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OK, so the day arrives. I have root canal work on this front tooth. Not looking forward to it at all. A night not sleeping (I didn’t spend all night agonising about going to the dentist so I assume it’s just normal insomnia), didn’t help and the appointment isn’t till 2:45 so it’sgoing to be a rough day.

Do loads of work stuff and set off. It’s really quite warm and by the time I get there I’m a little bit sweaty anyway. I sit in the waiting room for half an hour and then a pretty dental assistant calls me name and in I go. My new dentist is very businesslike. Straight down to it and no small talk which is good. Injects me, gives my bottom teeth an impression and then off we go. He’s good. Fast and direct, not much pain but then pain was never the problem. He pulls the old filling out with his thumb! I taste that horrible decaying thing that my breath has been smelling of recently. I’ve noticed people pulling away from me when I talk, glad it’s going.

He drills away, I feel no pain, it’s actually quite a pleasant visit so far. Once he’s got the top part of the tooth away he starts on the root canal. This bit is fairly unpleasant and I try to imagine myself away. They’ve cleverly removed the arms from the chair so I’m gripping my hands together tightly and my legs are crossed. Christ! What a jessie! It’s a bit painful and as always, the feeling of complete lack of control about the situation gets me all hot and bothered. I’m in the chair for half an hour while he delves around in my mouth!

Finally he pronounces himself finished and I ask where the temporary crown is. He huffs a bit and says it will be too difficult to put one in now. Great, big gap in my teeth for two weeks. It’s at the side of my front teeth but you can see it when I smile. Best not smile then.

I get up and my back, arse and legs are soaked in sweat. Great +2. Once I get home I pass out from fatigue and wake up with my mouth throbbing and my face itching all over as the anaesthetic wears off. The pain grows into the night and I eventually nominate to drink a bottle of wine to dull it a bit. That works. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

Overall though, it wasn’t half as bad as I anticipated. Maybe I’m growing up. At 42.

I’ve always liked the idea of macro photography. IN particular, insects. Flickr is filled with many, many close ups of the little blighters faces but I wanted to get my own. Macro lenses cost *a lot* so I looked round for ways of doing it cheaper and there are plenty of them. After a bit of research it turns out that the simplest and cheapest methods are twofold, either reverse the lens, or extend the lens. A bit more digging around and it seems the best guys use both methods. (And I mean the best guys who don’t use macro lenses). (And just for clarification, macro refers to photography where the finished image is at least the same size on the screen as the object is in real life).

So I purchase some bellows off ebay. These extend the lens up to 100mm from the camera and that distance is variable. They arrive quickly from Hong Kong and I start practising, stick my 50mm f1.8 on the front and give them a go. Hmmm, bloody hell it’s hard. The depth of field (clear focusing range), is extremely narrow, unusably narrow. I check on the internet and with the lens 100mm away from the camera with f1.8 and I find out it’s practically nothing. Bummer. Bit more investigation and it turns out that with a canon, at least, there’s a trick. You can set the aperture as narrow as you can (f22) with the lens attached, press the DoF preview button and then remove the lens with the button still pressed and the lens will stay at f22.

OK, lets give it a go.

Great! Although it’s not that great. Only a tiny part of the head is in focus. Turns out that even at f22, the DoF is less than 1mm. OK. Also, at this aperture, the amount of light hitting the sensor is next to nothing, looking through the viewfinder shows very little and the pictures turn out so dark they’re not worth the while. You can use a flash but since the lens is only a few cm from the subject, it doesn;t help much. And with a high ISO with macro, the amount of noise is immense. More research.

Reversing ring then, and I don’t like this messing about with my lens, I need to find an easy way to set the aperture. So I also get hold of an old 50mm f1.8 analogue lens with a manual aperture ring. In an ebay frenzy I also buy a set of extension rings but more about them later.

The reversing ring allows a wider aperture for the same results and once it arrives I realise it’s a godsend. I snap away for hours, delete hundreds of pictures and quickly learn a lot about macro photography. For a start, living things move around a lot, usually too fast to get focus. Also, a good tripod is essential but since even on ebay, good tripods cost a lot of money, we’ll forget that for a while.

Things that don’t move are easy so I practise on them for a bit.

A lot clearer but it’s still not great. I experiment with the bellows longer and shorter and realise that by using full extension, I’m not gaining much. Yes, it’s right up close and personal but it’s too up close, the flash doesn’t reach and the DoF is useless. I roll the lens back a bit and realise around 50mm extension produces the best results (with a flash with the dispersion filter pulled down). Which is handy because the extension tubes I bought are around 60mm extension.  Now I’m cooking and after a long period in the park I get two or three shots i’m happy with.

Some people use a soft filter on the flash and I’ll look at creating one (usually just a piece of foam strapped around the flash) but I got a shot i’m about 95% happy with almost by chance when I was unsuccesfully trying to capture some bees. Saw the fly, pointed, focussed, clicked away for about 10 shots. This one turned out great.

Click for bigger detail and seem my flickt stream for more examples.

Macro is very hard, requires masses of patience (I got three shots I liked today after taking about 100 exposures in 90 minutes) and some basic equipment but it cost me less than £40 extra on top of my existing kit so far and I doubt I’ll spend any more.

Can’t be arsed adding everything but I’ve done a little bit of riding. The crash I had has slowed me down *a lot*. Can’t breathe very well under load. I did go down south and rode the north downs with a friend but he totally kicked my ass because my chest and shoulder were killing me most of the time. I have to say, the North downs that he showed me were freaking ace! Masses of singletrack, very fast and lots of fun.

But my chest, arrrgh. if I start breathing big it kills me so I have to breathe shallow, which affects my performance  a lot. I feel so crap.

I did some wallpaper stripping tonight which really hurt. Needs rest I expect.

Bit wet this morning, bit of a shower. Decided to put a coat on. Good idea too, after 5 minutes it started coming down reasonably hard. Ten miles later it had stopped though so I unzipped the useful underarm gaps to let some cool air in, that’s nice. Little did I know I’d be letting a whole lot more in.

Finish through sankey Valley park, just a mile of road now. It’s cobbled here and as I’m riding along at a whole ten miles an hour or so, the front wheel hits a bump, I lose grip on the right hand side and off we go into the bushes. Unfortunately, because I’m now riding one handed and I’m slumped over the bars it all goes horribly wrong. Bike hits the ground, I land on top of it, with the bar end pointing upwards. SLAM!! Right onto the bar end on my chest, damn that’s painful. DAMN it’s really painful!!! There were a whole load of other noises when I hit the ground but I’m sure I heard a crack.

I lie in the bushes for about 5 minutes going ‘arrgh’ ‘ooorrgghh’ and ‘gaaahhh!’ until I finally recover myself enough to get up. Bike looks fairly broken but lets examine myself first. Serious pain in my chest, shortness of breath, both knees scuffed, right forearm pouring blood. The bar end went right through the underarm gap I opened and tore my jacket right off my body on one side. Feck! That’s an expensive jacket gone then.

The humu isn’t looking too good either, bars pointing the wrong way, wheel is fairly badly buckled, one of the v-brake pads has SNAPPED it’s mounting bolt, WTF!!!?

Bit of jumping on the wheel and some tuning with allen keys and spoke key and I managed to get to work. Can’t lift my arm up above my shoulder now. Shortness of breath has gone but my chest still feels like I’ve been shot.

All i can feel is pain in my chest, knees and arm. He he, look at my colleagues, they don’t even know. Fight club.

Not looking forward to riding home, only got a back brake, got no coat and moving about makes things hurt. Bet today is the day some fat commuter fancies his chances for a race too.

Problem with a tooth, feels like it’s moving a bit everytime I bite on it.

i’ve approached things differently this time. Realising that allowing myself to be controlled by childhood angst about being worked on without anaesthetic is a bit silly (they’d never do that again… would they?), I just manned the fuck up and didn’t let myself get apprehensive. This being simply a check helps but still, I don’t worry about it. Despite my best efforts I’m still feeling a bit edgy sat in the waiting room and try to take my mind off things by answering emails on my blackberry. Luckily the wait is fairly brief and I follow the plastic blond assistant up the stairs.

Straight into the chair, no wimpering about being shit scared, just ‘that’s the tooth, it does this, what’s up with it?’. He prods it a bit and agrees it’s moving ever so slightly, looks like the filling has some loose. Worse still, he can’t repair it. That’ll be a crown then. X-ray and he decides that he will re-do the root canal work because he’s not sure how good the last lot is. Freaking great.

Now it turns out the root canal work is before we go on holiday and the crown fitting is after so I’ll have to spend the holiday nursing a temporary crown which will no doubt be a completely different shade and size to my existing tooth. Looking forward to the holiday snaps.

On a positive note this businesslike approach certainly works a lot better. No sweating, no popping fingers through the chair upholstery, no chasing me round the surgery with a tranqualiser gun. of course, that might all change when they actually start drilling away with their instruments of torture.

On an interesting note the dentist was as expected, from a different country but not the country I was expecting. He was irish.

Bike: Lightspeed
Distance: 35 miles

Really windy. No, REALLY windy. Right pain in the bum most of the time and I;d had enough after only 35 miles. 17.4mph average over that time, pretty slow. I can only blame the wind although I did go for a quite hilly course too. Nice and un-eventful and at least it was sunny. My new zyme shorts rock hugely, very comfy. Excellent recommendation from STW there.

One good thing did come from the ride though, I’ll let you see the evidence….

Need to sort out the front mech so I can get it into a decent gear for descending, I reckon I can get it to 60 easy down this hill if I can actually pedal.

Bike: Humuhumu
Distance:29 miles

Reasonable commute. No serious issues. Not very sunny but still good. I’ve refined my processes at work now, I leave more stuff in my locker so there’s less to carry round and I’m getting quite adept at a very fast strip wash. The cleaners are on to me now and have started saying I can’t use the disabled toilets until 7am.

Incidents of note: Woman who works at our place approached me and told me I should be using the cycle lanes instead of the road, idiot! I’ve not worked out who she is yet but once I do it might be karma time on the IT front.

Also,   on the way home I cracked and rode like a cock through the traffic, in and out very fast. I just took control and made moves I knew were safe rather than obeying any rules. Good fun but dangerous.

The freehib on the humu is now slipping a lot, need to get that replaced, hope that the standard shimano freehub fits most things as Sheldon suggests because you certainly can’t buy DX freehub specific freehubs any more.

Bike:Humuhumunukunukuapau’a
Distance: 30 miles

Well that made up for the shitty weekend. An absolutely dream commute, well almost. Going there I found out the short route is only 12 miles Need to see if I can extend that offroad a bit, but beautiful all the same. I need to see if I can sort the washing arrangements too, it’s horrible trying to get clean in that tiny sink, I pretty much gave up in the end, towelled myself dry and sprayed liberally with deodorant, need a desk fan to cool me down too.

Going home was lovely. Very bright and sunny, Sankey Valley park filled with smiling young ladies. Lots of flying insects about too mind. Rode back to Newton then carried on to Haydock. Obviously as I got nearer to leigh things got a bit darker. In Golborne this angry looking pisshead stagger out of a pub and walked straight in front of a car. The lady beeped her horn and he shouted at her, then he made straight for me. We stared at each other as he approached and I prepared to get the first punch in if he turned nasty for no other reason than I was there but then he saw a drinking partner/enemy/wife and shouted at someone and veered off towards them. After that it went downhill a bit. Bad drivers, idiots driving too fast, too close. Got on the towpath and came across a few gangs of loud, shirtless teenagers all being macho to each other and shouting at me. Got to a busy road in Leigh, Eventually someone stopped to let the car in front of me out and when I went out after him the stopped driver shouted ‘Not you!’ at me. Fuckwit.

Good ride overall though, bloody hot. Just considering doing it all again tomorrow.