Random Ramblings
Created | Updated Jul 26, 2007
I'm back home after a week I spent with my sister and family. The weather was — well, weather; more like April than like July. The last few years, whenever I went to visit my sister in summer we had extreme weather conditions: either it was scorching hot (30 - 40°C) so we stayed indoors, or it was cold (12°C) and wet — so we stayed indoors. However, this time we took our chances one of the mornings when it was dry and she introduced me to 'Nordic walking'.
Have you heard of Nordic walking? Maybe even tried it? It has been the in sport here in Germany for a few years now. It is said to be a very healthy way to get and stay fit; all you have to do is walk. Trouble is, you need special sticks or poles for this special way of walking, and somebody to instruct you how to go about it. It's not as easy as you may think, as I had to find out.
So, there we were, my sister and I, in the morning, in the quiet forest, 'armed' with a pair of poles each. I'll not go into details of how to go about it, suffice to say I think it's ridiculous. (And no, that hasn't got anything to do with my inability to coordinate arms and legs, resulting in me just dragging those poles behind me for an hour!) What was most disturbing about this was the noise the poles make! I mean, how can you enjoy the peace and quiet of nature when the clickety-clack of the poles is so loud that it drives away any wildlife within a radius of a few miles? And on a forest ground, mind. I don't even want to imagine how it must sound on a paved ground.
Well, while I was taking lessons in Nordic walking, some brave h2g2 Researchers were taking swimming lessons for the planned meet in Hull on 14 July. Undeterred by torrential rains and resulting flooding of the Hull area, Galaxy Babe, jollywinegums, lil and husband, Br MazinMadFiddler, Moonhogg with wife and daughters Cheekymonky and
Kitty, Prof Animal Chaos, scorpio_witch and ST-The Pussycat met up for a weekend of fun, getting inebriated on Saturday and visiting The Deep on Sunday with the help of their inflatable friends Ivan the Kangaroo and Aquatic Megastar, a Nemo-like fish. According to various journals, photographic evidence and video footage on YouTube, they all had a smashing time.
Not even a week later, the rains and floods eventually reached the south of England, causing not only the BBC servers in Maidenhead to be smashed (well, sort of), as this h2g2 announcement stated, but generally creating havoc. For those of a superstitious nature: no, it was not Friday 13 July, but it probably should have been. And that's it, really — nothing more to report for the time being. If you have something to tell, why don't you go and write it up or down and submit it to the next edition of The Post?
