Crickety downtime

I was kinda hoping to be falling asleep in front of the telly today and tomorrow.

Friday - England v South Africa in one day cricket
Caturday - Twenty20 domestic finals day

Friday's England game was effectively a washout, with the day being "will they ?" "won't they ?" with heavy showers interspersed with occasional dry spells. Hoping for better tomorrow although I'm expecting the rain to intervene again.

Definitely needing the downtime as I'm definitely not feeling right at the moment. I suspect I'm having issues shifting to this different diet. I've had trouble adapting to taking mineral supplements before so putting the greens back into the diet too ?

How am I doing at the moment ?

Structurally, my legs are fine. I have maximum power available, even if I can't use it when I'm not on a cricket field (max power = slippage = sore bum). Ok, maybe not 100% ok because for some reason, my left achilles has decided to clamp up and go tight. No big deal.

My legs are still a mess though. It's going to take a while for all the surface damage to repair itself. That'll be another advantage of the downtime this weekend, no work trousers to sandpaper the healing away.

My muscles have been rebelling too. I run a fine line before my muscles go into a cramping up tendency. I suspect some of the healthy options stuff I've been eating/drinking have had too much salt in there. That's what tends to get my muscles into trouble.

Oh - yesterday was good. I was supposed to be at a meeting at a contractor's office in the middle of Bristol for a 10am start. I'm thinking - leave around 9am, that'll let me miss the worst of the rush hour traffic as they'd be at their offices by then. I actually left at 8.50 and was on the motorway at 8.55. I was still on the motorway at 10am ... And this is for a trip that's supposed to take about 15-20 minutes total.

Meh. There'd been a lorry break down on the motorway, which caused the initial traffic problems. But what compounded it was a little Citroen dropping the contents of its radiator into the inside lane. And what made that into a major problem was that it wasn't pushed into a refuge that was less than 50m ahead.

Deeply meh. I'm still on my learning curve so I didn't contribute as much as I'd like but I think I learned enough and contributed enough to make it worth me coming. That learning curve is pretty huge at the moment but one of the things I've always been good at is taking in and assimilating new information.

News has been active lately. There's 2 stories that especially catch my eye - a playboy Prince (which I'm not going to say anything about except for "silly boy" for getting caught) and exam results.

I got used to being top or near top of every class at school. This was in the days when GCSEs were just coming in and they were a decent test. I got 6 A's and 4 B's (iirc!) at GCSE. The B's were English Lit, French, History. Coulda been 3 Bs and the rest A's.

However ! My GCSE results and those of the other kids in my year have been made irrelevant by more contemporary results. The A* result didn't exist when I did my GCSEs. It was added because too many kids were being allowed to get A grades. Over the years, the pass rate has gradually gone up and up. There's a couple of reasons for that :

Past papers allowing more practice
Easier marking

Both reasons are valid. What's caused the controversy this time around is that someone's decided that English GCSE results could be permitted to have a lower pass rate than previous years ...

Good on 'em ! But what it has done is provoked huge "how could this be allowed ?" controversy.

I have a huge problem with exams anyway. They teach the wrong behaviour. Rote learning for facts isn't particularly useful in modern life. Knowing how to attack questions and hunt for information is what's useful. Knowing when to say "I don't honestly know but I will find out asap" is the most useful thing anyone can say. It's far better than just guessing. Guesses can be very dangerous.

But then again, for some techniques rote learning is key. If someone was doing medical stuff on me, I don't want them to be looking it up in a book ;-)

I'll leave it there cos my fingers are getting itchy for a bit of gaming. I have a contingency plan in case the cricket is hit by the weather - Guild Wars 2 early activation starts tomorrow morning. And I suspect that as soon as I log into Steam and get spotted, a certain SteamGirl will be looking to drag me into GW2 :-) I have a feeling that SteamGirl has her eye on the Eurogamer expo at the end of September. I think she'd have liked to drag me off to Gamescom which just finished over in Cologne, Germany.

That's something really good for a struggling ego - someone who I've only met in person once (and she thought I was 10 years younger, pre-diet!) and who is highly amusing to natter to over Steam chat and wants to drag me off to places :-) What's stopping me ? I really don't know. Although I'd pin it on that one track mind that had me looking elsewhere somewhere closer to home for quite a while.