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

The weather’s definitely getting more autumnal this week, and wetter. I seem to have been very lucky though – the forecast for Wednesday evening’s Run for Beer was a 95% chance of rain, but we stayed dry, and I just missed showers cycling to work and back on Thursday, then waited for a massive downpour before heading out for a fairly dry run (apart from the puddles). Leaving the house on Saturday morning for parkrun felt the coldest it’s been for a while, but as usual it quickly warmed up.

I finally got round to getting new tyres for the car at the weekend. I wasn’t expecting to notice any difference, but it does feel weirdly smoother. No doubt they’ll outlast the car.

On Sunday I did a fifteen mile “Reservoir Jogs” charity trail run, with three pub stops (plus the one at the end). We may have made a tiny navigational error early on that added a mile or so and saw us going the wrong way round Alton Water, but other than that all went well! Oh, apart from arriving in the first pub at 11.40 when they weren’t licensed to sell alcohol until 12, and having to make do with a coke instead of a pint.

Oh, and I made a tiny dent in the gardening backlog by removing a wheelie-bin’s worth of brambles from what I still laughingly call the lawn. The biggest one was about 15 ft long, and nearly half an inch thick at the big end.

We returned to the pub quiz at Hanks on Wednesday, despite having reservations about the new quizmaster. Sadly it wasn’t any better this time, and we didn’t even win! In fact we were second-to-last, although there were only five teams and only a few points between second and fourth places. We’re going to try a different venue next time.

One of the podcasts I subscribe to is Jokes with Mark Simmons, where Mark talks to another comedian about jokes they can’t get to work, and try to fix them. This week’s guest was Mark Wallace, and after they’d given up on one of the jokes, I was chuffed that they liked my suggestion ?

I had a couple of days off work, but didn’t get anything particularly useful done, as usual. I did spend some time finishing off the small library I’d accidentally ended up writing while shaving a yak related to my stalled attempt to work through GOOS in Elixir. Most of that time was spent on something I ended up removing after deciding it didn’t really add any value, but never mind.

I didn’t really expect the library to interest anyone, but before I’d even told anyone it existed one person stumbled across it and found it useful (and sent a PR)! I got a bit more feedback after announcing it on the Elixir Forum.

I didn’t run the Ipswich Half on Sunday, but did a half-marathon distance easy run with my camera, timed so I could stop after a few miles to support and photograph people coming out of Holywells Park, then headed over the Orwell Bridge, where I stopped again to get some shots looking down on the runners passing underneath. The photos are all on Facebook, but here’s one of the aerial shots.

In what is apparently now a monthly thing, I went to the Fat Cat on Wednesday for a drink with Rupert (my current manager) and Mel (his former manager, now retired). Joe (my former manager) would have been there, but was busy. It was more fun than it sounds!

I discovered this week that I’d somehow managed to fat-finger a config file change back in May and disabled the minimum test coverage limit from our build. Fortunately coverage of new and changed code in that time hadn’t suffered too much, and it took less than a day to remove a few bits of dead code, add some missing test cases and reinstate/update one integrated test that I’d deleted, thinking it was duplicating stuff tested elsewhere (because the coverage didn’t fail when I removed it).

I ran for coffee twice this week, on Thursday and Friday. It was much colder than mornings have been for a while. We stopped for the traditional brief rest at the top of the hill on Friday, and looked over the railway bridge parapet to see a cat nonchalantly walking along one of the rails (fortunately that line’s not electrified, and we have overhead power up here anyway). A train did come past, but by then he’d already wandered off, and it was a goods train anyway so he’d have had plenty of time to hear it coming.

I entered the Dedham 10k at the last minute (well, the day before). I’ve not run it before, and it’s pretty hilly! Didn’t go too badly though.

Looks like Casper made a new friend (or possibly foe) on one of his rare trips into the garden (he still hasn’t figured out the cat flap):

I thought last week’s mouse had made good its escape, although Casper (who still hasn’t worked out the cat flap, so only goes out when I have the door or windows open) brought in a grasshopper, which I caught and returned to the garden. Then in came Ninja with a mouse in his mouth – once again unharmed and extremely energetic (too quick for a photo!), but I did eventually manage to catch it and let it run off outside.

On Saturday I heard a screaming noise from the garden, which turned out to be a frog. I suspect Casper had been tormenting it, but I don’t think they taste nice so they tend to get away relatively unmolested.

Sunday was the Felixstowe Coastal 10, another of our club’s home races. It wasn’t insanely hot like last year, but quite windy (with a headwind in the first and final quarters). I did better than last year, but not spectacularly. I did beat Holly this time though, after she annihilated me last time!

The Tour of Britain was finishing in Felixstowe on the same day, so some of us hung around to watch the cyclists come in. We spent a couple of hours in between sitting on the beach with a few beers, then suddenly the weather took a turn for the worse, and by the time the cycling had wrapped up it was cold and pouring with rain. We retired to the pub for a while before getting the train back to Ipswich. This plan entailed me giving some people a lift in, then leaving my car behind to pick up on Tuesday: in characteristic fashion I realised when I got home that I’d left my house keys in the car, but fortunately I have a spare hidden in the garden for just such an emergency!

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.