Call me Ishmael

And so I continue my obsessive quest to hunt down my Nemesis. I am locked in an elemental relationship with this pair of plastic serving spoons. Do I hate them or fear them? At times I feel that I can walk away - that they are nothing to me. At other times they consume my every waking thought and haunt my fevered dreams. I fear that this compulsion will subsume my existence. But I also live in terror that my quest might succeed. Whence the hunter deprived of his prey? Whither the obsessionless obsessive? And, at other times, such as this, I am simply in a state of awe occasioned by the unparalleled majesty of my dark counterpart and am content to merely exist in orbit around its being whilst it, in turn, is in counter-poised orbit around my own cockleshell existence. Here we see the mighty creature caught in the instant before serving up a nice bit of salad...

In other news, after getting off the computer linked to work at 11:00 last night, I was in the office before 6:00 to spend a busy morning sorting out this, getting to the bottom of that and coming to terms with the consequences of the other. And, at lunchtime, I had to stand in as a last minute replacement for one of the runners in the Big Annual University Relay Race? This is four legs of a 1.1 mile course and a horrible distance - too short to settle down to a comfortable pace and too long to sprint. In previous years, I have made a bit of an effort to train at this distance. I hadn't done anything this year but it was still a respectable time. But with the familiar feeling of feeling slightly sick at the end. And then coughing all afternoon. Never again! And, yes, I've said that before.