The site is new, as you can see, and it’s moved away from WordPress to being a static site. Based on hexo.io. There is a plugin for Hexo that allows migrating posts away from WordPress in to what is, basically, a Markdown format used by Hexo. The migration was a bit rough and ready but after a bit of touch up the basics are here. As I get time I’ll tidy things up and straighten the shelves and may give it another lick of paint…

The reason for doing this is to get away from the maintenance of a Wordpress site. Static sites (HTML and CSS) don’t take a lot of maintenance. This is basically a vanity site and doesn’t see a lot of attention, it’s not worth the effort to keep WordPress up to date and secure.

Hexo is simple, written in Javascript and makes it straightforward to create a post and install it on the site:
hexo new post my-title, write the post, hexo generate, hexo deploy
and voila, there it is. And the posts are in standard Markdown format so are easy to transfer to another system should I wish…

Today is the 20th December, a day I have been building up to, and training for, for the past six months. It’s the day of the Portsmouth Coastal Waterside Marathon. I booked the train tickets and the hotel room months in advance, did some wonderful long training runs and was feeling confident that I could do this, my first marathon in five years. But it wasn’t to be :(

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Three years ago I read “Habit Fields”, an article by Jack Cheng on A List Apart. It struck a chord in me and although I didn’t reorganise my life as much as I should have, I did become very aware of how different spaces effect the way I do things. But time moves on and the recent house change has thrown the ‘habit field’ ideas into a sharper focus.

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For the past four or five years, I’ve spent a few months of the year in the Bahamas, at WildQuest, swimming and diving with wild dolphins and helping others enjoy the same. It’s a wonderful experience in itself, but what has it taught me about running? What do our flippered, undersea friends know about running?

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I’ve been looking around for a nice trail run and came across the Relish Running Races who organise some very interesting races in the Bath, Somerset area. I’ve no idea who they are but the races look like a lot of fun. The one that strikes my fancy is part of the Bath Running Festival on July 27 th, which offers 5k, 10k, half and full and it’s the half marathon that I’ve registered for.

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Last Sunday was the 10th Freiburg marathon and the fifth one that I’ve run in. The weather was not too bad, given that we’ve had a run of freezing nights and very cold days, that was a nice surprise. Not sunny, but nearly into double digits. The Freiburg marathon boasts “42km, 42 bands”, and as the course is 21km that translates to a band every 500m. Well, they don’t all show up and when the weather is really bad (cold and raining) few of them do, but last Sunday there was, I guess, about 30 bands, some of them very good and all of them very enthusiastic.

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We’ve tried, without success, to contract the dolphins to show up regularly at a set time and place, we’ve offered them unlimited fish and squid, but they obviously value their freedom higher than that. And so we have to head out to the ocean every day in search of one of the pods, armed only with binoculars and a lot of patience. We, as humans, tend to sail above the surface of the sea. Dolphins are more at home beneath the surface. This obviously introduces some difficulties to the process of finding a small group of dolphins in a very large ocean.

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In the society I come from, talking to others while wearing sunglasses is kind of frowned upon, usually the preserve of teenagers with an attitude problem. But here in Bimini, where the sun is bright for most of the day, sunglasses are normal. It’s taken me a long while to get used to this, having whole conversations with people and not being able to see their eyes. And myself talking to others while wearing the things. I’m most comfortable with a light shade that can be seen through. I notice it often with newly arrived guests, they feel a bit disconcerted at first, whereas I think most of the crew here are not aware of it as it is normal when living here.

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A mixed and varied week of breathless days and storms, hot sun and torrential rain. A fresh influx of Germans replace the outgoing group (except for the dozen that have stayed over for a second week) and a full and juicy group it is. I try my hand at freediving and we all play with the dolphins and go snorkelling at Turtle Rocks.

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This is the second of four weeks of the Life Trust peoples and half of the previous weeks people have stayed over and some leave and some new ones arrive. It’s like being back in Germany with the sound of German around me. We’ve got a young lad, Leo, who decides to shave his head while here. So in minutes he goes from angelic blond hair to shaved cranium, which is a pretty courageous thing to do on holiday. He is now the Man of the Month for September on the Wildquest calendar!

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