Winning brekkie this morning!
Woke up for a 9am run.
5 miles.
Was hungry after it.
Ate this:

The egg was a bit over-done.
Over the years I have come to be a bit funny with my eggs. They have to be free range and they have to come from happy hens. I used to like them sunny side up but now I have them ‘over easy’. I used to like to see the yolk gush out when you slice through it with a knife, but now i don’t. I like it very soft and gooey in the middle but it mustn’t spill out all over the plate. The yolk mustn’t run past the circumference of the white part of the egg. It mustn’t have that kind of film of see-through goo over the yolk either. That turns me off.
As a result of my fussiness, I never have fried eggs in a restaurant. If I did, I would have to go in and cook it myself and chefs don’t really like people doing that kind of thing.
It was a winning brekkie all the same.
Adventure at Sainsbury’s and mean Irish man…
Went grocery shopping last night, walked down to Sainsbury’s with the trolley, it was a lovely evening for it. The trolley fits really nicely under the Sainsbury’s Shopping trolley too. See the trolley’s there on the right hand side?

They’re the ‘half measure’ trolley’s. Well those are the ones that our shopping trolley fits under. It stores it out of the way so you don’ t have to be carrying it around while you are shopping. Not many people know of this. People watched me store it under there too and you could see that they were well impressed with my finding such a storage space for it.
I went over to the stack of trolley’s anyway, I had a pound coin in my hand.
There was a man putting his back and he was kinda loitering there for longer than it takes.
He turned to me in a gentlemanly manner and said something along the lines of “Here you go… here is a trolley for you” I was feeling a bit dozy and said ”Oh right, so how does this work, I give you the pound and you give me the trolley” and he said “you can give it to me for 50 pence if you like as it’s second hand” I laughed then and he smiled at me, I felt a connection with the man, as he too was Irish.
I looked at him as he walked away across the zebra crossing and out of my life.
I just kind of studied him for a split second, the way you do when you have an interaction with someone for the first time, you kinda take them in, don’t ya? You kinda make a judgement about them based on the way the hold themselves in their skin, their clothes, their walk and their shoes… you can tell a whole lot by someone’s choice of shoes.
I snapped out of that anyway and got on with my grocery shopping. I bought this lot with my money:

What you don’t see clearly in the above picture is my little chocolate collection for the week:

I have turned into a terrible chocolate snob altogether. I spent £9.00 on the chocolate bars in the photograph above. I never tasted any of them before and wanted to try them out.
I finished my shopping anyway and paid for what i bought.
When i tried to return the trolley to the stack I discovered that the pound coin was jammed in there and it wouldn’t let me take it out. I swear to God, i was cursing that man. What a sneak…
When I looked back in hindsight, I remembered that he was attempting to take his coin out of the slot before i came along. Way down deep inside the bowels of my psyche, there was a part of me that twigged it too, but I never kind of allowed that feeling to surface. I guess it was an instinct.
He had a sneaky way about him too and he palmed it off on me, that gammy trolley. He ripped me off… So out of principal, I decided to queue up at Customer Services to get my pound back. I was waiting in line for about twenty minutes. For all of those twenty minutes I was seething. I was thinking evil thoughts about that man and was also thinking how strange it was that i walked into that situation all knowing. There was a part of me that knew exactly what was happening… and that intrigued me.
There was a Greek lady with a moustache in the queue in front of me.
She turned around and we had a brief two way conversation about city life and she said she has been living next door to the same neighbours for twenty five years and she doesn’t know them and in Greece it isn’t like that. The conversation then went into a one-way conversation and I just kept saying “yeah… yeah…. yeah….” but couldn’t tell you what she was saying, she was kinda hard to understand anyway.
I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat. I just wanted my pound back…

Lemon Meringue Pie…
I don’t know where I read it now, but I read it somewhere and it said that training for a marathon is like being pregnant! It takes over your life for several months and everyone gives you advice and tells you how they did it…
Well I don’t know if that’s true but I thought of that analogy when I experienced an overwhelming, almerciful craving after my run tonight and I just can’t shake it off…
My craving was for a slice of this:

A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie
I still can’t get it out of my mind. My mouth is watering at the thought of it. I haven’t had a slice of it in years…
I remember where and when I had my last slice of it though, it was here:

Good ol’ Patsy’s Corner in the heart of Kinsale Town… and the Lemon Meringue Pie was made with Patsy’s own hands.
I would kill for one of Patsy’s Lemon Meringue Pies now…
She makes the best Lemon Meringue Pie without a doubt…
If anyone knows where you can get good Lemon Meringue Pie in London, please drop me a line…
I’m gunna run a Marathon!
Jeekers, It’s been a while since I wrote a blog!
Well as if my life isn’t hectic enough, I thought I’d add something more to the mix… A marathon!
Yip, I am now in training to run the Dublin City Marathon on the 26th of October 2009. I am doing it because I have always wanted to run a marathon.
I specifically wanted to run the Dublin City Marathon cuz Dad ran that one and we have a photograph of him just finishing the race and the clock behind him declaring “3 hours and 5 minutes”. I remember when he was training for it too, I was quite young at the time and I remember coming in from school and asking my mother where he was.
She said he was running over to Garrettstown and back again. I remember thinking that was very strange altogether and I asked her if his car was broken or something (there were no local taxi’s then – ha!).
Well there’s no way I will beat the Walsh record… Who knows what’ll happen in the future, but for now I just want to complete the floggin’ thing.
So I am midway through ‘Week Two’ of my 21 week intensive training programme. At the moment it’s easy as I am just kind of doing what I normally would do, but every week it increases 10% .
In about 6 weeks time I will be foaming at the mouth I’d say and the ol’ joints will be giving me gyp, especially my knees. I’m obsessed with my knees, I am afraid of getting a knee injury. I might use some of them knee improving machines at the gym.
As it is, I cycle 83 miles a week in my commute to work. This combined with 50 hours work and 20+ miles of running actually kinda makes me laugh in a kind of mental way. I have given up the drink too as i know what I am like. If I drink I will lose focus.
My summer is therefore a social write off.
Oh, I am raising money for the Donkeys at the Donkey Sanctuary in Mallow:
http://www.thedonkeysanctuary.ie/
Can ye sponsor me?
Will be buggin’ ye all closer the time anyway…


