Back by dope demand

I've noticed lately that my blog has turned into a weekend write-up and this entry will be no exception. As soon as I returned from work on Friday we were back into the garden laying the turf. It was a bit like laying carpet but muddier and using a kitchen knife and spade to cut the edges.

Saturday was supposed to be another hard grind but ended for me at 10:30am doing my back in. Whilst lifting the boxes of old hardcore for the dump I did my lower back in. Ignoring it we drove to the local dump with four boxes of brick and concrete to chuck. After the 2nd or 3rd box I somehow twisted the wrong way whilst picking up the box bringing in more pain across my chest. The rest of the day I was doing very light lifting of tree cut-offs though I did manage to create an equivalent of a Stannah lift for our old-aged cat. Poor puss can't jump too far and is in danger of breaking his legs so I built him a platform/shelf to get over the fence.

Skydiving with her indoors
Back in April, one of Kerry's birthday presents was an Indoor Skydive experience and Sunday was the chosen day to do it. Body Flight is based near Bedford so was about 2 and a bit hours to drive to. It's located on an old military testing base where Red Bull Racing have a testing hangar for their F1 cars. We were told to be there an hour before the experience as we had to be kitted out with jumpsuit etc plus a half-hour instruction with various hand signals to recognise and to practice lying on a table arching our backs in skydive position.

The actual flight times were very short. Individually we got 1 minute 15 seconds fly time with an instructor pulling us around and signalling to either relax, chin up, arch your back or change your leg position. It was amazing and quite natural though couldn't quite believe it was over. Kerry also got the hang of it very well and we had two sessions of joint time. Every slight movement of your body made you move in a different way and the experts just showed over doing loop-the-loops, backward rolling and all sorts like a plastic bag in the wind.

We went away with a DVD of our flights (included in the price) and five photos at £6 each which were a rip off. An extra £2 would have got them emailed to you as well! I've since scanned these photos and put them up on FlickR though I don't think the scanner did them justice. The DVD was ok but they added a soundtrack of f*cking Nickleback...grrrr! Not quite the same as our NZ souvenirs.