Kerry Buckley What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

The long-awaited return of local GoodGym group runs happened on Monday. Various things, including but not limited to a pandemic, conspired to there not having been any in Ipswich since early 2020 (although there have been a couple of bonus tasks in the meantime), but we finally have a newly qualified run leader/coordinator who seems very keen. This also marked my 100th task (a few years later than expected), which means I get a new T-shirt. Unfortunately it looks very similar to the basic red version unless you’re paying attention, as opposed to the black one I got for 50.

Wednesday saw another Run for Coffee/Run for Beer double-header. I can’t help noticing that attendance at the latter skews more male than the former!

On Sunday a few of us from work met up at Bin 93 for a board games afternoon. We ended up playing Zombicide, which took about three hours but was good fun. I enjoyed playing an entirely cooperative game for a change, rather than trying to work out who were secretly werewolves, minions of Mordred or whatever. The mechanics of the game worked really well to keep us teetering between “we’re going to win easily” and “we’re doomed” right up to the final round (we did win in the end).

I had half an eye on the London Marathon tracker while we were playing, with a fair few people I know running, and some good results. We were also rudely interrupted at 3pm by the daft emergency siren thing, which somehow came as a surprise to us all even though I’d remembered and warned everyone ten minutes earlier.

It feels like Spring is finally arriving. The branches that fell off my apple tree last year, but are still sitting there semi-attached, have buds on them, but all the branches that are still in their traditional elevated positions seem to be dead.

My baby niece turned 18 this week, which hardly seems possible. Does this mean I’m … old?

Now up to 19/12 (or 19/67) languages on #12in23. Some of them have been more pleasant experiences than others, based largely on the availability, quality and helpfulness of language documentation.

I went to see Half Man Half Biscuit again on Saturday, with Rupert from work. Support were Model Village, who I think I saw supporting the same band in the same venue ten years ago. I wore the Pet Needs T-shirt that I bought at the gig the other week, and while we were waiting for HMHB to come on the bloke standing behind me tapped me on the shoulder to comment on the shirt. Turns out he’s a mate of Johnny from Pet Needs, and is also in Dingus Khan with Ben Brown (who was supporting Pet Needs as a solo act). Small world.

While most of the people I’ve been semi-marathon training with were off running at Boston (UK) or Manchester today I was in Essex for the far more sensible distance of 10k at Little Bromley. It went pretty much to plan, and I shaved 40s off last year’s time, coming in at 42:35. Still a minute or so outside my PB though (am I getting old?). Someone collapsed in front of me just short of the finish line, but there was a paramedic within feet of him so hopefully he was OK. He must have been furious that no-one helped him cover the last few yards to the mat before putting him in the ambulance though.

Almost forgot that today was Sunday, on account of tomorrow being a notional Sunday too.

I’ve finished #12in23, a little early – the dozen I ended up with were 8th, AWK, COBOL, Crystal, Go, Lua, Pharo, Rust, Scheme, Standard ML, Vim script and Zig. I also did a few more exercises from the Ruby and Elixir tracks, so with the abandoned Ballerina my tally currently stands at 14.4/12. It’s kind of tempting to aim for five exercises from each of the 67 available tracks by the end of the year, but I suspect that way madness lies.

Still on the tech side of things, I spent Friday adding Absinthe to my work project (A Phoenix web app), and building an API around a specific (non-database) tool which was previously only exposed via a LiveView GUI. It was all in all a very pleasant experience, and I’m very grateful to past me for building the original feature as a UI-agnostic core component returning trees of well-defined structs, which were very simple to map onto a GraphQL schema. The only remaining snag once I thought I’d finished was that the bundled GraphiQL client doesn’t seem to work on the deployed application, which I assume is something to do with it being behind an NGinX proxy.

A gentle start to the week, running-wise, then a busy weekend, starting with the Sudbury Fun Run (which despite the name is definitely a proper race) on Good Friday. I’d never done it before, but enjoyed it (if you leave aside the usual discomfort of running as fast as you can for five miles). It featured one of those sneaky elevation profiles where you feel like you’re going uphill for ages, then lose all the height gained on a short steep downhill where you don’t really get the benefit. Also an amusing feature where the route went slightly out past a turning in order for us to cross at a zebra crossing and come back on the other side of the road, no doubt much to the bafflement of people trying to drive past in the gaps between runners.

Saturday featured a change of parkrun, with a bunch of us running at Alton Water, then back to some friends in Holbrook for coffee and bacon rolls. The course featured some big muddy puddles – in fact more than a lot of this year’s cross country venues – but I managed to finish in tenth place with a time just outside 22 minutes.

Sunday saw a third day of leg abuse with the annual charity “beat the bunny” event in Chantry Park (basically everyone sets off at staggered times based on their recent form, and tries not to get overtaken by the fastest runner, who is wearing a rabbit onesie). It should have been 5k, but ended up more like four thanks to parts of the park being cordoned off behind police tape after an incident.

I made my “hot cross buns” joke for the nth year, and fortunately managed to offload most of them on Saturday to supplement the bacon rolls, although I still ate more myself than is entirely healthy.

April already.

I think my car has now finally used up its last last chance, and is going to have to go. After behaving itself for a couple of weeks to lull me in to a false sense of security, it decided to go back to its old tricks from months ago, and refuse to start to come home from Felixstowe on Tuesday. Various attempts to push-, jump- and tow-start it failed, and I finally decided to just ask Peter to tow it over the road into a side street so I could park it somewhere other than the sports centre car park and scrounge a lift back with one of the Ipswich folk who’d hung around to help. Unfortunately, being an idiot, I forgot to communicate the plan to said folk, and once I’d locked the car up and Peter had driven off I walked back over the road to find that everyone had (understandably) gone home. This left me having to resort to the train, after a bit of a walk and a chilly half hour wait. To make matters worse, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sudden suspicion that I’d got the magic sequence to allow the daft Smart auto gearbox to bump start slightly wrong, a fact that a quick Google confirmed. If only I’d thought to do that while I was with the car and had a bunch of people around to help push. Sigh.

On Wednesday a bunch of us went to an 80s quiz in the local Wetherspoon’s. Unfortunately after waiting a while for it to start and decided it was clearly not happening, it eventually turned out to be taking place in a different side of the pub (where there hadn’t been any available tables anyway), so it ended up just being a few pints and no quiz. An enjoyable evening nonetheless.

Only one language to go to complete #12in23 now. I started 8th (a dialect of forth), but it’s weird and frustratingly unfamiliar and I haven’t made much progress.

The weather still seems to be all over the place. Properly warm on Thursday, then pouring with rain on Friday. I got soaked walking back into the office after lunch, then soaked again cycling home. I expected a third soaking at the club track session in the evening, but the torrential downpour stopped just as I headed out and didn’t return, and it turned out I’d overdressed with a base layer and long sleeves and was far too warm. The threat of rain must have put people off, as only eight of us turned up.

On Saturday I went to see Pet Needs again, this time in Bury St Edmunds. It was an acoustic show in an art gallery, with only Johnny and George with no drummer or bassist, and with Ben Brown co-headlining and support from Slughouse. The evening got off to a bad start when I left home to cycle to the station and found a flat tyre, and had to quickly switch some lights over to my dodgy old mountain bike (and then it started raining again), but after that small glitch I got there in plenty of time and really enjoyed it. Having gone on my own again I even ended up randomly chatting with a couple I’d never met before, which is most unlike me. We fairly quickly established that we’d been to a variety of the same gigs over the past few years, so I wouldn’t be surprised to bump in to them again another time. The show was sold out with only 60 tickets, although it felt like they could easily have fitted a couple of hundred in there. Some nice idiosyncrasies of a small venue: being able to just hang your coat on a stanchion of the barrier fencing off the cake counter and trust it would be safe; a bar that served beer from those mini kegs you get in the supermarket; and going to the toilet to find myself queuing behind the singer of the band I’d come to see. Oh, and I managed to grab a set list from the stage at the end as a souvenir!

On Sunday (after a ten mile run first thing) I cycled to the supermarket because my car’s (a) still not working and (b) (related) still in Felixstowe. Limited by what I could fit in a rucksack, I adopted the strategy of using the self-scanner, starting with the most important items and continuing until the bag was stuffed full. So, naturally, when I reached the till I was randomly selected for a rescan and had to take it all out and cram it back in again.