I love food, me

a whole trolley full of fish and fruit & veg today - I love this time of the year here for the fruit especially - water melon, strawberries, raspberries (a present from the guy at the fruit stall), loads of cherries. the fact that you can't get it all year round makes it special for the couple of months (weeks in the case of the cherries) that you can.

and lunch was a plate of fresh grilled sardines with bread.

brilliant

the fourth round of the Mountain Bike World Cup was held in Casa de Campo at the weekend so we went along on Sunday to watch the races. We went last year too and I'd forgotten just how exciting it is. We met a couple of friends from the club and rode around the park stopping at various points to watch the action and take (loads of) photos (look over there on the right to see if I've managed to link to flickr or something). They are terrifyingly good. Not even the huge thunderstorm on Friday night which made the course muddy and slippy could stop them getting up La Subida Infernal. The crowd were awesome too - there were hundreds of them cheering the riders up the hill, several wouldn't have made it without the support.

One of the guys from the club also brought along his trailer for me to try on the back of the bike. As we're wanting to do the Camino de Santiago next year we need a way of carting our stuff around. We originally thought we would get panniers but after speaking to Agustin, he recommended a trailer instead and offered to let us try out his. So when we met on Sunday morning I hitched the trailer to the bike (it has its own QR which you put in the rear wheel instead of your usual one). It was GREAT! You obviously notice a bit more weight when carrying the girls' rucksacks up a hill but other than that you hardly know it's there - we did climbs and descents and rocky bits and it handled them all without a grumble. We handed it back at the end of the day but it's definitely the way forward for next year.

just shut up

I like the Spanish, really i do, but they don't shut up, do they? I'm thinking particularly of meetings and presentations at work - at any one time there are about 4 different conversations going on around the room which makes it much harder for me to understand any of them (and contributes to meetings laster longer than WWII's reparations negotiations.)

ups and downs

on sunday evening sandra and i popped out to casa de campo for about an hour for a quick ride (we'd done a route on saturday morning so it was really just a quick spin of the legs) and had one of those rides that will be filed under "just-about-perfect". It was a lovely warm spring evening, the trails were dry, we found ourselves in a part of the park i didn't recognise (the first time in many months that that's happened) and the bikes were clearly in a good mood.

not being able to think about anything else subsequently has made work a bit of a slog but then that's why they call it work, i guess

first post

I guess this is supposed to be some sort of introduction...but all that will have to wait.

First things first - how the hell does this thing work