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

I finished a thing! I submitted a PR with my Elixir port of the Supermarket Checkout kata, although it hasn’t been merged yet. Also, I haven’t got round to actually doing the kata itself, which is an exercise in refactoring the convoluted code that I translated.

I made some small progress on GOOS-Elixir too, in that I now have it successfully both displaying a message in a GUI and sending an XMPP message from one process to another. Still a way to go before I have even a first passing (or even correctly failing) test.

A better turnout (and better weather) for the last Run for Beer of the year on Tuesday. I burnt my mouth on a very generous, but also very hot, portion of loaded chips, and got talked into stopping for a fourth pint before running home. I blame Merv for the latter – he may be a decade and a half my senior, but is still a bad influence.

The following night was the Christmas run with the TTT crowd, which fortunately didn’t involve the usual ten mile time trial, but a more leisurely jog round seven pubs in a similar number of miles.

Friday was mostly spent recovering from Thursday (thank goodness I’d decided to start my Christmas break on Thursday!), then Saturday featured the usual parkrun (not to be confused with the unusual one which will be happening on Monday), plus cake icing, mince pie making and late night food shopping to avoid the crowds. Sunday saw the annual Stutton & Holbrook Christmas Eve 6k(ish) charity fun run. It was a surprisingly mild day for that, but very windy, which I’ll blame for being marginally slower than the past few years.

My Brooklyn Nine-Nine rewatch has made it as far as season seven now, so almost up to the point where I get to see new episodes. I was saddened to learn of Andre Braugher’s death on Monday.

On Wednesday I was roped in again as a last-minute quiz team substitute, and we won again! I even felt like I contributed something this time, although not in any popular culture questions.

I was in the office on Friday, and a loud “tick tock” noise started coming from (as far as I could tell) above the ceiling tiles. It stopped eventually, then restarted and stopped again later, but nothing had exploded by the time I came home, so I assume it wasn’t a bomb.

After parkrun on Saturday I headed to Colchester to see Pet Needs for the fifth time this year (!) at their Fractured Party III at the University of Essex. I got there early for a secret acoustic gig in the afternoon, then killed a couple of hours by walking round an eight mile sub-loop of the Colchester Orbital route (which seemed apt as it pops up in one of their lyrics).

With the walk complete (and muddy trainers – oops), I popped into the campus fast food place to grab a burger. Once I’d finished I went to take my tray back, leading to the weird experience of having to politely ask at least two of the band and another two from the support act if they could move so I could get to the bin.

The main event was ably warmed up by Henshaw and The Lottery Winners, and the headliners were great as ever. I forgot my earplugs, but fortunately the sound was just on the right side of too loud (in fact during the encore Johnny’s vocals were pretty much drowned out by the crowd singing along). No guest appearance by Frank Turner this time, although I did spot him watching from the wings.

No progress on the GOOS-Elixir project, but I came across a refactoring kata I hadn’t seen before (Emily Bache’s Supermarket Receipt Refactoring Kata), and have started porting that to Elixir as it isn’t one of the currently implemented languages. I should probably get myself checked for ADD at some point …

The week got off to a good start when I woke up on Monday to find that I hadn’t plugged my phone in properly and it had gone flat and turned itself off. The real problem though was that once I put it on charge and switched it back on it refused to accept my pin. I eventually had to do a factory reset and reload everything from backup (which was fortunately pretty painless, if annoying). This time I didn’t enable “auto-confirm unlock” (where it unlocks when you enter the final digit, rather than having to press enter) – I’m don’t know for sure that was the root of the bug, but I have my suspicions.

Monday night I finally made it to another GoodGym session (most of them have been on Tuesdays lately), and got to wear my 100 shirt at last. Three of us ran up to the Blue Cross centre and helped them repot a bunch of plants in their reception area. I ignored the advice to bring a head torch, but somehow still ended up running in front and warning the better-prepared people of obstacles in the dark section of path.

Tuesday was our work Christmas meal. We did lazer [sic] tag again, and I was rubbish again, then went to The Forge to eat, and finished up in the Nelson. Fortunately, unlike four years to the day previously, we didn’t witness a fight in the latter. More people than usual made it to closing time, but a few of the younger team members seemed strangely unaware of how the last orders and time bells and drinking-up time work!

Having missed the normal club training night on Tuesday because of the meal, the monthly track session was handily scheduled for Wednesday. It was forecast to be cold, so I switched the spikes on my cross country shoes for short ones to avoid any risk of slipping over, which also provided an excuse to cycle there and back instead of running. Unfortunately the back bend was completely covered in frost, so we ended up running on the infield instead.

I felt like I’d run out of excuses for missing TTT (Thursday Tempo Ten), and turned up with two other hardly souls to run the ten miles in pretty miserable weather. Gripper had twisted his ankle and Neil the vicar had a cold, so for once I was able to keep up, at least for the outward leg. We drifted apart on the way back, with me ending up in the middle, and just under 75 minutes. As usual, I felt wiped out afterwards, and was hoping a rest day on Friday would be enough time to recover for parkrun and the ten pub run on Saturday.

Then I remembered it was also the club social “12 pubs of Christmas” run on Friday night, so no rest day after all. This involved using a slightly flaky app that gave us quiz questions once we reached each pub, and a puzzle to solve to reveal the next one. Our team were last to leave, adopted a three on, one off (nine halves) strategy, and were also the last back. Fortunately time wasn’t a factor in the scoring, and it turned out we’d won.

The weather for parkrun was possibly even worse than it had been on Thursday night, with attendance down by about 50% from the week before. After cycling home in the pouring rain I just about had time to get dry and warm before heading back out for the annual Christmas ten pub run (12.8 miles, three pints, seven halves and a sausage roll).

I got a £100 vehicle tax refund for the Roadster, after finally getting round to SORNing it. I’d put it off because I couldn’t find the V5, and begrudged paying £25 for a new one, but was spurred into action by the threat of a £100 fine for not insuring it, under the daft new (OK, 12 years old) rule where you still have to insure a car that you’re not using. At least now I can tell myself I’ve saved £75, though obviously in reality if I’d done it straight away the rebate would have been more and I still wouldn’t have had a fine.

Also, despite this being 2023, it came in the form of a cheque, which means I have to go into town at some point to pay it in.

We had a tiny bit of snow overnight on Thursday, and woke up to a wintry-looking world on Friday. I was nevertheless intending to cycle into work, having not been to the office for a few weeks thanks to a combination of time off and having a cold. Then I heard that the Orwell Bridge had been closed (nothing to do with the weather), which meant that anyone coming from north of town wouldn’t be coming in. I suspected I might be virtually the only person to turn up, which was plenty enough excuse to stay home (and get more work done).

Nothing had thawed out by Saturday, which made for a chilly but firmer underfoot parkrun, but it had warmed up a few degrees by Sunday for the delayed opening round of cross country. The forecast had been implying torrential rain, but it actually wasn’t too bad. Plenty of puddles and sand to run through/round though, but I managed a creditable (for me) 83rd place out of 400-odd.