badly camouflaged

Nice to see that the Coffee Mill down the West Port has been successful enough to expand laterally, now offering seating as well as really nice coffee. Ideally I should be able to make a litre flask last all day but it occasionally requires supplementation, though I try to make it a rare thing, even more so now. As all the small flasks are without stoppers sturdy enough to withstand even small amounts of jiggling it might be time to get another and sacrifice a little bit of space and weight on the way in for a measurable money-saving.

***

Although it wouldn't have been a problem during July and August I'm starting to wonder how on earth I coped with cycling to, from and between the King's Buildings and George Square campuses back at uni; unless it was massively cooler during spring and summer in the mid-nineties I can't work out how I didn't spend the entire morning being repellently sweaty and smelly considering that I was lugging around a bag of books and folders of the equivalent weight to my current work-bag yet wore normal clothes (possibly including trousers and boots though presumably not when it was too warm) whereas even after wearing sweat-friendly modern bicycling-fabrics (formed into, I must emphasise, baggy clothings) I currently have to find a nice cool spot either in the car park or just outside to cool down after the trundle into the office to stop sweating sufficiently in order to be able to change into work-clothing. Part of the problem is possibly the two layers of shorts required in order to get the arse-padding of bicycling shorts with the somewhere-to-keep-phone-and-keys-and-work-pass-and-not-looking-like-a-tit of baggies. There are models of baggy available which offer bum-padding without an entire elastane inner-short but the types available for testing locally have been tested and their pockets found to be wanting. It's also not my legs which get offensively sweaty, though it's undeniably insulating them which in turn will help them retain any heat build-up through their use and in turn help heat up the large volumes of blood passing through them. A rucksack can't help the heat-loss-through-the-back situation but without using Nicky's bike with its rack and panniers I can't currently avoid that, though the presence of another buggered spoke might mean I get to find out sooner rather than later.

During the summer of 2000 I worked out in Gorgie and occasionally bicycled in directly whilst wearing office-clothing but usually arrived well before 08:00 and probably avoided a lot of the heat present just after 08:00 when I've been setting off for the past couple of weeks. For the warm early spring-time bit of 1997 I lived in Morningside but don't recall sweating massively after either getting to the King's Buildings via mostly mild uphills (though I do remember occasionally rumbling audibly if I'd not had time for breakfast and that the back of the lecture theatre was a bad place to sit if you didn't want this to be bounced around the entire room) nor George Square, though there were two nice downhill bits to counteract the short climbs and most of the buildings were nice and big and old and cool, especially the medical school lecture theatres and labs.