graculus

This year's summer holiday was a trip to Ireland, first to Dublin for WorldCon and then off to the west coast for a few days. To be honest, if it hadn't been for the convention I would have jumped the train to the coast after 2 days in Dublin, as I'd pretty much done all the tourist stuff last time I was there and it was just noisy, crowded and I didn't enjoy it all that much. Probably not helped by discovering that the hostel where I was staying was on a street where idiots people were making noise till 3 or 4am every night. The hostel itself was fine, as I was staying in a 4-bed single sex room, and definitely didn't want to spend the kind of money it costs to stay in Dublin in August. I had thought Helsinki was expensive!

Enjoyed the con a lot, which is good because it'll probably be the last WorldCon I make it to unless Glasgow wins the bid for 2024. Can't see me making the trip to the US any time soon and I'm definitely not off to NZ for next year's edition. Though it probably won't suffer from the horrendous queues that Dublin did. The other downside was that there was nowhere to sit and actually have a conversation, which is always a good part of any con.

Then I got the train to Sligo, as I figured it would be less busy than Galway, and it was great. A beautiful part of the country, some of it very reminiscent of the national park nearest to me - lots of sheep and heather and rolling limestone hills. I got to go kayaking, though only on Lough Gill as I didn't organise myself too well, and the highlight of the trip was definitely the neolithic stuff. There's a big concentration of megalithic stuff in that area, including a cairn on top of a hill that I didn't make it to which I could see from my hotel bedroom window.

I went to one particular place called Carrowkeel, which has a number of passage tombs dating back to about 3600BC and which were way less attractive to passing tourists because you have to hike for a mile or so to get to them. Next time I'd like to get a proper map of the area, as there were more neolithic elements around that area which I didn't get to see, but you can go inside the cairns which have been excavated. The best, you have to crawl into down a passage that's about 3' x 3', then it opens up into a central chamber where the roof is about 8' or so and you can stand, with other smaller chambers and shelves off it. There's another one like it, where you have to squirm in past a stone that almost blocks the entrance, again where you can stand up inside.

And then it was back home, as for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to get the train back to Dublin rather than flying back from the regional airport near where I was staying. Not sure what I was thinking when I organised all of that.

We're not officially back at work yet, though tomorrow is the date when we're officially supposed to be 'available' for any meetings etc. though ours all seem to be on Friday. This meant I couldn't avail myself of the bargain trip I was offered to go on the whale watching survey again, as it doesn't finish till Saturday, so I'm trying not to torture myself too much at the moment by reading the posts from that trip. Grrr.

I'm also trying to get ready for the new fencing season, which means regular practice and trying to get a routine of gym attendance as well. First competition of the season is in 2 weeks and so far the line-up in my weapon is all veterans (myself included) and the 2018 national senior champion. She was almost the 2019 national senior champion as well but lost in the final. You can probably imagine how much I am looking forward to possibly fighting her!

Yes, it's another one of those.

Currently off work for the Easter holidays after a flurry of exams and enjoying the lovely weather - hopefully this will continue, as I'm off to Scotland in a few days and another boat-based survey. The forecast is mostly good and I have a new pair of wellies after my old ones split during the last trip. I'm spending a couple of days up there before we sail out, partly because I wanted to visit Kilmartin Glen, which is a massive collection of Neolithic and Bronze Age standing stones, stone circles and rock art. And there's also a site where beaver have been reintroduced in the same area, so I'm hoping to spot them too!

Fencing continues to be very up and down but I've managed to tick off another of my wishlist - this weekend I fenced my first veterans competition and managed to come 6th out of 17. I missed out on getting a medal by one hit, as I lost my round of 8 fight 10-9. We have the national veterans championships in a few weeks, so I'm feeling like I won't be completely out of my depth in that competition after all.

I've been offered a bit of a change for September, as I've been asked to teach an evening class twice a week. That means a move from two days teaching morning and afternoon to two teaching afternoon and evening - there's a few hours between the two and it doesn't interfere with the nights I fence, so it doesn't really make a great deal of difference to me (not having commitments around children and so on, like some of the other folks I work with). Anyway, we'll see how it all looks when the timetable gets finalised in a month or so.

Lots to do before I head north, as I've spent an entire week being a sloth and it's been lovely. :)

Well, that subject line's probably not completely fair because what I just experienced wasn't directly caused by me, but the concept still stands...

( In which my holiday gets affected by a Canadian who didn't live up to the stereotype )

Apart from this, I enjoyed myself and got a bit sunburned, as well as seeing lots of minke whales, harbour porpoises and Risso's dolphins (a new species for me!). I also got to go back to Lunga and visit the puffins again, this time when there was literally just us there and not a boatload (or two) of tourists!

You'd be forgiven for thinking I didn't go on holiday this year, since I may have mentioned it in the run-up to actually going but then haven't posted anything about it over here - folks who follow me on Twitter will have seen some flailing about the trip, for reasons I'll detail in due course, but that's it.

A couple of years ago, I went to WorldCon in London (that's the World Science Fiction Convention, in case anyone reading this was unaware) and at the time there was a bid in to host a future WorldCon in Helsinki, Finland. In its lengthy history, the majority of WorldCons have been in the US and I was keen to support the idea of it being this side of the Atlantic again, so bought a supporting membership. The bid was successful and 2017 was therefore when it was due to happen - in 2014, it seemed like a long way away! Anyway, I felt I should support this plan in person and, if I was going to go to Finland, it seemed like a good idea to have other things to do...

Which is how I ended up with this year's holiday - first off, a week's hiking in a National Park near the Finnish-Russian before heading back to the Baltic, a few days in Turku (medieval capital of the country) and then back to Helsinki for the con and whatever else I felt like doing. That was also how I ended up getting up at 4am to drive to the airport to get a flight to Amsterdam, then to Helsinki and then another flight north, to Kuusamo. Or at least that was the plan, until Finnair overbooked my third flight and I got stuck in Helsinki for 18 hours.

I've travelled quite a bit and this is the first time that I've ever been caught by overbooking. I think I've been lucky in that I once got stuck in Paris on the way back from a trip to Canada, but that was because the flight in was delayed and I missed the connection, not the airline selling something it didn't actually have. What other business is allowed to work that way? The only positive thing I can say about Finnair was that as well as organising a hotel & meals, they gave me compensation there and then, while other airlines have a bad reputation for expecting you to claim later and then, oddly enough, taking forever to pay you back for what you've spent.

My main concern was that I was due to join a group and knew that they'd already left the Kuusamo area and travelled into the middle of nowhere, as well as being due to go bear-watching that afternoon and that was one of the main reasons why I'd chosen that particular trip! In the end, I spent the majority of my compensation on a very long taxi ride from the airport (200km, to be precise!) and arrived just in time to bolt down a cup of coffee, run to the loo and then go bear-watching. The bears were awesome and I'll post some pics at the weekend.

The rest of the week was spent hiking 10-15km a day, with our luggage being taken to the next place we were staying, then sauna and a swim in the lake if you felt so inclined (which I did, in two different lakes, while others in the group younger than me chickened out). I also had a go at canoeing for the first time - I've kayaked before, but this whole thing with one paddle and switching hands is far too much work! The only downsides to the trip were the mosquitoes, which loved me greatly despite bug spray, and that it was too early in the season for cloudberries by about a week! They were everywhere in the bogs we were crossing and I only found one that was ripe the entire trip. :(

Then it was a flight back to Helsinki and a train to Turku for a couple of days. It's a nice, compact little city and I liked it very much, though one of the main attractions was being able to go kayaking in the Baltic for the day. The trains in Finland are significantly cheaper than in the UK (though this isn't difficult) and I definitely recommend them.

Once back in Helsinki, we had a complementary travel card for the bus and tram system as part of being a WorldCon member and this got used a lot - I was staying in the city centre, near the train station, and could either get a commuter train (10 mins) or a tram (25-30 mins), usually depending on whether I could be bothered to walk to and from the respective train stations, since the trams were also frequent. I only managed to get a bit lost once, waiting for a bus that never arrived and then deciding to walk (and walk and walk) before spotting my hotel from a distance and navigating towards it by guesswork. That was also partly caused by my not trusting my instincts, as partway through this journey I'd got on a tram that was actually going the right way then second-guessed myself and got off a couple of stops later.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how easy Finland was for me as a vegetarian, though I think being a vegan might be significantly more difficult. Helsinki in particular seems to have embraced soy as an alternative to meat - the local burger chain, Hesburger, was doing soy burgers and tortillas, for example - while I ate a lot of potatoes and vegetables, it wasn't anything like as one-dimensional as my trip to Newfoundland a few years back where I pretty much lived on grilled cheese sandwiches for most of my time there.

Anyway, back to WorldCon. I think my main criticism would be about the panels, but that's probably because I've been spoiled by other conventions, NineWorlds in particular. The panels were short, scheduled for an hour but really limited to 45 minutes to allow for people to get to the next panel, which then turns into 30 minutes plus time for questions. There was a problem on the first day about getting in to some of the panels as well, with the convention having to organise some additional panel rooms for subsequent days, which meant that even then people were leaving panels early - I don't really see the point of going in the first place if you're going to do that. As a result, most of the panels I went to felt a bit lightweight and at least one suffered from a lack of robust moderation, or a moderator who wouldn't shut up and let the panellists talk. It was ever thus, I guess!

I knew a few people at the con but felt the lack of people to chew stuff over with, which I've become used to. Anyway, the next European WorldCon is going to be Dublin in 2019, so I guess I'm going to Ireland again in 2 years time! Hopefully more folks I know will go and help keep me entertained.

In general though, I'm glad I went and Finland is a very beautiful but expensive country. I ate a lot of chocolate and licorice, although the salty licorice they love so much (salmiakki) is vile and I don't know how anyone can eat more than one piece. I wish I'd been there for cloudberry season and also that the mosquitoes didn't love me so much. And yes, I did sauna naked - it's traditional, you know! - but put on a swimming costume for the lake because we weren't the only people there. I highly recommend the sauna + lake combination if you ever visit...

Sorry, this blog is probably going to be quite fencing-heavy for a while now. *shrugs* For some reason I'm finding it hard to concentrate on books and nothing has really grabbed me, while other than the picfor1000 challenge I've signed up for again, no writing is going on. I've started booking my trip to Finland this summer, so perhaps more on that later?

So, an update on the club competition - my team lost by one hit. I'd been told it was close but hadn't realised quite how close it was! I could have been sharing the very ugly team trophy this time around (and yes, it's really hideous, it's a glass thing of indeterminate shape rather than a proper cup or something) if not for that one hit.

The regional comp is now a week and a day from now and I've finally succeeded in my quest to get some of my fellow newbies to enter too. I'd been badgering them for weeks, as I didn't really want to go on my own (not that I wouldn't, but I'd rather have company!) and finally a combination of pleas and pestering has carried the day. So there's going to be 4 of us in all, maybe even 5 if someone else gets his arse in gear in time. \o/

Of course, since a foil competition is coming up soon, our coach decides that last night was an ideal time to start teaching us epee instead. Which is basically 'where would you like to stab your opponent today and it's okay if he stabs you at the same time, it totally still counts'. None of this ridiculous right-of-way and who attacked first business, so much easier to referee in that you just see whose light goes on. I'd been thinking about doing epee some time this year anyway, since there seem to be a lot more competitions, but I wasn't really thinking quite yet!

Anyway, more news after the competition next weekend. ;)

As mentioned above, I've also started booking stuff for my trip to Finland in the summer. As well as going to Helsinki for WorldCon, I've booked a hiking trip beforehand (including bear watching) and then a few days in Turku as well. So far I've booked internal flights and my Turku and Helsinki hotels, so just the main flight and Turku-Helsinki train to go. Though at the moment July seems a long way away and I'm currently trying to decide if I want to go anywhere before then, even if just for a few days.

Finished everything in terms of work on Friday, now to get off on holiday. Tomorrow I'm off to the Scottish island of Mull for about 10 days, though given the weather forecast it's quite possible I may decide to come home before then, as I'm camping and the forecast is Not Great. Still, as long as I have coffee and books, I shall struggle on heroically and see how it goes!

I've got a couple of trips planned, but didn't want to over-organise myself and I'm also hoping to use my newly-refreshed navigation skills at some point - I've actually used them already, since I went out to the Peak District and got slightly turned around so then had to use map & compass to re-orientate myself. For map nerds like myself, discovering WH Smith were doing a sale on Ordnance Survey maps was just too much to resist, so I now find myself the proud owner of maps covering the entire Peak District National Park and also Mull (for obvious reasons).

Today is packing day as I'm leaving early tomorrow and driving up to Scotland, though I also need to go and see Ghostbusters this morning and drop the lone ferret off at the local pet place - they're looking after him and the woman who helps run it is so excited about having him. She has ferrets herself but this is the first one they've had to board, after a false alarm a few months back when someone called about boarding a parrot and she misheard them. It's literally over the road from the local vet, so if old and cranky turns into old and sick, he's as close as possible. All my washing is done and I want to pack the car tonight, though I'm still wondering if I've chosen enough books for if I do get stuck on a waterlogged island! ;)

Photo spam on my return, assuming that I didn't spend the majority of my trip underwater! :P

I managed to lose my house keys yesterday so had to call a locksmith, which I don't recommend not because said locksmith wasn't a really nice guy (he was) but because it cost a load of money. Since he couldn't pick the lock, he had to drill it out and replace it. And I'd just picked up my car from its MOT and was rejoicing over the fact that it had passed without needing anything done to it. Knowing how my income works, all I could think was 'well, that's x hours teaching'. :(

I'm very much enjoying working part-time but the drop in overall income is not so enjoyable - I used to travel a lot more, but now what with teaching in term time and the money thing that hasn't really happened. However, we have a couple of people retiring in July so their hours should soon be up for grabs. We run a load of ESOL courses every week (weekday mornings, afternoons, late afternoons, most evenings and even Saturday mornings) at various levels and in four different centres so I'm really glad I'm not the one who has to timetable it all!

I'm trying to get out more on my day off and also really want to have a proper holiday at the end of our year (the week before the schools break up), to the point where I've been offered the possibility of more work by the university but they want me to do more training and I'm probably going to blow that off in favour of going to Scotland for a week. Going to conventions is nice but it's not really a holiday, you know?

I also got invited to stay behind this week at fencing and train with the rest of the adults for the first time, so I must be making progress; that means I got out of warming up again, as I was still very much warmed up from my lesson! At the moment, there are only two women turning up regularly (both of us relative beginners), so that means I got to fence a couple of teenage boys this week in addition to my fellow learners - I don't mind losing, though it's frustrating, as long as I've given it a good shot and hopefully taken at least one point off them. I'm now about halfway through my first set of lessons so I can definitely see myself carrying on past that, though I plan to delay buying any equipment for as long as humanly possible.

Final reminder for London-based or London-adjacent folks that I'm off to that London tomorrow for a couple of days and you are welcome to join me/meet up for dinner and/or mooching around various museums with myself and other folks who've already indicated they can get with the program!

Please message me if you want to know the finer points of our agenda, though it roughly looks like this:

Wednesday - Black Georgians exhibition in Brixton, pumpkin curry

Thursday - Cosmonauts exhibition etc. at Science Museum, Tintin exhibition at Somerset House, also food

Friday - Celts exhibition at the British Museum, also food

So, because I am dumb and didn't realise that the con actually starts bright and early on Thursday (tomorrow! eep!), my train doesn't get into London till about 3pm. Which means, by the time I have schlepped across to my hotel (Travelodge London City Airport, in case anyone was wondering) and then back to ExCel to register, I'm aiming for 6pm as a reasonable time to actually make it to a panel.

It's far too boring to list all the panels I'm looking at, but if anyone fancies getting dinner one evening, this is where I'm likely to be of an evening-meal-eating time:

Thursday - Capital Suite 9 from 8pm (two panels in the same room from 6pm!)

Friday - Capital Suite 7 from 9pm (after the 'Beyond Bechdel' panel, which I am determined to attend...)

Saturday - Capital Suite 14 from 8pm

Sunday - looking tricky at the moment as I currently have panels from 12 noon right through to 8pm when the Hugo Awards start. Clearly something will have to give!

Monday - Second Stage at 1.30pm. Maybe Monday is a good day for fannish get-togethers, if we haven't managed it already?

And on Tuesday I'm planning to go to Greenwich, for both the Royal Observatory and the National Maritime Museum, with a side-trip to the church I included in one of my stories to check out some details on it and a visit to Mamuska for some lovely Polish nosh. Anyone wanting to tag along to any of this, please let me know!

*points to title of this post* Though I'm not certain it's really a Bank Holiday as the sun is shining...

Been back just over a week from my trip to the Outer Hebrides but still haven't quite got my bearings yet or indeed unpacked completely. It was an odd trip, mostly because I'm not that used to staying in B&B - hotels have been much more my thing and it's quite a different approach, particularly for the anti-social amongst us (me, in other words). The only downside about travelling on your own - which is otherwise great, because you get to do exactly what you like, no need for negotiation or compromise - is that you get to listen to the inanity of other people without any kind of buffer.

The Hebrides themselves are extremely beautiful. I have hundreds of pics I need to sort through and that was despite the fact there were a couple of days where the weather limited what I could do. The way of life is like stepping back in time - the resident population of the entire archipelago is only about 28,000 and even when you add tourists (considering I was there at the start of their tourist season) it's never going to be that busy. Most of the time, wherever I was, I had the place to myself. The top half of the islands, everything is closed on Sundays and even outside there, most shops close at 6 and restaurants don't serve food after 9.

There were lots of people cycling the islands (which seemed like quite a masochistic pursuit to me - they're not that hilly, but the weather is very changeable and the wind can be evil) - not to mention the hordes of folks with campervans. This is a place where the majority of the roads are single track with passing places, which takes a little getting used to, as does the cavalier attitude of the livestock to the concept of vehicles. I'm used to sheep, though the Hebrides sheep are much more cocky than any I've encountered before - I'd been told that sometimes you have to 'nudge' them with the car to get them to move, but fortunately I didn't meet any that were quite that recalcitrant - and then there's the Vatersay cows. Yes, the cows on that particular island are notorious for their liking to lie down in the road, not to mention apparently making a special detour to it when it comes time to defecate, since there seemed to be more cowpats on the road than in the surrounding fields.

I'd hoped to get the chance to do some kayaking while I was up there, but sadly it was a little too early in the season, so if there's anything that gets me back there then it'll probably be that as much as anything else. That and just how relaxed the place is, if you get into the swing of things there, not to mention the fact that while it's supposed to be one of the best places in the UK to see otters I didn't manage to spot a single one. :(

In other news, before I went away I've been doing some work on the house and garden, discovering yet more joys of BIY (bodge it yourself) from the previous owner. This is a guy who thought it was a really good idea to just plaster in water pipes running along an outside wall without insulating them first, so that when the inevitable burst pipe happened one winter I ended up with a massive mess before I could get the burst fixed. Those pipes have now been boxed in instead, in case of future calamity.

He'd also built a raised bed in the garden which was falling apart, so this year I decided to pull it to bits and replace it. Digging down, I discovered that he had pulled up a bunch of paving slabs underneath it (fair enough) but had then just thrown the resulting rubble into the raised bed with the earth. I now have a nice pile of broken slabs to dispose of, but I do have a proper raised bed in which I am attempting to grow vegetables. At present, pumpkins (which are finally coming up even though I planted them before I left for Scotland, delayed by the poor weather), garlic and beans.

I had all sorts of plans for catching up with various shows and writing too while I was away, none of which really amounted to anything, though I did read a lot of fic. When it came to updating the recs pages on my website, I discovered all sorts of issues with them which led to a complete overhaul and this led to a general sort-out over there. All sorts of things were on AO3 that weren't on my site and vice versa, though the latter is mostly stuff I can't quite bring myself to re-read (SG-1 fic, I know your ears are burning...) and I'm not sure if it should be more widely shared. Or if there are even still people reading that fandom, fcol. ;)

Also I have written a thing, (a Magnificent 7 fic) which makes me hope that I can continue to make some progress on the other stuff I need to finish.

Okay, I think that's sufficient rambling for now...