July 4 (4)

No time to turn around for photos, those plants won't eat themselves!

Look! A non-scheduled post!!!!

Let me tell you a story, a story about how one can go from totally loving a book to disliking it in about 50 pages. Before last night I didn't really have an opinion on Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett, I was just reading it along because I generally like most Discworld books. Then last night I hit the part where Magrat, a character I generally don't care much about, finally finds a role model she can look up and prepares to take names and kick ass. This morning I finished the book and I am generally very upset with Pratchett because last night I believed that Magrat would finally be the strong female character I always look for in Discworld books, the one that kicks ass till the end and never lets others influence her… but like with Polly in Monstrous Regiment we were close but never quite got there. In the end, Magrat might have stood up the Queen of Elves but it's still the other two witches who were portrayed as the big heroes! I wanted Magrat to finally stand up to those two but she never did. For me that would have been the ultimate thing for her, the rare times she did do something that went against the older witches was when they weren't present… and that's a start but she should have been able to stand up them head on. By the end of the book it's clear that she will never be a "proper" witch, and therefore she'll never be on the same level as the two older witches because it's been made known since the start of the series that witches are above pretty much all others on the Discworld. And that bit really upset me. I also disliked the whole bit about the queen Magrat took for a role model being a "fake" and her being portrayed as a bit of a joke (her armour being made of pans and a bathtub). Of course one could argue that it was rather feminist of that king who asked for the portrait to be painted and for the armour to be made - he wanted a female others could look up to, but the way Pratchett wrote it, I read it as it being a kind of joke on the king's part. Once again I let a book get under my skin. I should know better by now, I really should, but why can't we get proper strong female characters in the Discworld books that aren't old annoying witches or dressed as dudes and talking about how it's the fake socks in their trousers that give them the extra courage to kick ass?

July 5

On the 5th I had the chance to experience doing a 10K race in 30C at 9PM… after three and a half hours in an overheated train (because SNCF + first day of real heat = "sorry, the A/C is out of order… we don't really know why"). In the end it was rather funky running around Toulouse as the sun was setting but it was still way too hot and humid! 30C+ and no wind in sight! At the 5K bottle station I just dumped a whole bottle on my head/back and that was probably the best part of the race, that moment of immediate cooling down. Overall I got a decent sub-hour net time given the conditions (1:00:37 in official time but we were about rather far away from the start line - see photo) but there were too many people running for the small streets we were asked to go on! My pace was all over the place because multiple times we went straight from large avenues to streets where three people could barely run shoulder to shoulder and many peeps clearly had never run before with many other peeps and they just would not keep their line. The other problem was that the race was mostly in the city centre and Toulouse has loads of bars/restaurants and people kept crossing the street or walking very slowly along the same narrow streets we were taking, it got rather frustrating after a while. But hey, it was for a good cause and all that. We had a good two or three minutes of walking just to get to the starting line… … which you can see on the right there, behind the "arrivée" line. And we finished the race when it was pretty much fully dark.