Remember how last week I was feeling smug about the fact that I’d filled the brown bins up at the weekend, rather than at the last minute on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning as usual? Of course what I hadn’t done was check the Christmas schedule, so I failed to put them out before they came to collect them on Tuesday morning.
I got an email from the blood people saying they had some last-minute appointments available, so I went and gave my 66th (nearly an) armful on Tuesday. It was surprisingly busy for the time of year, but once I got into the chair the blood flowed out nice and quickly.
On Christmas Eve, as usual, I did the annual Stutton and Holbrook Fun Run (this year renamed to the “Stutton and Holbrook at RHS Fun Race”), in aid of Suffolk Mind. It was ridiculously windy, which made it quite cold, and because the wind was in the opposite direction to usual it meant a headwind on the normally fast downhill bit of the lap. I was another half minute slower than last year, but I’ll blame it on a lack of blood!
Obviously Christmas Day kicked off with parkrun, on a gloriously sunny (if a bit chilly and still windy) day. I switched plans at the last minute to head to Kesgrave, as that’s where most of my friends who were running had decided to be, but as I was running habitually late that meant a mildly frenzied ride into the wind to get there (and it’s about three miles, as opposed to half that to my normal venue). Fortunately they started about ten minutes late.
I spent the rest of the morning chopping bits out of a worn-out felt Santa suit and pinning them together to make a small hat that I could attempt to put on a cat for a Christmas photo. Badger was the most stoical about ignoring it.
I made myself the usual excessively large Christmas dinner. Despite this obviously only happening once a year I seem to have internalised it to the point that I can have all the components ready at the right time without having to faff around with all the lists and timers that I used to rely on.
I even forced down a slice of my Christmas pudding afterwards – it hadn’t turned out at all badly, even if I say so myself.
Saturday started with yet another parkrun – the last one of the year, so now I’ve successfully ticked off all 54 in 2025. The post-run Spoons visit was back on the agenda, and me having come out without money, cards or phone was not considered an obstacle to joining in. While everyone else was eating their breakfasts, Dave (who is a bad influence) bought us each two pints. This meant that having only had one beer on each of Christmas and Boxing Days, I’d managed to double that before lunchtime on Saturday.
I thought I’d have a play with NeoVim/LazyVim. It’s clearly shinier and no doubt more powerful than my usual lightly-configured Vim8, and most things worked as expected out of the box, but there are a couple of plugins I haven’t managed to get set up right yet, and I think I’m going to have to relearn some muscle memory to get back to the same level of effectiveness.
I belatedly discovered the excellent Inside, and played through it in a couple of days. I’m sure I’ve searched for “games like Limbo” plenty of times in the past, so I’m not sure how I missed it. I’ve also dipped into Silt and Superliminal, but I’m not 100% sold on either yet.
In what seems like a bizarre coincidence but is probably just an example of the frequency illusion/Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I watched an episode of Columbo where he was running around looking for a “Shriner” for some reason (something to do with a ring), and I was wondering what on earth one of them was – I was sure I’d never even heard the word before. Then I immediately watched Die Hard 2 (I’d seen the first one on Christmas Eve), only for the airport cop guy to shout that “everybody from the Shriners convention to the goddamn boy scouts” was passing through the airport.
Another long run on Sunday, on the same trail route out to Witnesham that we’d done in October. Last time we’d encountered a length of pipe in a field and idly wondered whether either of us would fit inside, and this time we felt that we couldn’t pass by without finding out. The answer was “not really”.
