How much? My head Hertz.

Picked up a hire car from Belfast International and was scratching my head about estimated rental cost.
It took meticulous inspection of the invoice to find that apparently £100 of it relates to bringing car back with an empty tank, having not paid for a full tank.
So, I guess I'd better not forget to fill 'er up before dropping the car back at the airport.

KiA 2010

A taster video from Les 2 Alpes.
The main omission is footage from the Coupe de Yop and anything of interest from Ian's video.
I've not included the audio soundtrack for this, but for the full effect, try playing Have a Nice Day (Bon Jovi) in the background.

Pancake day photo

time to move...

Given that I'm paying money for a website hosting service, I've finally uploaded some blogging software onto that website and will probably be moving away from blogger.
With the new website, I can add additional people as guest bloggers, add all kinds of customizable and pointless widgets and potentially, only cede copyright, data protection and privacy rights to my web hosting company rather than to Google and the whole of the interweb. :-)

Pancake pizzas

Pancakes served with tomato sauce, bacon and melted cheese. Mmmmm.
just a bit different from chocolate pizzas...

Somewhere near bridgend...

There's at least one robin in Wales which has no fear.
Hence probably the best wildlife shot I've ever taken so far...

For-Ethiopia

A fund raising event for For-Ethiopia went ahead on Saturday and was a great success, combining Ethiopian food, information about the charity, 'Irish Bingo' and a charity auction. Also had the inaugural speech from the charity patron, Dr Alice Roberts who is sometimes seen on BBC TV.

I was somehow roped into giving a 5 minute presentation about what the charity is doing during the evening too. In actual fact, it took about 9 minutes... :-)

At the end of the day, the event raised nearly £4000. Partly helped by some great auction items - including a week's holiday in a holiday cottage just inside Dartmoor National Park, sleeping 8 people (to be taken anytime except July & August). And all the proceeds from the auction go directly to For-Ethiopia projects. There are some generous people out there. Even in a recession!

Bristol Half Marathon

Me at 9 miles...

Bristol Half Marathon

It's done! The training paid off and I did a Personal Best (PB) for a half marathon - 1hr 37mins and 9 secs.
Just for fun, I quickly did a spreadsheet to calculate my split times and so graphically, you can see how I did. Generally a poor start and slowed up at the finish (mainly because that's where the course went uphill and downhill and also where the cobbled sections started...


It's amazing how you can quickly make a blog boring by the addition of graphs!
OK, for some amusement here's some video footage of the morris dancers who morris danced 13.1 miles!

Training run

Went running today... Apparently there's an iPhone app which uses the phone GPS to track your movements. Just waiting for the iPhone app which actually burns the calories for you.
I plotted my route today manually. 2 laps of the Downs in Bristol is apparently about 9 miles.
I got passed by someone while running, but then tweaked my running style and passed him again. I think I run a better when I've got some competition...