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

My usual Tuesday routine of heading to Felixstowe for club training was foiled by a complete inability to find my car key. I tried all the obvious (and less obvious) places like pockets, bags, in the ignition, in the fridge etc, but eventually found it several hours too late next to the bed.

What had actually happened was that earlier, while looking for a ruler (which I never found), I stumbled across a very old Android tablet that I hadn’t been able to find for years. I plugged it in to charge (doesn’t seem to have worked) and put it down next … apparently on top of the key. There’s clearly some law of conservation of finding things going on.

Wednesday was time for the every-ten-weeks visit to the pub quiz – due to someone else dropping out I seem to have been promoted to full-time team member. Unfortunately when we got to the pub they’d lost our reservation, and it was full up, but we decamped to the Nelson for beer and food instead, so it wasn’t a wasted evening. They’ve offered us 50% off our bill next time to make up for the mistake, so that’ll be a bonus.

Friday was the day when Pet Needs discovered how successful their “bottom of the pops” campaign had been. Thanks to some great ideas on their part to sell multiple versions of the album, they exceeded expectations by entering the album chart at number 17. Glad to have played my part by sponsoring the album in the first place, then buying – er – 16 different variants!

Sunday saw the Tarpley 20 roll round again – the closest I get every year to a road marathon. The weather was almost ideal, but it’s still a tough event. I managed to finish only two seconds slower than last year, and one place higher, which I’m happy enough with. We hung around afterwards for the presentations from last year’s Suffolk GP series, where I’d got third place in my age category (which sounds far more impressive than it is, and is largely down to turning up to the right events!)

I hadn’t spotted pancake day looming in the calendar, and happened to have made pancakes on Saturday. I’m not as greedy as I used to be, so one portion of batter is too much for one meal, which meant I made a second batch on Sunday. Then of course I had to have them on Tuesday, as it’s tradition. And on Wednesday, even thought that makes a mockery of the original point of the tradition, and probably means I’m no longer shriven.

I finally got round to drilling out the tiny ventilation hole in the Sudbury Fun Run water bottle that I keep at work. Now I can drink from it without sounding like someone trying to suck up the dregs of a McDonald’s milkshake. That also seems to have significantly increased the amount of water I drink while I’m in the office.

I did my bit to help Pet Needs achieve their goal of exploiting the album chart rules to try to get their new album to “Bottom of the Pops”, by buying the 12 CD bundle (and the signed normal CD … er, and also the release day special edition). After a lot of faffing with a mount cutter, they’ve been transformed to a piece of ‘art’ on my wall.

People I’ve seen in The A-Team this week: the “You gonna look pretty funny trying to eat corn on the cob” bloke from the Good Ol’ Boys in The Blues Brothers, and Sgt. Taggart off of Beverley Hills Cop. Also some weird goings on where Col Decker was played by a completely different actor, then came back two weeks later as the original (then an episode without BA, followed by one without Face).

I’m still keeping up with #48in24. Last week was Roman numerals in Elixir (kind of used to that one), Pharo (Everyone always raves about Smalltalk, but despite how much ruby et al owe to it I always find it hard to get my head round coming from a career using boring normal languages) and Julia. This week is protein translation in Crystal (rubyish), C? (javaish) and F? (surprisingly elixirish, in a way).

Another Saturday night downpour saw an even muddier Sunday cross country than last week (without the unseasonably mild weather). This time I fell over twice – the first time on some mud-covered concrete and gravel, which left me with a nice collection of grazes.

Lost my 95-day Wordle streak this week.

Had an unusual issue at work where the Erlang VM (yes, the app’s still a single-server monolith) suddenly attempted to allocate 50GB of heap memory, then crashed in a huff. This is the first time in half a dozen years I can remember the VM actually crashing, which isn’t too shabby a record. I never got to the root cause, but did at least switch the systemd config from simple to update, so it’ll be automatically restarted if it ever crashes or stops responding in future. Updating the Elixir app to send the necessary heartbeat signals only required a couple of lines of code, thanks to the erlang-systemd library.

On Wednesday I decided to treat myself to a small can of beer, despite it being a weekday. It was a bit lively when I opened it, and foamed over the top, so I put the can on the floor while I wiped off what had spilt on the table. Then settled down, reclined my seat, hit play, reached out for my beer, and remembered it was still on the floor. Where, as I’m sure you’ve already predicted, it had been knocked over by the settee footrest popping out. So I only treated myself to half a small can of beer, as it turned out.

I’m still working my way through the A-Team box set. It’s still largely harmless entertainment, despite some of the acting being almost as wooden as the box the DVDs came in. Obviously the old trope of no-one ever getting hit by a bullet despite everyone spraying automatic weapons everywhere at the drop of a hat still holds true, but I was surprised how few times (so far) they’ve been locked in a building with tools and welding equipment. I don’t think it happened at all in the first series, and only once in the second. Twice so far in series three, but there may be more to come.

I also decided to give the BBC’s Domino Day a try, on the basis of at least one review describing it as “Buffy for a new generation”. It’s no Buffy (the series has virtually no sense humour, for a start), but then again I’m very much not a new generation.

I decided to try to do something useful with my post-parkrun Saturday for once, and hacked out most of the two wheelie-bin-loads of ivy that had colonised the corner (and the apple tree) at the bottom of the garden behind the garage. It’s still a mess, but it’s slightly less of a mess. Just the other 99% of overdue garden jobs to do now!

Sunday’s cross country at Pakenham was made more interesting by torrential rain the night before (even the road to get there was flooded). The weather on the day was positively spring-like though, and I had a better race than I was expecting. doing anything useful for a second afternoon in a row would have been too much to hope for though, especially after stopping for lunch and a couple of pints on the way home.

As is somewhat traditional before a longish race, I made some flapjack on Saturday. It wasn’t my best effort (a bit too crumbly), but I turned it out onto a chopping board, and cut it more or less successfully into rectangles. I then put a cooling rack on top, flipped the whole assembly over onto the worktop, and lifted the chopping board off. A moment of confusion ensued as it dawned on me that most of it was still stuck to the board, then after hanging there for a second, Wile-E-Coyote style, gravity won out and most of it went tumbling onto the floor.

Yet another Pet Needs gig on Saturday, this time at the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket (surprisingly my first visit, despite it being a handy 10 minute train journey away). They were excellent as usual, as were the two support bands, Ecto Peach (who I’d seen before) and especially Zombie Nation (who I hadn’t).

The toilets at the John Peel Centre had a classic case of having to use signage to compensate for a lack of design affordance:

Sunday saw the first proper race of 2024, in the shape of the Great Bentley Half. I hadn’t exactly had the ideal lead-in week, what with a fairly high-mileage club training night on Tuesday, then daftly also going along to the monthly track session on Wednesday. Not to mention several hours standing (and occasionally jumping) on Saturday night. I dragged myself round in my worst time since 2020 (when I had some kind of chest infection which I assume was slightly early to have been Covid), but still better than the 1:40 that Stryd was predicting. That pretty much wiped me out for the day though.