Weeknotes 2024-35

Another bank holiday Monday. I’m convinced that at some point one of them will completely pass me by and I’ll wonder why no-one’s working, but I noticed this one coming with a few days to spare. I didn’t do a lot with it though, other than a (not very long) long slow run on my own in the countryside.

It turned out over the long weekend that the cache optimisation I mentioned last week wasn’t quite so premature after all, so I ended up rewriting it again. It’s still simpler than the one before last, but not quite as simplistic as the one I thought we could get away with. Although I also realised we hadn’t enabled pruning of old Oban jobs from the database, which can’t have helped.

I went out for a Bangla curry on Thursday, which ended up with Robin and I heading to the Cricketers afterwards to meet Dave, who was later than planned, leading to consumption of a few more pints than might have been originally planned. A good evening though.

Ninja cat was behaving oddly on Friday morning, hanging around in the lounge and apparently convinced something interesting was under the settee. Then in the evening I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up to see a mouse creep out from under the TV, then skitter back in again, so that probably explained it. I couldn’t catch it from there, but was woken in the night by sounds of commotion downstairs, and went down to find that Badger cat had caught it. He didn’t seem to have injured it, so I rescued it from him and put it out of the front door. Some time later I was woken again, and he’d obviously managed to find it and bring it back in, and was walking round with it in his mouth. Still apparently unharmed though, and this time I relocated it a bit further away and set the cat flap to in only, which gave it time to escape while I was kept awake by cats bashing at the flap until they remembered how to pull it open and go through anyway. There was no sign of the mouse by the morning, so either it got away or they ate it outside!

On Friday evening a bunch of us from work (and a couple of former colleagues who I hadn’t seen for a while) went to Avid again for some bouldering. Although I thought I hadn’t overdone it, I had all sorts of aches by Sunday. Fortunately (and unsurprisingly) the worst were in my arms, so they didn’t completely scupper the Framlingham 10k. They probably didn’t help though, and neither did the heat. I finished a couple of minutes slower than last year, and if I’m honest I’m not entirely looking forward to racing 60% further at the Coastal 10 next weekend. Nice to be back racing though – the August break seemed to last ages, although somehow I managed not to take advantage, with the fewest miles run of any month so far this year.