Juneathon 5/30 – Oh crumbs

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The last 24 hours have been very cakey. Perhaps too cakey. An excess of blackened bananas in the fruitbowl led to the quite faffy but incredibly light and yummy Butterscotch Banana Cakes from Dirty Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet.

Muffin top? I’ll show you muffin top…

This morning I baked a lemon drizzle cake to take to afternon tea at my mum’s. The cake was given preferential treatment being transported in the car, whereas once again I was thrown out at the side of the road and expected to run the last three miles of the journey. Not entirely coincidentially, the drop off point was mere feet away from a motorbike (suggested by Torsparkles) but the rest of the run didn’t yield any more treasure until I landed at mum’s.

Vroooooooooom!

There, I announced my arrival at the back door jogging on the spot and announcing that I couldn’t stop running until I’d seen some pretty bunting (Jen again!). One more lap of the garden and I’d clocked up two lots of bunting…

Patriotic bunting

More pretty bunting and if you look closely…

…and a bonus item of a teaspoon (added to the list by the wonderful Christine Evans AKA Artist on a Bike).

We couldn’t let this patriotic chap go unrecorded, especially as his tie originally decorated my gran’s coronation cake 60 years ago.

King of the Garden

There was then another treasure hunt around the garden and more cake.

Butterfly cake

Proper fairy cakes

And then a nap.

Juneathon 4/30 – hungry like the wolf

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Yesterday I was out on a bit of a pub crawl toasting Her Maj and my nutritional intake for the day was mostly in the form of malt, hops and barley. By some miracle, I was spared from a hangover but did become the  Very Hungry Caterpillar in human form. As such today’s Juneathon effort was a paltry token mile because I wanted to get home to the lasagne that was in the oven (since devoured and now I’m ravenous again).

I also thought that I better tick off Union Jack (suggested by Adele and Jen, hopefully the third one covers ‘in an unusual place’!) before this weekend is over (the first two are from my run today and the other one was from the Olympic torch celebrations on Friday).

Flying the flags through the village

Quilt in the craft shop window (with intentional (honest) arty reflection effect)

Tall man, tiny feet. Very suspicious.

Juneathon 3/30 – anything could happen in the next half hour

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It’s only day three of Juneathon and already I am relying on the route where Ginge throws me out of the car in a layby on the way home from Tesco.

I had no treasure plans in mind when I set off. I’d spotted an orange squashed on the road on the way to Tesco and thought “Oooh, something orange“. This thought was then followed up with “Ooooh, roadkill that’s something orange“. Sadly the route I ran home was a different one, so the squashed orange enthusiasts amongst you will have to wait another day. I plodded along, my eyes darting left (a stick shaped like a letter) and right (roadkill) but to no avail. I did spot a pleasant pheasant but they aren’t on the list.

I’m not the pheasant plucker…

I was getting a bit desperate, but then with half a mile to go I was overtaken by a Skyride and I thought, “Ah, cyclists, I’m sure that they’re on the list” so I crossed my fingers all the way home and thanks to Knitrun4sanity there it was on the list.

Number 38: Cyclist

Juneathon 2/30 – unexpected treasure

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Before setting off for this morning’s run I announced that I would be seeking ducks and baby swans, and duly set off on the same run that yielded ducks and baby swans earlier in the week. Unfortunately, the swans were having a lie in but there was plenty more to see.

First off, I nearly ran headlong into the postman and cursed as his mate drove off into the distance. I ran round the corner, nearly got squished by a police landrover and scuttled across the road to take a sneaky picture of a postvan (thank you knitrun4sanity.

Proper Postman Pat style – no Jess though, which would have ticked another one off the list.

After the postvan, I ran down the hill looking for sticks shaped like letters other than I or L. I spotted some cows and decided to take a photo purely to curry favour with JogBlog…

Cows.

But while I was taking the photo, I noticed an unusual bit of rubbish (suggested by fairweatherrunner) in the hedge…

They’re a size 8. So before anyone asks, definitely not mine…

After the unexpected pause, I trundled on down to the lodge and found no baby swans, but there were some ducks in a splendid flotilla…

ONWARD!

There may have been no baby swans, but I did find a feather

Fluffy feather

…which was suggested by Fortnightflo, and was only outdone by what I found as I embarked up the final steep hill – an even better feather, which I tucked into my camera and carried all the way home.

Could I blog with a quill? I bet someone could.

And that was that for that run; 3 miles done, Juneathon treasure hunt ticked off, big smile on my face, what more could you ask for?

Juneathon 1/30 – it begins with a pothole

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On a night out a couple of weeks ago someone showed us a photo of a pothole in our village (that’s the kind of wild rock’n’roll nights out we have). At the time, we denied the hole’s existence and declared the picture to be photoshopped because the traffic cones had funny perspective. Yesterday I drove past the end of the road where the hole allegedly was and noticed that it was home to some shiny JCBs and there was a mini diversion in place. ‘Ah’ I thought ‘So it was an actual hole’. In the days between these two fascinating events, abradypus added ‘pothole’ to my treasure hunt list.

This morning, I got up at 5:15 to do a three mile out and back, taking in the amazing hole that was worth people showing off in the pub. And they’d only gone and filled it in. I’m still claiming it.

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A few people have asked about the rules of my treasure hunt. When I first had the idea, I planned to have a list of 30 items and would do one preordained item per run. Then I realised that I would most likely go insane. So I have decided to wing it take a more flexible approach to the hunt. Basically, I will try to find at least one item on each run, for each item I find whilst running I will award myself 3 points. I’m also letting myself claim things that I stumble across when not running, but for those I will award myself 1 point. Thanks to JogBlog’s natural sense of joyful evil, I will also be putting some items up for a vote and will try to find the winner on a particular run.

Technically, the list closed at midnight last night with a grand total of 67 items. 67 is a very untidy number and I would be much happier and able to relax if it was a nice round number. Seeing as it’s my rules (and I’ve just realised that Jen, Phil and Morning of Magicians gave me some wonderful suggestions that I somehow missed yesterday) I’m going to add these other suggestions and recalibrate the list. Starting with… the Olympic torch relay.

The other reason for my early start was that the Olympic torch relay was passing though town at 7.20 and having been stuck in a meeting and missing it pass right outside my work yesterday, I decided to go and have a look. It was very brief and strangely moving.

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For anyone bearing torches later in the route (Hels, I mean you) I would say, make sure that you wear good undies that don’t give you a VPL because a lot of people are going to take photos of your bum.

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(I’ve had to edit this post to try to hide my thickery that I missed shed loads of suggestions yesterday)