Forgot to mention last week that after putting up with the appalling battery life of my Pixel 6a after the mandatory update to stop it catching fire or whatever, I finally decided to upgrade to a Pixel 9a. Other than the battery thing, there wasn’t much wrong with the old one, despite it being three years old, but the free battery replacement option would have entailed a trip to Cambridge or London, and the price of the 9a had already dropped by £100, so I ended up taking the £150 off which basically meant it was half list price. As is the way with phones these days it’s not a huge leap forward, but the battery life is way better (I generally use about 40% battery in a full day, whereas the old one needed charging by early evening). The screen’s much brighter too, which is nice in sunlight.
I managed to fit a quick cut of my increasingly scruffy hedge between the showers on Saturday, which is hopefully that job done for the year, and just all the other jobs remaining.
I’d been getting increasingly worse results from my pizza oven lately, with it struggling to get to a decent temperature, and taking far too long to cook. This weekend I noticed that the chimney vent had somehow ended up closed, and after opening it the oven quickly heated up to 400°C and was back to cooking a pizza in 90 seconds again.
After last week’s ten mile warmup, this Sunday was the Ipswich Half, which it turns out I haven’t done since 2019 (when it was the Great East Run). It’s the biggest local race, with around 2,700 runners this year, round closed roads in the town centre and out to Freston, with a couple of biggish (for Suffolk) hills. I went in thinking 1:35 would be nice but unrealistic, and anything under 1:40 would be OK, and ended up pretty much in the middle with 1:37:22, which is faster than I managed in 2017, 18 or 19. That put me in 296th place, so not quite top 10%! I had Holly and Maria to run with again this week, and as usual we each somehow relied on the other two to maintain our pace. Holly broke away in the last mile and finished about ten seconds ahead, and I just about kept in front of Maria in a race to the line (although she’s somehow currently still missing from the results).
Naturally a lot of us ended up in the “clubhouse” afterwards, then all went home for showers and coffee before most of us returned for the evening.
