Snippets from April - Part 2

17 April

The fine, if cool, weather continued and I took myself out for a circuit, starting on the estate, which is where this selfie was taken. My review of the outing was "As an exercise in running tired, that went well. In the absence of that context, it wasn't good. Bit more recovery* needed, methinks." (*referring back to the 40km with 1700m of ascent in the Lakes earlier in the week)

18 April 

A circuit with Mick, but this one taken at a walk, on another fine day. I tested my watch in 'ultratrac mode' for this one, which extends the battery life from 14 hours to 40 hours, albeit at the expense of some tracking accuracy. The distance recorded was accurate enough (within 100m of what Mick recorded using standard GPS tracking), but it achieved this with a recorded line that wiggled around on the straights (adding distance) and cut corners (cutting distance).

19 April

The spare room had become a dumping ground and needed tidying. Usually this involves me taking the stuff that has accumulated on the bed and putting it away in the proper places. Today I got a bit sidetracked and decided to see if there was anything in the drawers and cupboards that I could rehome or otherwise dispose of. Mick arrived home from taking Erica to have some new tyres to find the upstairs in the state shown above. It was a successful endeavour.

20 April 

Still fine weather...

...although still too cool for the time of year. Finally just about all of the local mud had baked dry:

This was early in a 25km run/walk with Mick, before I left him to pursue a different run/walk strategy. The plan was that when I reached the 'big hill' (50m ascent!) I would do some reps up and down it until Mick caught up, then we would continue together. When he didn't appear, a couple of phone calls eventually clarified that he had taken a route at variance with the one I'd marked on his map and was doing reps on a different hill whilst wondering where I'd got to. Once that was clarified we were soon reunited and it was some time later, on our flat return route, that he observed that I was uncharacteristically colour coordinated. Not sure how this happened:

Even the sunglasses and socks are blue!

21 April

The water level in the pond was finally dropping significantly, although not yet quite to normal levels.

22 April

April will have to go down as the month when we kept running cross-country under glorious skies!

23 April

I was to have lunch with a friend in her garden. She lives 13km away, which conveniently was the distance I was due to be running that day, so I ran there. I'd intended to then have Mick come and pick me up, but then it occurred to me that there was no reason not to run home too, particularly as it was such a lovely day.

24 April

It's not just in cafes and restaurants that I take photos of my food! Mick made me exactly the lunch I'd been hankering after for days and I deemed it photo-worthy:

25-28 April

These were the Reading(ish) days, about which I already wrote a series of blog posts.

29 April

Our luck with the weather ran out! In the five hours I spent gassing in Maike's garden (on top of the 3 hours I'd spent doing the same 6 days prior) we endured multiple rain and hail showers. She commented on how very British our behaviour was, to sit out, covered in blankets and with umbrellas, in spite of the weather (clearly, we would rather have escaped indoors, but Covid restrictions still prohibited that, so outside we stayed).  

30 April

Thanks to contents of veg boxes, we'd built up a glut of lemons, some of which were looking a bit sorry for themselves. The resulting lemon curd turned out very well indeed:

Apparently I made an apple crumble too:

I'm pretty sure that was also the day on which I dehydrated three mangoes that had all reached peak ripeness at the same time, and for which I was struggling to find an immediate use. 

All of which brings us to the end of April, just days before we headed back up to the Lakes.