You're strong on the puck......

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So yesterday, a Sunday, I woke up at 5am, this morning my alarm rudely interrupts my sleep and I am so disorientated I can’t even recognise the sound as my alarm clock! I drag myself out of bed, don on the running kit and hit the park. Surprisingly the run is just what I needed, it re-orientates me, and after a shower I feel completely human again! Hooorah!

Rowena and I cycled to work and I continued working on the documents from last week. I was then tasked with digging through the compost heap and beds in the back garden to collect so soil samples to analyse. With the shovel in hand, the aroma of the compost and the sun beating down (despite it only being 10am) I thought what a contrast this was to sitting behind a desk at BI, battling the January weather. Sharpishly I stopped grumbling to myself about getting dirt stuck under my finger nails and a couple of ant bites and went back to collecting the soil samples!

This afternoon I was preparing my collected samples; baking them, grinding them up with a pestle and motor and combining them with hydrogen sulphide. I am going to be working on a chromatography project – a way of analysing the quality of a soil sample. So I prepared the paper with the silver nitrate and then left the paper in a dark area to dry overnight.

This evening, I headed off to give under water hockey another try, but arriving early so I could do a few lengths in the pool beforehand. At least today I was less nervous about hockey and we went straight into a match where as I played as an extra again for 10 minutes. After however, they said I was too good to play as an extra anymore, so I played as a forward on the wing. It was great when I got my breathing right and I managed to get in the right place at the right time, and with another air left to stay there, but when it doesn’t work, or I tried to stay down too long it felt like I was trying to suffocate myself! I received a number of compliments from team mates and the opposition, including ‘your strong on the puck’ and ‘It’s great, you don’t mind getting in the thick of it do you?’ which all made me chuckle slightly. So for now I will keep at it, it’s nice to get out and meet people and the only way to improve is to practise, and when I did get it right it was a great buzz.

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