A long-overdue week off work (finally used some of my 2024/5 leave allowance! I tried to use a dash there instead of a slash, and had to fire up the character viewer to find an en dash that didn’t look weird with the old-style numbers that this blog theme uses. I was glad to discover that U+2012 FIGURE DASH is a thing), but annoyed to find that for some reason WordPress mangles it, regardless of whether I paste in the character or insert it as an HTML entity.
Obviously there were a million jobs I needed to do, and obviously I did very few of them. I did manage to do a small amount of gardening (some of the clippings from the top of the front hedge were taller than me, as were some of the weeds from what I’ll optimistically call the lawn). I finally got fed up with my 20-year-old petrol tools, and bought a rechargeable strimmer, pole hedge trimmer and chainsaw from the Ryobi Max Power 36V range. So far I’m very happy with the first two (I’m yet to use the chainsaw).
I also spent quite a while washing washed seven or eight years’ worth of old running shoes (27 pairs), ready to send for reuse/recycling. Then I looked on the site and it said you don’t actually need to wash them. Oh well.
I’d been vaguely thinking about picking up my abandoned attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. I was using Scenic for the UI, but that was hard to test, so I was wondering whether to backtrack and try using wxWidgets instead, as it has bindings in the Erlang stdlib. That led me into a couple of diversions to learn about Erlang macros and records, how to use the latter from Elixir, and why you can’t call the former, and I ended up porting the code from Arif Ishaq’s tutorial to Elixir. Still didn’t get round to looking at the GOOS stuff though.
On Saturday I went to a barbecue at Jen and Alec’s, with most of the coffee running crowd. I nearly forgot to go altogether, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was a pleasant afternoon/evening.
Nothing very exciting on the running front this week. I ended up cycling to Felixstowe (about 11 miles) for the Tuesday club session, which ended up involving a possibly unprecedented 8.5 miles of running, including some warm-up laps of the tennis courts, running to and from the session location, then a 2?4?6?8?6?4?2 minute pyramid session (there’s that figure dash again!). I’d hoped for a gentle ride home after that, but Dave had other ideas and I ended up being dragged along at an average speed of nearly 17mph.