Sunday Summary Monday Missive Whereyabeen? Wednesday

Hello to you and happy ... what day is it? Again I've lapsed in my duties as a Sunday Summarist << is that a thing?? And indeed a Monday Missivist. Again...

But there's good reason for that: general busyness. And a much, much, did I mention much?...-needed short holiday to recover from aforementioned general busyness.

So, this last two weeks, I have mostly been...

...Enjoying the vocal stylings of Rock Choir at Hever Castle (after a very edifying wander around the house and grounds -- for all his faults, our 'Henery' VIII was quite a romantic ol' sod, wasn't he, if the letter transcripts to Anne Boleyn were anything to go by...):

 

and simultaneously trying to recover from the Voicerox Choir concert the night before (Saturday 5th July, forever etched in my memory -- at least until next year).

It went well. Very well. (Truncated curtain call aside.) After months of rehearsal, frustration, more rehearsal, a little more frustration and a lot of hard work and a great need for FOCUS we pulled it off. So please do excuse the relative indulgence of this post. I'm still clinging on to the memories, y'all...

Photo by Anthony Gould-Davies

{Safe to say I was enjoying proceedings...}
Photo by Anthony Gould-Davies (cropped from original)

Our set list included interpretations of songs by a variety of artists and groups from the Trammps to the Beatles via Bruno Mars (Runaway Baby, anyone) with a splash of 10cc/I'm Not in Love thrown in for good measure -- this was our a cappella number -- the first time we've ever done something like this in a Voicerox concert. And I think we nailed it!

Photo by Anthony Gould-Davies
{Much respect -- and celebratory Battenbergs -- to all of us who took part}

It was a very musical weekend, all things considered, but two days on I was still suffering from what I gleefully termed a singover (a singing hangover... oh wait, you were there already, weren't you)

Sorry. What can I say?!

And incidentally, after a fashion, those dance moves I was fretting over didn't even matter. I just needed to work on owning the mic. Dancing -- if you can call it that! -- was secondary.

Holidaying

On the Costa Del... Kent. Y'know, for a break away from this:

you can't beat the good ol' English coastline.

Ma, Pa and I spent four-and-a-bit days decompressing in very sunny if breezy Lydd where we spent a week waaaay back in September 2012 (I suspect many of the photos I've taken are duplicates give or take an altered sunset angle).

This little sojourn looked a little something like this:

During this delectable downtime {OK, enough with the alliteration} I was mostly also (brace yourselves, friends)...

Reading!

and reading...

and reading...

{my current read -- or more accurately, reread...}

A mixed bag, all in all (top of the heap preference-wise: H. E. Bates, bottom, Julian Barnes...) but, yea verily, finally I am back on track with the Goodreads Reading Challenge. GO ME!

Celebrating yet another birthday

...with a Giant Jaffa Cake, excellent curry in very excellent company, and some delicious lemon sole on the day itself, with ma and pa in the wondrous Britannia Inn on Dungeness.

...Heck. I'm 36.

Honest.

Reminiscing (again)

This is me exactly ten years ago today, heading off to Brighton for a truly momentous night out. Just thought I'd share this as I'm feeling particularly reflective about my state of mind then, and now. But in a good way.

{Keeping it classy with a plastic cup of Archers Aqua on a railway station bench. Yep.}

More on that at a separate time, I think...

Discovering 

...that at least two of my friends share my love of this film:

{Staying Alive}

Girls, I respect you even more for this. Gnarf.

And now for...

Weekly Weblinks (just a couple this time)

• Enid Blyton's The Famous Five to be a West End Show
• Key authors unite in Amazon protest and
• Alan Ahlberg turns down Amazon-backed award
• Simon & Schuster seek to expand commercial women's fiction line

Hoping usual SS service will resume this Sunday...!

What's the buzz? Tell me what's a-happening...

I really am the most appallingly sporadic blogger. Sorry.

But here's what's been going on in qb-land:

On the Sunday of the last Bank Holiday weekend, I sang on stage with Shane Richie and The Prelude, and a group of other ladies lovingly dubbed 'The Preludettes' at the Broadway Sound Festival in Haywards Heath:

I'm the pipsqueak with the bob who pops up behind the trumpet!

The sound dudes forgot to turn our mikes on so you can only hear us properly towards the end but it was one heck of a blast!

I became somewhat obsessed with cooking salmon in various different guises with an assortment of marinades (sesame oil or sweet chilli sauce) and alongside seasonal asparagus:

...and pak choi...

I was distraught by these books:

via here

via here

 and subsequently wept buckets over the film of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas...:

I've been rehearsing for my rock choir concert but in between have been listening to dance tunes on Gaydio -- arguably the best radio station for continuous dance music; it's really lifted my spirits of late!

Current favourite songs are: (predictably) Get Lucky | Daft Punk -- this is not the official video but this is superb:

and U Got the Power | Swiss Lips (Monsieur Adi remix)

(audio only)

And in between times, working and sleeping and wishing I had more time for blogging, creativity, and writing.

Must work on that.

On how life is...

The following things are rocking my world at the moment.

This song.

Lana Del Rey | Without You

And this remix of this song.

Ellie Goulding | Figure 8 (Alias Remix) AUDIO ONLY

Sounds a bit dry but... reading actual books. Finding time to read actual books more to the point. I set myself the new year's resolution of reading 24 now 30 books in 2013 -- I'm 10 down already and it's only March so quite pleased with that. There are so many books I have listed over on Goodreads that I haven't yet read but want to, and some off-list titles as well:

Smoothies.

Hello, you smoothie.

This might look like a truly dull cup of milk but is actually a banana-honey-yogurt-and-cinnamon smoothie. With oats. YEAH.

I'm not the best at eating fruit in its immediate form (I'm not a mega fan of bananas with any sort of brown marking!) and so much fruit in the UK is imported (except for those two weeks in which they're actually in season); I have a weird stigma about buying fruit off the market especially round here when I'm convinced it's all blighted by the cigarette smoke of passers-by... (never mind in supermarkets when you don't know how much it's all been sprayed etc etc) BUT I'm blissfully ignorant when it comes to zhuzhing a handful of fruit in a blender.

I'm in training for the MoonWalk again this year and have foregone the gym in favour of outdoor training. Which with the exception of Friday's soggy jaunt* is fine. But more on that in the next paragraph. I bought a new blender a few weeks back (I live an exciting life) and have been throwing yogurt, fruit and fruit juice into it at regular intervals ever since. Thus increasing my fruit intake. A bit. A smoothie also staves off hunger for a good while. At least until I see a maple pecan danish with my name on it.

Handy Walking Apps and Sites

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not one of life's natural gym bunnies. Actually, no, that is a lie -- sometimes I don't mind a gym. But when I'm sweating it out on a machine next to Miss Skinny Von Tiny Bum or between Mr Muscle and the King of Body Odour I'm decidedly less keen. Especially if I'm paying £40 a month for the privilege of feeling even worse about my not-exactly-waif-like physique and inhaling strangers' man-sweat. Ew. No, thanks.

So this year I decided to hit the road a little more keenly in my MoonWalk training. Train 'in the field' as it were. Because as I discovered last year, gym training, hardcore though it may seem, is no substitution for training on the kind of surface you'll be pounding for 26.2 hard miles.

There are some downsides, of course.

It's been a miserable three months weather-wise, snow, rain, -3 degrees and dark when I got up and got home until very recently. And my walking buddy's no longer available to train as last year. And the roads around here are heinously lit. As in, barely lit in some places. When I'm walking with a buddy that's fine, but if I'm walking on my own, well, I need aural stimulation i.e. my iPod and it's not safe for me, a laydee, to be walking on my own, in the dark, with an iPod on even at low volume. (Note to self: buy hi-vis clothing...)

So to put it bluntly, I just hadn't been driven to get out and walk (excuses, excuses).

But then the MoonWalk Facebook Wall started filling up with the proud declarations of people who've done so many miles' training already, and I got the guilt.

Last year I relied on the treadmill to log my mileage. I have a pedometer but it's far from reliable. So armed with my trusty Android and t'interweb I decided to look into possible route-plottin', mileage-clockin' apps to help me build up my training.

And these are what I'm using at the moment:

MapMyWalk (app and site) -- this is more a reflective tool at the moment. I refuse to use it as a live clocking device as it seems quite judgmental in asking for your calorific intake and weight and quite frankly for what I'm doing I don't need MMW to keep count of this (plus I just don't wanna know). BUT for logging my training online it's great. Even if it's stuck on asking me for km rather than miles.

Everytrail Pro (app and site) -- a friend recommended this as it's possible to search for local routes that other walkers have already tried and tested. Which is absolutely great, until there are none in your local area for the distance you want. BUT the best thing about Everytrail for me is using it in conjunction with...

Mapometer (site)! Not available as an app yet, this site does enable you to plot out your own routes (off-road or on-road) on a Google Map, by activity, so you can see exactly how many miles you will clock up, and you can increase or decrease your route accordingly.

You can export your Mapometer route as a GPS file and then import it to Everytrail and check your adherence to the route on your phone. Which is the great bit. Until the battery conks out.

I plotted out a route of 4.5 miles from Shepherds Bush to Clapham (part of my train route home) to walk on Friday.

What I didn't factor in was...

• Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. People do seem to have been happily training in the rain -- but for me? Never again (at least not without waterproof trousers and eggs to throw at motorists who splash me at pedestrian crossings). 

Screengrab from Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

• Lack of visible pedestrian crossings on Old Brompton Road -- I went in search for one, ended up turning up a dead end road, had to come back again.
• GPS draining my phone battery to nada. Rain soaking my paperback map and my iPod into uselessness.

I didn't take an intended turn off the Battersea Park Road and ended up in Vauxhall. Tired, wet, and slightly off-route. That was it -- I got a bus to Clapham.

However, when I got home and replotted my actual route on Mapometer, including the diversion off Old Brompton Road, I'd done an extra 3.2 miles.

So not all bad news!