The Home of Tom & Morven

You probably haven’t ever heard of free-running, I hadn’t either until several hours before the injury you see here. By chance I happened to watch a movie/documentary called Jump London (refer IMDB).

The goal of Free-running is to “use the environment to develop yourself and to always keep moving and not go backwards”. This is not to be confused with Parkour, which aim is to “move from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body”.

I’m definitely not a Parkour purist as I like to be free to run where I want and how I want, and believe I’m a free-runner at heart (but not necessarily by skill level)! I’m often running over fences (albeit usually only small ones) when I go out running, and have great pleasure in the freedom of turning down one trail and up the other depending on what I feel like at the time. I guess this makes me a free-runner at heart?

Injury from my first ever free-running style of run

To put it to the test, last night after watching Jump London, I went out for a “free-run”. However it was dark, cold, wet, and slippery! I nearly slipped a couple times whilst jumping up onto metal rails (not very far off the ground!) and not long after I clipped my knee whilst trying to jump over a concrete wall, hence the above photo!

Not sure how this seems to have happened, but I haven’t had much time for mountain biking over the last couple months. I’ve been out on little rides here and there but nothing epic. Today was my first epic ride for quite some time, as it was cold, wet, muddy, slippery, muddy, and really slippery. I sort of forced myself to go for a hard ride because I missed out competing in a race today in favour of a social event. What I found was a strong correlation between going for a hard ride in wet muddy slippery mud and frequently losing control. This made it the best ride I’ve done for a long time, also because I didn’t do too badly fitness wise either.

Below is proof to my riding buddy who is currently overseas that I’m keeping up the fitness, and that I should be able to pull my weight for the Foxy1000 100km race with 4km of vertical ascending in October.

Last night Morven and I made dessert pizzas! I made the dough, and Morven organised the topping. Half of it was bannana and caramel, and the other half was nutella, raspberry jam, raspberry lollies, cherry ripe chocolate, and marshmallows.

I like to use private posts, as not everything that I blog about should be read by the public. Several versions of Wordpress ago, I used the Disclose-Secret plugin.

However, development of this plugin hasn’t really happened since version 2.3 of Wordpress, due to significant changes being required from the plugin in order for it to work with the later versions of Wordpress. Now using version 2.5 of Wordpress, I finally decided that I couldn’t wait for Disclose-Secret to catch up, and have converted over to using Role-Scoper. As far as I can tell, Role-Scoper does absolutely everything that Disclose-Secret did, and with so much more flexibility I can’t begin to comprehend. Anything to do with privacy, restrictions, permissions, groups of users permissions, etc.. you name it, it can do it! There were a few minor bugs with it that affected a few users like myself, and I am very proud to have helped Kevin (the author) debug the plugin to produce version 0.9.16, which I believe now does absolutely everything that Disclose-Secret did. Kevin is an excellent coder/hacker, and I think he will do very well in his web development career.

I’m so proud to have been part of debugging this fantastic plugin, that I have taken screenshots of my name in cyberspace. Maybe one day when Kevin becomes the next world famous coder/hacker I can autograph these screenshots and sell them on eBay?

Download Role Scoper now!

I was proud to have solved this puzzle, whatever it is called! Not sure where it came from. If anyone knows what it is called please let me know.

I solved it using an analytical approach, which is why I was proud. I then dismantled it taking photos so that I could do it backwards the hard way (albeit physically easier to manipulate).

Need not comment! Taken from here.

Morven and I went for a long winters day walk and got wet in the rain. We chased ducks, and I went down a slippery dip which gave me a very wet bum! We also climbed a giant spider web.

Morven and I recently stayed a night at Aldgate Creek Cottage. We were recommended it by a friend, and would like to recommend it to our friends! It’s only a few minutes up the freeway, right in the heart of Aldgate. The creek is literally only metres away from the cottage, surrounded by a beautiful lush garden - and apparently we went at the worst time of year to see the garden!

We enjoyed sitting on the upper balcony sampling some tasty cheeses that Morven had selected and sipping Piper-Heidsieck, overlooking the lush garden.

We then cranked up the methylated spirits fireplace, and watched a ridiculous movie called Blackball. After the movie, we went for dinner at the Mercure Grosvenor at Mt Lofty so that Morven could scope the place out for some wedding that she’s planning. We had a quick meal and went back to the cottage to crank up the awesome fireplace. I ate the majority of the truffles that Morven made (she’s going through a truffle making phase - and I’m trying to encourage her with this inspiration she has for as long as possible).

Everything about the cottage is so cute, it is really new and stylish with very well thought out highlights such as an old ladder that holds the kitchen utensils over the kitchen sink which is mounted in wood.

The next day we went for a hike on the Eastern side of Mt Lofty, down party of the Heysen trail that I’ve never been on before and always wondered where it went. It took us to the Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens, and we walked around the Gardens and back up to the summit. The walk was less than 7km but very steep, so we were both a little tired by the end. What a great way to spend a couple days of leave.

The rest of my leave has been spent mountain biking, finding two pairs of jeans that both look good, fit, AND feel comfortable enough to wear without creating a hernia, AND only cost $99… for both! (This is extremely cheap considering I was nearly convinced to buy one pair of Hugo Boss jeans that cost $229 (it is rare for me to find jeans that fit well). Also have visited a financial planner for the first time (I’ll try almost anything at least once), and been catching up on a bit of blogging, making pesto for Morven only to remember that she was going out for dinner (which I should have remembered about since I was invited as well, but couldn’t go because I wasn’t keen on the vegetarian options offered) and coating truffles in chocolate for Morven.

Tuesday morning I went to the dentist. I was in a state of shock because he told me that I need fillings done on a couple teeth. This is big news to me because Morven thinks I have OCD of cleaning my teeth rather fastidiously. My dentists over the last decade have always congratulated me for having “teeth of the week” or whatever. From short discussions with my dentist and hygienist it seems like the suddenly large amounts of electrolyte drinks I’ve consumed this last summer is responsible for my suddenly I have tooth decay. Thanks Powerade.

(Note that I was going to insert a picture of a Powerade bottle here with an “equals” sign followed by a picture of rotting teeth, but decided against it as the ones my search engine found look rather horrible!)

Anyway, in my state of shock I went to go jump on my motorbike, but… what the!?!? What on earth is a flaming scooter doing parked right up my arse? This was opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace.

My bike was parked in the motorcycle park, with my wheel right up against the curb. A scooter had parked right up my arse with it’s front wheel almost touching my wheel. There were free parks. No idea what possesses someone to park like that. Why would you illegally double-park a motorbiker, when you could illegally park just next to the motorcycle parks and not be in anyone’s way? What is a scooter even doing parking anywhere near a sign that says “Motorcycle parking”? How did the scooter think I would be able to get out? What was there to stop me from pushing the scooter over? Regardless, was pushing the scooter over an invitation? So many questions, so little answers. The only thing stopping me from wheeling the scooter down the road to teach the learner scooter rider a lesson was the fact that I was pretty sure it’d be knocked over before the end of the day anyway, as the arse of the scooter was close enough to the traffic of North Terrace.

For purposes of public shame, I present the number plate of the scooter.

This is a photo taken by Nick on my birthday. It was an epic ride, we linked up many trails, and I showed him a few tracks I used to ride as a kid, including this drop-off. It took me a while to get the guts to do this drop-off even though I did it as a kid. It’s not a vertical drop-off but not far off. the photo doesn’t do it justice, it’s much more scary when you’re at the top looking down! I made Nick feel my heart rate when we were standing around just after riding off the drop, it was stuck on about 120BPM, purely from the adrenaline! What a good way to celebrate a birthday.

Not sure why I didn’t blog about this earlier, I guess I was busy with our engagement party the following day, and now I’m taking some annual leave and cleaning up photos on my phone.