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

Extremely late this week – almost forgot entirely! I don’t think very much happened though.

The front brake on my bike was making a right racket on Tuesday, so when I got home I had a look and the pads had worn down to the metal. I had a rummage around and found a new set, then managed to drop the little springy thing that keeps them apart, and spent so long looking for it that I was nearly late getting back out for training. The old one wasn’t usable, but in the end I found an old one in the bin that was still serviceable. In the process of looking, I opened the old fridge that’s in the garage that I used to use as a warming cabinet to melt honey for bottling (not that I thought the spring would be inside, but it could have been under the door), and I found half a dozen jars of honey still in there, so that’s a bonus.

Ipswich parkrun has been paused to let the park recover a bit (although the ground seems in much better nick than it was last year), so I went to Kesgrave instead, which is exactly the same distance away but in the opposite direction. I met up with Holly and Maria again to incorporate it into a long run, partly because I’d felt really tired on Tuesday and Thursday, and didn’t fancy trying to keep up on Sunday with last week’s crew.

Sunday was a lazy day, having already got the long run out of the way, then in the evening it was off to the Cricketers again to celebrate Robin’s birthday with a few too many reasonably-priced pints.

I figured I’ll probably need more gels for a marathon than I can squeeze in a shorts pocket, so thought I probably ought to buy one of those belts with stretchy loops to hold them. The best-reviewed one seemed to be a Ron Hill product for about £20, but I found one that looks basically identical on AliExpress for about £1.50. I ordered a landing pad for the drone, a 256GB micro SD card and some muslin squares for marmalade making at the same time, to make the total up to £8 to get free postage, and all but the last one arrived about four days later. Capitalism is weird.

First ex-colleagues catch-up in the Fat Cat on Wednesday, although it was actually two current colleagues and one former.

Struggling to think of much else that’s happened this week. Lots of running as usual, culminating in an 18-mile long run on Sunday to take me just over 46 for the week. My watch has finally upgraded my status from “maintaining” to “productive”, so I guess it must be working.

Brr.

First week back at work. A not insignificant part of Monday was spent trying to work out why a handful of tests were failing on my machine that weren’t before Christmas. It didn’t help that the first time I ran the full test suite was after upgrading to Elixir 1.18 and fixing a few new compiler warnings, but then when I went to bisect from main I realised that that branch was failing too. After clearing various caches, build products etc with no luck I slowly narrowed it down to certain integration tests not receiving expected completion messages, then to a couple of specific background tasks that didn’t seem to be succeeding. After running them manually, I eventually spotted that they had a two-minute sleep that was required in production but had been stubbed out in test. Because these are TCL expect scripts called from the main Elixir code, making them behave differently based on environment hadn’t been as simple, and I’d done it (a while ago) by checking for an environment variable that was only set in production. And guess what I’d been playing with last thing before finishing for the year? Yup, trying out some setup for a new production environment, in the process of which I’d set some environment variables in my shell profile, including the one that caused it to do a real sleep. As Dan pointed out, the mention of environment variables was a bad sign. I’m not sure the hack I’ve currently replaced it with is any better, but at least it works for now.

I also managed to soldier on to the end of the exercises in the Factor chapter of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks ready for the study group on Tuesday, but no-one else bothered, and I can’t say I blame them. Definitely not my favourite of the random languages I’ve dipped my toe into.

In my usual style of finding things on TV that everyone else has been watching for ages, I’m currently about two thirds of the way through Man Like Mobeen, and enjoying it.

I’m also over halfway through my Christmas cake. I’m not sure it’s doing my “lose a stone before London” diet much good, but I have at least started to build my running distance up again (80 miles so far this year). Sunday was the Stowmarket cross country – my first race of the year – and it went better than expected, so that’s vaguely reassuring.

Happy New Year! I must admit I’ve not been a particularly fervent celebrator of the occasion since the overhyped (and one year early) celebrations in 2000, but it is mildly terrifying that that was somehow already a quarter of a century ago.

This was the second of my two weeks off work, and as predicted I’ve done virtually none of the tasks that I really need to get round to one day. Back to work tomorrow, which may be something of a shock to the system, although at least I don’t have to physically go into the office until Tuesday.

The vet was happy with Nobby’s progress. Although his respiratory infection has cleared up, he prescribed another week of the antibiotics in case the kidney issue was also an infection, and he has to go back for more tests in a couple of weeks.

For the first time in a few years I bought a couple of games in the Steam sale – the old Tomb Raider trilogy (one of which I already had), and the slightly odd (but cheap) Firewatch. I’ve finished the first Tomb Raider, and just have the final battle to get through in the second, and I finished Firewatch today (it’s a pretty short game). This may go some way to explaining the lack of chore accomplishments.

As is traditional of late, on New Year’s Eve a bunch of us cycled to Felixstowe, had a run along the prom, got very briefly in the sea, then cycled home again via a couple of pubs. We were pretty lucky with the weather, although obviously the sea was a bit chilly.

The next day saw a bonus parkrun, and Justin organised another of his not-parkrun runs to make it an unofficial double (now the real thing no longer happens). I ran to the park and between the two, but the heavens opened as we were feet from Justin’s door afterwards, so I wimped out of the run home and got a lift back.

I went to the shops on Thursday and noticed that the seville oranges were in, so I stocked up and made two batches of marmalade. I’d had to buy one jar before Christmas to tide me over, so I might need to make one more batch to be sure.

I didn’t scrub the pan properly after the first lot, and the peel stuck to the bottom a bit the second time, so that batch ended up much more caramelised than the first (also slightly over-set). I’ve sampled a bit of each though, and they both taste fine!

I bought a cheapish second-hand (but as-new) drone from eBay, but the weather hasn’t really been suitable to fly it yet, other than a quick play in the garden to make sure it all works. I have a feeling this might be one of those “why did I buy that again?” purchases, but we’ll see.

The weather’s been odd this weekend. Sub-zero temperatures for parkrun yesterday, then I woke up at around 4am and looked out of the window to see what looked like about half an inch of snow. By the time I got up properly though it was raining and hardly any snow remained, and by the afternoon the temperatures was back up into double figures. It’s a good job no important world leader positions are about to be taken up by anyone determined to wreck any last slim hope we might have of addressing climate breakdown or anything.