Snaffled from… well. Almost everyone, really.

Not long now until the Embra Tri. Ohmilord. There really is no getting away from it. My name is up on the competitors list.

The swimming is coming along nicely. I estimated 11 minutes for the swim leg and I’m a comfortable 10 right now. I’m counting on my generic bike fitness to help me bring me up to speed over the next four weeks, and that just leaves the run section to panic about.

Still. Competition is an excuse to buy kit, and I have employed my talent of tracking down Borgtastic outfits to come up with this. Better than that nasty Cannondale/Ironman thing I was looking at.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It’s supposed to be fun!

Munky just sent me a link to a news story about another baby seal found in an impossible location.

Nick Green, animal collection officer for the RSPCA, said: “Wild seals don’t like being around humans at all, but this one seemed really quite tame, which suggests he could have been a pet.

“We can’t understand how he got there.

“He was found in the middle of a farming community, nowhere near the sea.

“It’s bizarre. The sea and the nearest river are a long way from the spot where he was found.”

What’s going on, folks? Have we got some form of Marvelised mutant whose superpower is the fantastically useless ability to put baby seals in stupid places? Is this some grand practical joke on the part of the Grey Seal Community?

This is getting a little too weird.

I made another new avatar.

I think this one is fab and groovy.

This year’s best birthday card poem goes to S’leste and Mark with The “MADNESS” hamsters:

This is Munky‘s fault. I should be out running, not fecking around creating new avatars.

Told ya.

Munky obviously spent a lot of time splicing and dicing this thing. Not to mention adding the shortbread red soundtrack!

Good job that man. Now excuse me while I shamelessly pilfer it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FewUecYCQ7w]

Munky made me a new avatar!

So. On Tuesday Munky and I decided to go for a walk to the end of the harbour. You can see the end of the harbour from our window, and the lighthouse that blinks on and off at night. It was a nice day and it seemed a reasonable enough thing to do. We had plans to go over to Embra and visit Run and Become but it wouldn’t take long to walk to the end of the pier.

The pier is part of the old disused harbour, past the flour millers:

It’s sort of run-down and dilapidated. They’re probably going to develop it soon. We walked a bit further on and saw a gate:

Luckily the gate had a gap in it so we could squeeze through:

We refused to be daunted by the nasty wire:

And before long we were nearing the end of the pier:

It was all a bit Silent Hill, really:

We had to climb some steps:

You’ll never guess what we found. We certainly wouldn’t have guessed it would be there. We were so astonished by what we found that we spent the entire trip home asking each other whether we’d really seen what we thought we’d just seen. Munky had to go back to take these pictures, because otherwise we couldn’t be sure we weren’t imagining it. How had it happened? How had it got there? Did it fly? Was it magically transported by one of the Tomorrow People? Had it been dropped there by a very, very, very large seagull that had been hoping for a nice snack? Was it the result of some little known superhero with a practically useless superpower?

How? Why? What for? All these questions tumbled and whirled around in our heads and we were so confused we failed to make it to Embra but hung around at home motorboating instead.

What was the source of this confusion? Why, I’ll tell you. Morris. That’s what. Morris was the source of the confusion.

Morris is a grey seal pup, and we have absolutely no clue how he made it along quarter of a mile of harbour wall, through a fence, up two flights of steps over another broken fence and into the hut. No idea at all.

And neither did the very nice man from the SSPCA who came about an hour and a half later to rescue him.

I tell you: Morris may look unbearably adorable, but he was a vicious little blighter with a temper problem and big bloody teeth.

That’s why we had to put him in a bag:

There may be video of that at some point, if Munky gets around to putting it on YouTube.

So. It was my birthday on Sunday. I am now ancient and haggly.

Munky came to visit, all the way from deepest, darkest Devon., to offer tips on triathlon training, go cycling and swimming, thrash us mercilessly in Buzz and rescue a seal.

Yes, I did say “rescue a seal”. More on RB, Munky and the Trapped Morris later. There are photos. And video. Although you’ll have to wait even longer for the video.

Munky brought me a binary explosive (AKA two miniatures of sloe gin, yummy), a Stewie keyring (“Oh to be the Lindberg baby right about now!”) and elastic laces for my tri shoes, which are fab and I will be trying them later.

Frood and I split the cost of a Sony NW-S205F. Excuse me while I go all geeky for a moment.

Oh. My. Gods. This thing has a 2GB memory in a flash memory stick that weighs the same as the fluff on a hairy caterpillar and is slightly larger than the remote unit for the Sony minidisc I was using. It is a shiny sexy silver and it fits underneath my On-One jacket. It is water resistant and shock resistant. So far all of this is enough to make me wet my pants, given that my kit is generally used for tough sporty activities and I get fed up with having to make sure it stays dry and coddled (even so both minidiscs are starting to give up the ghost).

But then you look at the features. Features!

In SPORTS MODE you can play songs using the automatic selection function in which the player changes the playlist automatically depending on your pace of movement, like walking or jogging.

Now I thought that the three-shake shuffle play feature (bored? Just shake the player three times and it reverts to shuffle play!) was cool. But a player that can select playlist by BPM depending on how fast you’re running? Dear gods. I shall have to make sure I put the rest of Space Tribe and the Crystal Method on there.

Oh. OK. No. It just detects whether you’re walking or running and you need to tell it which playlists are for walking or running. But even so, a nice short chillout playlist for the cool-down or just strolling along the beach. How groovy!

And if all the music playback, stopwatch and other miscellaneous things weren’t enough, you tell it your height and weight (which it reassuringly tells me in the operations manual does not get sent to the computer by the USB connection) from which it calculates your stride length and then gives you an idea of calories burned and distance travelled. I shall be comparing these to known numbers later.

My only niggle with it so far is that the buttons are very small and fiddly to use wearing full-fingered gloves and the sound quality isn’t too great in the headphones, which is an issue with the headphones not the player.

So that was fab.

Thanks to all those who sent birthday wishes. I’ve been concentrating on having a bit of a chilled time over the past few days, which I desperately, desperately needed. Those of you who know what has been happening will understand. The rest will just have to take my word for it.