• Sunday, 2 Jul 2023 6:44 pm

  Weeknotes 26 June 2023

  Trying something new this week. Inspired by Phil Gyford's weeknotes, I'm writing some of my own. I got into a good swing of monthnotes last year, but for some reason I've found it hard to build a rhythm in 2023. It feels like each month is too jam-packed with stuff to write about, and so inevitably I waffle and procrastinate until we're two weeks into the following month and the previous has been all but forgotten.

  So I'm breaking it down into weeks. We'll see how I get on.

  This week was quiet round our end, plenty of time spent with Ghyll in the evenings. We've had an uncommon run of nice weather—great big puffy clouds scattered across vivid blue skies and the thermometer hovering around twenty degrees—so I've taken Ghyll out for a few walks to a nearby field for a run around. He always comes back foaming at the mouth and panting his heart out. And then he sleeps well.

  

  Not to say that we haven't had a bit of rain, though—and all the attendant allergies rainy weather entails. I'm useless on the first (and sometimes second!) sunny day(s) after a spell of rain, wheezing continually into a soggy handkerchief and squinting at the computer screen through itchy eyes. When I try to explain this to people, I feel like I'm astrologising: "No, it was sunny yesterday, and then the rain fell last night, and we've had a bit of wind, and the moon's waning... atchoo." As much as the dust was annoying during a dry spell earlier in the summer, I think this is annoying me more. Good for the plants, though.

  

  Sam prompted me late last week to start training in earnest for my triathlon at the end of July, so this was my first full week of Serious Training. You might say that's a bit late—and I would too!—but I have been doing sort of triathlon-adjacent running and cycling for the past few months now. I think I'm in decent shape. The training plan that Sam has subscribed me to has taken it out of me, though. Only got a single (blessed) day of rest this week; difficulty sleeping has not made it any easier. Here's hoping that it gets easier over the coming weeks; if not, well, pain is temporary etc etc.

  Sam spent most of Friday cooking up some goodies (quiches, breads, rolls) to sell at the church fair that St. Luke’s held on Saturday afternoon. The baked goods sold well (thanks in small part to my own zealous cake-eating); Sam’s disappeared almost instantly. I’ve heard tell of people who come to the St. Luke’s fairs exclusively to pick up one of her famous quiches lorraine. It was nice to catch up with folks I hadn’t seen in a few months, too; though when asked how I’d been and what I’d been up to, I struggled to come up with an answer. I don’t want to be the kind of person whose go-to is “work has been busy,” but what have I been doing for the past few months? Going out for runs? I guess I cycled the C2C back in May—and we went to the States. I’ll lead with that next time.

  Afterwards, I took my first open-water dip in the UK in the Hartlepool marina. I'd swum in lakes back in Canada before, but almost exclusively on calm days at the end of summer when the lake'd be nice and warm and the sun would heat the top 10 cm of water to bathtub temps. Nothing quite as choppy as the marina turned out to be in a high wind. About halfway across the channel between two docks, a group on a dinghy came sailing up to me and told me that I wasn't permitted to swim in the marina. Strava's Global Heatmap misleading me again!—oh well, I paddled over to one of the ladders and climbed out. I must have been a bit of a sight to the locals in the marinaside beer gardens: some soggy, bearded Canadian crawling up out of the waves and wandering off down the promenade. Defeated, I stripped out of my wetsuit and ran a contrite 6k down to Seaton Carew and back, making good time in defiance of Hartlepudlians giving me the ol' up-down-up in my skintight triathlon suit. A long shower and a couple beers in the evening put me back to rights.

  

  Woke up Sunday to a high wind, regretting a promise I made to a buddy of mine to head up to Newcastle for a bit of running. I struggled to get out of bed and strongly considered being an absolute flake, but with some effort managed to pull together my running gear. Then I grabbed my backpack, my boots, jacket, and helmet, because I was back out on the motorbike for a ride up to the Toon—that's right, I'm back on the YBR after my catastrophic encounter with a roundabout last November. It was easier than I remembered it being! I think that, in some lizard-brain-type way, I'm mentally readier for the speed and the full-body way that you operate a motorbike, after riding my bicycle so far over the wintertime. Bombing down Bargate Bank into Lanchester going 65 kph in the slipstream of some Vauxhall Insignia with nothing but a juddering steel frame under you really girds the loins, it turns out.

  Anyway, my friend in Newcastle talked me into an impromptu half-marathon through Gosforth and Heaton and back across the Town Moor, under a sky threatening at times both sunburn and a solid soaking. We did a good job of keeping a steady pace, and Strava reckons that I broke my PB in the half-marathon. Given that we didn't get rained on in the end, I reckon that's a decent result. I never thought I'd be the sort of person able to wake up early and knock out a half-marathon and then get on with the rest of my day, but here I am. Quietly proud of myself.

  

  Triathlon Monthnotes Ghyll Motorbike

• ---

  Sunday, 30 Apr 2023 2:30 am

  April 2023

  Cast off

  Started the month off right by getting my cast off! What an ordeal this has been. The hand was absolutely grotesque for the first day post-cast-removal: shedding skin, pale and bony, barely mobile. By the evening, I was able to hold a can of beer in my hand, however—a titanic feat (for me) at which I couldn’t help but exclaim to Sam. She didn’t care.

  

  The healing bone has left a minor bump on the side of my hand, but you wouldn’t notice it unless I’d brought your attention to it. The pain in the bone itself is mostly incidental—when I bump it or flex it in the wrong way. Tightness in my wrist is the main trouble for me—putting weight through my wrist is still a no-go, and even leaning idly on e.g. the countertop in the kitchen gives me a pang if I hit it at just the wrong angle. The pain’s in a totally different spot from the broken bone, which makes me think it’s just a question of a bit more stretching, a bit more light strength work, to get it back to where it needs to be.

  I can type and use a mouse (mercifully!), I can ride a bike, and I can haul groceries, and those are my three main hand use cases anyway, so I’m pleased as punch.

  Polmood

  Spent some more time outside this month, as the days extend and the weather ameliorates. What a difference a bit of thin, watery, April sunlight makes.

  A trip up to the bothy at Polmood served as the first excursion with cast-less hand—and with Ghyll no less. The enclosed garden around the bothy was perfect for him to run about in, and an idle football generated literal hours of fun for the little guy. We brought his crate with us as well so he had a place to settle down for quiet time while we ate, and he gleefully fell asleep in front of the fire when the sun went down.

  

  I’ll admit I went into the trip with a bit of trepidation, both for my hand and for Ghyll. There are a lot of sheep about, and he’s a curious fella without much concern for animals that want nothing to do with him. But it all went off without a hitch. We even took him up into the hills above Loch Skeen and the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall. Had to keep him on the lead the whole time, but he tackled the fells with aplomb and gazed amidst them like one of those shaggy hounds on the front of shortbread tins. Good lad.

  

  Got in a run while I was out there, climbing to the top of the forestry track below Broad Law. Exhaustion set in at that point and I turned back for the trek downhill. Expect a more glorious result (nothing short of the summit of Broad Law) on our next trip to Polmood.

  The 59th Fellsman

  Marshalled in our usual spot on the top of Great Knoutberry again for the 59th Fellsman. The Fellsman is a 61-mile fell run through the Yorkshire Dales, and the Great Knoutberry checkpoint sits on top of the eponymous hill at the end of an out-and-back around mile 29. By this point the runners are well & truly tuckered out, but arrive with smiles and good cheer to have their tags punched and their number counted before the long descent off the fell.

  Sam and I had our Vango Xenon tent for the first time this year, with all of the creature comforts that its massive vestibule entails—making for this year’s vigil on the hilltop a decidedly more comfortable one. Bringing a pair of camp chairs certainly helped. It was foggy for the better part of the day, though the wind was mostly well-behaved and we had a blissful interlude around the golden hour where the mists retreated and the Dales could be glimpsed in all their pastoral glory. This was probably the point of highest morale for the runners before their long march through the foggy dark ahead.

  

  I remember that at our previous Fellsman, in 2021 I think, that I considered a challenge like the Fellsman to be wholly outside the realm of possibility for me—that ultramarathons were for the hyper-fit, the borderline-unhealthy. But something about this year’s Fellsman filled me with a vigour for the punishing outdoors. I spoke to septuagenarians running their 27th Fellsman, to newbies who'd never run more than 20 miles before but who reached our checkpoint with zeal to spare. I don't think that the challenge is quite within my grasp right now, but it's near enough that I could maybe give it a go with a little more training. I think the 60th Fellsman might be my year. Watch this space.

  AI

  Not going to say much about this because everyone else seems to be talking & writing totally w/o surcease about AI, but now I’m trying to learn about it too.

  It seems like there are increasingly two camps of AI-literate folk:

  1. people who make AI: those who write, configure, and train neural nets (e.g. people who work at OpenAI or Meta), and
  2. people who use AI: those who hack their productivity and abilities by writing great AI prompts (e.g. regular old GitHub Copilot subscribers, but also prompt engineers).

  Maybe the second could be split in two.

  Anyway, while every second hot take on the web is concerned with how and when AIs will make jobs obsolete, I think there are going to be tons of new jobs created in both of the categories above. I think I’d like to be in the former camp, since my work is sort of funelling me towards thinking about systems in Python anyway, but I’ve got boundless respect for those in the latter, because it requires a creativity that I don’t think will ever be abstracted away, no matter how clever artificial intelligence gets.

  And that was April. Bring on the springtime.

  Monthnotes AI Running Polmood Ghyll

• ---

  Friday, 31 Mar 2023 1:00 pm

  March 2023

  Almost nothing at all happened in March 2023.

  Broke my hand

  Well, that's not strictly true. At the beginning of the month, going on a run with Sam and Ghyll in Weardale, I took a tumble on some ice, landed on my knuckles, and broke my hand. As far as breaks go, I was told that it was basically barely broken at all. Still: broken enough to warrant a cast for 4 weeks, immobilising my two last fingers on my right hand and effectively bringing my outdoor career to a halt.

  

  I struggled to cope for the first couple of days, but over the first week found workarounds for most of the important stuff: typing on a keyboard, putting on clothes, cleaning myself. No running, though, and no cycling; ideally no sweating at all. Measures in place to prevent the cast getting wet: an eye on the typically drizzly spring skies when taking Ghyll for a walk, plastic bags on my arm when taking a shower. Clothes with baggy enough sleeves to fit the unwieldy thing without tugging putting pressure on my immobilised fingers.

  The first week was the slowest: the first night with the cast on, the second night, the first couple of days, the first weekend, a full seven days! By the end of the first week I'd gotten so antsy that I built a web application for tracking the passage of time with progress bars. I'd check it two or three times a day. Healthy coping strategy this was decidedly not, but it did help pass the time.

  Besides not being able to partake in my favourite activities, the worst part was a sort of phantom-limb adjacent sensations I got every few days or so, where I'd feel that the two immobilised fingers were being contorted into all sorts of arcane positions: pinky bent backwards, ring finger twisted underneath, bent in half. After a few weeks I could sort of wiggle the fingers a couple millimetres within the cast to restore normal(-ish) feeling, but it was uncanny.

  After three weeks or so I could tell that, deep inside the cast, bone was starting to fuse again. Intra-cast wiggling would trigger a bit of pressure around the break but gone were the sharp pangs whenever I accidentally bumped the cast up against something. I was forewarned against itching and an awful smell, but neither reared its head except on occasion (once prompted by accidentally spilling a bit of milk down into my palm while emptying the recycling).

  The cast comes off on 5 April, which as far as I'm concerned can't come soon enough.

  Ghyll

  Ghyll's well into his adolescent years (months?) at this point and he's as big a bundle of energy as he's ever been—but nowadays, when we take him off the lead, he's quite content to sprint off into the woods or into the fields and poke his head out only occasionally to check that we're still there. I'm told it's normal behaviour for a dog his age—he's only 10 months old!—but it unnerves me.

  

  Still, it hasn't so far eventuated in catastrophe. Although we did have a close call with a sheep and two lambs in Kielder Forest—where sheep aren't expected; it's a managed forest after all—when Ghyll got a little too curious for his own good. He's remarkably well-tempered, always kind, never aggressive at all, always willing to play and loving to be chased around—but sometimes his curiosity gets the better of other dogs or sheep.

  Reading

  I've been doing really well with the reading goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year; Goodreads reports that as of the end of the month I'm four books ahead of schedule. Reading seems to be one of the few things that I can do reliably with a cast on, so I've spent most of my free time with my nose in a book. As a result, I finished 5 books in March:

  • Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, 5/5
  • Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, 3/5
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, 5/5
  • The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 4/5
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, 4/5

  Great books in general, though the Russian ones were a bit heavy. Life and Fatein particular feels like required reading for anyone interested in the Soviet Union.

  Cycling

  Sam and I completed a trip over the North York Moors by bike at the beginning of the month. We'd planned to ride from Kildale in the north all the way down to Kirbymoorside via the trails, but halfway there we decided that we just weren't making good time and headed back to Kildale via the roads. A couple of 20% grade climbs later, we were back at the car and drove down to Kirbymoorside (an unqualified lovely little town!) for a stop at the George and Dragon overnight.

  

  No more cycling after that in March for obvious reasons.

  February 2023

  Not having the full use of my hand at the beginning of March prevented me from writing a proper monthnotes for February 2023, so here's a quick rundown.

  Nabbed a couple of Wainwrights (Longlands, Brae Fell) on the back of Skiddaw at the beginning of the month; the rain was relentless but Ghyll went for a serious run and slept for the better part of the following couple of days.

  

  Long ride with a friend from Newcastle, including a trip under the Tyne through the pedestrian tunnel and a long stint on an industrialised dual carriageway north of the city. Punctuated by lots of cake and coffee, which makes it all worth it.

  

  Participated in a practice duathlon hosted by the Cleveland Triathlon Club; finished in 1:04. Hopes to eke out a sub-hour effort were dashed at about the exact same time as my hand was.

  

  Sold the Volvo C30 that we had previously and bought a Skoda Fabia estate, which fits our lifestyle significantly better than the Volvo did. Breaking my hand at the beginning of March prevented me from writing a proper Monthnotes for February 2023, but We got a secondhand bike rack for the back and a dog fence so Ghyll can stretch out in the boot on drives. It's a terrific little car.

  The future

  Daylight Saving Time had started and what a difference it makes! Suddenly there's plenty of light after work; suddenly the sun is out three days a week; suddenly the world seems wide open and ready for exploring! I sit dourly on the deck out back with my cast on, stewing in the sunshine and the warmth with the budding bushes all around me.

  Sam and I are working on plans for the summer. We have a busy April ahead of us and a May full of sunny weekends just waiting to be filled up with adventure.

  

  Monthnotes Ghyll Cycling

• ---

  Tuesday, 31 Jan 2023 11:11 pm

  January 2023

  January was a weird one. I feel as though I say that at the end of every month. Not sure why. Whenever I sit down to write one of these—a day or two or three or seven late, invariably—I feel as though I’m looking down from the cloudy top of a hill: not much to see, a little sweaty, a little tired.

  Running

  When I read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running at the end of last year, I didn’t think very much of it. That’s not to say that I thought it was _bad_—but I didn’t come away from it with a renewed sense of self or a novel perspective on the world. Mostly I came away from it a little annoyed that Murakami treats a five-minute kilometer as an easy pace. I’m not convinced that’s an easy pace for anyone who isn’t regularly running on television.

  But in the intervening time, I’ve internalised some of his advice about the frequency of running: you really do have to run very regularly to see any appreciable increase in fitness. Going for a run once or twice a week will help you maintain a basic level of fitness, and it’s probably one of the best ways to spend half an hour—but you’re not going to get really good at running on that alone. You need to eat up the miles.

  

  Which is what I’ve been doing in January. I think I’m better at running now than I’ve ever been before—though that’s not saying much, and even then it’s really only over a five-kilometer distance. I don’t have the time to sink into 10ks except on the weekend, and even then I’d rather be doing something else. But I’m pretty pleased with the little progress that I’ve made, and I feel like I’m on track for completing my sprint triathlon in July in a respectable time, which’ll be the first time I’ve ever completed a race in a time that I could really respect. I’m hopeful.

  Ghyll

  It feels like Ghyll has regressed a little bit, on the separation-anxiety front, since we went to Florida for Christmas. Before we went away, he was quite pleased to sleep through the night; but throughout January he’s been really fussy about being awake in his crate without us in the room. He’d whine and whine even when we both just popped upstairs to get dressed, and we weren’t sure why. Ditto in the mornings: he’d wake up half an hour before us and whine until we came downstairs to see him. We’ve been making a concerted effort not to leave him alone too long, or to put him in his crate while we’re still in the room.

  He’s chilled out a bit in the past week—he doesn’t whine in the mornings anymore, and he’ll generally settle himself if we leave the room for a little bit. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not sleeping in. But at least we’re not being woken up before our alarms.

  

  He’s coming along well at obedience training. His specialties are walking to heel and waiting before acting. When I take him on a walk at night, I can usually go quite a little while with him at heel, off-lead. If he smells something interesting, he can be distracted off it with a word and a treat when he comes. We can tell him to sit, and then walk away and do something interesting and he won’t come bounding over until we tell him it’s okay. You can see him shiver with energy and focus while he’s waiting to be released. He’s getting better at running, as well; it’s only when we run on the litter-laden front streets, where the empty crisp packets and crushed Strongbow cans lure him with their glinting angles, that he’s distracted away from my side.

  On the other hand, he’s still pretty mouthy, which isn’t ideal when meeting new folks, and if he finds something he really likes, like a crab shell or a dead seagull on the beach, he’ll play keepaway. It’s no use chasing him down: he’s faster than either of us, and too smart to let himself get caught in a pincer manoeuvre. The only trick is to see it coming before he does, and redirect him away. And if he does miraculously leave something when we tell him, we have special treats on hand.

  He’s a good dog.

  The dark

  Heavens help me but January is a dark time of year. Weatherwise it’s been alright: the drear and the rain and the wind are all par for the course at this point. But the darkness has been getting to me in a major way. Every year, round maybe March or April, I look back on January and February with the fresh horror of someone who’s been through the ringer, emotionally, but by the following Christmas I’m always blindsided when it comes around again.

  

  I’ve written before that there’s not much worth in writing (publically) about how down you are, but it’s been dark enough that I thought it warranted a couple of paragraphs at least.

  On days when the clouds don’t roll across the North East like a vast shield, there’s now a bit of light left in the far corners of the horizon directly after work. That’s progress! If I move quickly, I can be out the door for a run in the twilight—though I’m always home in the dark.

  Reading

  Started 2023 on a reading tear, finishing JR and then devouring a few shorter books in quick succession. We Need to Talk made sense but didn’t need to be a full book; the TED talk that it’s based on is enough. The Housekeeper and the Professor was touching, but it fell a bit short of the Ishiguro it was trying to be. Wittgenstein’s Mistress went over my head; come back to it in 10 years. Sea of Tranquility was a fun time-travel romp, and worth the praise from last year. I also finished Kawabata’s Snow Country right before the end of the month, though I haven’t written the review yet.

  I didn’t address it in my end-of-year review, but I noticed after the fact that of the 25 books I read last year, only 3 were written by women—which is pretty appalling. I’m trying to amend that this year, going for an even 50-50 split. I’m on track so far!

  Work

  Work proceeds apace. I don’t know how worthwhile it is to write about my changing attitudes towards building applications on the web when I’m not sure of their exact shape and magnitude right now.

  During my working day, I spend the vast majority of my time building networked systems in Python. It’s pretty conclusively back-end work. When I do front-end stuff, it’s on the order of add a button that does X rather than implement a design system.

  I don’t think that’s a bad thing: I’m a little tired of keeping up with the fast-moving front-end landscape, the endless squabbles and frameworks du jour. I don’t like how modern tools and systems seem to priorities developer needs over user needs; I don’t like how complex things have gotten. I think they were probably just as complex six years ago when I was first learning, but I’m more aware of how complex they are now. If I had a year of experience under my belt and had to make decisions about serverless platforms and databases-as-a-service and build tooling and CSS frameworks, I’d probably give up and join the priesthood. Hell, even with my current experience I feel like joining the priesthood some days.

  After a couple of listless months of relatively little extracurricular development work, however, I sat down for a couple of hours of uninterrupted frontend hacking and built a little search utility for my website. Go ahead and hit Cmd/Ctrl+K on your keyboard. Yeah that’s right, I’ve got a Raycast on my website. It’s powered by a single, 150-line, dependency-less JavaScript file.

  In fact I don’t know if I’ve ever made much of a stink about it, but this website doesn’t have a build step, doesn’t have a bundler, doesn’t have a transpiler or a type checker or even a CSS preprocessor. Browsers are good enough now that I don’t really need one. I’m even using :has() on the search widget. When I push to main, a GitHub action logs into my VPS, runs a git pull, and then does a little find-and-replace to cache bust the CSS & JS. Consider it my little contribution to the indieweb of radical simplicity.

  Around the house

  I wrote a little bit, midmonth, about how Sam and I have been getting handyaround the house. Nothing serious. We put up some new storage by the front door and replaced a couple of ceiling lights that were starting to show their age. Installed a floodlight in the backyard. Maybe the biggest job that we did was to replace the bonnet and front bumper of the Volvo, which sounds daunting but in practice really just came down to the creative use of a mallet and a pry bar. We’re trying to sell it and couldn’t very well leave it with a buckled bonnet and a dented bumper.

  

  Easy to underestimate, but being productive like this has given us a bunch of momentum going into the new year. A small, warm sense of accomplishment. It’s easy to feel as if the Pile of Stuff to Do grows faster than it shrinks, but sometimes a good month like this comes around where the Pile really isnoticeably smaller than it was at the beginning of the month, and you can head to bed and finish the month with that sense of accomplishment wrapped up under the duvet with you and live by its warmth for another 28 days at least.

  Monthnotes

• ---

  Wednesday, 30 Nov 2022 12:00 am

  November 2022

  Well, it's officially Dark. I'm never quite ready for the darkness to fall in the winter—I always underestimate the length of the nights. The nights start to get truly long in November; the sun sets at like quarter to four and stays set until almost 9 am the following day. The result is that you start work in the dark and you end work in the dark. I'm glad that the NHS is understanding about taking a break in the middle of the day, and I'm glad that Ghyll provides an excuse to get outside for a walk (and away from the computer) around lunchtime.

  Still, November hasn't been easy.

  Greg's Hut

  We started the month off with a trip up to Greg's Hut in the Pennines for a bit of fitting-out work in the wake of the massive renovation/restoration that was undertaken (by professionals!) back in August. They repointed the building and put up new roofing timber and sealed the holes where the wind and weather were getting in and blasted off all of the old lime wash on the interior walls.

  Our job was, mainly, to refit a new sleeping platform—tongue-and-groove rather than plain plywood this time—and put up some of the amenities: candlestick holders, notice boards, shelving.

  

  We ambitiously brought Ghyll up with us, anticipating a rough but not unbearable stay; unfortunately, it was a little bit much for the little tyke. He whined for most of the day, frustrated to not be able to play with the gruff old folks pottering about the bothy with drills and nail guns. In the evening, Sam elected to take him back home, while I'd stay up at the bothy to help finish up.

  Manchester

  Back down to Manchester for Sam's birthday! Hot dang do I like Manchester: it feels like a distillation of all of the good parts of a larger city. Great little corners to hide away; tons to do; a potent sense of intimacy. Great city.

  

  We were there to see The Mountain Goats at the Albert Hall (no not that one, that's in London). We had dinner at Almost Famous as well—another gourmet hamburger joint but with the twist of irreverence and gratuitous helpings of blue cheese. Counting my lucky stars that I've thus far evaded contracting an acute case of gout.

  Motorbike

  Midmonth, on a three-mile trip to one of Ghyll's obedience lessons, I locked up the front wheel of the motorbike and came off. I was only going around 30 miles per hour but the ground is hard at any speed. Luckily my gear took the best part of the impact and I was left with only a bit of a hobble where the bike fell on my leg and a tweaked shoulder & left hand.

  The bike's also in remarkably good condition, considering that I crashed it: a bent headlight bracket, a couple of burnt-out bulbs, a cracked instrument panel fairing. Most of this can (I assume) be coerced back into shape by enterprising use of a pry bar and mallet—once I've got use of my left hand back.

  Exercise

  With shoulder and hand out of commission, and with leg bruising healing up nicely, I got back into running a little bit more seriously. I don't think that I've ever been able to describe myself as a Serious Runner (nor do I now) but I'm at least more serious about it now than I was before. This latest burst of spontaneous motivation is mostly due to reading Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I'd like to get maybe 60% as good at running as Murakami (who, similarly, considers himself Not a Serious Runner) by the end of the year.

  In pursuit of which goal I've advanced by daily alarm by 45 minutes to get out for a quick run or cycle before work. On colder days I really struggle to coerce myself out of bed, but on successful days I sit down at the computer with the warm self-satisfaction of the exhausted.

  Hell, Sam's even joined me a couple of times, in preparation for a bit of a bike tour next summer. Which, speaking of which, I've got a new one (a bike): a Dawes Galaxy upon which I intend to accrue memories and memories across kilometers and kilometers countless.

  

  Walking with Ghyll also afforded us a couple of opportunities to get out into the countryside—on a walk through the marshland behind the industrial estate on Portrack Lane in Middlesbrough (okay, maybe not the countryside) and amid the erstwhile mine workings on the moor above Hamsterley Forest. Marked the latter as one to revisit with the bicycles.

  Reading

  Didn't get a ton of reading done—spent the whole month trying to slog through Nausea, which I wasn't as much a fan of as I was The Stranger.

  I think a lot of existentialist thought has been coopted by Main Characters online, probably because existentialism centers personal meaning on the self, which means you get a bunch of literally self-centred people walking around thinking that they know something the rest of us don't.

  Well, it's 4:30 pm and the sun's been down for like an hour, so it's time for supper. A busy December awaits.

  Monthnotes

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