Still no hot water. I’m getting used to it, to be honest – even attempting these cold showers that seem to be so trendy these days. Additional delay caused by a couple of days’ back-and-forth with the person who was recommended to do the plumbing, only to eventually discover that he’s a heating engineer and doesn’t really do that kind of stuff. He recommended someone who is a plumber, but who is yet to get back to my message. Obviously this could all have been accomplished much quicker with phone calls, but that’s only for dire emergencies.
I bought a mildly-damaged but working customer-returned dehumidifier from eBay, and have had it running continuously while trying to keep the kitchen as closed off as possible while still letting the cats get to the flap and their food. Unusually, it has the water tank on the top, fed via a pump that comes on when (I assume) a small internal tank is full. This means that by simply adding a length of aquarium air hose it sends the water straight into the sink so no need to keep emptying it. It’s keeping the kitchen at around 35% humidity (and warm), so hopefully the damp’s slowly being drawn out of the floor.
Wednesday was FRR’s Run Bike Run event, a club social in Felixstowe that involves running about 1.5 miles, riding 6, then running another 2.5 (with the catch that there’s a cutoff time, and the “winner” is the last person to start that gets in in time). Then we all sat around for a bit eating sine excellent veggie chilli courtesy of Nicola and Sally, and I drank the beers I’d brought with me. As usual, I made life difficult for myself by cycling there and back from Ipswich, so once you add in my commute to work I ended up riding nearly 40 miles by the end of the day.
With the long string of Friday races finally having come to an end, and in fact nothing really happening until September, I didn’t really have an excuse to take it easy at parkrun this week. The plan was to just go a bit quicker though, as we’re still only five weeks into the new Christchurch Park event, so I can keep getting course PBs for a while. Unfortunately I’d put the wrong numbers into my spreadsheet, and convinced myself I needed to beat an average pace of 7:54/mile. I succeeded, but it felt tougher than it seemed like it should, given that I’d basically jogged round the previous four times. It turned out I’d actually gone about 2½ minutes quicker. Oops.
On Sunday I went for a long slow run round a loop out to the imaginary local village of Culpho with Holly, then as it stayed dry I finally took my new bike out for a quick spin. Surprisingly to no-one, it turns out that a carbon bike with fancy gears is significantly quicker than the fixed gear gravel bike that I’ve been pretty much exclusively using for years! I rode about 8 miles, mostly on country lanes, in half an hour without incident.
According to the scramble/timer app on my phone, I’ve now solved my puzzle cube (not technically a Rubik’s Cube because that’s a trademark) over 5,000 times. I’m sure this is perfectly fine and normal. I’ve also discovered that I struggle to solve anything other than a speed cube (I got a comically tiny one for a couple of quid from AliExpress, and can’t do it at all), because I rely on muscle memory and my hands completely fail to have any idea what to do if they get slowed down.