Monday 17 September 2012

Bravery

Evening All,

Today I quit my job.

One of them, anyway. I will soon no longer be an employee of the shop I've been working at since October. It's been a very useful wee job, got it just soon enough to get me back into earning some money when I returned to the real world from Nethy Bridge. It put enough pennies in my pocket for me and my pocket to enter the heady world of financial independence.

So I walked in, said hello and asked the manager for a word (not really sure if I had a particular word in mind*) and said that here's my notice because I've got a full time job now. Which is true, though I do wish it was set in stone for a little longer. In true anticlimactic fashion my dear (nearly-ex-)boss didn't seem to care either way. Yeah, that's fine, I'll get that sorted out, see you. So flippin' appreciated. My knees still cracked out their jelly impression just for the occasion. Thankfully most of my life's big nervous moments have been on a stage wearing dance shoes** and I've learned to hide jelly knees quite well.

Then I bravely ran away.

All the while I had this beautiful song playing on the old metal jukebox.



Now I'm down to a single job, an office job, that I'm taking a bit of a gamble on, and praying it will prove to have been a wise decision. I'll be employed full time there for the short term, and then praying and hoping that I can do a good enough job that they'll keep me on for a while longer.

For now I'm looking forward to when I've seen out my notice period at the shop and I get my next day off (only 11 days to go now!).

Tonight I'm feeling a bit quiet and still and not all here. I've watched two episodes of House, which is almost definitely what's put me in a funny mood, that and this being the second job I've resigned from this year.

I bought a tent last week (ok, half of one) and test-pitched it this past weekend. It will be the subject of a much more exciting blog post, so thanks for reading this fairly mundane one, and please do come back for a more interesting story about a big pretentious tent.



*But there are many amusing words in the great English language. Today's word is "picnic", which thinking about it now, would have been a very strange thing for my boss to say in that given moment.

**Never just dance shoes, usually lots of tartan and white cotton. 

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Ducks on a Treadmill

Today I stumbled across this article.

All because I now have a staff ID card. This ID card gives me free access to soem gym facilities, including a swimming pool. On the website search box I entered "swimming". This was the fourth result. I couldn't resist.

Heart rate and oxygen uptake in exercising eider ducks

Oh yeah.



Here's a photo of an Eider Duck. Because blog posts should have pictures*.

Take some ducklings, convince them that you're their Mother, feed them, love them, implant litttle scientific things in them, and ... teach them to use a treadmill.

Which gives us such informative snippets as:
  • "Maximum sustainable running speeds ranged from 0.72 to 0.82ms-1 in all six ducks apart from duck 4**, who would not run at speeds above 0.6ms-1."
  • "The ducks were trained to run on a variable-speed treadmill (Powerjog EV2, Sports Engineering)."

I'm in the wrong field. Someone get me a duck and a treadmill, I'm having a career change.


*I tried a google image search for "eider duck treadmill", strangely it didn't do much. Maybe I may have been the only person in a while to google that exact combination of words? Who knows. What have you googled today?
** Duck # 4, not the Usain Bolt of the waterfowl world.