End of the leave year, so I had this week off to use up the last of my allocation of days. Which was nice.
My new TV arrived on Monday. Fortunately the template I’d made to check for fit was accurate, and it just squeezes onto the corner wall (with about 10mm total clearance).
As is my wont, I ignored the safety instructions’ insistence that (a) the wall mount should be installed by a professional, and (b) the TV needed three people to lift it, and with a bit of ingenuity, planning and some minor jeopardy I managed to successfully get it up on the wall on my own. I’ll probably stick to one of the other instructions though, namely “do not throw anything at the TV set”. Which is why I don’t watch Question Time.
Once I’d removed the old (home-made by me) media tower, the (likewise) MDF projector screen, the projector shelf, the projector, the old TV, various bits of obsolete kit like a Sky box and a TiVo (!) and a phenomenal pile of now-unused cables, and filled and painted over some holes, the room now looks much tidier (or might once I sort out the piles of random stuff in the other corner!)
My new Mac arrived too. Apart from it being many times times faster than the old one, the switch was almost anticlimactic. A couple of hours for the migration assistant to do its thing, and everything from apps to preferences to command line tools was set up and running pretty much exactly as before, which isn’t bad considering the new one’s running a whole different processor architecture. The first Macs I used were 680×0-based, so over the years I’ve now migrated from there to PowerPC to Intel to Apple Silicon.
Another month’s Run for Beer has rolled round already (actually it should have been last week, but hardly anyone could make it then). Before we know it spring will be here and we’ll be out in beer gardens again. This week we headed to the Three Wise Monkeys. That made the route slightly shorter, which fitted in nicely with it being in a fairly short gap between last weekend’s 15 mile race and a five mile one this Friday.
Friday was the Sudbury “fun run”, which despite the name is very much a proper race. I did it last year too, but had completely forgotten that the second half is pretty much all uphill. They’d had to move the finish line at the last minute thanks to some emergency roadworks, so it was 4.75 miles instead of five, but the missing bit would have all been downhill! My pace was pretty much identical to last year, and it was nice to average under 7 minutes a mile again.
Saturday’s parkrun was another story altogether – just dragging myself round at 9 minute+ pace was a real struggle. The heart rate monitor on my watch backed this up, with the average value being weirdly almost as high as the maximum I’d hit on Friday. At least I’d taken along the batch of hot cross buns I’d made on Friday to hand round, so I got to refuel before cycling home.
On Sunday I headed back to the same park to run the parkrun course again, this time as part of the annual Beat the Bunny unofficial handicap race (start times are based on your fastest 5k so far this year, and the fastest runner is chasing you all down wearing a bunny suit). There seem to be fewer quick people at these events every year, to the extent that I was the last non-leporine runner to depart. Fortunately my best 2024 parkrun time was slow enough to give me a four minute head start, so the bunny didn’t catch me and I wasn’t quite last. In fact I even improved on my handicap time!
