unironedman

Well sometimes you just get bored. And as S said, you will need another bike helmet. I mean, feck it, it’s not like I need an excuse to buy more shit from Lidl. I have my own Lidl store here in the office, and a subsidiary under the bed.

But the bike helmets in Lidl are sort of gack. Silvery-white colour with some abstract stripes down the side. And a rear light. And one of those really pointless ‘visors’ on the front.

Pimping your ride:

Step 1: remove visor and toss into the recycling. Stick the little black plastic stoppers in the holes where the visor was, if you didn’t already toss them as well…

Step 2: buy a can of matt black spray paint (from where, I hear you ask? From Lidl of course. Don’t ask daft questions…). This one was designed for cars.

Step 3: cover the areas not to be sprayed with masking tape.

Step 4: give it a few coats and allow to dry.

Step 5: buy a metallic gold marker pen from the local art shop and get to work. (Lidl do stock them on occasion, but it’s good to support your local art shop, right?)

What you do, design-wise, is up to you. I went for the floral, Mexican Día de Muertos look. There is a small skull on the back but you can’t see it in the pic.

So. Two lids. Hmmm. Let me see. What else do I need two of? Where are my runners…

In other news, S managed to spy the Cormorant that has taken up daily residence along the Liffey above the weir. These are seabirds, but they have no issue heading upstream in search of food.

And I say Cormorant, but the more I see it, the more I think it’s a Shag.

It has that greenish hue of a Shag, but one of the main ways to tell these seabirds apart is size, and without a comparison, it’s hard to say. Well, for me it is.

Next time I’m heading down to the woods, I’ll bring the binoculars with me, and the camera with the zoom lens. It’s not the best in terms of a zoom, but it should get me closer, and solve the mystery.

More anon.

Training? Oh yes, I nearly forgot.

Good pacy run on Saturday but spent much of the weekend in the garden, pulling out old brick and stonework, and generally doing fairly heavy-duty chopping of wood and smashing of concrete with a sledge. My back has lodged an official protest, and an old injury (more than likely sustained when hauling heavy amps up and down stairs when I used to do pub gigs) flared up straight away. Much Deep Heat was rubbed in.

A handy swim of 1,250 metres this morning helped ease it a bit, but it’s still sore, so I wasn’t exactly heart-broken when news came through that Pilates is off tonight. It was to be the last one (next week, no doubt), and I hope to build some of the routines into my gym work. They are great core workouts. I will go for a run instead, in sha’ Allah.