Month: January 2022

Zombie Eye IV: The Reckoning

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For the fourth time since it first showed up in April 2019 (just days before my first marathon!), I’ve had an iritis/uveitis attack. Thankfully (?) it’s so chronic now that I already had an emergency supply of prescription eye drops in the house and so I didn’t have to spend the day in the eye emergency department again.

It’s been an extremely busy (and thus stressful) few months and so I’m not really surprised that it’s happened (it’s always triggered by stress), but it is especially bad timing work-wise and everything-else-wise. Hoping work will be a bit quieter by the end of the week so that I can start looking after myself properly.

Juggling!

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It’s been a bit of a struggle to balance work and studying ever since I started the TechUP course back in October, but this coming week is really going to be a challenge. Lots of clients with deadlines, and lots of stuff going on with the course. It’s also week four of the marathon training plan… all of this will be a real balancing act!

Marathon training is still going well with no major aches or pains – I think the mileage buildup must be going at the right pace. Podcasts are really helping still.

I’ve enjoyed the course but I’m really looking forward to having some downtime in March, especially with the long training runs getting longer.

parkrunday: Town Moor #526

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It’s sort of for the best that I ditched my NENDY* touristing plans this week, given that my NENDY wasn’t on this morning. It was one of the many NE England parkruns that cancelled due to Storm Malik. Geth and I went to our home parkrun at Town Moor instead… and it was mental in the high winds. Easily the toughest winds on the Moor I’ve ever experienced, and the Moor is breezier than most places anyway due to being so exposed. Most of today’s run was focused on staying on the path and not getting blown over, and there were points where I was sprinting yet standing still, if you see what I mean. I really felt for the volunteers who were also struggling to avoid being blown away!

I am quite looking forward to winter weather being over.

Still, it was fun in a sort of unhinged way, and it was nice to have an excuse not to worry about pace.

Post-parkrun
Various windswept attempts at the post-parkrun selfie. Should have given it up as a bad job, really. Lost my barcode tag shortly after these pictures – a victim of the storm!

Town Moor is off next week so won’t be there. No idea where we will be though!

*NENDY: parkrun tourist speak for ‘nearest event not done yet’.

The same is good

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In the quiet part of the year, every weekend is the same, and that’s the way I like it.

I was going to go further afield for parkrun tomorrow morning, but I don’t have the energy at the moment as there are a lot of other things going on (January is quiet social-wise but not work-wise or study-wise… certainly not this year anyway!). Just the usual will be fine.

After that I’ll be on my sofa all weekend. Probably not fully awake. It’s been another long week.

Phone Box Thursday: Phone Boxes In The News, January 2022

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No new phone boxes spotted recently so here’s a news roundup.

The Surrey phone box graveyard has been featured on several local news sites this month. The restoration work on these sounds fab – just need to save up roughly the cost of a small used car so that I can buy one haha!

Further north, the North Yorkshire graveyard has also been doing the rounds again on local news sites this month, but it’s a recycled story from 2016 unfortunately.

RIP laptop

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My laptop has died. RIP Rio* (2017-2022). I spent all day today trying to recover it, but unfortunately it seems the situation was terminal. Despite its tendency to shut down suddenly without warning when I was in the middle of an important Word document, I will miss it and its quirks.

I am really glad I’m in the habit of backing up all my files to memory stick every night, meaning I didn’t lose anything important. Unfortunately, I am also the type of person who has approximately 1,537 tabs open at any one time in Chrome, all carefully organised into groups. I rely very heavily on the setup of these tabs as I’m always doing thousands of different things, and I have realised too late that on Rio I did not have Chrome set up to sync tabs to other devices. I will not make that mistake again.

Until I manage to get a new laptop, I will be on Geth’s spare one. He doesn’t use it much so hopefully it will hold out for the interim!

*It was named after the Duran Duran song. Obviously. Don’t know what I’ll call my next one!

Burns Night

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It’s a busy time for me at the moment, so I’m not hugely in the mood for celebrating anything, but it was nice to make the effort to cook Burns Supper tonight.

Burns Supper

A really nice change. We even sat at the dining table instead of in front of the TV!

Eyeing the end of the month…

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…though to be honest I’m not sure why. I’ve been trying to get out of the habit of ‘wishing my life away’ by constantly barrelling onwards to the next thing. Winter may be a bit rubbish and miserable weather-wise, but it’s also nice and quiet and enables me to hibernate indoors and get on with things. I should make the most of that before things start happening again in the spring and summer.

I’ve got an extension for my course deadline, which is a bit of a relief as it means I can focus all my study energies on the group project we’re doing at the moment and save the rest of the outstanding work for later. I should still be done with everything by the end of February, meaning that I can focus on my own tech work again from the spring onwards.

Spring will be nice… but I need to find a way of enjoying winter while it’s still around!

Two weeks down…

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Week 2 of 20 completed on the marathon training plan and so far it is going well. Podcasts on my Aftershokz are really helping, it has to be said! I’m building up the miles nice and slowly and my legs seem to be coping at the moment, so fingers crossed for another good week.

I’m also making sure to get in a good yoga session at least weekly, in the hope that it will keep the usual issues at bay. This was recommended by the practitioner at my hospital appointment on Monday and I think it’s good practice for me anyway, so it’s a habit I will really try and stick with this year (and not just when I need to do it to get a Garmin badge or Strava trophy). My hips will thank me, hopefully.

parkrunday: Jesmond Dene #44

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Monthly volunteering slot today! Geth and I were marshalling at our favourite point along the Jesmond Dene parkrun route.

Volunteering at parkrun
One of the many nice bridges in the Dene!

Jesmond Dene is gorgeous even in the winter, but I was thinking this morning how nice it will be to see it in summer again, especially as (*crosses fingers*) it looks like we will have a full summer of parkrunning there this year.

Back to running next week… possibly somewhere new!