Silent Sunday: Springing

Walking to Lothlorien, Progress Update

Last year I sent myself a challenge to walk from Bag End to Rivendell; the first part of Frodo's journey across Middle-earth. Frodo did it within a month but it took me from the 1st of January to halfway through December.

I was so impressed with the fact that I'd gone from walking sporadically to walking virtually every day (including some days when I managed around 18 miles in a day) that I decided to keep going once I arrived at Rivendell. Unlike Frodo, I didn't rest up for very long and I got straight on with my walk from Rivendell to Lothlorien.

Of course I've had a month off with the IVF treatment so I'm just now getting back to it. Aside from a few occasional walks, I really did no walking (or rather, no tracked walking) throughout February. On Runkeeper I only logged two walks (though there were a couple of walks which I forgot to track along the way).

Last weekend I decided that it was time to start walking again and after having a pretty easy weekend I dragged myself (and Mr Click) out of bed and out the door with Tara for a 7am walk. Since then I've been aiming to walk roughly 1.5 miles per day in the hopes that it'll get me to Lothlorien before the end of the year.

Less than a week later and I'm up to 38.8 miles on my way towards Lothlorien, which puts me in the early stages of Day 3 of the Fellowship's journey. I've got 423.2 miles still to go which means I need to get in 1.43 miles per day to hit my target on schedule.

Hopefully I'll be able to get some longer walks in between now and the end of December to help me reduce the number of miles I need to travel. Today I've walked 1.80 miles so I'd say I'm doing pretty well for restarting my journey, I just wish I'd not taken so long before getting back into my walking routine.

Currently...

Nursing...
... a bleeding hand.

It's entirely my fault.

I was lifting Fezziwig out the big cage to put him into the small cage, only to have him struggle to get back into the big cage. Normally if you hold Fez tight he'll stop the struggle, but this time it just made him struggle more. And ratties can have pretty sharp claws, so I got scratched.

It's a good job he's so cute.

Returning...
... to walking.

We had lovely weather on Saturday and Sunday but I didn't get out at all, which I felt really guilty about. What with the stims, the op and then the cold/virus/flu I just wasn't up to walking for a long time and each day I could feel my chances of getting to Lothlorien slipping away.

So Sunday night I made the decision that I was going to walk on Monday morning. And walk we did. Since Monday I've been managing to get out morning and evening with Tara and I've been doing roughly 1.5 miles so as long as I keep this up I'm still on track to finish on the 31st of December.

And I've been able to see an old friend again too:

It's Billy Big Pig.

He's not actually forgiven me for abandoning him for over a month though. Both times I've been up to visit him he's had his nose stuck in his dinner and despite looking up and snuffling at me, I'm losing out to the food right now. Hopefully in another day or so we'll be on speaking terms at the gate again.

Learning...
... Welsh.

And doing pretty well at it too.

I'm using Duolingo and I've joined a club on the app so I'm in direct competition with other Welsh learners. Within a couple of hours of joining the group I'd worked my way up to third in the rankings and since then I've climbed to first place. I'm terribly competitive and I have no intentions of relinquishing my top spot, so it's definitely keeping me motivated.

What've you been up to this week?

Silent Sunday: Parsnip

Christmas in Wales: Part 5, Boxing Day

After all the excitement of Christmas Day, we took things very easy on Boxing Day. We had a lovely long lie-in, played with our Christmas presents and worked on the jigsaw puzzle which we'd started on Christmas Eve.

We did make time to go for a little walk up the hill at the back of my Mum's house. It was bitterly cold, but the scenery and views were beautiful.

There are some wonderfully shaped trees up there which just look interesting and old, kind of like the ones which surround our home.

And just like home not all the trees were standing upright:

Our walk covered a little over 1.75 miles, much of it uphill, which was definitely needed after all the food we'd eaten the day before (and would continue to eat over the rest of the holiday)!

Next time I'm in Wales I'm hoping we'll be able to do this walk again and perhaps go a little further. We ended up having to turn back because the ground got a little boggy and my trainers had sprung a leak. When I fly down in the future I'll not be transporting dozens of Christmas presents so I'll be able to pack a spare pair of shoes and wear my walking boots.

When we got back (and warmed up, it was pretty bitter out) I spent most of the evening kneeling on the floor behind the sofa working on the jigsaw puzzle.

And look! We finished it:

Silent Sunday: View

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone has woken up feeling ready to face whatever 2017 will throw at us.

We took a nice, brisk walk this morning while the sun was coming up and so far, aside from a dead blu-ray player, the year is going pretty well.

I'll be getting caught up online this week. Check back for some more blog posts soon.

Currently...

Celebrating...
... this:

Yesterday I took a half day from work and got quite a bit of walking in during that time. I woke this morning with 1.2 miles left to go and I finally hit my target right after work this evening.

Just as a reminder. I started my 'journey' across Middle-earth way back on January 1st and I had no idea whether I would stick with it the whole time. But I did.

And these walks are just the ones I've actually logged. There's been quite a bit of walking which hasn't been tracked, otherwise I probably would've made it to Rivendell a little while ago!

Planning...
... my next route in my journey across Middle-earth!

I'm a glutton for punishment.

I debated giving myself the rest of the month off for walks without any pressure, but the next leg of the journey is Rivendell to Lothlorien which comes in at 462 miles. And next year when we start treatment I'll have to cut down my activity (when you're stimulating the follicles in your ovaries there's a risk of them twisting if you're too active, not really something that's recommended).

So I'm starting tomorrow, with a plan to not sweat it too much come January/February time when I might need to sit it out for a while.

Watching...
... Home Alone.

It is Christmas after all.

Reading...
... nothing!

That's right, I'm currently in between books. I finished A Christmas Carol earlier on today and I'm yet to begin Letters from Father Christmas. These are my two Christmas regular reads, so I figured I'd follow one up with the other. Except the latter is pretty big and not really portable so I've not gotten around to starting it yet. Luckily it's not a long read and then I'll go back to my Kindle for a few more Christmassy reads before the 25th.

Have you achieved any of your goals you set for yourself this year?

Silent Sunday: Beached

Walking with Seals

This morning Mr Click had to go out for a while so I decided to use the time I had to myself to take Tara for a walk. Originally we'd planned to walk her to Kerrycroy together, but once we left the house (after a false start when I forgot to put her collar on and only realised when I had nothing to clip her lead to) I decide to let Tara pick our route.

As you can see, she did a pretty good job of choosing the route. We had a little meander around the area where the bird hide is (right around the mile mark). Tara was desperate to get down onto the beach there but it wasn't a great spot; we would've had a bit of a jump and then there wasn't actually much down there except for slippery seaweed covered rocks.

So we kept on going. At each break in the plants along the route to the beach Tara would stop and look at me as if to say 'can we go down now, mum?' and I had to shake my head because I didn't fancy breaking a leg on the walk.

Until she finally found a good spot to get down onto the beach. She practically took off and then couldn't believe her ears when I even allowed her to go into the water. It was pure coincidence that I let her go paddle just as it started spotting with rain; I figured if we were both going to get wet, she might as well have a bit of fun while she was doing it.

But what was a little weird was that she didn't seem overly keen to go too far into the water.

Since she's discovered that she can swim we have a devil of a time trying to actually get her out of the water. She bobbed in a couple of times to retrieve some seaweed but then decided she had had enough and started leading me up the beach.

And that's when I got that feeling like I was being watched.

Except I knew there was no one else around because the beach had been totally deserted when we got down onto it and no one had joined us there.

I looked back at the water and suddenly realised that a couple of the rocks in the water weren't rocks at all. There were about seven seals gliding by on the water, about fifteen feet away from us, and several of them had stopped to have a look at us.

These photos actually make it look as though we were further away from them than we were.

There was one very large one (who is in the centre of the first photo but bobbed under the water slightly), who seemed quite brave and didn't mind us taking a couple of steps back down the beach towards them. That was, until Tara had a little shake and startled them. Then they all popped down under the water.

We just stood there for a while watching them watching us. I think they were more interested in Tara than me, or perhaps they thought we were there to steal their prime beach lounging spot.

After a while Tara started leading me along the beach and to my surprise, the seals were following us. I think some of them fell behind but there were a good three or four who were with us right the way until we left the beach.

I think they were just escorting us away.

It felt truly magical.

Silent Sunday: Sniff

30 miles to go!

This week has seen some crazy cold weather. Temperatures have dipped down as low as -7 at night and there's been frosts so thick that it's looked like it's snowed.

Yesterday the temperature finally rose a little and the frost on the grass outside work actually started to melt a little (for the first time in about three days). All the same, when I was walking Tara home from Kerrycroy, I still ended up crunching over ice as I passed the chapel.

It did slow down my walking rather a little because neither myself nor Mr Click were particularly keen on breaking any bones whilst out walking. Even though it was mostly just frost, there were still some very slippery patches along the way.

All the same, I did manage to walk a fair few miles this week and now I only have 30 miles to go!

So only 7% of the way left to go now.

This morning we took a little walk up to Calvary Pond. They've recently done some work on the path up there, so it's no longer as boggy as it used to be.

Once we reached the top of the slope, Tara managed to tangle her extendable lead around a tree and we had great fun unwrapping her from it. Other than that it was a pretty eventful walk.

And it earned me another 1.33 miles towards Rivendell. I'm so close I can practically smell the libraries!

Silent Sunday: Closed

Silent Sunday: Avenue

Silent Sunday: Walk

Silent Sunday: Sea

A Slightly Different Walk

Last Saturday Mr Click and I took a stroll around the estate with a slight difference.

It was a walk that we've done hundreds of times before. I call it 'the circuit' because you walk round in a big circle. When you leave the house you can go in one of two directions; heading down the hill, along the shore, back up the slope towards the back gate, along the road and back to the house. Or you can do the whole thing in reverse.

We picked the former.

And what was so different about it?

Well, halfway round I handed the camera to Mr Click. Hopefully he doesn't mind me sharing some of his snaps here.

I very rarely make it into photos these days. Most pictures of me are taken on a mobile phone which isn't always the most flattering sort of picture. They're grainy and the focus can look weird and they're generally posed.

I'm going to have to give him my camera more often because these photos are so much more natural. Like this:

My sock was falling off inside my welly boot so I had to fish it out! Don't get much more spontaneous than that.

All of these photos are entirely his, I just did some basic colour correction, resizing and cropping on them. Like this one below, he'd taken the picture straight on, but when I was resizing it I just adjusted the crop slightly:

When we went past this tree I told Mr Click he had to take a photo of the tree for me and what he got was probably not hugely different to the photo I would've taken myself. And as for this one:

Well, I could've taken that one myself.

I have a funny feeling that I might be handing over control of my camera to Mr Click a little more often from now on.

Silent Sunday: Changes

Troll Hunting

I'm so close to the end of my walking challenge. Look at this:

85% there!

Mr Click and I have been walking every morning and almost every evening. Each walk's somewhere between 0.71 and 0.75 miles long (depending on how much Tara weaves across the road) so I'm getting in almost 1.5 miles each day.

Every couple of days I work out how many miles per day I need to do in order to finish on December 31st, at the moment it's working out at 0.94 miles per day and I'm 9 miles short of hitting 400 miles. That feels like such a milestone.

And 391 miles means that in the next two miles I'll be hitting a pretty significant Middle-earth Milestone: Mr Bilbo's Trolls. Which I think calls for this:

I actually have this on tape somewhere, but I'm always afraid to listen to it in case it gets chewed up or ruined, so I'm pleased to have discovered these Tolkien recordings on YouTube.

Of course, that's not to say I've not run into any trolls on my walk. When you have as overactive an imagination as I do, then you'll know that something like this innocent-looking tree stump:

Is actually a troll in disguise:

And this is why Mr Click has to come walking with me when it's dark!

Silent Sunday: Feather