Kerry Buckley

A cold week. We only got a tiny flurry of snow here, but it never really got above freezing, so wherever there was a dusting (or just frost) it hung around all week. Looks like temperatures are set to rocket back up into double figures tomorrow though.

Because I’m a grumpy old bah humbug Scrooge McGrinch I don’t really do anything much for actual Christmas (other than cook myself a massive dinner), but all the action ends up in the week or two before. This was certainly the case in the past few days, with the usual monthly Run for Beer on Wednesday, a curry on Thursday, the FRR running pub crawl in Felixstowe on Friday, then on Saturday what’s now becoming the traditional ten pub/ten mile Christmas run (which actually included 13 pubs, but fortunately we stuck to halves in all but the first and last).

I got talked into running a quiz for our team meeting on Friday, which seemed to go OK, despite requiring me to coordinate three windows at once to show the questions on Teams, operate the buzzer system and keep score.

My fox-chasing-the-cats reel on Facebook has now apparently been watched three million times. I don’t really understand why.

Must remember to book some time off work.

Well it’s definitely properly cold now. Much as I liked to moan about it being too hot all through the summer, since the clocks went back and it got cold and damp I seem to have become mysteriously averse to leaving the house unnecessarily. I’d only been out for a “normal” run (ie just heading out on my own rather than an organised event) three times, and two of those were end-of-month panics to get a photo for my monthly hollow tree challenge. I also hadn’t run more than ten miles in one go since September. Friday was sunny though, and I had the day off, so I dragged myself out for a gentle 13 miles in the countryside.

The social running’s still going on though, and becoming more alcohol-focussed as we approach Christmas, starting with the TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten) Christmas special on … er … Wednesday. Rather than the usual ten mile time trial, this one basically involved running to the Fat Cat for a pint, then to the Duke of York for another, then the Dove, the Last Anchor, St Judes and finally the Cricketers for a final beer and a burger. I even added an extra loop on my way home to round up to the nominal ten miles.

I posted the video of a fox chasing the cats to Instagram last week, which these days means it’s a “reel”, and ticked the box to share it to FaceBook. For some reason the algorithms decided to start showing it to lots of people, and I kept getting notifications that more and more people had watched it (last time it told me it was 100k). More annoyingly, I get a notification every time someone likes it (800+ at time of writing), which for someone who doesn’t like leaving those little unread message badges sitting on apps/tabs is quite annoying.

I’m still just about still doing Advent of Code (albeit a day or two behind). Usually by now I hit one where my naive solution that works for the sample data looks set to take until the death of the universe to run against the bigger real input, get bored and give up – I expect that to happen any time now. My solutions (in Elixir, although for some reason they always end up looking more like Haskell) are on GitHub.

The other night the camera caught two badgers in the garden at once:

Work Christmas meal this week, which I guess means the festive season must have started. It was on Thursday, which was the first day of December, making it borderline acceptable. We began with a few games of Lazer [sic] Tag at the place over the road from the office, which was good harmless fun. I didn’t come particularly close to the top of any leaderboards, but for some strange reason my accuracy rate was way above everyone else’s (like two or three times higher). If only we’d been paying for each imaginary bullet I’d have got a bargain.

That was followed (via the Dove for a couple of pints) by dinner at The Forge. The meal was good, but that has to be the most hipster place I’ve ever been in. People were ordering drinks that came in wooden boxes and massive lanterns, or were on fire. We then popped into the Nelson for a couple more pints (well I think two or three of us might have had pushed the boat out and had a couple, while most were apparently more restrained). As usual, I wore my Bah Humbug T-shirt, which is older than a lot of my colleagues.

It was the second cross country fixture of the season on Sunday, at Sutton Heath near Woodbridge. After resetting the calibration on my watch to stop the distance from my foot pod reading too high, it now seems to be reading low, so I spent the whole race thinking I was running slower than I was and wondering why 7:15 pace felt so tough. Turned out I actually finished two minutes quicker than last year, although it was a lot less muddy this time round. As at Framlingham, I caught Robin about three miles in, but this time didn’t manage to stay in front and finished a couple of yards behind him. One all.

I’m still regularly getting foxes and badgers in the garden. The other night I caught a video of a fox chasing Ninja cat, which doesn’t usually happen (they mostly completely ignore each other) I was in the kitchen at the time, and both cats who were out came flying in through the flap at great speed.

I reached the end of the Angel boxset this week, which means I’ve now watched all of Firefly, seven seasons of Buffy and five of Angel, plus all the special features and commentaries for the latter two, since the beginning of the year. No, you’re a saddo with no social life.

The starter motor in the Roadster refused to move again as I attempted to come home from Felixstowe in the pouring rain on Tuesday night. So far, it only ever does that when I’m at least ten miles away from home. Fortunately I’m now armed with the “stick it in gear and rock the car forward or back slightly” trick, which worked again. On balance, I think that all left me both more and less confident in my ability to return from anywhere I may have driven to.

At least one of the cats has now spent a bit of time climbing on the new contraption, although not before all three of them had played in the cardboard box it was delivered in.

Another double “Run For” Wednesday, with coffee in the morning (missing the rain) and beer in the evening (not so lucky, and completely soaked, especially on the run home from the pub).

It was my birthday on Thursday, which I largely ignored. I had the day off work though, and popped to the supermarket. In doing so I remembered to take my stack of “£12 off when you spend £80” coupons with me. Uncharacteristically, I did actually spend £80. I even remembered to scan a coupon at the checkout.

Naturally they’d all expired four days ago.

On a more positive note, I’d been contemplating a Pixel 6a after cracking the screen on my 4a on Tuesday (the battery life has also getting progressively worse, to the point that it barely lasted half a day on a charge). I hadn’t quite made the decision by Thursday though, at which point Google made it much easier by dropping the price from £400 to £300. It arrived on Saturday, and the process of transferring everything over was pretty painless.

Phil came up for his traditional annual birthday beer & curry visit on Saturday (we’re fairly sure this tradition is unbroken since 1992, apart from 2020 when the world temporarily stopped). This time I’d managed to persuade him to enter the Hadleigh 5 on Sunday (I was running the 10), and then had to break the news to him that it was five miles, not km. He got round OK though, especially considering he hadn’t previously run further than 5k, which he last did over a year ago. I think he even kind of enjoyed it! I did better than last year in the 10, but not as well as in 2019. When we got back I made the also traditional fry-up, despite it being by now past lunchtime. I cobbled together some hash browns from a couple of potatoes I had left, an onion and an egg, and despite relying on vague memories of how hash browns work rather than consulting any kind of recipe they came out OK. Also notable for being one of the extremely rare occasions when I’ve used all six burners of the hob at once.

Not much happening during the week, but on Friday I went to Norwich to see the always-excellent Half Man Half Biscuit. They were on at the Waterfront, which is much more convenient than UEA because it’s about five minutes’ walk from the train station. I saw them for the first time there 14 years ago (almost to the day, coincidentally), although I first heard them about 21 years before that. In 2008 I remember having to rush to the station the minute the encore ended to catch the last train, but this time we had an hour to kill, which meant we were forced to pop back into a pub for another pint.

Saturday saw a very gentle parkrun on the slightly dull Kesgrave course, as Chantry Park had been taken over by the “MoRun”, which seems to be an rather expensive race trading on the Movember brand while not actually directing any of people’s entry fees their way. Then Sunday was the Scenic 7: always a pleasant event, and used to be the only local seven mile event until Martlesham muscled in with the redesigned 10k. I managed to go a little bit quicker than I’d expected, but still 30s or so slower than my best. My ankle, which had stopped hurting, started hurting again – both times it was after wearing the Hoka trainers that I bought semi-randomly when I couldn’t get hold of the New Balance ones I usually wear, so I don’t think they suit my feet. The Saucony ones I got at the same time are fine, as are the lighter Asics that I wore today.

I finally got round to taking the shelf unit that I set up as a standing desk in the corner of the lounge at the beginning of lockdown out to the garage (I only used it for the first few months of working at home), and replacing it with a giant cat scratcher/climbing thing. So far none of the cats have shown any interest in either the thing itself or, more surprisingly, the box it came in.

Well it feels like summer might be finally over, although we did have a bit of a false start to autumn a while ago, so who knows? I finally caved in and put the heating on on Friday evening – partly because it had dropped to 14? in the house, but also because the humidity was 89%, which seems like it might be a bad thing. Incidentally, am I the only person who can never remember the keystroke for the ? symbol, so just holds down the option key and mashes the first two rows on the keyboard until one appears, then deletes all the other rubbish?

I went into the office twice this week, because it’s been mandated that we go in three days a week from now on, and two is equal to three if your error margins are wide enough. On Tuesday I forgot about the clock change, and didn’t take any lights with me (fortunately there’s a route home that’s mostly cycle paths). On Thursday it rained, and it turned out that despite most of us being in the office the team meeting we had scheduled was happening on Teams rather than in real life.

In the light of all the Twitter/Musk kerfuffle I found my Mastodon account again, and actually made my first “toot” (hmm) there, after five years of silence since I initially signed up. That may seem like a long time, but I was on Instagram for a whole decade before posting anything there.

The cross country season started this weekend. I pushed a bit harder than planned at parkrun on Saturday, but despite that and the pouring rain and mud I actually had a reasonable race on Sunday. Obviously these things are all relative – I only managed 97th place – but I beat Robin for the first time, which I’ll take as an achievement.

Feels like I might be getting close to shaking off this runny nose and cough, a mere four weeks after contracting covid. The fatigue’s mostly gone too, but I have to say that if the expectation is that we’ll all get this a couple of times a year from now on that’s a pretty miserable prospect.

I think I’ve definitely narrowed the car issue down to the starter motor now. I didn’t risk driving it to Felixstowe on Tuesday night because it felt a bit reluctant to start again (there was a definite “strong–strong–strong–weak” rhythm to it turning over, which makes me suspect there’s a dodgy winding or contact somewhere). Fortunately I had time to get the train instead, which meant I got a few extra running miles in too. However, after a successful supermarket trip the next day and the purchase of a battery booster pack I just about summoned up the courage to drive it to Cambridge on Saturday night (for a much-delayed CoCo and the Butterfields show), but when I got in to drive home it did the dreaded click but don’t turn over thing. The booster was no help at all (as the battery presumably isn’t the problem), but by a stroke of luck I’d parked on a slight uphill, and there was a big empty space behind me. By putting it in reverse I was able to rock it enough to shake things up a bit, after which it worked OK, to my immense relief. Not sure I really want to use it again until I’ve fixed it now though, and to be honest it’s tempting just to replace it (it’s still virtually brand new by my standards – I find number plates with the letter at the beginning rather than the end a bit suspect, let alone these new fangled ones – but actually nearly 20 years old). Unfortunately that entails deciding what to replace it with – something small, cheap, economical, not too boring, reliable and maybe slightly more practical.

I’ve finally started getting my running volume back up again, after a few weeks where not only was the mileage very low, but a worrying percentage of it was races and other attempts to go quickly, with far too few easy miles. I don’t think I’ve got much chance to hit my original 2022 mile target for 2022 now, although 55 miles a week is theoretically doable (I managed something close to that for the last few months of 2020, to hit 2020, but there wasn’t much else going on then to get in the way). I’m seriously running out of time for my October hollow tree picture, so went out on Sunday looking for a suitable candidate. I found a couple, but didn’t realise until too late that the app I have on my phone that lets me trigger the camera from my headphones was misbehaving, so I hadn’t actually got any photos of myself (a normal person would have just asked the people who walked past while I was standing sheepishly in a tree to take one for me, rather than just sheepishly nodding hello).

I woke up on Sunday morning thinking “that’s odd – I feel like I’ve had a decent eight-hour sleep (bar the odd coughing episode), but it’s only been seven hours. Then I remembered that the clocks had changed. If we’d still been in the old world of having to do them all manually I expect I’d have made it through the day without noticing that I was out of step with the rest of the country.

Week 42!

Mostly over covid now, but still have an annoying (to others probably more than me) cough and an intermittent runny nose. Still slightly lacking energy too, but probably no longer to the extent that I can realistically use it as a cover for my usual laziness.

I had most of the week off, and as predicted failed to do most of the tasks that are waiting for me to get round to. I spent far too much of the time off preparing a talk for the internal DevCon15 event at work on Friday, which I think may be missing the point slightly. I think the talk went OK, despite giving myself 108 slides to get through in 15 minutes (mostly showing incremental code changes, which is safer – if a lot more work – than live-coding).

There was some kind of reorganisation while I was away, but I think it’s just the usual “someone senior you’ve never heard of now reports to someone else senior you’ve never heard of, and you’re now technically in the same organisation as these other teams you have no dealings with” nonsense.

I did manage to make my Christmas cake (plus the small extra one I somehow got talked into making every year for a friend – I need to get a smaller tin so it’s not so wide and flat). They came out OK, but there was a near-disaster when I finished mixing the ingredients and wondered whether I’d missed anything … ah yes, the dried fruit that’s all sitting in a bowl soaking in brandy. Nothing important then.

On Tuesday when I went to come home from training in Felixstowe my car refused to start (or even turn the engine over). I got a lift home (realising that I’d left my house keys in the car, but fortunately I have a hidden spare), then returned by train the next day for a brief and unsuccessful attempt to diagnose the problem followed by a call to the breakdown service. It started OK once I was home with a boost from a battery charger, so I think it’s probably the starter motor (it’s always been a bit sluggish if the battery’s not fully charged). It’s going to be a pain to change it though, as it’s hidden behind the engine where there’s no easy access.

Went out for a meal with work on Thursday night, which I think is the first time since last Christmas. Quite a few people have left and joined since then, so it was good to do something vaguely social.

I got talked into entering the Thurlow 5, which I’d never done before. It looked like we were going to get soaked, but fortunately the rain stopped before the start, and didn’t start again until afterwards. It went OK-ish (35:37), and I think I may have got enough points to move up a place to fourth in my age category in the final Suffolk Grand Prix standings (for what that’s worth, which isn’t a lot as it only really includes people who make the effort to enter at least five of the races in the series, or just enter anything going like me).

I bought a temperature-controlled butter dish, which seems a bit indulgent but means I can finally stop having to microwave the butter to make it spreadable in the winter, and having it almost runny in the summer. I’d been thinking of trying to build something with a peltier junction and a heatsink, which I assume is how this one works, but I’m sure a commercial one will be more reliable (and not end up as a half-finished project).

A pretty quiet week, really. Slowly recovering from covid, which is mostly taking the form of the lingering cough I end up with every time I get a cold, plus a runny nose, headaches and general tiredness (the latter probably thanks to the cough stopping me from sleeping for more than an hour at a time).

I’ve probably been drinking too much coffee too (which won’t have helped with the headaches), but my brain seems determined to try to help by sabotaging the production process.

First I managed to grind the beans, fill the portafilter, tamp it down and lock the portafilter into the machine, then put hot water in a mug for an americano, remove the portafilter, knock out the grinds, start the machine, and wonder why the water level in the mug was rising but remaining strangely not coffee-coloured, and with no pressure at the grouphead. Fortunately I’d also mistimed my coffee order again and run out of proper beans, so only wasted some unpleasant stale emergency supermarket beans.

Then on a separate occasion I briefly wondered why coffee was pouring over my scales, before realising that I’d forgotten to put a cup under the machine.

TimeHop also reminded me that a year ago I tried to add beans to the grinder without taking the lid off, and for completeness I should also mention the incident a few weeks ago when I decided it would be a good idea to clean the cup that goes under the grinder while I was grinding the beans, instead of – you know – leaving it in place to catch the grinds and stop them from just falling on the grinder and the worktop.

Another very low mileage running week, for obvious reasons. I still went along to Run for Beer on Wednesday, and did parkrun (very slowly) on Saturday before finishing the week with the Saxons 5 mile race on Sunday. I don’t know what it is about that race that makes me suddenly become weirdly consistent, but in 2018 I ran it in 35:47, then in 2019 just failed to beat that, with a 35:48. After a couple of years when the race didn’t happen I absolutely smashed those times today with … 35:46.