Hat Trick Post

My third that is.

David Millar is making a comeback, he is joining the Saunier Duvaul team for the Tour next summer. His ban lifts 9 days before the tour starts. I'm still on the fence of whether I'll be supporting him or not. He was my favorite cyclist until he got caught for blood doping.

In other news, I'm feeling a bit better, I had my blood tests and they rush malaria tests, so I should have results tomorrow.

An update?

From me. I know, shocking. I'm going to get tested in half an hour. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid, but I want my mind put to rest. I started feeling nauseous again after lunch, and my headache has returned.

I'll update y'all in an hour or so.

Wahoo!

Internet in office :) it only took what, 3 months? It is pretty exciting though :)

This weekend, hmmm... Friday did nothing. Saturday Burger and I went for a bike ride and then I went to my Aunt and Uncles for lunch. And met my new little cousin, Deven, he was adorable :) As my friends from highschool would describe him, he is caramel ;)

Saturday night went home and relaxed. I watched the movie National Treasure, it was pretty good, but kind of ripped off the storyline from the Davinci Code. On Sunday it was my long run (but a cut back week, so only 21.5 km) and soccer in the afternoon. Burger and I watched the last part of the Rugby game, which was pretty fun. UW got creamed, 24-5 for UWO. Oops :O. Watching the game though made me want to play again. I need a serious psychological evaluation for even considering playing again, but it was so much fun. If I'm still interested in the spring, I'll look into the City team. I might be good enough for it. Who knows.

Last night I watched Desperate Housewives. A pretty good season premiere, but I was really tired and practically asleep. Maybe that is a bad sign?

So on the Malaria front, I just don't know, I seem to be feeling ill on and off, and keep on getting this bad headache. I'm thinking of getting the test done just to make myself feel better. I don't want to have malaria, but if I have it, better to catch it early.

I'm SO getting malaria

Shit. I'm supposed to continue taking my malaria drugs for 4 weeks after getting back in the country, and I just realized that yesterday I forgot to take mine. Shit. Apparently, you can go up to every 10 days for taking them, but they only advise every week so that people remember to take them. A lot of good that did me. Must remember to take drugs tonight with dinner... BTW, thanks to Margo who inadvertantly reminded me to take it while talking about her bad night sleep last night. Insomnia is a side effect of Larium.

Okay, other than that, not much. Second yoga class last night. There was a guy there wearing tight lulu lemon capris?!? It went pretty good though, and none of my positions had to be fixed. I felt totally cool. Then back home for survivor. The team I'm rooting for lost both challenges, but they made a smart decision about who they voted off. Then up to QC's for the season premiere of CSI. Pretty good episode, but also the most graphic pictures I've ever seen on that show. I seriously felt like vomitting. Oh, and I also liked Nick in his white shirt. V. Hot.

Okay, I guess I should be getting back to work. I'm supposed to be getting connected to the internet in my office today. Yipee! I've only had my computer for 3 months...

Oh my!

So last night I watched the premiere of "My name is Earl", and I have to say, it was one of the funniest shows I've ever watched. Definitely going to be on my TV roster. Only problem - it is in the same time slot as the Amazing Race, so I'm going to have to tape one of them. Oh well, I'll make that sacrifice.

Didn't do too much else. I made banana muffins, and they are yummy.

This afternoon is the first soccer game of the season. I think we are going to get our asses handed to us on a platter. We moved up a division (most of the people on the team can handle being up a division, I on the other hand am not good enough for this), and about half of our team can't make it, so we'll only have 8 players and the other team will have 11. So we will have to play the entire game - did I mention I ran 15 km already today???

Tonight is the season premiere of Americas Next Top Model. Woohoo! I'll probably watch it tonight, but I'm not sure if I'll watch it every week. I need to cut back on my TV viewing time.

Back to the Flow

Body Flow that is. I went last night for the first time in like a year. It was pretty good. I felt really good afterwards, my legs were loose, not tight, and I was unstrung (well, a little anyways). Now, after this mornings run, and being back at school all that work has been put to waste. Oh well, guess I have to start going on a weekly basis again. Plan - Monday night Flow, Thursday night Yoga.

Today - not much going on. I'm at school for the morning and possibly the afternoon. I'm on a waiting list to take part in this online seminar thing, and might have to rush home to take part if a position magically opens up. If not, no biggie, it'll be available online later this week.

So now that I'm back in the country, summer is over, and marathon training is dwindling into my taper (starts in two weeks!), I all the sudden have more time on my hands than I've had in a while. I plan to use some of the time at the gym getting back into activities I like (Monday night weights and flow, tuesday training swim, wednesday weights, and thursday yoga), but that still leaves a whole lot of free time on the weekends. Hmm... maybe I need a hobby. Or a boy.

Oh, and on Saturday I registered for the Niagara Marathon, so I really have to do it now! eek!

The love affair continues

My new combination - Cream of wheat and raspberries! yummy!!!!! I got frozen raspberrries last week to make jam, and I have some left over, so I tried it with my cream of wheat and success! Yummy :)

On Friday I went to get my hair cut (it is between my shoulder and my chin now. Just long enough to pull back, but pretty short). Then it was off to B-town to hang out with the Nej and C-dub. We had a blast, went to the kingdom and then foot attire shopping on Saturday. I didn't get anything, there were a few pairs of shoes and boots that I liked a lot, but they were either out of my price range (like over $200 for boots) or not in the right size. I stopped by Conestoga mall on my way home as a last ditch attempt and found one of the pairs I had liked at Transit in my size. yay! They are brown and pink and have cool velcro closures. And they were pretty cheap too!

Saturday night I did nothing of consequence. Watched some tv, read some, and went to bed pretty early. Sunday morning was my longest run to date - 30 km! I did the last 4 km just a bit faster than my hopefull marathon pace, and it felt really good. Yay! I wanted to do the Terry Fox run (well, walk) as well, but I didn't make it back in time, maybe next year?

Sunday afternoon I lazed around, and by lazed, I mean lazed. I wanted to sleep, but the adreneline from my afternoon rum wouldn't let me fall asleep, so I just hung out instead. In the evening I made my raspberry jam, and cleaned my kitchen up a bit. It is amazing how fast I can make a mess. Give me 5 minutes in any room, and it'll look like a tornado hit.

The new love of my life

So when I was visiting Kate, her roommate made this porridge type stuff out of millet flour, it was pretty good and I searched hi and lo for millet flour at Zehr's, but no dice, couldn't find it. Jamie and Kate suggested that I try cream of wheat since it was pretty similar, so I got that instead. I made it for breakie this morning and oh my! I put cinnamon, brown sugar and raisens on top, and it was scrum-didily-umptious!!! I think I'm in love with a new breakfast food.

Other news. well, there is none. This afternoon I'm getting my hair cut. Might go for something drastically different. With the exception of the brief foray with short hair in 2002, I've pretty much had the same hair style since starting university 6 years ago. I want something different dammit!!! Tonight is also the kingdom, so I'm going to get the hair dresser to do something funky with it :)

Oh, and I went for a run this morning, and it was pretty perfect. I did my usual 8 km route in 47:45 which is only 15 seconds slower than the fastest I've run it leisurely. I've run it faster when I was trying to, but this morning my heart rate stayed under 70% for almost the entire run (except for a few short uphills). It'll be interesting to see what sort of time I can pull off in the marathon.

Clarification

It has been brought to my attention that some people out there mistakenly think that Jamie is a Boy. I was informed this when I got back and was accused of never using a he/she to clarify this point. I would like to draw everyones attention to the first e-mail I sent out after being in Ndolage...

"Kate (my sister) has a physio student with her right now from Canada. She
is actually from Waterloo, so what are the chances???? She also has a
multi-enty visa since she was planning on going to kenya when she was done,
but is no longer going. Kate's Passport is in Dar es Salaam right now
getting the visa extended, and she's not going to get it back in time to go
to Uganda for the white water rafting, so Jamie, the student, is going to go
with me instead. We'll be going next weekend."

So Clearly, Jamie is a girl. Sorry for those of you who got up hopes about my love life. No dice. Although, Jamie is a very nice person, I'm not attracted to females.

Meh. Time to go to school. I don't want to go :( Oh well, I think it'll be another short day. I'm a little sleepy, so I'll probably come home early for a nap.

Back in the Loo

So I'm back after my whirl wind tour of East Africa :) I had a long and arduous journey on my return home. I left Ndolage at 8 am on Saturday look the dala dala to Bukoba (always an adventure - I think they managed 25 people this time.) That was followed by the first two of my flights home. First to Mwanza (second biggest city in Tanzania) and then on to Dar and a Taxi ride to my downtown hotel. Luckily there were no mosquitos around, the net was in pretty bad shape and slept without it. On Monday I started the longest leg of my journey.

My plane left Dar around 3:30 in the afternoon and was just over three hours to Jo'burg, but by the time we had taxi'd to the airport I had only 20 minutes to get through security and borded onto my next plane. I was luckily able to get my bording pass in Dar. So I made the plane with a few minutes to spare, however I was pretty scared about my baggage (it was a relief when I saw it in New York!!!!) The plane was pretty empty, so I ended up having the two seats along one edge to myself and was able to get a decent amount of sleep - about three hours on each side of Dakkar - but they had to wake us up for an hour in Dakkar to do a security check - What a pain!).

17 hours after leaving Jo'burg we arrived safe and sound at JFK where I had around 4 hours to clear immigration, collect my baggage, change airports and check in. So since everyone loves hearing about incompetence, here is one you will all love. So there were two international flights coming into JFK around the same time. they had two separate lines - one for US citizens and residents and one for non residents. Since it was an INTERNATIONAL flight, there were about twice as many non residents as there were residents. How does US immigration handle this. Why of course they had 6 officers handling the US people and 1, yes 1, handling all the non-residents. Finally after moving like 8 people through in half an hour they brought a few more people into the non-resident line, so it moved marginally faster (note, the non-residents for the most part take like 2-3 times as long as the residents, being Canadian, it took me under a minute...). So finally after waiting in line for over an hour, I cleared custums with my bad and was ready to set off for Laguardia. Note: Most Airports (like all) have a "ground transportation information centre" where people can get help getting a cab or a shuttle to whereever they need to go. It was closed. So I wandered around for a bit until finally stumbling upon the sign for the shuttle, and after nearly taking a cab instead, the shuttle finally showed up.

Trip through new york was uneventful. Much safer bus driver this time!!! I was pretty confused with where I was with respect to the rest of the city. I figure we went west of manhattan??? (Just checked a map, we were east of manhattan!!! however, I was correct that we drove through queens and brooklyn :)) I could see it from the runway at laguardia.

One final flight home and I was back in Canada and quite happy to be so. People here are so much nicer and friendlier than elsewhere. I chatted with the custums official (note we had like 8 or 9 officials on and didn't give preferential treatment to canadian citizens), and she helped me with my declaration form and it was off to see my dad :)

Last night was weird getting settled back into wloo. Burger brought Jenny over and we cuddled for a bit. I think she remembers me, and she hasn't tried to escape yet. When I woke up at 3:30 this morning (I was luckily able to fall back asleep) we had another little cuddle :) I think I'll keep her :)