Ace day off

Due to HR rules I had to take a day's annual leave before the end of June - today was the day.

The baby slept from 10pm till 7am; Mrs Starfish had a good sleep. The larger child went to school very happy and looking forward to the weekend (plan to go camping). Mrs Starfish went to the gym while I looked after baby and came back looking all rosy and happy. I found sheet music on 'tinterweb that big daughter has been after so that she can nail them good style (99 Red Balloons by Nena, Broken Strings from Nelly Furtado, Brand New Key by Melanie Safka). Booked camping place at Thorpe Park, Cleethorpes for Saturday night (includes tickets to use all facilities and see shows and is right by the beach and is chavtastic). Went to gym, climbed well, OK on dips and weights. Experimented with a mackerel, carrot and beetroot salad with vinegar and soy sauce - goodish. Met up with Canadian Todd and went fishing. Phoned big daughter to tell her about sheet music printouts and Saturday in Cleethorpes - very happy child.

Canadian Todd is from Canada and so smells of maple syrup and says "right on" and "ferkin eh". He is pretty scruffy (as are most foreigners), but has great teeth, eh. He goes fishing back home on his local pristine wilderness lake. I took him to The Mighty Don in Attercliffe (rolls on floor cackling like a crack dealer). To be honest it's not such a bad place. We had a stack of chub and dace and Todd caught a cute baby brown trout - all new species for him. I lost a whopper which was probably a barbel (using big pellets on a hair rig on 10lb line).

Todd's first chub

Todd found it odd to be fishing in such an urban environment. It was also odd for him to be surrounded by bits of architecture that are older than anything in the town where he comes from.

Overall, a well used day.

Ace

Defying Gravity

When I got up this morning I was wondering how well I had recovered from Saturday's gym session so I got on the pull up bar.
Managed 20 without stopping - pleasantly surprised.

Impossible film project

I've been trying to make a film about urban trout fishing in Sheffield. It's not going well. The obvious practical difficulties are enough of a challange

• getting cameras in place without scaring all the fish off
• batteries and tapes running out before catching a fish
• composing the shot without knowing just where I'll be standing when I do catch a fish
• the weather

This last one got me last night. I got the cameras set up and got myself into position where I could see a couple of nice trout feeding. Then it started raining. Rather than risk my cameras getting damaged I decided to put them away and wait for the rain to stop. It didn't.

Having got very wet and having accepted that I wasn't going to get any good footage I decided to start fishing in the rain. I flicked a gold head nymph just upstream of the fish; the bigger one gently opened it mouth and took it. On my little 7ft light rod and 2lb leader this beautiful 3/4 lb fish put up a right scrap. I put him back and 5 minutes later caught his slightly smaller friend. This would have looked great if I'd caught it on film. Still came home with a big grin on my face.

Fathers' Day

Well it kind of started yesterday when the living room was turned into Father's World - because it wasn't the day itself, but they wanted to do something nice. All sorts of strange paper chains and animals stuck on the walls. Nice.

This morning was ace.
Number One Daughter crept in and woke me up at 6am.
"Happy Fathers' Day. The suns shining and it's six o'clock so shall we go fishing now?"
20 minutes later we were climbing over a wall to get down to a small pool on the Sheaf. We fished a couple of spots and ended up catching 10 trout in 2 hours. All beautiful wild fish. All lovingly returned to the river.









When we got home I was given a couple of lovely cards and had a fantastic brunch cooked for me - bacon, two fried eggs, maple syrup and kippers.
Yummm

Exercise

This morning I managed to drag my lardy arse down to the gym (Virgin).
My scales at home tell me that I weigh 14st 8lb. This is exactly a stone lighter than 6 months ago, but still a couple of stones heavier than I would like to be - for the sake of my fingers and my vanity. The first stone dropped off due to changing the way I eat, but I've not been doing much exercise and have lost nothing in the last 3 months.

The Wall
I started my session on the climbing wall - warmed up on a few 5s and 6s and then did the pink 7b on line 2 a couple of times. It's not 7b, but it is a nice steady route to get my lazy body working without risking injuring my fingers.
Then I had a go at the yellow route on line 1 - this is one that the route setters couldn't be arsed to grade so they have given it the label "guess the grade" - wtf?. If it was "guess the grade that the setters gave this route and win a box of chocolates" I could see the point. As it is, it just looks like they set a route and couldn't be bothered to grade it.
Did this route a couple of times without the last move (which is way harder than anything else on the route). I was pleased with this coz it's on smallish edges, which I'm shit at using. Using an extra pocket for the top made the route about the same difficulty as the pink "7b" - could probably have used the arete to make it easier, but I wanted a crimp route.
Hopefully these two routes will be up for a while so I can measure any progress.

The Gym
Not been for a while, so no structure - just doing what I felt like.
Dips 2 x 10 and then a third set of 20.
Dead lifts. 1st set 15 @ 40kg to warm up; 10 @ 80kg; 5 @ 100kg; 5 @ 120kg; 20 @ 40kg to stop cramp from setting in.
Shoulder press machine 10 @ 20, 10 @ 30, 5 @ 40, 5 @ 50 - no idea what the units are on this thing, but I've never moved it on 50 before (I am crap at this sort of movement).
Looked at the bench press machine and decided against using it.
2 x 10 pull ups with my legs out in front of me.
3 x 10 @ 100kg on the pull down machine (both arms).
40 mins aerobic stuff.

Still feel fat.

Kidney Bouldering Video

I filmed this one evening after work. Filmed in widescreen in one scene. I speeded it up and edited out the bits in between problems because otherwise it was rather tedious (and long). I suppose I was trying to show how many easy problems there are on this one little block. There was a strange low cloud that day and I wanted to capture the look for the title at the beginning. I manually changed the focus to get the effect of it coming into...um, focus. The music is off some tv ad and had been going round in my head all day, so I had to find it and use it as the soundtrack.


Originally I had planned to show all the problems being done at once like the vid below, but it turned out that there were too many problems too close together to do this. Anyway, I had fun putting this together from the same footage

Arete on The Pebble video

Over the last couple of years I've enjoyed making short videos. I've ended up doing some odd things when editing, with variable results. However, I've been pretty pleased with the results of some of them. Like this one




I didn't plan for this to be anything like it turned out. I had intended it to be a mix of colour and black and white with the close up shots freezing and loosing colour to emphasise... well I'm not sure what it was meant to emphasise, but it works on CSI; not here though, it was rubish.
Obviously I climbed the problem several times with the camera in different places.
The original footage had another climber trying the traverse and cleaning holds in the background, which was a bit distracting. A bit of masking got him out of the picture so I was the only action happening.
I messed about with contrast and brightness to get the look a bit more black and white rather than shades of grey. I've got it wrong in some places and have lost definition on my hands and head, but generally it is OK.
Music was created with Sony Cinescore.
The picture at the start with the title is a still from another video - the effect I was aiming at was to look a bit like Ansel Adams' photo of El Cap - pretty ambitious for a 12ft high lump of sedimentary rock in Northern England, but If you don't ask you don't get.

Rain

Having got used to the sunshine, I find myself to be very disappointed with today's rain.