Choosing a name…

As part of my course I have to create a website, which is fine and I have now chosen a subject for it but choosing a name of my fictional site was a lot harder than I thought. The subject for my site will be about hiking in the Lake District, so the obvious ideas was ‘Hiking in the Lakes’ or ‘Walkers’ – something on those lines but as I looking at design my site around the 20-40 age group I decided that I needed something more exciting. A couple of ideas came up while discussing this with a colleague at work; these were Best Walks, Best Hikes or Fresh Trek. After about twenty minutes of pondering on this I suddenly had an idea for my site – iHike. Like iPod but about hiking… shows you what happens when you love your iPod touch so much (even though I really would like an iPhone now!). I have a quick check on Google for existing sites called iHike but could only find iHikes. Not that my site is going to go public but I thought I should check first. All I’ve got to do now is build the site and write the content.

Choosing a name for a fictional site was quite difficult but choosing a name for a company or even a child must be really hard. Some company names last the test of time like Sainsbury’s or WH Smith and other can easily be abbreviated like my companies old name of EPS (Electronic Publishing Services). Sometimes we were mistaken for the Erotic Print Society – ah, the old days! Now choosing a name for a child must be the hardest but I can’t really write about that but I can for pets. Our hamster was called Harry after Harry Potter and the cats that me and my brother had at my parents house were called Noah and Domino. I would quite like to get a dog, some sort of terrier but as we both work it wouldn’t be fair to the dog but if we did I would called it either Homer or Bob. One of the funniest things about having a pet is taking them to vets as they use your own surname for the pet as well. So when I took Harry the hamster to the vets he was called Harry Sparkes (my maiden name), which is just hilarious when they called out his name. So if we got a dog it would be either Homer Best or Bob Best!

Sunday – nothing new going on

After two days of studying and late nights with early mornings I’m not sure what this post is going to be about – just silly ramblings most probably. My creative juices have stopped maybe due to lack of sleep and too much booze, so I thought the best way to write something without actually thinking was to write a ‘diary’ day. Awake this morning at around 7.30am as my husband was working again this weekend – managed to get out of bed at 8am and get ready for a run. Left the house at 8.30am for a 20 minutes run around the streets of Upminster which is always a lovely time of day for a run as it is so quiet with only dog walkers and other runners about. Also, first thing this morning it was glorious sunshine unlike the rest of the day which has been cloudy. Showered, dressed, had toast and a cup of black Earl Grey by 10.15am. Popped around my parents so I could use their printer, had a quick catch-up with them and brought home a few photos of my family from years ago for my ‘family photo wall’. Got back home and started studying – well almost started straight away as I had managed to do something with my laptop screen and spent 30 minutes trying to get it back to normal.

The rest of the day was spent studying, eating lunch, listening to Glastonbury on Radio 1, putting laundry on and hanging it out, putting the dishwasher on, watching Amy Winehouse at Glastonbury on the BBC website, uploading a new profile picture on Facebook and Twitter. Right now I’m writing this while Neil Diamond is on the TV (at Glastonbury of course!) and I’m eating Green & Black’s Dark Chocolate. I’m also contemplating getting the cocktails shaker out and making a cosmo or maybe a Pimms and lemonade just to top the day off. Not a very exciting day but at least there was good music to watch and listen to this weekend.

A day studying

So my Saturday has consisted of studying for my Open University course instead of enjoying the lovely warm weather. One of the main problems with my OU course is finding the time to do it – most Saturday afternoons and Sunday’s are study time but this leaves no time for housework (oh well) or ironing and doing exciting things like reading or chilling out in the garden. Luckily this course is only ten weeks and I’m in week nine so not long to go before I get my weekends back. Saying that I have really enjoyed this course (Design and the Web) and most probably will do another OU course when the new term starts in October. The past few weeks have been a real struggle with motivation, which is why I was a week behind this morning. I have managed to get through Lesson 8 today – albeit I might have to re-read a couple of pages but I did create a six page fictional website.

I won’t bore everyone with the design cycle about my website but I did enjoy myself playing around with the WYSIWYG software (Nvu) and managed to create a site about a fictitious Ladies Ice Hockey Club! I won’t post the URL on here as it is just for fun and I don’t want lots of women wanting to join my team (if only I had a team!). All I’ve got to do now is come up with an idea for my final assessment – a fully working website (again fictional) plus a 2,000 word report documenting the design of the site. I have various ideas for this but no definite plans – I think I should choose something that I enjoy as this will make it easier to create. Well, I’m cracking on with Lesson 9 this weekend and a day off work next week to get everything finished by the 10th July. After all that then I will have that agony of waiting for the results, that will take me back to my school days!

Casual Friday

Since moving office my firm doesn’t have the space for a meeting room anymore, which means no more clients popping into the office, so I decided that Fridays should be casual day or dress down Friday. In all my years working I never worn jeans to work except for staff days out or when moving office. I remember years ago dress down Friday taking over the City of London. A big influence came from all the US companies within the square mile – I had friends wearing nice casual clothes for work but still no jeans. Nowadays, that has all changed and I see many people wearing jeans to work (maybe not so for the big financial institutes). I think smart jeans with smart shoes is acceptable, hence my thinking for casual Friday and considering there is normally only two of us in on a Friday, I don’t think it is going to hurt anyone. Also now that we owned by a Californian company, who have a very relaxed outlook on working dress maybe I’ll get away with it!

I do wonder what people wore before jeans were classed as acceptable for everyday wear. Blimey I remember the days when you couldn’t wear jeans in nightclubs! My mum has only just started to wear jeans recently and I don’t think my grandparents ever wore them.

For all my ramblings about buying clothes, at heart I’m really a jeans, t-shirt and trainers girl. My shiny white trainers that I got in San Francisco at the beginning of the year are still shiny white – they have taken second place to my Converse shoes this year. Jackets and coats are something else I love wearing which luckily goes really well with jeans. I would love to wear jeans and trainers all the time but then I would most probably turn the other way and start dressing up more at the weekends. Below is a picture of my white trainers – you might need your sunglasses as they are so white!

Glasto

I thought I would write about the biggest festival in the UK, Glastonbury, which officially starts tomorrow but many people are already there already setting up camp. One of my good friends has gone and is there now, I hope the weather stays nice for them. There has been a lot of press about this year’s event about the line up and not selling all the tickets. Just because it didn’t sell out in 10 seconds the press have been slating it ever since – personally I think it makes a nice change that people who don’t normally get a chance to get tickets for these sorts of events can get to go. If it wasn’t for the fact that the toilet and shower situation is so bad at these festivals that I would love to go. Maybe one day with a camper van. The line-up looks great to me, just because there isn’t of the usual huge bands like Oasis, The Killers or The Arctic Monkeys playing this year, the press having been writing about that as well. But there is Amy Winehouse, The Verve, Gossip, Mark Ronson, Massive Attack, Shakin Stevens – hey, Shakin Stevens from the 80s pop era, how funny is that!

If you aren’t going to Glastonbury then it is one of best reason to stay in and watch TV for many hours over a weekend. The BBC covers this wonderfully every year and as I have written before with interactive TV I can watch it all weekend. We did try to arrange a Glasto party for this Saturday night but we didn’t get much of an excited response from most of our friends – maybe they thought it would be a wash out like last year’s real festival. The only thing I need to get now is a pair of wellington boots in some wild bright colour – this site has some great ones. Not sure if I would ever wear them again, but then again maybe at the V Festival. Definitely not a good look for work unless I change jobs and go in to farming.

Walking Tall

There are just some days when I feel taller then I really am and its not to do with wearing high heels. Maybe it’s a matter of confidence but when you are 5ft 2in anything to make you feel a few inches taller always helps. Today was a tall day, OK I was wearing heels but I don’t feel tall every time I wear heels. I don’t remember hanging about with people shorter than me today either. At 5ft 2in (I’ve sadly just measured myself and I’m 5ft 2 and half inches – that half makes all the different!), I’ve always been short but I have a few friends who are the same height as me so I don’t feel as short anymore. All during my school years I was the short one, I just got taller very slow and caught up with everyone else so nowadays I’m not always ’shorty’. Not that shorty was ever my nickname – that was Sparky!

One of my issues with being short was my confidence which in turn made me always look at the ground and I never held my head high. This did mean that I never stepped in dog poo! Now I always tried to stand tall, look ahead with my head held high and my shoulders back. Whenever I see someone with a really rounded back it automatically makes me stand straight. My old yoga teacher was forever trying to get me to relax my shoulders but I always carried so much on them that they were never relaxed. Maybe that’s why I gave up yoga – running and ice-skating seem to be having a better effect. I have often thought about taking classes in the Alexander Technique which is meant to help with posture. For now I will have to make do with ‘tall days’ and trying to imagine that I have a book balanced on my head.

Voom Voom went the Electric Car

Actually electric cars don’t go voom voom, they have a more of a stealth mode and can silently move about the streets. My brother-in-law has a hybrid Toyota Primus for work and it is really quiet but also in a deadly way. If electric cars very take off like they are predicting then watch out kids – you’ll never hear it before it hits you. Also, the Primus is the ugliest car in the world (well, maybe after the Fiat Multipla) and has a top speed of around 80mph – boring! My brother-in-law’s company got the electric car for free congestion charge and parking in London, well now the City of London has changed its mind about the free parking. Today they have announced that it is going to axed free parking for it being too successful! This isn’t going to help the environment. Around London I’m always spotting the electric cars – I would say about 30% of cars around town are electric. Shame they can’t make taxis electric, maybe one day.

I’m quite an environmentally-friendly person – ecover washing products and recycling but I also like a nice petrol car. Preferably a fast car but my history of cars hasn’t always been that great. Having fast cars runs in my family, my dad and brother both have or had fast cars. I honestly believe that if my brother had more encouragement with go-karting when he was younger he could have been a rally/racing driver. Back to my history of cars: first car fell apart for being so old and rusty; second car I crash into a friends car and wrote it off; third car got stolen; fourth car was too expensive to run (that also got broken into once). Wow, makes me sound like a bad driver. Those were all my cars after that I have been using my husband’s cars but I still managed to get one broken into and hit someone else in another. I have to say that I haven’t had an accident in years but I do still drive too fast on the motorways – I’m much safer on other roads. My dream car is an Aston Martin, true British and gorgeous looking but that’s never going to happen, so my other dream cars at the moment are a new version of the Fiat 500 or a Mini Cooper that has a Union Jack flag on the roof!

Summer in the UK

Fingers crossed summer has finally arrived in the UK – well, I say UK what I actually mean is the South East of the UK. Most of the time the South East/London does have the best weather overall. Yesterday was nice and warm and so was today. The weather forecasters predicted that the rest of the week will be the same. Now this is amazing since there is two major events starting this week, one is Wimbledon which started today for two weeks and the other is the Glastonbury Festival. Wimbledon is notorious for bad weather – last year was a wash out with extra games being played late in the day to stop it from running over the two weeks. I remember many years ago Cliff Richard singing on Centre Court while it rained and rained. Wimbledon is a British icon with grass playing courts and strawberries. Another thing that is all British and associated with the summer is Pimms with lemonade. It has to be a proper Pimms with all the trimmings; mint, cucumber, orange slice and strawberries. This is a very good way of getting one of your fruit portions for the day!

The other event for this time of year is Glastonbury. The past few years it has rained nearly during the whole four days with images in the press of tents floating away down a river of mud. Now if you want to see mud then Glastonbury when it rains is the place to go. I’ve never been to Glastonbury but I have watched it on TV for the past five or so years. Thanks to Interactive TV I can choose who I want to watch – hopefully this year the BBC will have some of it on the BBC iplayer so I can download some of the really good bands. If the nice weather stays for Glastonbury and Wimbledon then maybe it will stay for the rest of summer, I’m being overly optimistic here but stranger things have happened.

Was it really a Race for Life?

I don’t think it was really a race – more of a walk for lots of women wearing items of pink clothing. What I’m talking about is the Cancer Research UK Race for Life ‘fun’ run that I took part in today. When I started running way back in February I could hardly run for about a minute and then in April I decided I needed a goal, so I joined up for the 5k Race for Life. Training went OK and I managed to run 4k on Wednesday just gone. This is the most I have ever run in all my years so I was feeling pretty confident about the race. As my husband was out today with the car, my parents took me to where the race was being held. It was at Hylands Park in Chelmsford (where the V Festival is going to be in August – I can’t wait for that), which is about 30 mins drive from my home. We get to the park at around 10.30am due to the traffic but still had 30 mins before the official start of the race. The weather seemed ideal for running – cloudy and a gusty but warm breeze. After much hanging about near the start, the race didn’t get going until 11.30am, during which time the weather decides it is actually summer. Out came the sun and it warmed up to about 25 degrees.

It took me about five minutes to get past the starting mark but I had my iPod with me so I could start the stopwatch. Started with a slight jog with lots of manoeuvring through the crowds. They announced at the beginning that there was 6,000 women racing but I reckon that 85% of them were actually walking, not what I would call racing. This caused a lot of problems at the beginning and as the course went around many bends there were a lot of bottlenecks of walkers. This made for tricky running so the first half kilometres was a mixture of running, jogging on the spot and stopping altogether. After about ten minutes things picked up and I managed to get some sort of rhythm. Running on grass is a whole new experience for me and I had to watch were I was going, avoiding dips and the long grass. I got to the 4k mark well and then I started to overheat with the sun burning down and another bottleneck of walkers that I stopped running and walked a good half of a kilometre. I was pretty gutted by this but I decided that fainting in a public place wasn’t such a good idea. At around the 400m mark from the finish, I got back in to the running (as everyone else was) and finished in 48 minutes. Not as bad I as thought considering I walked part of it. A few friends said that I should be OK at the run as the atmosphere of everyone else running will spur me on but with so many women walking there didn’t seem to be any spurring going on. I will continue to run (at home on the streets of Upminster) and would like to have another go at a 5K race, but next time I will make sure it is a mixed race (I can’t see many men walking 5K) and maybe on the streets of London (or some other town), so the course might be wide enough to let everyone run or walk in a more comfortable environment. Now I’m going to drown my sorrows for not running it all by having a drink or two. At least I got an ice-cream at the end of it, thanks to my parents!

White jeans… and photos

After writing about being a man yesterday, today I’m going to write a really girlie post (sorry guys!). How odd my brain works sometimes. I’m going to write about my new white jeans that I purchased about six weeks ago from TopShop while the weather was nice. Of course since then the weather has been pretty rubbish – not as bad as last summer but it hasn’t been as warm or sunny. This obviously means I haven’t even worn my new white jeans so today I put them on for half an hour and stood about it them. Couldn’t really do much else in them as I have to wear my 4 inch heels with them so I thought I would take some pictures of me in my jeans. What else is a girl to do instead… so below is a snap of me in the white jeans. Then I got kind of vain and started taking lots of pictures of myself, most of them not very good but I know have few that I can use on here or on Facebook/Twitter as an alternative. I’m sure I’m not the only person who does this for profile pictures but that is the great thing about digital cameras. Take 100 pictures, delete 90% of them and use 1% for your profile picture. Gone are the days of taking pictures and waiting for the film to finish before getting them developed, only to be disappointed with them. Also, for some reason with printed photos I have a tenacity to keep them forever while with digital photos I will happily delete the rubbish ones.

Obviously I can’t really write very girlie posts as I’m now writing about photography! I had an idea a few months ago to hang some pictures of my family in the hallway. All the pictures will be black and white and I’m hoping to source some black frames. I’m starting with my grandparents as my mum has a few pictures of their weddings – great 1930/40s pictures full of history followed by my own parents wedding photos. Unfortunately my mum told me that they don’t have many photos of themselves apart from the wedding photos but I’m sure there must be some of them from the 70s. I’m hoping there is one of my dad in his mini cooper (before he wrapped it around a lamp post) or on his moped. Then there is one of me and my younger brother when we were little – I must have been about six and my brother about two. Both of us looking very angelic with stripy knitted jumpers. I’ve just got to get these digitise and reprinted and the photos should transform a blank white wall. There are a few other photos that I can remember really well from my childhood (the days of Polaroids!) and they hold very fond memories for me. Nowadays, people have hundreds of photos to choose from if they were doing this all thanks to digital cameras – just were would you start. Also, I wonder in twenty years time if young adults would have fond memories of certain childhood photos – or because of digital photo frames and a high turnaround of photos that they wouldn’t be able to pick one out as a favourite.