Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

If you have watched Scooby-Doo, you will no doubt have seen one of them any episodes set in an abandoned theme park. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to be in such a place in real life, you might want to visit Flamingo Land in winter. Because we had the entire place to ourselves.

How did this happen?

As part of taking Elina away for her birthday, I booked tickets to the zoo. It sounded ideal: the theme park half of Flamingo Land shuts in the winter, so the tickets are cheaper and nobody who enjoys theme parks bothers attending. As people who just want to go to the zoo bit, this was perfect.

Then, the Beast from the East hit. The roads were near impassible and the temperature was below freezing.

We went anyway. But nobody else did.

Literally nobody. Except for the staff. We spoke to a lot of the zookeepers, who were happy to talk to us given there was nobody else there, all of whom informed us that we were the only customers in the park.

Animal encounter

We started by feeding the giraffes. I was worried that the giraffe would eat me but the zookeeper assured me that it hasn’t eaten anyone to date. That’s the way I would lull humans into a false sense of security if I were a giraffe, though.

They have very long and dexterous tongues that they use to take the food out of your hands.

Lots of animals

Despite the cold weather, we got to see lots of animals. The rhino sheds were open, the birds and the Wallabies were out, even the camels and lemurs came out briefly for a look around. Despite the penguins being from South America, and therefore not used to the snow, they came out for a quick swim, too.

We caught a couple of feeding times including the tigers, who seemed to enjoy the snow, and the red pandas, who seemed unphased by it, too.

When the Finnish military does operations, the enemy always comes from the east. Nobody is saying that a specific country is that enemy, it just happens to come from that direction. Just like now, when nobody is saying that the horrible weather is a punishment by god for the way Russia treats gay people. Even though we all know it is.

It’s been pretty heavy. Although I’m not sure I agree that it’s been heavier than anyone can remember. Take a look at the snow in 2013, 2009 and 2008, for example.

And, as usual, the country grinds to a halt because that’s more cost-effective than paying for all of the things we would need to carry on.

Does the snow really stop us?

Whether we really need such as grind is questionable, though. Schools across Yorkshire closed. Venla’s daycare closed. Many offices, including Univar and Sky closed.

But why?

University remained open. I went to all of my lectures and lab sessions. The Edge remained open, too, and all of my exercises classes were still on. I even went swimming thinking I would have a quiet pool and found it just as busy as normal. It feels like an odd parallel world where half the people are panicking and the other half are just getting on with life with absolutely no disruption.

How about travelling

Travelling is one area where the snow can get in the way. But it doesn’t always have to stop you.

I had booked a night away for Elina and me to celebrate her birthday. A lovely country hotel in the Yorkshire Moors. Of course, then this happened.

It should have been an hour and a half’s drive. We set off up the A1, got all the way to the A170, up Sutton Bank and then, just 14 miles from our destination, found the police had closed the road. So, we had to come back down the A19, across to the A64, up the A169 and over the A170 in the other direction.

This turned the entire journey into three and a half hours of driving.

A massive pain in the ass. But we made it, in a little two-wheel drive Astra with regular tyres on.

A dip in the pool

And if there was any remaining doubt that normal activities can be accomplished during snow, here is Elina and me taking a swim in the outdoor pool.

To be fair, it was a heated pool. The heating wasn’t working properly, so it was colder than it should have been, but still not the frozen block it would have been without the heating.

I was in a furniture shop in South Leeds called SLATE last week. They had a selection of media available for sale, too, including some VHS cassettes. Such as this one, featuring “over 130 spectacular crashes”.

I don’t know how anyone can look a this and not think about Alan Partridges “Crash! Bang! Wallop! What a video!”

I’ve used DSLRs for a decade now, including my 6D for five years. In that time, I’ve never had an accident with it. That is, until now.

I was out filming on a windy day and I didn’t put enough weight on the tripod. The wind caught it and over it went, lens first.

Luckily, it was nowhere as bad as it could have been. I put a UV filter on the front of all of my lenses in an attempt to protect them. It worked: the filter smashed but the lens underneath it surprised. So, a quick repair at the local camera shop, a new UV filter and a new lens hood and the camera was as good as new.

What should we learn from this? Weight your tripod and make sure you have a filter on the front of your lens, even if it is only there for protection.

The so-called new year is a pretty arbitrary deadline that evolved from a series of long-dead popes. Still, as arbitrary deadlines go, it is a great chance to regroup and take stock of what’s been going on and what we want to achieve in the next solar rotation.

Of course, it’s now the middle of February. So, I’m going to stop thinking and finally publish this.

Be better at business

I declared that 2017 was my year of marketing and I have learnt a lot about building sales funnels, capturing leads and building an audience. But none of it has been hugely successful and certainly not good enough to provide a real income.

Part of the problem is that I’m struggling to engage with step one: build what people want, not what you want them to want. So, I’m going to double down on this.

Finish my master’s degree

By the middle of last month, I felt like giving up. My grades have not met my own personal standard, and while there is a queue of people telling me that a merit (the equivalent of a 2:1) is a great grade to have, it doesn’t feel like it. Especially now Venla is here. There are standards to be set: there is no award for coming second in the Nobel Prize voting. Or, worst still, settling for winning a non-natural science-based prize.

But I don’t like giving up and that certainly wouldn’t set a good example, even if we would be a lot richer. And I’m excited about my dissertation, or, at least, motivated to get on with it.

Triathlon & fitness

Last year felt like a pretty slow year for fitness. Sure, I smashed my 5km, 10km and half marathon times, but it all felt a bit like business as usual. This year, I’m taking things up a gear. A bit of business as usual two: aiming for a sub-2 hour half marathon, but also looking at longer distances and continuing my move over to triathlon.

On a previous ride to Eccup Resoviour, Google Maps took me on a “public footpath” that was more bog than path and involved me having to shoulder my bike over several fences.

Yet, even this experience, did not prepare me for that happened when I asked Google Maps to route me from Guiseley to Apperley Bridge. The road seemed to be a farm lane. Then a dirt track. Then this:

But it gets worse. After I had traversed this valley of rubble, I then had to ford a river.

I checked to see if I could tell Google Maps to avoid routing me on public footpaths and keep to actual, real roads. But there isn’t.

It’s really a poor experience on their part. On my Garmin sat nav, I can view the map without inputting a destination, and it will automatically move the vehicle and re-centre the map as I drive. Google Maps won’t let me do that, either.

Happy Darwin Day!

It feels like not a lot has happened in January. But it has been a busy month. Primarily because most of my Christmas and early January was taken up with revision for exams.

It’s not like undergraduate where we had them stacked on top of each other: we only had four to do. But you can’t get away with undergraduate level answers, either.

We also had an essay deadline. This fell on the first day of teaching for semester two. However, I submitted it at noon the day before, giving me a good 17 hours of relaxation between the two semesters.

It also feels like an anachronism that I’ve done all of this work: include deadlines in November and December, and we’re still waiting for results from the lot of them. I understand why marking takes a long time, but I’m part of the social media-obsessed instant generation. Basically, I don’t want to put in any work for semester two if I have already failed.

In, January I set out to make 2017 my year of marketing. Have I learnt it? Well, I’ve definitely learnt a lot. But there is always more to know. January was also “book launch” month. I released Why Restaurants Fail and How to Exit VIM, which, despite both being short books, would turn out to be my most popular. Our friends Craig & Zoe welcomed Holly into the world.

Valentine’s Day is tricky when you have a baby, so February was not all it could have been. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that I had had to trade down my guitar amp. The Patriots won the Super Bowl and I launched a new version of my website.

The excitement of our domestic lives increased significantly in March when we bought a stick blender. It proved very useful for Malaysian month. In business, I launched the IT Career Acceleration course and launched the WAM online store, built with Stripe and React. Venla had her naming ceremony.

I published yet another book in April. This time it was the Human Baby Cookbook. I also discovered that costermonger is a real thing and made it to the Division E final in the public speaking world championships. In business, I launched one of my courses on Udemy. Most of my time, though, was taken up running my 30-Day Anxiety Challenge for WAM subscribers.

Everyone knows that May is all about Eurovision. Portugal won for the first time. We discovered chanterelles in Pateley Bridge and said goodbye to Ho’s Chinese. On the back of my 30-Day Challenge, I launched my 4th book of 2017, Do More, Worry Less. And knocked a respectable 24 minutes off my half marathon time. Anxiety Leeds pitched at Leeds SOUP.

In June, Venla had her first trip to the beach and started learning the xylophone. We celebated Kerny’s first birthday and had a changing of the guard at West Yorkshire Humanists as Moz stepped down as chair and we celebrated 50 years of the group’s existence. Food was tasty but small due to canape month. I wrote half a million words in one week (according to Grammarly).

It was a good foodie month in July with hand-rolled truffles and MasterChef-inspired dishes. We attended the annual Finnish picnic and celebated Higgs Day. I ran an okay-ish time in the Leeds 10k and launched my Mindfulness for Anxiety course.

Things got technical in August, with a focus on accessibility and mobile-first navigation. We celebrated Leeds Pride and Anxiety Leeds published its first impact report. It was also a month crammed with sport: inspired by the Tour de France we got on bikes for the first time in decades. We went swimming. And I traded in my Air Retaliation 2s for new trainers and brought my Parkrun PB down to 25:06. We celebated Gran’s 90th birthday and Finland turning 100. Riitta came to visit and Hugh and Anna got married.

In September I helped the NHS launch their new homepage before heading back to university. We bought bikes and went to City Ride and ran the Kirkstall Abbey 7. I made a very early exit in the Toastmasters speech contest.

Richard Thaler collected a long-overdue Nobel prize in October. We celebated our second wedding anniversary and Venla’s first birthday. I also celebrated my birthday, just after squeezing in last year’s birthday present. I ran the Yorkshire 10 Mile in under 90 minutes and moved my Parkrun PB down to 24:37.

I declared that November would be a month of action for my business and it was. I published two books: a book version of the IT Contracting Master Class course and Skeptic’s Guide to Pregnancy. I published my course Mindfulness for Social Anxiety and made Running For Anxiety available to the public. I went to my first business networking event, WapenTalkie. Outside of work, I went sub-50 in the Abbey Dash, completed my first duathlon (and my second and continued training on the bike.

Finally, in December we celebrated the festive season. It wasn’t quite a white Christmas, but it did snow. Venla mastered the art of standing up and climbing and we celebrated Finland’s independence day. Elina became an auntie for the second time. We held the 8th annual Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters. I placed 9th in the Braham pie-athalon: a dualthon where you had to scoff a mince pie at each transition, and completed my first sportive.

I, Chris Worfolk, hereby certify that on the 21 December 2017 I defrosted the freezer. In accordance with the presence established in case law by Pics vs I Didn’t Happen, I submit this photo, including the EXIF data, as proof. Thus, should any other party to this marriage again attempt to claim that they might have done it last time so it wasn’t their turn, even though they have never done it in the entire time we have lived at this properly, this post will serve as evidence to the falsity of their claim.