29:52

It's not exactly 3:59.4, but I'm proud of it. In my lunch hour, a couple of times a week, I do about 30 minutes of cardio exercise. I used to walk for most of those 30 minutes, then ran for most of them and now, most of the time, run for all of them. 3 miles is a distance I've been able to run for a while, but always in just over 30 minutes. I feel like I've been chipping away at it for ages and today finally beat it by 8 glorious seconds, so if anyone needs me, I'm going to be in my happy place for the rest of the day.

The Blog Entry That Didn't Quite Work

It's tough on these mean streets you know. Sometimes I see something funny and the blog entry pops fully formed into my head and makes me chuckle, which is a good sign that everyone else will be amused and Nikki will roll her eyes in that adorable way that says 'I'm only not laughing because when I encourage you I get a deluge of puns that are nowhere near as hilarious as this one'.

Trouble is I'm mostly only armed with a 1.3 megapixel phone camera, with a lens covered in fluff and dust and other crap from my pocket, so when I see something funny it's hard to get a good photo of it. Especially when I'm driving down the freeway feeder at 45 miles per hour. Take this photo for example...
The sign says "NOW HIRING BOOKEEPER". Which I thought was pretty funny and would make a good basis for a post about an alternative career in ghost wrangling, but then the photo came out crap and if I didn't tell you what it said you'd have a hard time figuring it out and even if you did, your brain, which of course is smarter than the average brain, because you're here, would fill in the correct spelling of BOOKKEEPER and ruin the joke.

Oh, and hello Bruno!

Bangkok - Day 3

Our third day in Bangkok was a national holiday, so entrance to the Grand Palace was free! Though we had to let the King go first. Seemed like a fair trade.

The Grand palace complex is home to the Emerald Buddha, which is carved out of Jade, just to confuse you. Anyway, it's carved from a single piece of Jade, and having seen the huge reclining Buddha the day before I was expecting something pretty spectacular from the even more famous Emerald one. It was mildly disappointing, but sadly, because you can't take photos in the room, I do not have much evidence of this with which to convince you. It's about 45cm tall and, though it may well be a beautiful Jade statue, it's covered in different gold outfits most of th year and surrounded by much taller, much gaudier gold Buddhas that really distract from it.

In the afternoon we went to Chatachuk market, which was awesome. Everything you could think of was for sale. The food was great, lots of fresh cooked stuff that took just a couple of minutes to prepare before you were off on your way again. My favourite was the happy buns, which are little dumplings stuffed with meat or seafood that have smiley faces on them.

All Pain, No Gain

Before bed last night Nikki was brushing her teeth as I got undressed. She leaned out of the bathroom, looked at me and said, "Did you do weight lifting today?"
Delighted she noticed, I replied, "Yes! Do I look buff?"
"No," she says, "You're sighing and groaning a lot".

Top Tip

If you park your car at a shopping mall in Bangkok during a national holiday, leave the handbrake off:

True Love

"Nikki, would you sneak into Jabba the Hutt's fortress to rescue me, if I was frozen in carbonite?"

"Yes"

Phuket Photos

In the home stretch now with the holiday photos. Just to confuse everybody I'm posting these before Bangkok Day 3, because I thought I'd posted that already but just realised I haven't even created the slideshow. Our last leg of the trip was to the island of Phuket, these are photos from Kata Noi, where our hotel was, and from the town of Kata itself. Enjoy.

Morning

This morning I kissed my lovely wife goodbye, collected the tasty looking lunch she had prepared for me and stepped out the door into beautiful sunshine. I took a deep breath of the lovely fresh air, savoured the warmth of the day, smiled at my freshly mowed lawn and stepped off the porch...right through a huge spider web at face level.

Earning Lunch

Nikki and I took a nice bike ride from the house to the rather high running bayou, all the way along to Morningside, which brings you nicely into Rice Village for lunch and a pint at Two Rows, before heading back:






(There should be an embedded map from Map My Ride there, but it doesn't appear to be working, you can check it here instead while I get on the blower with the Ian and Nikki tech support idiots. I knew we should never have outsourced to Bangalore.)

12 Miles total and a guilt free delicious pint. What could be better?

My New Hero

"See this animal poo, see what's in it, bit of seed, lots of hair, even a bit of bone. These tapered ends tell me this is more than likely a coyote poo."

Bear Grylls. Host of Man vs Wild on the Discovery Channel and a man who knows a little too much about poo. Realising he had found coyote poo, he knew there must be a way down from the top of the bit of Copper Canyon he was on, because coyotes couldn't live at that altitude.

He got down to the bottom and then treated himself to a delicious meal of still alive scorpion, which apparently tastes like cheese that's been left out for 3 weeks, only worse. He cut the stinger off first, obviously.

Then he got excited about finding a wee bit of wire, which seemed a bit much until he rubbed it in his hair then stuck it on a leaf in a bit of water to find out which way was North. "Keep the wire, get rid of the leaf, drink the water..."

Exactly what I was thinking Bear.

Vegas

We now take a break from the recent holiday pictures to show you instead some pictures from our weekend trip to Vegas, which was more of a mini-getaway than a holiday and is only referred to as a holiday here in order to keep consistent labels.



I should also, being honest, let you know that the photo of the woman who played Tanya in Mamma Mia was taken, not during the weekend, but the previous Wednesday.

It was a fun trip. I forgot how much I enjoy Vegas. Nikki discovered previously untapped roulette skills. We went to downtown Las Vegas too, we'd only ever been to the strip before, so that was pretty cool. We're very tempted to stay there next time we go. The Golden Nugget has one of those big slidey tube things into its' swimming pool that actually runs through a shark tank at one point. It's transparent, but I assume you're moving pretty quickly, so I'm not sure how much time you would have to get freaked out, but still, pretty cool.