PigPog

Just a quick one before I head off to work. On Sunday July 20th I will be taking part in the Race for Life at Westpoint in Exeter, alongside fellow Slimming World members from my old Monday night group.

Please sponsor me!

I’m doing the race this year for my Mum, who is recovering from bowel cancer, my old pal from Notts Jackie K, who has also kicked cancer’s arse and, yes, I’m also doing it for me. Two years ago I signed up to do the race in Nottinghamshire. But I was too unfit to go through with it, so I chickened out at the last minute. Now, over 10 stones lighter and walking at least a mile a day anyway, it seems like a good way to celebrate how life has changed.

I wanted to get a Sports Racer t-shirt but I doubt it would arrive in time for the race. Maybe one of these would work just as well…

Any support you can offer through sponsorship would be greatly appreciated and rest assured Michael will be waiting at the finish line with his G9, filming me at the end.

Good luck to everyone else doing the race, and well done to everyone who’s done it so far. Looking forward to joining you all.

Week four in my new Thursday night group, and I’m already feeling the benefits of Katrina’s full-tilt, gung-ho, I’m gonna get you to target if it kills me, you and wipes out half of Tiverton spirit. Some Consultants take the comforting, gentle approach which works well with nervous newbies (me, last year). Katrina however, bless her heart, gives it so much passion and welly that you can’t help but run out of her group screaming…

> Grrrrarrrr! I’m gonna take over the world!

And it’s that all-guns-blazing spirit that’s going to take me to my target weight of… er… um… haven’t quite decided that one yet.

Anyway, on Thursday night I was fired up once more by a 3 and a half pound weight loss, taking my total weight loss back over 10 stone and seeing off almost all of the amount I gained around my birthday. So when Katrina asked who was up for a challenge, my response was…

> Grrrrarrrr! Bring it ON!

She passed around a bag, containing stars with numbers on them. Each number represented a challenge on Katrina’s Challenge Board – because all good Consultants are part coach, part counsellor and part game show host. As Image Therapy kicked off, she revealed the challenges on the board. They were:

1. Eat at least 5 pieces of fruit or veg every day before any syns.

2. Drink at least 4 glasses of water each day.

3. Use a food diary, honestly, for 7 days.

4. Have at least 10 different Healthy Extra B’s this week.

5. Speed food – each day have at least 5 ‘S’ or ‘SS’ foods

6. No more than 10 syns each day for the next 7 days.

7. Cook a new Slimming World recipe this week. (can be a simple one!)

8. Do at least two Success Express days.

9. Donate £1 to charity for each pound gained.

And finally…

1. Katrina will give you £1 for each pound you lose!

Not surprisingly, there was only one star in the bag with number 10 on it. I drew number 7. But, as I was fired up and ready for action, cooking a new recipe just didn’t feel like enough, I felt the need to up the ante. So I threw down the gauntlet and offered a challenge of my own… If I manage challenges 1 through 8, then I qualify for challenge 10. She accepted my challenge and I ran away from the group screaming…

> Grrrrarrrr! Guess that buggers up my plans for going to the chippy tonight!

I’m now on day four of this insane mega slimming challenge and I have to say that for the most part it’s going rather well. It just requires a great deal more thought than usual, especially now I’m working on challenge 8 and trying to get my head around Success Express (that’s when you divide your plate up into thirds and have Original and Green in the same meal). So far, so good, so get your chequebook out, chief! Or pay me in HiFi Bars, either’s good.

So yeah, fired up and ready to rock. The only thing I need is some backing music. And when I think about pushing up the ante, only one song springs to mind. When you’re ready, Mr Kilminster:

Following a link from an ad on The Show, I had a look around PhotoShelter on Friday, and decided to apply.

I submitted ten images, but didn’t actually regenerate them to match their requirements. After reading their standards later, they should have been saved with AdobeRGB, not sRGB, should have been output at a higher JPEG quality level, shouldn’t have been sharpened, and shouldn’t have had their colours played with as much as I did.

So, I’m quite pleased that they accepted three of the images, which can now be bought for use as stock photos. If you want to see what got accepted, here’s my photo page. I’ve submitted a few more now, so hopefully some of those will join the initial three soon.

Submitting the images wasn’t too difficult – very similar to uploading to Flickr. For generating images with the right settings, I’ve made a new export profile in LightRoom, and I’m creating second versions of some images so I can do more colour tweaking and add vignettes for the copes that I’ll put on Flickr, while keeping the ones for PhotoShelter a bit cleaner.

Why PhotoShelter rather than one of the many microstock sites? A few reasons:

• Most microstock sites I’ve looked at have very precise standards for submitted photos, with many wanting really huge files. That’s extra time and effort to produce the files, and extra time to upload each one.
• Very small payouts. They are geared up for selling images as many times as they can, but the payment per sale is usually only a few cents.
• Most will only accept ‘perfect’ images, with very little style to them.

I’d end up spending a lot of time and effort doing the sort of photography I don’t really enjoy, with relatively little reward.

PhotoShelter seems to have a chance of more payout, though that remains unknown until one or more of my photos actually sells, but they accept images of they type I actually enjoy taking.

I had a couple of days off this week, so I walked with Sam as she was going to work, then walked back home. We walked around by the River Exe on Thursday morning, to kill a little time before Sam needed to be at work. Someone had disposed of a rusted old moped by parking it in the river.

I can never resist photographing rusty things.

A couple more:

Sam and I volunteer at the local Blue Cross animal shelter, giving the animals some social time. Yes, they need people to volunteer to walk dogs and play with cats and kittens.

This weekend, we were having big problems with PigPog, so we didn’t have as long as we usually do. We decided to skip the dogs, and just do the cats. The cats had recently had some play time, so they asked if we’d mind playing with kittens instead.

Well, alright then. If we must.

The first bunch were lively, and wanted to explore everything. Some of the others didn’t want to get out of bed, so we had to crawl on the floor to get to them. All good fun, though. More pictures:

I used flash for the first three, but it seemed to be making them nervous, so I turned it off. I got very few decent shots after that, but they did occasionally stay still for a second or two.

Sound like fun? Contact your local Blue Cross centre – they’re very grateful for volunteers, even if you are only doing the most fun things.

Once I started to build up a bit of a collection of fountain pens, I started to want a way of displaying them. A nice old wooden CD rack made a good display stand for ink bottles, and Sam’s mum bought me a little glass cabinet for a few more bottles to go in. The pens, though, still lived in a leather pen wallet, hidden from view.

I recently bought a bookcase from a colleague (thanks, Sarah!) We only had a half-plan of using it for extra storage in the bedroom. Then, when we reached Tiverton market, after yesterday’s walk, there was a cabinet maker’s stall. There on the stall was a pen cabinet, for £27, which seemed like something of a bargain. I bought it.

I then realised that with a bit of moving of shelves, it could fit nicely into the bookcase, with plenty of room for other things. So here it is:

Here’s the pen cabinet itself:

If you want one of your own, it was made by Colin Holmes, based in the Exeter area. He’s available on 01392 259392, and he’s at the Tiverton Panier Market on the second Saturday each month. It’s a nicely made cabinet, and holds 36 pens.

We needed to do a bit of shopping in the market, so we drove into town rather than walking. Since we still wanted a walk, we headed in to West Exe after brunch at Mad Hatters.

We found a fairly sizable park we didn’t know about, with a bright colourful playground…

Even the ground was colorful.

Next to that was something I haven’t seen for years – an open-air paddling pool. Apart from a couple of sweet wrappers and leaves, it was even quite clean.

Further on, there was a bandstand.

A pine cone on the bandstand steps seemed a good time to go all arty and monochrome.

Locks just weren’t enough to protect whatever was behind this door.

Back towards the town centre, I couldn’t resist another shot of Devon’s great electric systems.

In town, at the top of Angel Hill, there was a window with a doorbell. There was a door further along the wall, but it was several steps away.

Along St Peter Street…

Warning light on some scaffolding:

A Volkswagen Campervan in a cool colour scheme:

Finally, we were warned about glass.

Quite a short walk in total, but we’ll walk more today. We had shopping to do, and kittens to cuddle.

Update3: The problem never stayed away, and got worse. I tried upgrading to Drupal 6.x, but our hosting has such an old version of MySQL that we can’t run Drupal 6.x. I then tried a fresh installation of Drupal 5.x, fetching the current version of every module we need, and enabling things gradually. So far, things are pointing at the search module again, but I only stopped the problems by deleting the search module and emptying all the search tables. Disabling the module didn’t stop lots of locked processes updating the search_index table. We’ll see how things go from here, then.

Update2: Running without the Image module didn’t fix it – it happened again. We now have the Image module enabled again, and a few other modules disabled. PathAuto is included in this lot, as I’ve heard it can have performance issues with a lot of paths (we have over 1,000). If things stay stable this way, I’ll probably try updating PathAuto to the latest version and enabling it again.

Update: This turned out not to be the case at all. The next batch of images I uploaded were ok, but the next after that caused the same locking problems without the search module running. I’m just going to abandon the image module for now, and maybe have another go when we upgrade to Drupal 6.x.

A GoogleFood post – there’s probably nothing of interest here, unless Google has brought you to this page when you’re trying to work out why Drupal keeps making your server crash, run very slowly, etc, after you’ve added a batch of images.

I think I’ve got to the bottom of this problem now, so I’ll post this in case it’s any help to anyone later.

I was using Drupal 5.x, with the Image module. I was importing images by uploading them using FTP, then using Image Import to grab them from there and add them to the site. When doing that, the first time you view the images after adding them, Drupal has to generate the various sized versions. I always went through viewing each image to let this happen, because it took a while, so I didn’t want visitors wondering why their browser was hanging if they happened to be the first to view an image.

At some point while doing this, the site would stop responding, and I found I couldn’t even stop/start MySQL through my host’s control panel. I had to log a call with them to get things going again. The first time, the database wasn’t working properly afterwards, and some repair was needed.

After a few more tries, I found that what was happening was that MySQL had a number of locked processes. The number of locked processes seemed to grow until it was too much for the server, and MySQL would stop responding. After a while, Apache usually died too.

From the look of it, it’s actually the Search module causing the problem when it tries to index the images. Generating the different sizes is a slow process, and can make things look like they’ve hung for a while, but nothing is locked, so it gets there eventually. Once I disabled the Search module, though, I could set lots of images off to generate sizes, without locking any tables. phpMyAdmin was good for troubleshooting – use Show Processes to see what’s going on. Try disabling the Search module, and see if the problem goes away.

We now have to decide if we can do without the Search module or the Image module. I think Search will probably be the one to go, replaced with a Google search box.

…hubster and myself took a long, long drive up to Manchester. It was a hot, sticky day and I think Michael would much rather have stayed home and shaved his head with a cheese grater. But because he’s my husband, and my best friend and has the patience of several saints, he drove me the 200+ miles up the M5 and M6 for one very special reason. To see this man do what he does best:

This was the show that pushed me through the doors of Slimming World back in April. All I wanted to do back then was lose as much weight as I could in the two months I had between then and the show. I managed two stone and felt good, but sadly not good enough to make it through the wait, the support act and then have enough energy left to cope with the sheer assault on the senses that was VR live.

I did, however, thanks to the persistence of my good friend Tania, manage to get to the front for a little while and found myself mere feet away from the legendary celestial being known as Slash. I stood there like a rabbit caught in the headlights while this fabulous creature widdled away on his Les Paul.

I made it 20 minutes through the set, and we left the heaving Manchester Apollo to the opening bars of this tune:

Which has stayed with me ever since. This fight will by my last fight. I’m going to nail this thing. And if you’re on a Food Optimising journey yourself, so will you. This is the best plan, the best group and they have the best support. As they like to say over there… together we can do it.

Greetings Sports Racers. Sorry, hubster and I are currently working our way through one year of the show with zefrank and it’s kind of rubbing off. We’ve been spending the weekend discovering each other’s power moves, which was just as much fun as it it sounds.

Anyway, yes, that diet thing. As you may have guessed from the Take-That-Covered-By-Lolcats title, my enthusiasm for Food Optimising is back with bells on. Really hit my stride last week, but sadly not soon enough to avoid a 3lb weight gain. Bugger. Having decided to take the gain as the ass-kicking I desperately needed, I’ve been able to stay on plan ever since.

So, armed with a 5lb weight loss target for the week I’ve been Optimising like a good ‘un, and walking further than I have ever walked in my entire lazy life. A total of 10 miles over three days probably doesn’t sound like much to real sports racers, but it’s a major achievement for me.

Anyway, as I aim to make the last two days before my next weigh-in count as much as possible. I’ll be doing Original (free lean meat and fish) days with loads of speed foods (like ordinary free foods but with go-faster stripes), plenty of water and exercise. Don’t know whether I’ll make that 5lb target, but I’m back into the swing of it, and that’s worth a vid or two. Oh YouTube..? Show me what you’ve got by way of Ashes to Ashes clips and classic 80s rock…

Ashes to Ashes – the clip from Episode 6 that made Philip Glenister the Coolest Man on Earth. Amazing scene.

And for your 80s rock course, a song that really neatly sums up how I feel about this whole malarkey.

I’m hoping to post more often this week, and also hope at some point to start doing video posts. Eek.

Till then, this is pigpog_s dieting so you don’t have to. Or something.