Kerry Buckley

Oops, late again!

Starting to get a bit fed up with the seemingly endless stretch of just-above-freezing temperatures we’ve been having. We haven’t even had any proper wintry precipitation, apart from about five minutes on Saturday which happened to coincide with me walking half a mile down the road to get a lift to Felixstowe!

I squeezed a short trail run in on Wednesday evening before heading to the Fat Cat for another pleasant evening shooting the breeze with Rupert (current boss), Joe (previous boss) and Mel (boss before last). It was a lot muddier than I expected (the run, not the pub), including a field that looked like it had been ploughed five minutes before I got to it. It got darker a bit quicker than I’d expected too, but despite both those factors I managed to stay upright. I also came across a sign in the small area of woodland that had unexpectedly disappeared last year, saying that it had been turned into cricket bats. The area now features some new willow saplings, which will apparently be ready to harvest in 15–20 years’ time.

Because it was the last round of the Suffolk Winter League cross country on Sunday, ruling out a long run at the weekend, I decided to join in with Thursday’s Run for Coffee, but to tack on some extra miles. I basically did a lap of more or less the usual route, met the people who start in town, ran another lap, stopped for coffee, then added an extra loop to my run home. I’ve been working at home all week on account of not being able to shake the cold I’ve had for nearly a fortnight, so I was still able to start work at 9am, although that did entail setting out at 5.30. My general tiredness through the day suggest that it might not have been my best ever idea!

Saturday was the FRR AGM and awards night, which was pretty sparsely attended. Nothing much happened, and obviously I didn’t win an award, although a few speedier friends did.

The aforementioned cross country was the Bungay event, which this year was on a new course at Woburn Farm in Corton, on the other side of Lowestoft (counting this side as south rather than west, otherwise it would have been a bit wet). It was two laps on mostly fairly dull field-edge tracks, but with one short section that was normally used by BMXers, with a rollercoaster of short sharp up-and-down mounds.

I woke up in the night on Monday (or possibly Tuesday, but you know what I mean) with the kind of sore throat that means you’re definitely about to get a cold, and sure enough it’s been progressing through various symptoms all week. Mostly just a cough left now, but knowing me that could last for months. To be honest if lingering coughs are part of some kind of demonic pact I don’t remember making to never get ill in any other way, I’ll take it. I hope that’s not tempting fate!

As I turned right at the staggered crossroads at the end of my road on my bike on Tuesday, an inattentive SUV driver decided not to bother looking in my direction, and drove into the side of me. Fortunately fairly slowly and there was no real damage done (to me or the bike – I hope the car picked up a couple of scrapes), and I didn’t think it was worth taking it any further than an admonishment to look where they were going next time.

I organised a code retreat at work on Thursday. Somewhere around thirty people turned up, and I think it went reasonably well. These events always remind me though that outside of the little bubble of our team, and despite people like me banging on about it for a decade or two, hardly anyone seems to actually practice TDD. Oh well, their loss I guess.

Having just about made it through the first two “days” (we’re actually doing one of the book’s day sections every fortnight) of Elm in Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks, we made the executive decision to skip day three and jump into Elixir (which is a bit of a busman’s holiday for me). The current version of Elm is totally different to the one covered by the book, and it seems quite tricky to get hold of an old enough version that still includes signals, which are core to a lot of what’s described. It’s a shame someone hasn’t rewritten the chapter at some point since 2014 when the book first came out.

I whiled away some time on Saturday adding age grade scores to the spreadsheet where I keep my race results, which involved copying a sheet from the official tables, then writing a pretty gnarly function to cross reference the race date (to get my age), distance, open standard time and age correction factor to work out the percentage. All to make me feel better by being able to claim that – even though I’m getting slower – I’m arguably still improving if you take into account the fact that I’m an increasingly old man!

Bury St Edmund (Pakenham) cross country on Sunday, which was much drier than it was last year, even if the weather on the day wasn’t as nice. I got round in a not altogether terrible time, given that I’m still ill, but nothing special either.

February already, eh?

Another double club session week, with the normal one on Tuesday night supplemented by the monthly visit to the track the next evening. I treated the latter as just a social event though, with a handful of us – who were either nursing niggles or thinking of the half marathon coming up at the weekend – jogging round the outside of the track while everyone else flew past at speeds varying from a bit faster to outrageously fast. Then we followed what seems to have become a tradition and headed to the pub for a few pints afterwards.

I ate the last piece of Christmas cake on Wednesday, so it’s officially not a special occasion until Easter.

On Saturday I headed to St Stephen’s Church – a whole 1.7 mile bike ride away! – to see the final night of Pet Needs’s acoustic tour, supported by Ben Brown again. Both enjoyable as ever, and it’s a great venue too, which I’d not been to since it was promoted from its previous role as a tourist information centre. There were a couple of cool looking young lads in front of me, then when the band came on they rather sweetly held up a sign saying “We love you Mr Sharman!”. Apparently Ryan the bassist used to be their teacher.

I’d been slightly dreading the Great Bentley Half on Sunday – the first proper road race since November, and the idea of running 13 miles at pace seemed optimistic. It went OK though, and I ended up finishing in 1:35:28, which is a couple of minutes quicker than last time (but nearly three minutes slower than my 2019 PB on the same course). I think most of that was thanks to Holly and Maria, whose company I enjoyed on the way round, which relied on me managing to keep up with them!

One thing I forgot to add last week was the Big Garden Birdwatch, which I did on Saturday. My total haul was five sparrows, five blackbirds, three starlings, two (for joy) magpies, two blue tits (no sniggering at the back) and two redwings. Also a fox and a squirrel, which I’m told don’t count.

Extremely late this week – almost forgot entirely! I don’t think very much happened though.

The front brake on my bike was making a right racket on Tuesday, so when I got home I had a look and the pads had worn down to the metal. I had a rummage around and found a new set, then managed to drop the little springy thing that keeps them apart, and spent so long looking for it that I was nearly late getting back out for training. The old one wasn’t usable, but in the end I found an old one in the bin that was still serviceable. In the process of looking, I opened the old fridge that’s in the garage that I used to use as a warming cabinet to melt honey for bottling (not that I thought the spring would be inside, but it could have been under the door), and I found half a dozen jars of honey still in there, so that’s a bonus.

Ipswich parkrun has been paused to let the park recover a bit (although the ground seems in much better nick than it was last year), so I went to Kesgrave instead, which is exactly the same distance away but in the opposite direction. I met up with Holly and Maria again to incorporate it into a long run, partly because I’d felt really tired on Tuesday and Thursday, and didn’t fancy trying to keep up on Sunday with last week’s crew.

Sunday was a lazy day, having already got the long run out of the way, then in the evening it was off to the Cricketers again to celebrate Robin’s birthday with a few too many reasonably-priced pints.

I figured I’ll probably need more gels for a marathon than I can squeeze in a shorts pocket, so thought I probably ought to buy one of those belts with stretchy loops to hold them. The best-reviewed one seemed to be a Ron Hill product for about £20, but I found one that looks basically identical on AliExpress for about £1.50. I ordered a landing pad for the drone, a 256GB micro SD card and some muslin squares for marmalade making at the same time, to make the total up to £8 to get free postage, and all but the last one arrived about four days later. Capitalism is weird.

First ex-colleagues catch-up in the Fat Cat on Wednesday, although it was actually two current colleagues and one former.

Struggling to think of much else that’s happened this week. Lots of running as usual, culminating in an 18-mile long run on Sunday to take me just over 46 for the week. My watch has finally upgraded my status from “maintaining” to “productive”, so I guess it must be working.

Brr.

First week back at work. A not insignificant part of Monday was spent trying to work out why a handful of tests were failing on my machine that weren’t before Christmas. It didn’t help that the first time I ran the full test suite was after upgrading to Elixir 1.18 and fixing a few new compiler warnings, but then when I went to bisect from main I realised that that branch was failing too. After clearing various caches, build products etc with no luck I slowly narrowed it down to certain integration tests not receiving expected completion messages, then to a couple of specific background tasks that didn’t seem to be succeeding. After running them manually, I eventually spotted that they had a two-minute sleep that was required in production but had been stubbed out in test. Because these are TCL expect scripts called from the main Elixir code, making them behave differently based on environment hadn’t been as simple, and I’d done it (a while ago) by checking for an environment variable that was only set in production. And guess what I’d been playing with last thing before finishing for the year? Yup, trying out some setup for a new production environment, in the process of which I’d set some environment variables in my shell profile, including the one that caused it to do a real sleep. As Dan pointed out, the mention of environment variables was a bad sign. I’m not sure the hack I’ve currently replaced it with is any better, but at least it works for now.

I also managed to soldier on to the end of the exercises in the Factor chapter of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks ready for the study group on Tuesday, but no-one else bothered, and I can’t say I blame them. Definitely not my favourite of the random languages I’ve dipped my toe into.

In my usual style of finding things on TV that everyone else has been watching for ages, I’m currently about two thirds of the way through Man Like Mobeen, and enjoying it.

I’m also over halfway through my Christmas cake. I’m not sure it’s doing my “lose a stone before London” diet much good, but I have at least started to build my running distance up again (80 miles so far this year). Sunday was the Stowmarket cross country – my first race of the year – and it went better than expected, so that’s vaguely reassuring.

Happy New Year! I must admit I’ve not been a particularly fervent celebrator of the occasion since the overhyped (and one year early) celebrations in 2000, but it is mildly terrifying that that was somehow already a quarter of a century ago.

This was the second of my two weeks off work, and as predicted I’ve done virtually none of the tasks that I really need to get round to one day. Back to work tomorrow, which may be something of a shock to the system, although at least I don’t have to physically go into the office until Tuesday.

The vet was happy with Nobby’s progress. Although his respiratory infection has cleared up, he prescribed another week of the antibiotics in case the kidney issue was also an infection, and he has to go back for more tests in a couple of weeks.

For the first time in a few years I bought a couple of games in the Steam sale – the old Tomb Raider trilogy (one of which I already had), and the slightly odd (but cheap) Firewatch. I’ve finished the first Tomb Raider, and just have the final battle to get through in the second, and I finished Firewatch today (it’s a pretty short game). This may go some way to explaining the lack of chore accomplishments.

As is traditional of late, on New Year’s Eve a bunch of us cycled to Felixstowe, had a run along the prom, got very briefly in the sea, then cycled home again via a couple of pubs. We were pretty lucky with the weather, although obviously the sea was a bit chilly.

The next day saw a bonus parkrun, and Justin organised another of his not-parkrun runs to make it an unofficial double (now the real thing no longer happens). I ran to the park and between the two, but the heavens opened as we were feet from Justin’s door afterwards, so I wimped out of the run home and got a lift back.

I went to the shops on Thursday and noticed that the seville oranges were in, so I stocked up and made two batches of marmalade. I’d had to buy one jar before Christmas to tide me over, so I might need to make one more batch to be sure.

I didn’t scrub the pan properly after the first lot, and the peel stuck to the bottom a bit the second time, so that batch ended up much more caramelised than the first (also slightly over-set). I’ve sampled a bit of each though, and they both taste fine!

I bought a cheapish second-hand (but as-new) drone from eBay, but the weather hasn’t really been suitable to fly it yet, other than a quick play in the garden to make sure it all works. I have a feeling this might be one of those “why did I buy that again?” purchases, but we’ll see.

The weather’s been odd this weekend. Sub-zero temperatures for parkrun yesterday, then I woke up at around 4am and looked out of the window to see what looked like about half an inch of snow. By the time I got up properly though it was raining and hardly any snow remained, and by the afternoon the temperatures was back up into double figures. It’s a good job no important world leader positions are about to be taken up by anyone determined to wreck any last slim hope we might have of addressing climate breakdown or anything.

Looks like I’ve correctly incremented the week counter in the weeknote titles all year (or at least made an equal number of mistakes in each direction). Also I’m told today is Sunday, although of course at the moment it’s impossible to tell. Yesterday was apparently Saturday because there was parkrun, but then I’m sure it was Saturday on Wednesday so maybe not. I didn’t even bother trying to remember which bin to put out when.

I’ve been off work all week, and all I’ve managed to achieve from the infinite chore backlog is finishing the TV aerial cabling and tidying away all the access equipment that had been up for weeks, and vacuuming (which I’m told most people do often enough that finally getting round to it in a week off is not news).

Oh yeah, I also marzipanned and iced the Christmas cakes. I’d forgotten that I needed more eggs for the marzipan, and combined a trip to the greengrocer to buy some (plus a couple of other shops for bits and bobs) with a short run. I probably should have rearranged my rucksack when I nipped into the little Sainsbury’s to get apricot jam and caster sugar – by the time I got home I had a slightly sticky back, only 11 intact eggs and a bag very much in need of a wash.

Christmas Eve saw the annual 6k-ish fun run in aid of Suffolk MIND at the Royal Hospital School. The bottom bit of the course is usually a bit muddy, but this year was the driest I can remember. I was slower than last year, as seems to be the pattern these days.

Christmas day, also as usual, began with a bonus parkrun (my 52nd of the year with one to go – once again I missed one). Then home to cook my traditional excessive lunch.

I tried to be a bit creative with the inevitable leftovers, including making a chicken & bacon pie (I’d made too much pastry for mince pies) and a “pigs in blankets in the hole” which I thought I’d invented but actually seems quite popular.

Nobby seems to have been feeling better this week – he’s been eating more-or-less normally, and the antibiotics seem to have cleared up his respiratory infection. The blood tests showed poor kidney function though, so he has to go back in for more checks and may need to go on a special diet.

I watched the new Wallace and Gromit, which was excellent (I may need to watch it again and pause to check out all the background details), and Doctor Who which was … meh. I’m not sure what it is about the way the Netflix era show is shot and lit, but parts of it somehow seem to fall into the uncanny valley from the opposite side (real people sometimes look offputtingly computer-generated).

On Saturday I took a train to Colchester to see Ben Brown, Generation Feral (who was one person last time I saw her, but now seems to have acquired a drummer and guitarist) and Pet Needs (yes, again!) celebrating ten years of the Three Wise Monkeys. According to setlist.fm that’s 11 times I’ve seen Pet Needs in two years, and they’ve recently overtaken Frank Turner as my most-seen band/artist (it took me ten years to see him nine times).

The next photo isn’t mine (it’s stolen from Jonathan Dadds), but it’s a great shot despite me accidentally being in it.

I finished work on Friday, and now I’m not going back until the 6th, which feels very decadent. It seems the Christmas/New Year “I have no idea what day it is” feeling has crept in already, as it doesn’t feel like Sunday evening (despite it having been a fairly standard weekend).

Last Run for Beer of the year on Wednesday, and we went to Bin 93 again to avoid the pub crowds. They did us a deal for a wine or beer (or two soft drinks) and basically all you can eat cheese and biscuits for a tenner, and I missed a trick by picking a relatively cheap beer, then accidentally choosing one that was twice as strong and twice as expensive for my second. Neil had the same two in the opposite order, so his expensive one was included with the cheese and he paid for the cheap one. Schoolboy error on my part.

Nobby cat’s been a bit ill this week. He’s been a bit snuffly on and off for ages, but got worse and stopped eating, so I took him in to the vet on Friday. They’ve taken some blood for tests and prescribed some antibiotics for the infection and some mirtazapine to stimulate his appetite. He’s still looking poorly, but his nose and eyes seem to have mostly stopped running and he ate some food today, so hopefully he’s on the mend (he’s sitting next to me as I type this). He’s 16, so no longer a spring chicken, but still put up a struggle while having his mouth examined, and managed to leap up on top of the high kitchen cupboards when we got back!

The very drawn out installation of the TV aerial continues – the aerial itself is up now, and the cable’s fixed to the soffit down to the edge of the house, so just the easy bit to do tomorrow (it seems like every time I start there’s only an hour or so of light left!). While I had the roof ladder up I replaced a slate that’s been broken for ages.

Work Christmas do on Monday, which consisted of an escape room (which we were distinctly average at) followed by a meal at the Botanist. Then I decided to add eight miles or so to my cycle home by doing 15 loops up a hill to take the local legend for a Strava segment off Robin (don’t worry, he went and did seven loops later in the week to regain it).

More early Christmas celebration on Thursday, with the festive edition of the TTT (neither tempo nor ten miles on this occasion), running round a few local pubs.

I arrived late to parkrun yet again. Fortunately one of the timekeepers had a brief technical glitch which bought me a minute, but I still started a little way behind the tail walker. I managed to work my way from 157th (ie last) to 28th, which is a surprisingly high position for a not particularly stellar run (although admittedly it was quite tough going in places).

Another long run on Sunday, visiting nine of Ipswich’s parks. Holly and I were joined by Maria this time, for her debut run over the Orwell Bridge, just after slipping in some mud. The distance was less than last week, but I felt just as tired by the end.

I still haven’t got the TV aerial up, but I have at least got the bracket for the TV aerial up, which is a start. I would have finished the job this afternoon, but ran out of daylight.