Nothing in particular

In bead news, my bundle of Creation is Messy testing glass arrived this week and it's going to keep me busy for quite a while. I made a start with the testing and the first colour I tried was a misty opal pink called Dollhouse. I'll give it, and its milky opal counterpart, a proper write-up in a separate post next week.

In a recent post I mentioned my Akihiro Okama 'Sakura' bead and I said I'd take a photo of it to show you. Here it is:

I bought this bead in about 2006. It's quite big and it's very beautiful. It has a 4mm hole and as you can see I just used a couple of sterling silver round beads and wired it very simply as a pendant and it's strung on a long chain.

In crochet news, I finished my Attic24 Aria blanket a couple of weeks ago. It's such a joyful thing!

I'm pretty sure that no two squares are the same.

When I first posted photos of the blanket in progress on my Instagram stories, my sister fell in love with it so I said I'd make her one too. I started hers about ten days ago and this time I made all the inner circles first...

...and then I added the second colour to each one, stringing them in order on a circular knitting needle as I finished them. I got this tip from one of Amanda Perkins' books. There are a hundred squares in the picture below but I managed to fit the remaining forty-four onto the metre long needle. 

I'm currently on the adding-the-third-colour-to-each-square-and-joining-them-as-I-go stage and I have thirty-six squares left to do.

In other news, I've not been running for a few weeks because the last couple of times I went out I came back all stressed out about people who'd given me grief for not wearing a mask. One woman got pretty flipping shirty about it. I wasn't huffing and puffing and I'm super conscious of keeping my distance from people, but still you can't please all the people all the time and all that. After this I tried running in a mask and I got two miles in and couldn't catch my breath. The mask gets absolutely soaked with wet breath condensation and it is zero fun trying to breathe through that. I decided that running with a mask was a no-go so for a few runs after that I stuck to quieter routes at quieter times but people were still tutting and giving me filthy looks so I thought I'd give the running a break until lockdown restrictions are eased and people will be less freaked out by a ploddy-jogging middle-aged woman.

I don't know when lockdown restrictions are easing and frankly I've lost interest in any kind of dates, numbers and what's what with this stupid bloody virus. Sick of it. I went back to the foodbank on Friday for my first shift since my arms malfunctioned and one of the other volunteers who also runs asked me if I was still running. I told him what I've just told you about the angry woman and his advice was to "Just ignore anyone who shouts at you. Get back out there!" and I think that was the boot up the arse I needed to get my trainers on and go for a jog. I did just that today.

Spring is officially here and my run this morning was so springtime with its sunshine, birds singing and this carpet of cheerful narcissi. I ran my standard route and nobody shouted at me and none of the other runners I saw had masks on either. Good times.

I'm off to complete the census now and then tonight is Line of Duty night and I am mighty excited!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

An episode of sporadic bloggery

Alright?

I thought I'd write one of those sporadic blog posts that I very occasionally do, just for something to do really. They've not put Holby on tonight and I was sat here doing nothing so I decided to do this instead.

Well, these are some pretty weird times we're in, aren't they? The news footage of empty London is weird; it's like the start of 28 Days Later but real. The social distancing thing is barely making a difference to my life, if I'm honest. I'm just glad that Boris has said we can still go outside and exercise because if I couldn't go out for a run every now and then I'd go loco. I stopped going to the gym a couple of weeks ago. Being with (and being one of) those sweaty people huffing their breath everywhere in a sealed, air-conditioned room suddenly seemed insane. And there would have been so much wiping down of equipment with sanitiser and paper towels that a session in the gym would have felt more like some kind of lycra-clad extreme housework rather than a workout, so the gym is a no-go zone for me for the foreseeable.

I get a workout on a Friday morning, though. Since the start of the year I've been volunteering at the foodbank warehouse and there's plenty of lifting and shifting involved with that. I really enjoy it. I never knew that I could get such satisfaction from packing a box; arranging a selection of items in a crate so that the crate still stacks but nothing gets squashed or damaged is my kind of challenge. It's like a puzzle from the intelligence round of The Krypton Factor but with baked bean cans, packets of biscuits and Fray Bentos pies instead of differently shaped blocks.

What else has been going on, apart from a tonne of Creation is Messy testing while a pandemic wreaks havoc across the world? Well, I ran another half marathon the other week.

Red face clashing with neon green shirt

After my first half I said I'd never do another but I had a guaranteed place in the Cambridge Half Marathon as a result of volunteering at the 2019 one and it seemed daft not to take it. It's a flat course in the beautiful city in which I live, and I knew the medal would be good, so I decided to go for it. I did two months of training with many long runs along the river in stupidly windy conditions (oh, the days of being stressed out at the constant stormy weather seem so insignificant and long ago now) and on Sunday 8th March I ran the 13.1 miles a whole twelve minutes faster than my first half marathon. Woohoo! I also raised £200.00 for The Trussell Trust. Massive thanks to all who donated.

The medal was indeed good

I bought myself a thing. A few months back there was a beautiful old kaleidoscope on an episode of The Repair Shop and I was captivated by it. I had a toy kaleidoscope as a kid and I loved that thing. I got on Etsy and found a fella called Roy Cohen who is some kind of kaleidoscope genius. I favourited his shop and vowed to return to it when I had some spare cash. That moment happened a couple of weeks back and I purchased one of his mini teleidoscope necklaces.

Teleidoscope necklace by Roy Cohen

This magical little thing transforms anything you look at through it into a kaleidoscopic groovescape. I love the fact that I can wear it wherever I go. Looking at stuff through it is endlessly enthralling and it makes even the most quotidian things all pretty and psychedelic. The photo at the very top of this post is my jar of CiM glass rods.

Cyclamen plant viewed through my teleidoscope

The teleidoscope is so beautifully made and the craftsmanship is exquisite. I shall definitely be going back to Roy's shop for one of his larger traditional kaleidoscopes at some point.

When working I'm filling my ears with the usual audiobooks and podcasts. I'm currently listening to The Last Witness which is the second book in Denzil Meyrick's DCI Jim Daley series.

These are crime fiction thrillers set on the west coast of Scotland. They're a bit gritty but the characters are fab. The books are sort of Irvine Welsh meets Val McDermid and I'm really liking them. It's always good when you find a series of books you enjoy and you know you have a wodge of them to look forward to.

On a similar crime-related note, I'm obsessed with the mortem podcast. It's not for the squeamish; it's all about forensic pathology, so it's very death and dissection heavy, but it's absolutely fascinating.

When I fancy something not-so-grim I opt for Off Menu, an always amusing podcast by James Acaster (I love him) and Ed Gamble. It involves food and funniness and it's always guaranteed to make me laugh out loud in the shed.

I think I've gabbled on enough now. I've got an episode of The Good Doctor to watch so I shall go and do so.

I hope you're OK. Hit me up on Facebook or Instagram if you're feeling bored or isolated. Comments on here are pretty pointless as I get so many spam comments it's really hard to filter out the actual genuine ones, but yeah, Facebook or Instagram are good places for a bit of interaction if the old social distancing is getting to you. The links I just gave you are to my business accounts but you can send me a friend request on my personal Facebook (be warned, I do sometimes swear and I barely mention beads on that one) or you can follow my personal Instagram if you like.

Stay well. X

Beady stuff and unbeady stuff

I've not got a lot to report on the bead front. It's not so much that I haven't been making beads, but more that I've been making lots of the same beads over and over.

I made lots of the 'Shoreline' hearts pictured above and I turned some of those into necklaces.

Now I'm on the Bumblebeads. I don't know how many of these I'll make. To be honest, sitting in the shed in these temperatures, making the same bead over and over again is already starting to do my head in and I've only spent two beadmaking sessions on the bees, so I'm not holding out much hope for vast amounts of them.

That's why I'm not taking orders for the bees. I've found that I can bear the shed heat until it hits about 36°C and then my brain gives up which makes my hands give up so that's why I'm only making as many as I can make. I appreciate that people are disappointed that they can't order as many of the bees as they like, when they'd like to, but hey, you should have realised that I'm an awkward pain-in-the-arse beadmaker (and person in general) by now. You can tut at me and call me ridiculous – it's fine.

I did make a one-off red heart bead that I love. The glass here is CiM Heartthrob and it's such a glorious shade of red.

In other news, running in the heat is HARD. I ran seven and a bit miles in it yesterday morning and sweet flipping Jesus, it was difficult. The heat has got me to the point where I'm walking back from runs in my sports bra like some kind of runstrumpet and I don't even care. We're due to have this weather for another fortnight so I'm not discounting the idea of actually running in my bra at some point.

I finished reading J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy and oh my word, that is some moving stuff. The book is like a cross between a gentle Sunday night BBC1 drama and Trainspotting. After that I read Cara Hunter's Close to Home, which is gripping, compulsive reading and quite short, and it's good but I'd only give it four stars due to its ending.

I also listened to the audiobook of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I'd seen so much talk about it that I had to see what all the hype was about. I was expecting it to be typical chick-lit, but it's not really. Well, the general feel of the book is quite chick-lit I suppose, but the main character is an unusual one which made for a refreshing change. Well worth a read or a listen, I'd say.

Last night I started the first of the Harry Potter books. I know I'm even more behind in this than I was with the House-watching thing but I was missing J.K. Rowling's writing so much I just had to Potter up. I'm about a third of the way through The Philosopher's Stone and I'm really enjoying it.

Right, enough tippy-tappy-typing as my dad-in-law calls it – I must go and make Bumblebeads. Enjoy the weather, if you like that sort of thing, and if you don't, stay cool.

Write what you know

I'm well and truly back in the beady swing of things. In this post I'm going to prattle on about the last couple of weeks and here and there I'll drop in some photos of beads I made during May to pretty up the post.

CiM Oobleck with black and white

Most of the month was spent catching up with trying out new-to-me Creation is Messy colours, and seeing how they work and what they are like to use. I've mostly been making these little 'potpourri' sets because the variety of beads within them allow me to get a feel for what the glass will and won't do in various applications. For example, a glass that works well as a base might not work well as stringer. This is the case for CiM Mermaid (not a new glass, I know) which looks marvellous as a spacer or encased as a base bead, but spreads when used as stringer. Sometimes you can use that effect to your design advantage. Glasses which do the whole stringer spready thing normally make weird two-tone dots and spots too, where they get a dark patch in the middle. So it's that kind of thing that I look for when testing new glass.

'Portillo' Potpourri featuring CiM Harvest and Mermaid

Sometimes you get a glass that does everything really well. CiM Harvest is one of those. It's a glorious streak-free orange that works equally well for base beads and stringer, where it retains its uniform colour and crisp edges.

'Seville' Potpourri

One of the CiM colours that totally passed me by was Pixie. This is a bright blueish green and it's fab when its encased but it sort of reacts with itself if you faff with it too much; it feathers and webs on itself. Because of this it is absolutely pointless trying to use it for the kind of stringerwork that I do.

'Seafoam' Potpourri featuring CiM Pixie

That's the thing with glass; you have to use it, learn what it does, make a mental note of its quirks, and then store all those notes away in your bead brain files because one day one of those quirks will be just the thing you need to create the particular effect you're after.

'Grellow' Potpourri

My bead brain files are beginning to overflow. It's why I keep my Tumblr full of glass recipes. I have a very good memory but fourteen years' worth of beadmaking (which must equate to absolutely thousands of beads) has me saying "What glass did I use for those ones?" or "What did I actually do to get that effect?" more often than I'd like. I wish I could back up the bead department of my brain to a hard drive, or download it every now and then so I have a copy of it, but sadly the technology for this does not yet exist. To get around this, I'm going to do the next-best thing - I'm going to write the book I've been tentatively threatening to write for yonks now.

'Mokey' Potpourri

I’ve always intended to write down all the stuff I know about lampworking but this past month or so I’ve come to the decision that it’s actually time to pull my finger out and get on with really doing it. “I’m going to write a book” sounds a bit pretentious, doesn’t it? Like I have things to say that people might want to read. The thing is, I think I do. I’m entirely self-taught and everything I know I have found out for myself through mistakes, hard work and learning from the glass. Do that for fourteen years and you’re bound to accumulate valuable beadmaking information.

So what’s the plan?

I’m going to get the bulk of the thing written and the tutorial photography sorted. When that’s done, I’m thinking I will crowdfund it on something like Kickstarter or Unbound or somewhere, so people can pledge to buy the finished article and I can get it printed into an actual factual book. I’m very keen on it being a real book you can hold, as opposed to a PDF or digital thing as these are open to unauthorised sharing. The working title for the book is ‘Everything I Know About Making Lampwork Glass Beads’ and that’s exactly what it will be. There will be step-by-step tutorials and information on all aspects of making and selling lampwork beads. It will be written from my point of view and my personal experience so it’s not a general ‘how to’ guide as such; it will literally be all my bead knowledge put together into a book. So if you want to know about making borosilicate beads, goddess beads or selling at craft fairs, this will not be the book for you because I don’t do any of those things. Does that make sense?

Bzzzzz

I've made a start on the book. There is a plan thing all typed up which lists all the areas I want to cover. And there are many. There is to be much typing in my future and this book is not going to be some flimsy thirty-four page pamphlet. I've had so much positive feedback about my book plan so far, with many lovely people telling me they're going to buy it, but it's going to take me a while to write it. I'm not putting a time or deadline on it because times and deadlines and I do not mix, but please know that I am working on it. Thank you for all your encouragement and enthusiasm. I will keep you all posted with updates and news of how the book is coming along.

'Hydrangea' Potpourri

In other news (this is becoming like some kind of regular blog-closing feature), I've finished all the Cormoran Strike books and am eagerly awaiting the release of the fourth one as I am absolutely hooked. I'm now reading (actually reading with my eyes, and not listening to) J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy which is as addictive as Branston pickle Mini Cheddars. I've never jumped aboard the Harry Potter train but I'm in love with Rowling's work. I know I'd probably love Harry Potter too and I shall read them one day.

'Nautical' Potpourri

I'm still moving my legs at semi-speed on a regular basis and on Monday I completed my first ten mile run. Ten miles! I've written about that here if you fancy a read. I've got a quarter marathon (6.5 miles) on Sunday so all being well I will have another medal to add to my fledgling medal collection.

'Beach' Heart

I'm off for a gentle three mile jog now and then I shall spend the rest of the day in the shed. See you later!

Runblog 3: Moved

Alright? If on the off-chance you're here looking for another Runblog post, I do have one for you but it's not here; it's on my new running-based blog, Laura Can Run. Head on over there if you fancy it. You can subscribe by email too, if you like.

I'll be back to beads here just as soon as I have some. The second year of my degree starts tomorrow and I have a lot to do. I don't foresee that many beads happening over the next three months but I'll keep you posted.

Runblog 2: Shut up, brain

I made a conscious effort to not overdo the running this week. My thigh occasionally does a little groan at me, normally when I'm doing something running-unrelated, reminding me that it was pretty knackered only a couple of weeks ago, so I make a point of listening to those groans and taking it a bit easier and so far, so good. I've been doing daily squats and assorted leg strengthening exercises and I think that's been helping a lot.

I did a 5km run on Monday and that was a tad tough. I knew my body was capable of it but my brain was telling me that it wasn't. I was all "We've done this many times, you daft brain. My legs and I can do this just fine, thank you very much for asking!" but my brain was telling me and my legs that we couldn't go on and that it would just be better for all of us if we stopped running, walked home and had a nice rest. I told my brain to shut its filthy piehole, and my legs and I completed the run. I also faffed about trying to do one of those running action shots. I propped my phone up against a post, set the self timer thing and ran past it. I managed to capture my leg. Still, my leg was running so I reckon the photo qualifies as a running action shot. (And don't be looking at my VPL; my Runderwear makes my arse look like a joint of pork.)

My mudguards for my bike arrived so I fitted them and went out to test them in the rain on Wednesday.

Post-cycling selfie

There was no grubby-buttocking incident this time, so that was a fiver well spent. I timed the ride wrong, though, and I got caught up in the school-home-time cycling traffic alongside the busway. I was bombing along on my bike amongst schoolyouths bombing along on their bikes and there was a moment where I felt like some kind of geriatric Goonie.

To date, bar parkruns, I've done all of my running alongside the busway. It's straight, flat and smooth, and I only ever have to cross one road. Apparently varying your route is a good thing to do so on Friday I planned a run somewhere that wasn't the busway.

Post-run selfie

I have no sense of direction. At all. The part of my brain that does directions and maps is just utterly useless; somehow my brain can remember the names of the entire Lockhead family from the terrible '90s BBC soap Eldorado, but it is incapable of working out how to get to a place. I studied Google Maps and worked out a route that was about 3.5km – a loop, all run on paths that I walk on a very regular basis going to the shops and the library and such. Except for one bit. There was one tiny bit that I didn't know but after looking at the map about fifteen times before leaving the house, I was confident I'd logged it it my head, but nope, I got to that bit and instantly my brain became all befuddled and I ended up doing a three minute scurry-about, trying to correct my route like a malfunctioning sat nav device. The stupid thing was, I was only five minutes from home! Eventually I sort of got my bearings and headed in the general direction of where I wanted to be and I ended up on a green, amongst children's boingy playground equipment, but I kept on running and sure enough I ended up on the right road and I was able to complete the run and make it home. I honestly shouldn't be allowed out without a helper.

I've not done a parkrun yet this year. Cambridge parkrun is in a country park so the route is muddy and there are lots of tree roots to dodge. When it's been raining there are puddles too, and sections of the route become mighty slopslippy.  I had to do a bit of tree root and puddle jumping on my last parkrun and I'm pretty sure that's how I twanged my groin, so I decided that I wouldn't run there again until the weather improves a bit. I know that's a bit runner wimpish of me, but I just don't want to risk injuring myself again. However, with my self-imposed parkrun hiatus, I was getting such parkrun ennui on Saturdays. Every Saturday my Instagram and Strava feeds light up with lovely parkrun photos and I was missing it so I decided to volunteer and yesterday I donned a hi-vis vest and did a bit of marshalling.

Probably one selfie too many

I was positioned at the point where the parkrunners head off on the final straight of the course, up towards the finish funnel. The runners have to go past this point three times before they can head off towards the finish so I was doing a mix of cheering people on as they completed each lap, and spurring on the just-about-to-finishers. I absolutely bloody loved it! Everyone talks about the parkrun atmosphere and I thought I'd experienced it as a runner, but nope, the volunteering was where I really grasped what they're all on about. I have never clapped and cheered so much in my whole life and every time a runner panted, "Thank you, marshal!" at me I got such a lovely feeling. Some fella high-fived me as he ran by and another gent shouted, "Thank you, marshal, lovely hat!" each time he went past me. A lovely lady came up to me after her run and said that my encouragement had really helped her at a point where she was flagging. That was so good! All I'd done was stand there clapping and shouting stuff like "Excellent running skills!" and "I love your leggings!" and "Keep going, you're doing fab!" and here was this lady telling me how that had actually worked. Magical. I had such a big grin for hours afterwards. After we packed up I put my name down for marshalling again next week so I will try and come up with some more things to shout – something better than the nonsensical "Yeah, you're doing a good!" that my mouth said to someone at one point yesterday morning.

Next week I'm going to do three runs with one of them being a 6km one, and hopefully none of them will involve me acting like lost idiot.


This week's runstats
Number of runs: 2
Total distance run: 8.8km (4.56 miles)
Standout running tune of the week: Cliff Richard - Wired For Sound

Runblog 1: On my bike

I mentioned that I was going to do a weekly running blog post so here I am doing that very thing which I'm calling my 'runblog'. How imaginative.

Yesterday I did my first run of the year. Hurrah! Oddly, I was sort of nervous about doing it. I was all "What if I've lost fitness?" and "What if I can't run and I have to walk because my body has forgotten how to run?" about it , but I gave myself a good talking-to, and after a twenty minute warm-up, I got my arse out of the door and into the rain. I walked to my usual starting point and Weezer's Feels Like Summer started playing as I broke into a run. This made me grin (because it's January and it was pissing with rain) but I grinned even more when I ran past a flock of geese in a very muddy field.

Look at them all having muddy funtimes

This particular bunch of sky-honkers fly over our house most Saturday mornings and I love hearing them. They live at the lake over the road from this field and yesterday it was like they were at some kind of goose day spa, thoroughly enjoying a therapeutic mud treatment.

Anyway, I set out with the intention of running a slow, easy mile and that way if my groin was playing me up I would just swear a bit and walk home. I ended up running two miles and I could have gone further but I didn't want to push my thigh luck. Running deliberately slowly is difficult. I'm not a fast runner at all, but making a conscious effort to run at a slower pace than usual is quite tricky and I actually ended up running faster than I did on my last parkrun. Ah well. It was just so wonderful to be back out there running. I've missed it so much and I ran most of the way with a stoopid smile on my face. This was partly due to my new Tikiboo nebula leggings. They're just so utterly cosmic!

I am in love with my nebula leggings

They are beautifully made too. They have a zippered back bumpocket (useful for stashing keys and fruit pastilles) and they also have a waist drawstring which guards against cases of baggy gusset syndrome. Nobody wants a baggy gusset when they're running. Or at any time, really.

I got home and did a long cool-down and a bit of foam rolling on my thigh. This is quite awkward and it looks very wrong, like I'm trying to hump a big grey sausage, but it really works. In case you're not aware, foam rolling is a way of doing a sort of deep tissue massage. You put the foam roller on the floor, and under the bit of you that want massaged, and then you put your weight on the roller and move slowly over it, back and forth, concentrating on any niggly bits. (Yeah, actually this does sound like I was trying to hump a big grey sausage, doesn't it?) Foam rolling can be a tad painful but at the same time it's really nice. It's particularly lovely on aching calf muscles. I've just got a smooth roller but you can get textured lumpy ones that really scrumble your bodymeats.

I want to do some form of cross-training on my non-running days. Until now that has been walking, which is great, but I do it anyway because I don't drive, so it doesn't ever feel like I'm actually doing a thing, if that makes sense. Ideally, I'd like to go swimming but the nearest pool is in town and that is just a hassle. And besides, I loathe swimming pools. Not the swimming  – the swimming is great – but I can't bear the rigmarole of it. You have to pack things and take shampoo and stuff. And then you have to stand in puddles in the changing room and you drop things in puddles and have to faff with lockers and keys. Then you go and swim and while doing so you try not to think of the other people's wee, arse particles, snot, germs and foot badness you're bobbing about in, let alone accidentally swallowing. On top of this, I end up performing an are-my-tits-still-in-my-cossie check and a pull-cossie-out-of-front-or-rear-crevice manoeuvre every two minutes. When you're done with the actual exercise you have to negotiate the changing rooms again but this time it's worse because you are wet. And cold. And oh god, look, there's the token unashamedly naked woman, leg up on the bench, towelling her undercarriage, but don't look at her, don't look, oh you looked at her and you made eye contact and why can't she just do the remove-cossie-and-put-underwear-on-under-the-towel thing that most of us perfected in the the gym changing rooms at school? Christ, it's stressful. And you will undoubtedly put a freshly-socked foot into a puddle. Then you have to battle for mirror space in the hairdrying area which is far too muggy because of all the hairdryers huffing hot air about, and there will be a couple of women applying a full face of make-up and spritzing hairspray and bodyspray all over the show, when all you want to do is get one tiny glimpse in a mirror to make sure you look borderline presentable and get the hell out of there.

So yeah, swimming is out.

That leaves the gym (just NO never) or cycling. So cycling is what I decided on. I've got a secondhand mountain bike which is a bit shit, but it's purple (and that goes a long way in my world) and it's got a lot of gears and it works and I'm not Bradley Wiggins so who cares? I pumped up its tyres, dusted off its cobwebs and squirted a bit of WD40 about, and pootled off. It was icy cold, snowing and therefore wet, but I just can't ever resist snow and I'd made up my mind to go out in it, and going out in it is what I did.

Wet and cold in my Guy Martin Proper hat that my dad gave me as a "well done on your running" gift

I cycled along my normal running route and most of the time I was thinking to myself "This is actually quite a long way and you normally run this, you weirdo" which made me feel proud of how far I've come (literally) since September, but it also made me think about how amazing anyone who runs long distances is. And I don't mean marathons or ultras – those people are incredible – I mean further than six miles, which seems like such a long way to me right now. I was going to do two circuits of my route which would have been about 10km but by about 6km it was snowing really hard and I couldn't feel my face so I decided to go home. My bike doesn't have mudguards so I ended up with a very soggy and mud-splattered bottom, and it took me about two hours to warm up afterwards. I really enjoyed the cycling and have now ordered a set of mudguards to try and minimise the grubby-buttocking that future wet bike rides will throw at me.

Because this past week has been full of me not running, I've been reading about running. Lots. I read No Run Intended and Run Intended by Hannah Phillips, both of which were amusing, entertaining and very inspiring - great stuff! I also read Your Pace or Mine? by Lisa Jackson, which was really good too. I'm partway through the audiobook of Marathon Woman by Kathrine Switzer which is incredible. Kathrine was the first woman to officially finish the Boston Marathon and flip me, she is one heck of a woman. I little-bit love her and I've not even finished listening to the book yet. I also got myself a copy of Build Your Running Body which is so good. Every time I pick it up I learn something new.

One last thing: I've started an Instagram account for my running. I wanted a place where I could ramble on about it without feeling bad for non-runner people. As I said in my last running post, I know how infuriating social media running posts can be. If you'd like to have a look, the account is lauracanrun and apparently I still can, even after almost a month off.

One of those tedious running posts

This is my running diary. I bought it to keep a record of my running progress. Sure, my Garmin watch and app, and Strava take care of that for me in a digital format but I wanted a physical thing that I can actually fill in, with a pen. I'm also hoping that writing in it every day will help to improve my ever-crappening handwriting. These days I only ever write shopping lists, greetings cards, bead package address labels, and terrible, awful illegible notes for essays, and the latter have got so bad that I now make notes on my laptop so I don't have to spend ten minutes trying to decipher what the hell I've written.

So far my diary is full of me moaning to myself about not being able to run, along with a record of what exercises I'm doing each day to fix my banjaxed groin. It has one date in it, though – a race date! My first one. Me doing an actual running race! It's the Supernova 5K in London in March. The race is at the Olympic Park and it's run at dusk. Everyone gets given a head torch and you wear neon clothing and lights about your person. I've seen some photos from previous events and it looks very pretty and a lot of fun. Chris and I are going to make me some form of neon tutu that will be lit up with little LEDs, and I'm going to get some trainer lights and wear some of those glow stick bracelet things. I'm a bit excited, can you tell? I'm pretty confident that I wont have a repeat of my first running-in-a-tutu experience. I did a Christmas parkrun in December and the Facebook page said to wear a festive outfit, so I did. 

Me, the Christmas tutu tit

Yeah, you know when Bridget Jones turns up to the tarts and vicars party dressed as a sexy bunny but when she gets there nobody else is in fancy dress? Well, that happened. There were 460 runners in normal running gear, with a handful of them wearing a Santa or an elf hat (lazy festive outfit cop-out) and then me in a red tutu, long striped socks and Father Christmas deely boppers, and two six year olds dressed as an elf and Mrs Christmas. I decided to just style my way through it, and I stood in the queue, warming up like normal, but looking and feeling like a complete tit.

Fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion

I ran the whole 5K in my tutu and socks because they said festive outfit and festive outfit is what they got. So yeah, hopefully everyone (well, everyone except the inevitable snooty super-serious runners) at Supernova will embrace the light-up dress code and I won't be the solitary tutu tit again.

Anyway, I think I'm going to do one post a week here about running. Maybe on a Sunday. Runday. Sunday Runday. Or something. That way I will limit my rabbiting on about running to one easily-avoidable post for all the people, who like me six months ago, do not want to read about running. I always scrolled right on by all those tedious route maps and times that people posted on Facebook and Twitter. Now I actively seek them out, following other running people and bookmarking websites and blog posts about injuries, exercises, fartlek (I know), nutrition and just about anything I can read about running. I've just finished listening to the audiobook of Christopher McDougall's Born To Run which was so good even a non-runner would find it interesting.

See? I think I could easily waffle on about running for one blog post a week. I do have beads to show you today, though. They are these 'Purquoise' ones. And yes, I know I've named umpteen sets of beads 'Purquoise' over the years but I've become lazy with bead-naming. Simple as that.

The beads are in the shop as I type. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to squeeze my exercise ball betwixt my ankles and knees in an attempt to mend this sodding groin injury. Have a good Saturday!

Long time, no type

The last time I posted here (let's not discuss how long ago that was) I was telling you how I couldn't run because I was injured.

Well, since then I've got myself un-injured, turned forty, bought new running shoes, restarted and completed Couch to 5K, run two parkruns, have achieved a sub-30 minute 5K, run a 6.5K, and got injured again! This time it's my groin and it's on the mend so I hope to be back out running and working my way up to a 10K soon.

The face of a woman who had just run 3.1 miles in under 30 minutes

I've also completed my first year of university and will be starting my second year in February. It's going to be a lot of work and I'm pretty apprehensive about it, to be honest. I'm filled with all the self-doubt and "I don't think I can do this" about it but I shall see how it goes.

And obviously I'm still making beads because that is what I do. The 'Blackcurrant & Mango' ones at the top and just above are the most recent and I'm a bit in love with the colour combination.

I've also made a few Anemone beads which I've turned into necklaces.

'Indigo' Anemone necklace

The aforementioned beads and necklaces are in the shop at the time of typing.

It's now time for a cheese and pickle sandwich (I tried Branston pickle for the first time ever over Christmas and I am now obsessed with the stuff) and then I'm heading shedwards.