While I’m generally frustrated by my lack of progress in the running department — I’m sure I should have my short route down to below 20 minutes by now, and not get home and melt into a pile of grease panting about the heat — the swimming is coming back to me. Forty lengths today, crawl (can’t do breastroke because of my knee, so I have to do crawl, no excuses) in a sniff under 25 minutes.

This not kicking lark is surprisingly effective. Although I’m not entirely convinced by the advice to use my boobs as a hydrofoil.

An antidote to X3. The worrying thing is that I know that episode of the original series and could tell you exactly what the plot was.

Before it was pimped. With a pimp cane.

Snaffled from Estara.

Seductive Vampy: You were made to make a grand entrance, from that revealing ensemble to those come hither eyes. You are the sex scene. It’s because of you that Goth girls have reputations as being total sex bombs. Go on, you know you’re gorgeous and so does everyone else. This makes it a bit hard for your friends not to backstab you, they’re so jealous of you aren’t they? Your life revolves around what parties/clubs you are going to attend and which sexy new boi you are going to snare. You can dress yourself well, regardless of how much money you have to spend and you always look glamorous. Most people tend to think you are a shallow slut; however there is more going on then they could ever know. You’re certainly not stupid. You’ve realised that life is too short to be chained to one unappreciative guy. You wear your slinky, sheer dress and skirts so that maximum flesh exposure is guaranteed. Your motto is “Catch me if you can”

Take this quiz!

I SO need a picture of that big blue thing with the flower on its head from Samurai Jack. The cute one. Huge and blue and it had flowers on its head and flies buzzing around and briefly turned into a ginormous terrifying monster to kill the cowboy robot bounty hunters.

Ties for best episode of Samurai Jack ever with Peach Boy. Oh, and the one where he learns how to jump.

Please don’t try to talk me into doing PBP 2007. I know I was planning on doing it but I have no chance in hell of completing an SR series this year, and that would mean qualifying with no experience of an SR in the first half on next year. And we’re kind of short of qualifying options this side of the border.

I can’t think past completing the Dun Run on fixed this year anyway. I hear the lovely Mrs Pike is going to be doing it on her accidental Pompino. Does this mean we have a Sorority Fixie Chicks peleton this year?

The men don’t stand a chance. We’ll break their hearts. They won’t be able to ride properly for the discomfort they will be experiencing in their shorts. Hot chicks on fixed bikes wearing skimpy lycra while feasting on jelly babies and midnight espresso.

I wonder if I can remember which field it was in which MVC and I had our little diversion last year.

• 9oz butter
• 3oz light brown soft sugar
• 6 oz golden syrup
• 2 oz maple syrup
• 13 oz porridge oats
• 1oz each dried cherries, blueberries and cranberries.

Grease and line an oblong tin of about 14 x 9 inches. Or yay big. Leave the greaseproof paper dangling over the edges – this makes it easier to remove the finished flapjacks. Grease the tin but not the paper. Preheat oven to gas mark 4. Stick everything except the oats into a saucepan and set over a low heat. Stir until the butter has completely melted and the mixture is smooth (except for the lumps of dried fruit). Add oats and stir together well. Pour mixture into the prepared tin and smooth down with the back of a metal spoon. Bake in oven for about 20 minutes, until it is just turning brown at the edges. Do not leave any longer than this otherwise the resulting flapjacks will be tough and lose their moistness.

Once baked, remove from the oven and score lines across the top for the individual flapjacks. Leave to go completely cold and then lift out of the tin using the greaseproof paper and cut along the scored lines.

Yummy and addictive. And so not low or even moderate GI. But there’s soluble fibre in the oats and they make fantastic cycling snacks.

I think I’ve worked out what I’ve done to my knee.

I think I’ve wrenched the MCL there on the right. Bugger. This does not fill me with the same sort of woe and despair as the thought of tearing my ACL does, especially as I can apparently still run and walk and swim on it without it hurting too much. Doesn’t hurt at all when I cycle. So I don’t think I’ve torn it. Just bruised it a bit. Or whatever the technical terminology is.

Oh, and when I went snorkelling yesterday at Elie, taking advantage of the gorgeously baking weather, the vis was really poor and I got smashed into a rock, so I emerged from the sea dripping wet and with blood pouring out of my leg. Nice. Plus I forgot that the neoprene boots would rub the sunscreen off and I have very sunburnt feet. Ow.

But hi to Katie, whom we met in Embra yesterday and who went on to be talked through rescuing a fledgling corvid. Me on one end of the phone, Katie and the baby jackdaw — now called Brian — on the other. I did try not to laugh at the noises. Brian is apparently doing well.

And also much respect to Run and Become, who were very patient with me on Saturday until eventually I settled on a pair of Asics Trabuco VIII trail shoes. In bright orange and silver. Very non-girly.

Frood bought a pair too — only the men’s version, obviously — completely independently. How strange. I mean, he was going to be buying shoes, but strange that he should buy the same shoes.

Of course when we went running last night I ended up melting into a panting heap while he found it relatively easy, even though he hadn’t been running since school. Bastard.

There’s an interesting article in this month’s East journal comparing carbon credits and neutralisation to Catholic plenary indulgence.

Plenary indulgence was, of course, the pin upon which the film Dogma hinged. I liked the part where Serendipity the Muse says: “The plenary indulgence loophole? …Leave it to the Catholics to destroy existence.” Anyone who has ever been in the company of a bunch of grizzled old Gimps whinging to one another will recognise that particular form of griping.

So anyway, Bill Leverett makes the point that not all the offsetting programmes out there are good, and a lot of them are just cashing in on people’s environmental guilt. The plenary indulgence loophole about which Serendipity was so scathing was one of the factors that led to the Protestant reformation, largely because of aggressive, unscrupulous selling of indulgences that didn’t really do what they were supposed to.

A good scheme should have additionality: no point claiming to be neutralising your impact if your money is just going to support something that would have happened with or without you coughing up for it. It should have permanence: fossil fuels are releasing carbon from a permanent store into the atmosphere, and so anything that can release and will release the carbon you pay to be sequestered isn’t doing the job of compensating. It should have simultaneity: in order to mitigate the effect on the climate, an equivalent amount of carbon should be sequestered at roughly the same time as that being released. Finally, it should be obvious that we should be able trust the project: you need to know that your money is being spent on locking carbon away to make up for that which your activities are releasing, otherwise there is absolutely no point.

This raises an obvious issue with the most popular carbon neutralising projects, which involve trees. Trees eventually die and the carbon they store goes back into the cycle. Also, a tree will eventually reach the point where it will no longer store any additional carbon. They also fail on simultaneity.

Unfortunately the only real solution is to reduce your carbon footprint in the first place. But in the meantime, don’t get caught out in the plenary indulgence loophole: if we buy into that too much then we’re going to end up sorely disappointed.

Snaffled from Estara:

You Are a German Shepherd Puppy

Intelligent, quick witted, and a bit aggressive. You’ve got the jaw power to take a bite out of anyone you choose.

My knee still hurts. I am grumpy.

But I can’t think what it was.

Abhasana has requested that I talk some more about my breasts. I’m not entirely sure what to say about them. There are two of them, they have darker areas on the front commonly referred to as ‘nipples’, they are fairly evenly matched for size, are free of tattoos and have so far escaped being scarred in some accident or other (unlike most of the rest of me), neither of them has a name, and Frood says they (each) are a perfect handful.

Although I suspect this latter is dependent on the hands in question being his. Or at least the same size as his.

There’s that bloody ant again.

My knee still hurts, by the way, although I think it’s just a strained ligament or tendon. It gets painful under rotation with a straight leg, down on the inside of the knee. Other than that it’s fine. I can run on it, cycle on it: I just can’t do breastroke kick. So I might have to take a break from the pool for a few days, or at least allow my distance to take a knock because I can’t do crawl for 40 lengths.

Not yet anyway. Although on Friday I discovered that I can still swim a length underwater (well, other than the painful knee), and more easily than I used to be able to. So there’s striking a blow for experience over youthful enthusiasm.

I’m rambling here… oh!

I remember!

I really fired this thing up to tell you all about this bloody weird dream I had the night before last in which my feet were bitten off by a shark whle on a job. I came round from whatever incident led to this and Munky and gecko and Maura and Estara and Ro and a few other people were there and they were all telling me how sorry they were and how dreadful it was but it was fine because prosthetics these days are really very good and I wouldn’t miss them. I looked down initially I felt stumps and there were my bandaged legs, still bloody, but I blinked and then there were my feet. I could feel them.

Everyone told me that I had phantom limb disorder, that my feet weren’t really there and my brain was filling in that they were, even down to making me see them there. I just pointed and said: “Look! Toes!” I could wiggle them. The toenails were quite dirty.

I remember crawling about on my hands and knees for a while because it was too painful to walk, but eventually I made myself stand up. My feet were still there for me even though everyone else was horrified because I was apparently walking on bloody stumps.

Not that exciting, then.

Last night — well, this morning, after the alarm radio had gone off, which explains a lot — I dreamt that I had to go and rescue Wolverine. When he was provoked into being angry and violent he was his usual, hairy barbarian mutant self, but someone had done something to him so that whenever someone shouted at him in a DJ fashion (“It’s the top of the hour! Time for a record. Here’s Free with You Ain’t See Nothing Yet and then we’ll take you right over to the news room…”) he turned into Chris Moyles.

Which, frankly, is a fate worse than death. Poor bastard.

Suggestions, comments, ridicule and mockery in the usual fashion…