bit sore - I’d obviously been compensating with my right leg to take the pressure off my left. Not good.

Still to make up for things, I ate another excellent five course meal in my hotel.