Always Expect The Unexpected..

So…  last night I went to watch grandson Harry play in a football match.  It was a friendly end of season game between the Rugby Club and Football Club youths.  He plays for both teams but elected to play for the rugby club on this occasion.  Harry is my grandson who is just taking up cycling.

We were enjoying the evening in the sunshine watching the game.  Harry had scored a goal in the first half.  In the second half he went into what seemed a fairly innocuous tackle and all of sudden he went down in agony and I and everyone else around heard a crack!  My daughter was on the phone straight away, without going to Harry first, to call an ambulance.  She knew, as did we exactly what had happened.

The way his legs were crossed we thought at first it was an ankle that was broken, but when the ambulance crew arrived they suspected a fractured femur, the big bone in the thigh, in fact the biggest bone in the body.  Its not easy to break and given the nature of the collision I am surprised it did break.  It seemed like ages while they treated him on the pitch, it had already taken them about half an hour to get to the scene anyway.   It is quite a way from the ambulance station but it seemed like ages.  Thats the trouble with living in the country I guess and I know they have to take a lot of care and follow procedures.  They gave him gas and air to breathe and told him thats what they give pregnant ladies in childbirth!  That went down well.  In the end they followed that up with a morphine injection.

I have to say though that through it all Harry was very brave and suffered in silence except when his Dad, thinking it was an ankle problem tried to move his leg to arrange his ankles better by touching his thigh.. wrong !!!

As the access road to the pitch was so bumpy the ambulance crew considered getting a helicopter to take him to hospital but in the end decided not to, mainly because it would probably have meant he was taken to Oxford about 60 miles away instead of Milton Keynes, about 10 miles distant.

The prognosis as of today, the day after is that hopefully they will pin the bone tomorrow and he will have it in for 6 – 8 weeks and no plaster cast.

So no more cycling for him for a while I guess.  I am thinking he should maybe try to concentrate on cycling when he is fit and able again.  I will definitely encourage him in that direction, especially as he is already showing signs of being a natural.  For a 15 year old he has quite an impressive sports accident record so far.  He had an ear half bitten off a year or so ago at rugby and now his broken leg playing football.  Lets hope thats the end of it.

So yesterday evening turned out to be nothing like I had expected at the outset, but who could have foreseen that happening.

Absence Of Miles…

I have had exactly a week with no bike riding as of today.  I was going on the Team MK ride today but I did something to my ankle yesterday and it gave me a lot of pain in the night and I didn’t want to aggravate it more by cycling with it.  It still hurts a bit now but I will take a ride at my own pace tomorrow.

The reason for no biking was that we took the caravan down to Devon to visit family and also have a short break.  It was the first trip of the year with the caravan.  It was supposed to be a first run after winter before our annual month long visit to France which should have been on 3rd June.  This has now had to be postponed until later in the year but the inaugural trip of the year still took place.  I did originally think about taking my bike but we were away for such a short time and the schedule would only have allowed for one bike ride so I decided to leave it at home.

We had found a beautiful place to stay on the edge of Dartmoor.  It was a small farm/smallholding in a very secluded spot.  One of the Caravan Clubs certificated locations.  They are all small sites that are only allowed a maximum of five caravans.  There was only one other caravan there when we arrived and another one arrived the day before we left.  Not exactly busy, just how we like it.

Our ‘pitch’ right at the top of the field.

In between family visits we found time on a grey morning for a trip  along the coast from Dawlish to Teignmouth and then on up onto Dartmoor, by which time the sun had come out.  We had a very enjoyable visit to the small village of Widecombe In The Moor.  We had a walk around the village and explored the church  and churchyard.

Widecombe In The Moor, Church

Widecombe In The Moor, Village Green

The day before I had also made a solo trip to Dartmoor to check out Haytor which the Tour of Britain cycle race will be climbing later in the year.  I must say I don’t envy them.  Its pretty steep whichever direction you approach it from.

The top of Haytor, Dartmoor

View down from the road at the top of Haytor

View down in the other direction.

You can see these photos and lots more in greater detail on my photography blog site if you care to visit.  Click the link here or the link in the sidebar.

Exciting Sunday At Watford

Or..  Sunday Afternoon At The Vicarage…

Some of you may or not know that when it comes to football the team I support is Watford FC.  they were the nearest team to where I was raised in Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire.  Once upon a time I would go to every home game at least and even some away games too.  These days due to the expense of getting there and the cost of admission I am reduced to watching on TV at home.

This Sunday Watford were involved in the second leg of the play off semi finals against Leicester FC at Vicarage Road..  Watford were trailing by 1 – 0 after the first leg at Leicester.

I was glued to my settee in front of the TV after my bike ride yesterday watching the ups and downs of the game live.

The game came to an exciting climax in stoppage time which is more than adequately described by this video of a TV sports reporter giving a match update to the studio.  I didn’t see this at the time as I was watching the game itself but when I found it afterwards I watched it over and over.  I hope you find it amusing too….

I now have to go through it all again on May 27th against whoever wins the other semi final tonight between Brighton and Crystal Palace.   The final game will decide who is promoted from the Championship to the lucrative Premier League of English football.

Time Flies..

Well, where did those four days go ?  We had family to visit from Good Friday until today, Easter Monday, and it seems like only yesterday we were preparing for their arrival !  They do say though that time flies when you are having fun.

During the course of the weekend we went through the spring time change, putting our clocks forward by one hour.  Maybe the loss of that one hour is what made the time seem to go quicker?

So now we have some nice long evenings to look forward too and can make use of the after evening meal slot for outdoor activities.  Hopefully the weather will play its part soon and start behaving itself as it should at this time of year.

The Felt bike will emerge from its winter hibernation at the next available opportunity, probably tomorrow afternoon.  Thats another sign of approaching spring and summer weather hopefully.. its about time for it I think.

Idle Hands..

The racing at Milton Keynes Bowl that I was supposed to be marshalling was another event to fall foul of the weather and was called off.   So, In the absence of any cycling today, except from the televised kind, I passed some of the time selecting some photos to add to my photography blog, Brian Goldsmith Photography.  Just click on the link here or in the sidebar if you would care to take a look.

I created the site a while ago but due to the weather I haven’t  been able to get out and take any photos to add to it.  So this afternoon while the snow was falling I searched out a few from last years archive, just to make it look like a proper site instead of an empty one.

It has snowed pretty much all day today although there doesn’t seem to be much to show for it.  There is probably about a couple of inches at most in the garden.  I suppose it was thawing almost as fast as it was falling.

Header..

I have been being playing around with my header in Photoshop Elements….

A Quiet Day At Home…

After a flurry of activity, over the previous few days with blog changes and setting them up there has been a distinct lack of outdoor activity.  I have neither been cycling or photographing.

Yesterday was mostly spent re-organising my photos on the computer and the external back up/storage disc drive.  Those RAW format files take up a lot of room!  I converted the photos I have already edited this year to .jpg files and moved them on to the Computer hard drive.

The RAW files are around 22mB each picture, once converted to .jpg they are around 14mB as a lot of data is stripped from the RAW files when they are converted.  My plan is to keep an untouched copy of the RAW files just as they are downloaded from the camera as back up on the 2TB external drive.  Also another copy of them on there converted to .dng files.  I will work on editing these .dng files with Adobe Lightroom 4.  Once edited I will  copy them to the Hard Drive in .jpg format for printing or posting on the internet in further reduced size.

On a separate partition on the external drive Apples ‘Time Machine’ software makes hourly back ups of whats on my computer and the external hard drive. After the initial full back up it only makes a note of any changes, not a complete back up every hour. I have 1.5TB for photos and 0.5TB for the back ups.

Also yesterday was my Granddaughter Daisy’s 11th birthday so that was cause for a family get together after school and into the evening.

This morning I spent some time in the garage working on bikes with some fine tuning adjustments to the Specialized bike wheel bearings and gear adjustment after the work and test ride the other day.  I also changed the cassette block on the Felt in preparation for its re-appearance on the 31st!  I didn’t hang about down there too long though as its very cold still.

This afternoon I watched a mountain stage of the Volta a Catalunya (Tour of Catalonia) bike race in the comfort of my sofa in the warm.  There is always some spectacular scenery to be seen on the mountain stages of bike races.  After almost 5 hours of racing already, todays final 12km, 10% average gradient climb was topped off with snow.

Hopefully I will fit a bike ride in tomorrow morning if the weather holds up as it is supposed to and or get out and take some photos, watch this space.

Last & Final Theme Change..

This really is my final theme change, (Sorry Steve, but at least you shouldn’t have to make any changes this time.. )

This is a keeper because I actually paid for this one!  The beauty of WordPress is you can change themes ad-hoc until you find just what you want. There are over 200 free ones to choose from. Now I have found out how to exploit some more functionality from the site I couldn’t find just the right one. If it had the appearance it didn’t have the tools and vice versa.

It only involves work by me and others if I change the name of the blog so its not too much hassle to just change the theme.