THE WEEKEND AFTER.....

Obligatory "Selfie"

The weekend that follows, immediately after, a return to work from a holiday always seems that much more important. Or is that just me?

Anyway. This was quite a good weekend.

Yesterday saw me go for a bit of a “trail run” for my training run. Up towards, and through, the wind farms at the back of us that scar the Lammermuir hills with their ugly testament to ineffectiveness (a bit like a metaphor for the Civil Service really).

Got home after the [nearly] ten mile romp and luckily JUST noticed the Amazon package that the postie had left under the doormat. Luckily as it included a new solid state SATA drive. These drives are a bit more robust than “normal” hard disk drives – but I’m pretty sure their robustness does not extend as far as having a runner rub the mud from his trail shoes over them!

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting one of these for a long time – not for my computer but for my Cocktail Audio X10 music player. One of the things I like about the X10 is that there is an easily accessable disk drive so that the storage can be easily changed/upgraded. Fancied a solid state drive as “a” there are no moving parts (so no sound) and “b” read/write times should be a bit quicker.

Only took 5 minutes to insert the new drive. Sadly it took about three hours to restore the shed load of music I already have.

New Toy

Seems to be working fine though.

Today we were off to Paxton House for the fourth leg of the Borders XC (the fourth leg but only my third race).

Got there with loads of time to spare so, after a few “hellos” to folk, I headed off for a bit of a warm up.

The route is a very scenic distorted figure of eight. One large loop followed by a shorter one.

Just finishing the large loop and coming back towards the house when I met Nick, so we headed off to do the large loop again. By the time we’d finished that it was getting fairly close to start time, so I just left my jacket etc. under a tree and went off to the start.

Race itself went well and I found myself working my way up through the field for about the first half of the race.

The terrain was fairly firm and dry. Nothing slippy to worry about, and even the one [small] burn crossing wasn’t akward.

Managed to get tenth place overall and third in my category – so all in all a fairly good day out. Doing the results for these races does pose one problem … you have to hang about to the bitter end to collect the paperwork before you can head off home.

Any other “events” this weekend? Why yes.. We finaly got round to watching the last of “Breaking Bad”. Marvelous stuff indeed. Won’t spoil it for anyone BUT …. If you like BB and you enjoyed the comedy Malcolm In The Middle (also with Bryon Cranston) then watch the “alternative ending” on the last DVD J