Stupor Tuesday#

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:12:27 +0000

Suddenly it's not summer (read: shorts weather) any more. When the official route check for this week's LFNS was postponed due to wet ground, I decided to put a draft route together for my lead next week and then go and have a look around to see if it was any good. The other week I'd noticed a road in Camden that seemed long and straight and well-surfaced, so all I needed to do was figure out how to get to Camden and back again - not terribly challenging, really.

In the event it was shorter and not as well-surfaced as I remembered it being (one of the perils of walking around without wheels on is that you get a tremendously distorted perception of distance which leads you astray as soon as you get back into proper footwear). But a lot of the roads on the way to it and on the way back are quite nice. Whoever rides the music bike is going to kill me for it, though: lots of up and down.

Back home now, and I have decided on an almost entirely non-technical workaround for my [[xbox trouble => Huge wastes of money, #1: the XBox]]: move the furniture around so that I can put a computer I already own next to the stereo, thus (1) sidestepping the entire need for another machine as "media centre"; (2) meaning I can watch DVDs with hifi sound. Did mean fitting a telephone extension to get adsl over on this side of the room, but that's about the limit of any wiring involved.

On another topic completely, I had a good look at my helmet this evening and - I don't know whether I've crashed it or whether it's suffered at the hands of baggage handlers, but it has a big split in it. It's only the plastic coating that's keeping it intact. Clearly it must have saved my life sometime. I still put it on to go out this evening, which one might consider a bit silly, but given that it still does a perfectly good job of keeping my head warm and providing somewhere to attach a small red LED, it's probably still almost as much use as it ever was. Perhaps I should get another before the weekend, though.

Race strategy for Köln: take it easy, avoid getting into fights, finish without another blood offering to the Tarmac Gods. That's about it, really. I'm not training for it, this is off-season as far as I'm concerned.