I have an owwiee

Rather foolishly, a couple of weeks ago, I allowed myself to be goaded into challenging a "friend" to a 10k race. Our race will coincide with the Great BUPA Ireland Run in the Phoenix Park (which we're both signed up for) on 9 April this year. I said I'd do it in under 45 minutes. Not 45 minutes. Under. 45. minutes.

I've been in training ever since. Luckily for me, I like to run and there are plenty of nice places for me to go at work and at home. I've been going out at least twice and mostly 3 times a week.

I did a drive around at home over the weekend and realised that I'm going to have to train a bit harder. My main route takes me around 25 minutes to complete, but it's only 5.5k.

So I decided to ramp up my efforts today. I did this circuit in 30 minutes, but I'm not sure how far the route is, because there's no scale on the map. Anyway, I feel like it's a lot further than I normally go and that I did it at a quicker pace than I normally run, because Oh My God, my legs are like jelly this afternoon. I am exhausted.

I suppose that it's all good - another couple of days like it and maybe even 10k in under 40 minutes will be looking promising!

Gerry, are you listening? The gauntlet is being thrown back at you!

Ballot Stuffing

The Irish have always been good at stuffing on-line ballots. Case-in-point, when the Wolfe Tones' 'Only the Rivers in Ireland Run Free' was voted Best Song Ever in an on-line ballot run by the (British) Times newspaper. Maybe you've got to be Irish to understand why that's funny, but it is.

Anyway, Irish Blogs are currently running the Irish Blog Awards and I want all my loyal reader [sic] to join in the ballot stuffing effort as detailed below...

One of my husband Conor's posts on his blog has been nominated in the category of 'Most Humorous Post', while my friend Gerry's blog has been nominated for 'Best Personal Blog'.

It's only at the shortlisting stage at the moment, but your votes are still important. So get your browser to the Irish Blog Awards site and vote.

Insomniac ShitList: Advertisements

I'm not down on advertisements per se, but there are certain ones that I really don't like:

Item Two (added 9 February 2006)
Lucozade.
What was wrong with the old "Replaces lost ener-geeeeeeeeeee!" jingle?
Now we've got some funky dancing zombies, with missing body parts. What's the subtext? Drinking Lucozade will rot your insides, make your arms fall off your body and your eyes fall out of your head. No-one else in the shopping centre will want to hang out with you, except for other creepy-looking Lucozade-drinking zombies, who just want to eat what's left of your brains anyway. Hmmm, it just doesn't hit the right note with me... even if the jingle is better.

Item One (added 19 October 2004)
Harvey-bloody-Norman.
Have you heard the latest ad? Listen to this crap. What I would like to know is, what alternative does this Antipodean addle-pate suggest to "electrical computers"? I tried (though not very hard) to find the Harvey Norman website, but a google search for "Harvey Norman Superstore" (pages from Ireland) gave me this beautiful rant instead

Decommissioning, mk ii

I'm just catching up with myself (a year later, almost) and I'm going to keep the posts from Insomniac ShitList and Insomniac Baby, but I'm going to incorporate them into Insomniac Tirade. So, they'll be buried in here somewhere. Unfortunately, any comments posted (and there were a few, though not many) will not be making the move.

Once I'm done sorting that out, I might even get to a spot of blogging today. Or maybe tomorrow. Don't want to wear myself out, now do I?!

Decommissioning

I know that the title of this blog may be a little misleading and/or insensitive given our current political climate, but the following has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Sinn Féin and/or the IRA.

I am considering whether or not to decommission the Insomniac Shit List. I know that it was a wonderfully cathartic solution to an incredibly hormonal time in my life. It certainly deserves to be enshrined in memory (mine, if no-one else's), though I think it may have scared a few people too.

If I do remove it, I won't be taking any photographs to prove that I've put the blog beyond use. In fact, I will gather up all the entries and save them as one big blog, buried in the mother-blog that is Tirade. It won't be gone forever. That means that I can always invoke the Shit List whenever I need to again.

If I don't remove it, it will gather cyber-dust until something sets me off again.

Should any of my reader [sic] feel strongly about this, let me know via those wonderful Comments. I'll revisit this in about a week and you will know my decision fairly quickly.

Where have all the standards gone?

As time goes by, I find that (in general) the mainstream media is becoming more and more liberal in terms of what is acceptable and what is not. I am often dismayed at the same time to discover that I am not... I can remember being outraged when I had to stay up listening to the radio after 10 o'clock at night especially just to hear George Michael's (then) new song with the shocking title "I want your sex"!

God be with the days.
Ah, the innocence of it all!

Just before Christmas, a radio station here ran a singing competition for primary school children (aged 5-12). Classes could enter any song they wanted, so long as it came from this century.

Imagine the shock suffered by those poor Junior and Senior Infants teachers, when they read the lyrics of Christina's "Dirty" proposed by their young charges!

Advertisements for the new millenium

The other morning, I was on my way to work and Con and I drove passed a new niteclub at Fairyhouse Racecourse in Ratoath, Co Meath. It was imaginatively called "One".

In a blinding flash of inspiration, it's advertising slogan came to me:

"Get your hole in One"

(I have so missed my calling in life!)

An update

So, there's now less than 5 weeks to my due date.
Graduation is four days before that.

I got a first for my thesis. Not enough to bring me up to a first overall, but a respectable result nonetheless.
My supervisor and I are now working on a research paper, which we hope to present to the Irish Academy of Management conference in September this year.

Con's in Denmark at the moment, enjoying the snow in my Dad's jacket.

I'm still living with my parents and much and all as I love them, they're driving me nuts. I cannot wait to get the sale of our new house sorted out and move in.

I've only got a couple of weeks left in work - finishing up in two weeks from Friday - and I can't wait. I am so wrecked and really unbothered about all the stuff that's going on at the moment. I wouldn't mind so much, but there's some really interesting developments starting to come on stream and I won't be around for them, so there's one part of me is a little pissed off to be missing all the good projects and the rest of me couldn't give a tinker's curse.

It's been a long time in the making...

I've just realised how long it's been since last I blogged and a whole lot has happened between then and now:
There's been a whole Christmas and New Year gone without comment;
I've bought a new house in the town where I grew up (how weird is that - I spent years trying to get away from the place and now that I'm about to have a mini-me, I voluntarily move back!);
This means that I'm in the middle of moving at the moment, so I'm half living with my Dad (how weird, for the similar reasons as outlined above) and half with my in-laws (now that's just plain weird!);
My Mum is still in Spain, having fled the country when she discovered she was going to be a grandma. She reappeared briefly around Christmas, but hasn't been seen since... Only kidding - she's due home next weekend, and I expect she's only dying to get her granny hat on;
Mini-me is still baking - less than eight weeks to go and everything is proceeding with boring normalness, which is great. I have my last scan in two weeks or so, which will be a good time to update the Insomniac Baby;
And finally, Whoo-hoo! I have finished my thesis. Yeay-me! Granted I'm still waiting for my supervisor to tell me whether it's any good and so forth, but I should be on track for graduation in seven and a half weeks! Hooray!

Scarle' fer ya!

I really didn't know where to put this story. It happened in the waiting room of the maternity hospital, so it could have gone under the Insomniac Baby banner. It involved a group of society that I don't have a lot of time for, so it could legitimately have been posted on the Insomniac Shit List. In the end, I decided it wasn't a tale I'd like to associate with my happy pregnancy and nor could I easily categorise it for the Shit List, so here it is, on the Tirade:

I was sitting in the waiting room of the maternity hospital for a few hours yesterday. It was really busy and lots of people were taking and making phone calls to say "I'm still waiting. I've been here for hours." The waiting room was incredibly busy and there were stacks of people waiting for visiting hours to begin aswell, so the whole place was jammers.

There was a young couple - aged anywhere between 16 and 20, their skin was too bad to be able to tell - sitting beside me on the benches in the waiting area, who had been getting streams of phone calls (about four or five each) all day. They'd had essentially the same conversation with each caller: "Naaah! I'm stiiill bleedin' waitin'..." or "Naaaah! We're stiiill bleedin' waitin' ta be seen by de dooooctor, bud..."

Eventually, she went in and was out again after 10 or 15 minutes. "Y'aaal righ'?" says he. She replied at the top of her voice, in the middle of the crowded room: "Yeah. I'm grand. 'S only de trush."

"Oh, my God!", I thought to myself. "I can't believe that you've just yelled that out in front of everyone. I am absolutely mortified on your behalf."

"Ah, just de trush?", says the boyfriend loudly, to be heard over the din of the waiting visitors. "Ah, jaysus, dat's alrigh' den."

"Oh, my God!", I thought to myself. "I can't believe that you've just yelled that out in front of everyone. I am absolutely mortified on your behalf."

Then, one by one, the girl begins to return the phone calls of her concerned parents and friends: "How'r'ya Ma! 'Sgrand. 'Sjust de trush!"; "How'r'ya Concepteh. Yeah, 'sgrand. 'Sjust de trush!"; "How'r ya Angeleh. Jaysus! 'S de bleedin' trush!"

At this stage I was beginning to wish that they would either vacate the bench beside me and leave the waiting room, or failing that, the the ground would open up and swallow me. I didn't think it could get any worse. I was wrong.

He takes his phone out of his pocket and starts dialling. "How'r'ya Ma? Yeah, she's grand. 'Sjust de trush!"

Enough! In the parlance of our maternity hospital waiting rooms, "Jaysus! I'm bleedin' scaaaaarle' fer yez!"