Category: Weeknotes

I took a random week off work, and managed to accomplish at least some useful things …

First of all, I finally finished running a new hot water pipe to replace the one that leaked under the floor. It looks a bit odd running round the utility room door, but I couldn’t really come up with a better route. I didn’t set anything on fire, and there don’t appear to be any leaks!

Unfortunately, when I turned the boiler back on (before finishing the plumbing, but after isolating the burst pipe), the boiler started misbehaving. It heats the water up fine, but when I turn the tap off the boiler keeps running – the actuator from the diverter valve isn’t going back in again and the microswitch stays on. Not sure whether it’s just sticking or the diaphragm’s gone again, but unfortunately it’s impossible to get at it without removing a bunch or other bits, and I think given the boiler was fitted in 2004 I should probably accept that it’s had a good innings and get a new, more efficient one fitted.

On Monday we had the return leg of the “A14 Track Challenge” in Bury St Edmunds, after the Ipswich version in June. It’s basically a 5000m race between four local clubs, with three races for people running at different paces. I was in the middle (19–23 minute) race, and despite not feeling great beforehand managed to scrape under 21 minutes for the first time in a while. A bunch of us took our bikes on the train to get there, then decamped to the Corn Exchange (one of the fancier Wetherspoons pubs). Thanks to the lure of beer at £1.79 a pint we ended up staying until the last train, finally arriving back in Ipswich after midnight.

The Tour of Britain had two stages in Suffolk this year. I didn’t join the people who cycled out to Woodbridge Snape to see them on Tuesday, but I did nip out to watch them come through the imaginary village of Culpho.

There was also a plan to ride out to Stowmarket to see them again on Wednesday, but the weather looked so awful that we ended up going by train instead. Basically the day involved hanging around for a bit to see the start, decamping to the Willow Tree for a few hours, coming out to watch them come back in near the end, then nipping back in for a couple more beers. Then the train got me back just in time to go back out to the Fat Cat for the monthly ex-colleague meet-up.

This weekend finally saw the return of Sunday racing after the summer, with the Framlingham 10k. It was warm, hilly and hard work, but I somehow managed to finish slightly quicker than last year’s admittedly poor performance.

Any hope of getting round to cutting the hedge on Sunday afternoon evaporated with the news that Robin & Jo were heading to the Fat Cat. By the end of the afternoon we’d been joined by Courtney, then Dave and Sally (and Fizz the dog), and finally Neil & Gillian. Eventually the lack of food got to us, and we decamped to the Harpers’ via the chip shop at the end of their road.

I think if I’m going to ever get quicker again and not become a massive fat man I’m going to have to hope there aren’t too many weeks where the running/drinking ratio is tilted that far toward the latter!

I forgot to mention last week that, after about 18 months, Casper has finally figured out how to use the cat flap! Just in time to get a bit more use out of the garden before autumn arrives and the house seems more appealing – even Ninja has come in and purred on my lap a couple of times in the past couple of days, after spending almost every minute of the summer hiding outside as usual.

It was the last bank holiday for a while on Monday, but I did very little other than recover from the cycling and drinking on Sunday. Onwards to Christmas.

I still felt worn out by Tuesday evening, so drove to Felixstowe for training for a change, rather than cycling. Even without the extra miles on the bike the running wore me out even more, but after another couple of rest days (apart from riding to work) I managed to drag myself out of bed for Friday’s Run for Coffee. Only two of us running this week for some reason, although a few others joined us at the coffee shop. Then a slowish parkrun on Saturday on what’s still a horrible course (I heard someone describe the uphill bit as “barbaric”, which seems about right). And yet another ’Spoons breakfast.

On Saturday my neighbour popped round to say that the lady whose garden backs onto both of ours was concerned about a plant that’s growing in my hedge. Apparently it’s called a black locust tree, and grows quite aggressively and quite large. He offered to cut it down and put it in his brown bin, but I felt guilty so did it myself on Sunday (as well as also removing another smaller one I found a bit further along). I’ve got next week off, and cutting the hedge is on my notional to-do list, so we’ll see whether I actually get round to it.

After however many weeks it’s been with no hot water, and no success with my half-hearted efforts to find a plumber who wasn’t booked up for months, I’d decided to fit a new pipe myself. I think I’ve now assembled all the bits and pieces I need, and made a start this weekend. I need to cut the old pipe off in the utility room, then run a new one through the wall, over the door and under the sink (completely bypassing the leaky one under the floor), and it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to put an isolator valve before my new pipework in case anything sprung a leak. Then (very belatedly) I realised that with basically half an hour’s work cutting the pipe and putting the isolator on I could now turn the water back on at the boiler and have hot water everywhere except the kitchen. A shame I didn’t think of that earlier, but on the plus side I’ve got quite used to cold showers, which I hear are quite trendy.

I always forget just how much better SDS+ drills are than normal ones. The only 15mm bit I had that I thought was long enough to go through the wall was one with a normal round shank, so I spent ages with a hammer drill making about a quarter-inch dent in the breeze block wall. I eventually decided to save some time by drilling as far as I could with the SDS+ and a short bit, then reverting to the normal one for the remainder. It turned out it was just about long enough after all, and flew through the wall in about two seconds, almost literally like a hot knife through butter.

I’ve now got as far as cutting and dry-fitting the pipes on the utility room side (behind the washing machine), so just the actual kitchen bit and all the soldering to go.

I noticed that Point Break (the original one, not the 2015 remake) was on iPlayer. I missed it at the cinema when a bunch of friends went without me 30-odd years ago, but on balance I think I’m probably with Bill, who said at the time that it was rubbish, even though everyone else had enjoyed it.

Another track session on Wednesday. This time it was split between 100m all-out efforts with 100m recoveries (which I walked), and the same but 200m. I’d remembered to take the lights off my other bike from Tuesday’s ride to Felixstowe and put them in my bag, but had inexplicably (well, explained only by my usual incompetence) forgotten to also take their brackets, so I had to nip home via cycle paths and quiet roads to grab them before heading to the pub. It was one of those “just gone off” days, with Dave and I between us having I think four different beers that we’d ordered on the app but turned out to no longer be available.

On Sunday it was time for what’s become the annual ride out to the Lindsey Rose for their beer festival, with ten of us this year – double the number from two years ago. It was a nice day for it, and would have been uneventful other than for a few people deciding that the lack of the sumo suits that were there the first year was no obstacle to doing some wrestling anyway. This somehow ended up with Peter getting carted off to A&E with a broken ankle.

Lots of people seem to be leaving Github lately, after some management changes or something (I seem to remember similar rumblings when Microsoft bought them, but I don’t think they ever came to much). I have loads of random repos on there, but hardly use any of the site’s features, and I’d be reluctant to leave, as I was almost one of the first thousand people to sign up (user ID 1194), which puts me in the earliest 0.001% of users.

Wednesday was FRR’s annual Two Rivers handicap race/social – starting off at Landguard Fort in reverse order of speed, picking our own routes (not that there are a huge number of sane options) and converging at Felixstowe Ferry about five miles later. It was hot and hard work, and I fell behind the people that started around the same time as me, and got overtaken by most of the faster ones. I still managed to pick off a few of the runners who started before me though. Then to the pub, naturally.

I heard a noise outside on Thursday night that sounded exactly like one of those squeaky toys for dogs. On investigation it turned out to be a frog, which was a source of fascination for the cats. After failing several times when it hopped out of my grasp, I finally managed to catch it and put it over in the corner of the garden where there may or may not be the remains of a water feature.

A rare weekend away, heading back to Totton for Tim’s birthday barbecue. It was good to see lots of old friends, and to stop off and take my dad out for lunch on the way home on Sunday (although we ended up being subjected to the Saints–Ipswich game on the pub TV!). I did Bartley Park parkrun while I was down there, and managed my highest-ever finishing position of 7th (albeit only out of 124).

After adding my parkrun result to my spreadsheet (what, don’t you all have a parkrun results spreadsheet?) I spent altogether too long trying to work out why conditional formatting in a column was colouring rows that it shouldn’t have. After I deleted the rule and the colour didn’t go away, I eventually realised that some previous copying and pasting had somehow brought the colour with it. In my defence, that feels like a bug, and at best another example of why “paste as plain text” should be the default everywhere.

The monster change I’ve been working on on and off at work has finally been merged, and apart from a couple of minor issues seems to be working OK. Basically the system runs about 2,500 different checks against a bunch of different bits of the mobile network (which are mostly just Linux virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters), and each of those checks used to be handled by a specific module, with functions to return the name, description, which type of node to run on, etc. This made sense initially, but as the number of node types we support and the number of tasks we run grew, there were an increasing number that were virtually the same, which led to a lot of delegation to common modules. The new version moves most of this metadata to configuration for each task, with a field pointing to the implementing module. Although initially the modules are the same (with a bunch of functions removed), we can now start collapsing the similar/identical ones, with multiple tasks pointing to the same implementation.

There are also quite a few other tools within the system that refer to tasks, and all those (and all the tests) needed changing to use the task reference instead of the module (although fortunately the way we were serialising the module name to the database meant that that could become the reference so there was no big data migration required). It ended up touching over 6,000 files, and changing in the order of 100,000 lines of code (in a 400,000-line codebase), and took a fair bit of ingenuity with shell scripts, vim macros, AST rewriting and random bits of grep/sed/awk magic to do as much of the donkey work as possible. I’m glad it’s done!

Another current/ex colleague Fat Cat meetup on Wednesday, this time adding Dave, another of my former bosses. We had a good rambling conversation covering all sorts of weird things, much like the old Friday Pub days.

I’d ordered a Pet Needs T-shirt on Bandcamp Friday (not because I need any more T-shirts, but because it’s a good way to support the band) and it arrived with a giant Post-It note on which front man Johnny had scrawled “Cheers Kerry!” with a signature, which was a nice touch.

On Saturday evening I rode out to Brantham again – fortunately not to run five miles again, but rather to have a few beers and congratulate/laugh at the mad fools finishing the SVP100 and 50.

My Sunday long run was short by comparison to that, and on my own this week, with a loop out through Witnesham and Grundisburgh. This took me through not one but two “bull in field” sections, but on the plus side while skirting round the edge of one of them to give the cattle a wide berth I spotted a kingfisher by the stream (I think this is only the second time I’ve ever seen one; the first being in the 1970s!).

The two young foxes are still visiting now and again, although it’s probably about the time when they’ll be heading out to find their own territories. Here’s one of them doing a big old yawn to show that he’s not bothered by the cats that were lounging around nearby.

Classic British summer weather now the schools have broken up, with a fair amount of rain spread across the week. Somehow it seems to have all fallen while I was at home, and it’s been dry whenever I was outside. This surely can’t last.

Tuesday night’s club session was what’s become the annual Slow Paul birthday party, with us all running cross-country-style hilly laps of a course marked out in his field, before recovering with beer, hog roast and cake.

On Wednesday the team from work had another volunteering day, this time at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life) at Stowmarket. The weather forecast was good, so I decided to give my new bike a proper debut and cycle there (15 miles) and back (16 miles, because there was a very strange road junction that funnelled me to the A14 roundabout so I ended up coming back a different, more scenic, but slightly hillier route). The bike behaved itself, and it took me just over an hour in each direction.

The morning’s volunteering involved clearing undergrowth from a patch of ground on the edge of the site ground and laying bark chips round hedging plants. Then we walked down to the Willow Tree for lunch, before returning to sand down the Settling House (a 19th century auctioneer’s hut from Bury St Edmunds) ready for it to be painted. We also got a chance to see some lambs, piglets, goats and Suffolk Punch horses being fed.

I got back just in time to hop back on my other bike and nip down to Kesgrave to give blood (I’d carefully picked a donation session halfway home from work at 5.30pm, which would have turned out better had I been in the office). That went smoothly (armful number 65), but by the time I’d got home and made dinner I was wiped out!

I’d recovered the use of my legs well enough to join Friday morning’s Run for Coffee, then surprised myself by taking another minute and a half off my time on the new Christchurch Park parkrun course. I even managed to do a small amount of gardening on Saturday afternoon, although I think things are still growing several times more quickly than I’m cutting them back.

Sunday was long run day again, with an 18 mile loop up the Gipping Path to Claydon, then back via Akenham and Westerfield. That stupid new giant footbridge over the railway at Westerfield is still closed, but Plotaroute has sudddenly started routing over it again and the footpath diversion sign that used to be on the approaching path has gone, so once again we got right up to it before realising we had to turn back. Someone had leant a pallet against the fence to climb over, but the prospect of piercing my foot on a spike didn’t appeal. At that point we were both feeling worn out, and pretty much out of water, so we were “forced” to stop at the Railway for a pint (although only of lime and soda in Holly’s case) to refresh ourselves for the final three miles.

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.

Still no hot water. The “trace and access” people came round on Friday, and confirmed that it’s leaking from below where the pipe comes up out of the floor under the sink (every time I turn the water back on the leak gets stronger!). Also as suspected, the fix (not covered by insurance) will be to get a plumber to run a new pipe and cap off the one that goes under the concrete. Drying everything out fully and reinstating it would be covered by insurance, but would involve ripping up the floor tiles and removing half the kitchen units and worktop. I can’t face the disruption of going through all that, so I’m going to opt for just running a dehumidifier for a while then getting the plaster and skirting boards sorted later.

I still haven’t ridden my new bike yet either – my new shoes and road cleats arrived on Friday, just in time for the wet weather to set in.

Tuesday’s club session involved lots of short flat-out sprint efforts (probably good as I generally don’t do enough anaerobic training). Strava decided to troll me with this summary afterwards:

I didn’t cycle there this week, which was a relief because of both the wind and the state of my legs afterwards.

We ran another unconference at work on Wednesday, with some interesting conversations around stuff like monoliths vs microservices and “how much testing is too much?” (probably more than you’re doing).

A second consecutive training night on Wednesday, with the monthly track session returning after a hiatus during Friday 5 season. It was “broken kilometres”, with sets of 1×400m, 2×200m and 4×100m efforts, with 30s static recovery between each effort. During the final all-out 100m effort I just about managed, for a few seconds, to reach Kipchoge’s average marathon pace!

Last Friday race for a while, with the Twilight 10k. It’s not the greatest of courses (several 180° turns round cones), but it’s nice to race through the town centre. A record turnout this year too, with over 1300 finishers (a bit big for my taste). I guess that makes my 211th place reasonably respectable, even if I continue to get slower year by year!

I made the mistake of watching Fall, as it was on iPlayer. It does a reasonable job of building tension, but hardly anything that happens makes any sense. I can’t decide whether they just didn’t bother talking to anyone with a basic knowledge of how climbing equipment (or physics) works, or whether they knew it was nonsense but felt that injecting any degree of realism would spoil the plot in some way.

Speaking of iPlayer, I’ve also started watching the US version of Ghosts. So far it looks as though it might live up to the original, which is no mean feat.

I remembered something else that happened, then immediately forgot again. Clearly getting old.

I forgot to mention last week that just before I left Ekiden on Sunday I bit into one of my home-made ginger nuts, and felt a crown detach itself from one of my teeth (if I remember correctly, it’s the one from about 20 years ago). I got an appointment with the dentist on Tuesday, and he poked around for a few seconds before (unsurprisingly, after being told at my last checkup that both crowns had decay underneath them) telling me that it wasn’t really salvageable. The options were basically some kind of complicated procedure involve cutting down into the gum that might not work anyway, extracting it, or leaving it for now and extracting it if and when it became an issue. I went for the third option. That cost me £30, which is a pretty nice hourly rate if you can get it.

For some reason I kept getting adverts on Instagram for some fancy hydroponic herb garden thing. I didn’t buy one, but did order something similar, less fancy-looking and about a tenth of the price from AliExpress. I found some out-of-date seeds, and planted basil, coriander, a couple of types of chilli and tomato. Most of them have germinated, so fingers crossed. The main one I’m hoping works is the basil, because whenever I buy it from the supermarket (either cut or as a plant) it generally lasts about a day before going weird and inedible. For some reason while I had the kitchen door open in the heat a grasshopper decided to take up residence under the light.

On Friday I poured a drink of water and was shocked at how warm it was. I initially thought it was just from not running the tap enough, but I turned the tap on again, and for the first few seconds it was definitely *way* hotter than it had any right to be. I tried the hot tap, and it was instantly at full temperature, which isn’t right as I have a combi boiler and it takes a while to fire up on demand. I went to check the boiler, and sure enough, it was running even with the tap off. Then I realised that an area of the kitchen floor was unnaturally warm under my feet.

I’m assuming that the hot water pipe has sprung a leak, and it’s probably been slowly leaking for a while, until today the flow reached a high enough rate to trigger the boiler. This would also explain why the walls and skirting board recently started mysteriously showing signs of damp. The problem is that the pipes are in concrete, under travertine tiles.

For now I’ve turned off the boiler and the inlet feed (and briefly turning it back on for long enough to shower), and am waiting for the insurance people to get back to me, presumably on Monday.

Last time I broke a tooth and had to turn a water supply off in the same week was in mid March 2020, so if these things really do come in threes then we’re all in trouble

Friday evening was the Brantham 5 mile “fun run” (kind of an unofficial extra Friday 5). With the prospect of traffic nightmares from a combination of the Orwell Bridge roadworks and Ed Sheeran playing at Portman Road, I was talked into cycling there (13 miles or so each way). Considering that, the race didn’t go too badly, although the heat made the fairly hilly course even harder than usual.

With all this cycling I’d been thinking of getting a road bike as an alternative to my fixed-gear gravel bike. I was watching a few second hand ones on eBay, and put in a bid for one after getting a “finishing soon” notification while sitting outside the pub after Ekiden. Fortunately when it arrived everything seems to be in excellent condition, and it’s a pretty high spec for what I paid for it. I’m yet to ride it, because I wasn’t organised enough to sort myself out with road shoes before it turned up.

On Sunday Holly and I finally managed to run to Felixstowe, after last year’s nettle fiasco. We took a road route this time, to avoid a repeat of that trauma, and by the time we got there we both had tired, but unstung legs. The plan was to stop for chips, ice cream and/or beer before getting the train back, but Holly had to rush back for a parcel delivery so we only had time for a quick paddle and a rushed pint in the Grosvenor on the walk back up to the station. We even found an outlying hare (I think there are two in Felixstowe, but not sure where the other is).

And yes, we accidentally wore matching vests again.

When I got home I was sitting in the kitchen, and looked up to see a sparrow hawk (I think) sitting on the pile of logs in the back garden. It flew off before I could get a photo though.

Third week in a row that I’ve been talked into cycling to Felixstowe (about ten miles each way) for training night on Tuesday. Not sure whether it adds to or detracts from the running effort!

Another month must have passed, because it was time for ex-colleagues Fat Cat meet-up again. Rupert, Mel and Tony this time, and it was warm enough to sit outside in a T-shirt (although only just, by the time we left).

The final Friday 5 of the series this week, at Great Bentley. I ended up 5th in my age category (out of 18 who’d completed at least four races out of six – the best four score), which I guess isn’t bad. Well done to club-mates Steve, who took the gold in my category with a perfect set of age group first places, and Holly, who finished fourth in hers, missing out on the podium by a single point.

The local parkrun was off this week because of an event in the park, so a few of us cycled out to Alton Water to do that one instead (and still somehow managed to end up in the Ipswich ’Spoons for breakfast!).

We cycled out in the same direction again on Sunday, for the Ekiden Relay. I had the opening 7.2k leg for FRR (it’s an odd distance because 7.2+5+10+5+10+5=42.2, or a marathon), and managed a not-too-shabby 30:44. The “supervet” (50+) team I was in managed to come third in that category, although I’m not claiming much credit for that. Our vets (40+) beat us again. Then I ran a 5k leg for the Coffee Runners’ social team, which went a bit wrong when I saw the previous runner go past and everyone told me he still had a lap to go, but it turns out that wasn’t the case. When when I wasn’t there for the changeover they called out on the PA, but he decided to start another lap rather than waiting and I had to intercept him partway round, meaning I only did about 2.3 miles.

The weather held for most of the day, but like last year there was a downpour late on. We managed to time our ride home to avoid getting too soaked this time though. Well I say home, obviously it was actually to the Cricketers first.