And in other, less interesting, news...

 ...the last week has been a mixture of happenings. As it should be, I suppose, otherwise it would be boring and totally uninteresting to my only reader...

Last week was the last few days for us at our Striders Athletics Club to finalise the last few bits and pieces for our annual Tortiose Tuff race. We had a meeting of the committee on Tuesday at the Sports Club, ironed out a few things, saw the Race Convenor's blood pressure rise just another notch or two, but generally come to the consensus that we were ready for the day. And it gave us another reason to have a couple of drinks and socialise a bit. Like that was ever a problem in Striders...

Before that, in the morning, I went for my longest (to date) recorded walk. Because I have the couple of cracked/damaged ribs, I can't go cycling (insert crying emoji here) so I do what's next best to get some exercise and whittle away a couple of hours. I hadn't intended to walk that far, but once I was out there it was a case of "ok, let's just go there..... right, let's go there next" and before I knew it, I was over 5km from home. And the thing about walking or cycling, the further you go out, the more you have to come back. Still, it was a great way to spend a couple of hours. Sedgefield lends itself to wanting to see the nature around it.

Wednesday saw me take Mum on her weekly "breakfast and shopping" outing to the local Spar. Mum doesn't get out much because of her OCPD (emphysema) as the slightest bit of physical motion gets her breathing all erratic and she struggles to walk further than a few metres. But, this being her weekly outing, she braved the ramp up to the restaurant, where we had coffees and breakfast. It's good value all round which helps. And the light shopping that mum does is good for her mobility too.

Wednesday was also our weekly Striders-Time-Trials-followed-by-copious-amounts-of-alcohol afternoon. It's a great club, jokingly referred to as "a drinking club with an athletics problem" by many of us members. A fantastic bunch of friendly people that enjoy a good drinking session, a bunch of laughs, and each others social company. We usually, and tonight was no exception, get thrown out of the club at closing time by the friendly barman. Okay, the usual closing time is 8pm, but that's Sedgefield for you, where the average age of folks is probably around 70 and almost everyone is in bed by 9pm. Still, I wouldn't choose to live anywhere else these days. Maybe one day I'll go to bed by 9pm too...

On Thursday I went for another long walk, again unintentionally. What started off as a beach walk, ended up in a bit of bundu-bashing too. Coming off the beach at the Groenvlei Beach parking area where I was going to turn around, I instead decided to carry on on the gravel road back to Lake Pleasant caravan park and, from there, back to Sedgefield. All was progressing well until I got to said caravan park. I knew there was a locked gate separating the park from the eastern end of Sedgefield, but I figured there would be a pathway around it on one or other side of the gate. Wrong. I found what looked like an overgrown path off to the left of the gate and proceeded into the bushes. About 15mins later, I'm sweating buckets (not good as I hadn't taken any water with me), the path has fizzled off to nothing more than a faint movement of the long grass and dead branches which was probably made by a big mole rat, and I'm thinking that if I didn't know where the cardinal directions were I would probably declare myself lost. By the time I crash through the growth, scraping my legs and arms in the process, about 10mins later I'm cursing myself an idiot for not just having retraced my initial steps and gone the long way round. Ah well, it was an experience and a lesson in survival too...

Friday morning was spent relaxing a little, while the housekeeper did her thing moving bits and pieces to show me she'd "cleaned" there, making a lot of noise with the vacuum cleaner and floormop. At 15h30-ish, I went round to my "Mr Miyagi", my very good friend and cycling mentor, to collect an amplifier and car speakers that I'm interested in buying from him. I want to put the amp into the bakkie to complement the door speakers, which aren't performing to their full potential and need some boost to bring them in line with the new demonic active-subwoofer. That done, I head to the Sports Club with my Barefoot Bowls team members, N&S, who are also lodgers at my friend's place.

Barefoot Bowls is a bi-annual event arranged by the lawn bowls club. Essentially, it is supposed to be for people who want to try the game, have either never played, or are not active in the game. Aside from the last two weeks, N&S have never played, I have only played in the event for the last two weeks and before that about 40-odd years ago when I was shown by my then father-out-law. Turns out, he was a good teacher. I recalled a lot of what he taught me. We practice a few minutes while our opponents get their team together, grab a beer and get ready for the game. This was the third out of the four week tournament. We had lost our first game by a single shot, and won our second by three shots. Not bad for amateurs, I thought, and we had a ton of fun with our opponents on those weeks too. This week was different.....a lot different. At the end of the game, I came off the green embarrassed for myself. I felt like a hustler. It was one of those days when I could do almost no wrong and just about every shot went where I wanted to go. It was a team effort though and we came off the green having beaten our opponents resoundingly by 15 shots, which also won us a bottle of wine each having been the second highest nett-score team. Next week will be the last in this series and it is a fancy dress event, so it should be even more fun.

On Saturday, I was up at 4am, out of the house by 5am, for our annual Striders Tortiose Tuff race day. We were hosting four races on the same day, a 10km run/walk, a 21km run/walk, a 30km run, and a 3km fun run for the junior members of the community. We have been planning this event for the last four months or so, and today was the day. Lots of activity in the morning setting up gazebos, assisting the official timekeepers to set up their equipment, making sure things were going to run smoothly for the enjoyment of our athletic guests.

By the end of the day, a little after midday, all the athletes were in, prizes were handed out, and we had tidied up the school grounds we had hired as our event venue. It was a huge success with only a minor glitch caused by the timekeepers who had given us the wrong names on one of the distance categories. The prize money for the categories was the same, so it didn't make for too much of a hassle. And the Emcee's microphone battery ran down as well, so we had to scurry around looking for a spare for a few minutes.

The surprise came late in the afternoon, however, when our club chairman posted a photo on our committee WhatsApp group that he had received from one of the athletes enquiring whether we knew about it. See if you can spot the mistake...

No? Some of you may also have noticed that I intentionally misspelled "Tortoise", twice, on this blog posting. Found it now? 

How embarrassing for us as a club.... So far, we have only had that one query about the spelling of the event...and we're hoping that that's the only one. Our chairman will spin it as a brand name though, I'm sure, as the race itself is "Tuff" and not "Tough".

Here's a link to the official race posting and photos. Enjoy...

And so ends this week. The Chinese F1 race is over and I predicted correctly that the young Australian driver, Oscar Piastri, would win. He has been driving consistently well this season and was due for a win. Congrats to him. Later on this afternoon I'm off to friends in Brenton for a Dop 'n' Tjop evening...bring-and-braai, in other words. There'll be some tanning of meat on an open flame and I'll probably crack that bottle of red wine I won at the bowls. A good way to end the week, I think...Next week will bring other adventures...

Look after yourselves out there, folks...