BOFHJournal - October 2015

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30/10/2015 [16:35] I didn't erg last night, and I'm doing no exercise today. Not only that but pretty much nothing happened at work either. I probably needed the rest, but I could have done with something worthwhile to keep my brain exercised. Anyway, I'm off for my physio session, then home to prepare for the weekend of rowing. Two outings on Saturday, one on Sunday. Rachel arriving on Saturday afternoon with a Halloween party in the evening. Then on Sunday I'll have to drag myself out of bed for an outing, then we get the remainder of the day to share together, plus a trip to see the new Bond film. It'll turn out to be quite a social weekend, for once.

29/10/2015 [17:10] I have to say that last night's outing wasn't too bad at all. We're getting to the point, as a crew, where bad strokes are the exception. As a result we tend to focus on them more than the good stuff sometimes. Anyway, it was a good outing, and I went home quite pleased. I promised myself I'd get up early this morning and run somewhere between 20 and 22km before work. And I did. I got up at 05:45 and was running from outside of work at 06:35 or so. I didn't do the full 22km in the end, deciding that a) my feet would appreciate a few fewer km to not get blisters during, and b) I was just a bit tired after last night's firm pressure row to the lock and back. I've felt a bit drained for most of the day, to tell you the truth. Looking back at the week thus far it turns out I've done two sessions of exercise every day apart from today (when what I did was the duration of two sessions of exercise). 10km and weights on Monday, 8x500m pieces and a Widowmaker on Tuesday, 10km and an outing on Wednesday, and ~20km running this morning. I think, therefore, I'm going to give this evening's 30min AT erg a miss, and take tomorrow off exercise entirely. There's such a thing as overtraining, and while I think I could do the erg tonight and even run tomorrow, I don't think I'd gain much from them other than not doing them to the best of my ability, and being even tireder for the three outings I have over the weekend (two on Saturday, one on Sunday). Plus I want at least a little bit of energy to match the boundless amount Rachel has (and to survive the Halloween party we're going to on Saturday night). Work has been overly quiet today. I've had very little to do other than read up on new technology stuff... which is all very interesting, but I'd rather be Doing Stuff with it than just reading about it. Anyway, that's that. I think I'll go home and see if the sausage and lentil stew from the weekend is still edible without repercussions. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's total rest day with trepidation more than anything else. I think that, too, might be a sign that I'm close to overtraining.

28/10/2015 [17:10] The 'widowmaker' erg last night wasn't nearly so hard as I thought it was going to be. And each and every one of the erg segments I managed to do under the splits I'd set myself based on doing a PB 2K. At least on average (in each segment). It was nice to know I had the strength, cardio, and general fitness to do it. It was hammering down with rain this morning, so I wasn't all that keen to get a run done before work. As a result I cycled in (getting quite wet in the process) and did a very relaxed 10K at lunch time instead. Hopefully it'll stay dry for this evening's outing in the 4-. I have to try and work out how to get a long run in this weekend while still taking a rest day, so it may be that it's tomorrow morning that that happens. We'll have to see how I feel if/when I wake up in time to do it. Work today has mainly been about trying to reduce the number of red lights on our monitoring system. I wouldn't say I was particularly successful, but nothing seems to have exploded. I suppose I'll settle for maintaining the status quo at the very least. I think everything I have that was wet seems to have dried over the course of the day, so it's time for me to pack up and head down to the boat house. See you tomorrow, at a time to be determined by my body (and alarm) clock.

27/10/2015 [16:40] I got weights over and done with efficiently enough that I was showered just as the boat house started to get really busy. It also meant I was home in time to greet Rachel. She went for a quick run while I prepared dinner, which helped her settle somewhat after being trapped in a training course all day. Once she was back and showered we managed to fit in watching Skyfall before an early as possible bed time. This was because I had to be up and at the boat house for 05:40 this morning for an outing. Given I'm not sleeping all that well at the moment it wasn't too hard to be awake when the alarm went off, considering I'd been fitfully in and out of sleep since about 03:30. Whilest it wasn't the best outing in the world (early morning, one sub in the boat, not everyone 'feeling it'), we still managed to get our 8x500m pieces in, and had the river to ourselves (apart from the two other boats from the club doing the same thing), before any of the other clubs got their boats on the bit of water we were using. We actually got back to the boat house pretty close to 07:00, which was very helpful in allowing me to have a nice long, hot shower, and then cycle in a leisurely fashion to work. At work today we've had a few minor issues with regard to how one of the tests I wrote to check web application loginability worked with what appears to be a stealth upgrade (in the end I solved it by making the test a lot less good, but more reliable), and firewall issues with a new development service popping into existence (solved with a tweak to the firewall ruleset). I also need to have a damned good think about what I've achieved over the past year so I can say something in my (almost meaningless) appraisal, which will probably happen this week. Oh, and I went for a haircut at lunch time, because I was beginning to feel really quite bushy on top. We're doing a "widowmaker" erg this evening. I won't describe it, but suffice it to say I'm looking forward to it being over, and my being on the way home to a steak dinner and some television. Rachel won't be around tonight, or for the rest of the week until Saturday, which is poo.

26/10/2015 [16:45] Tons of rowing this weekend just gone. Two outings on Saturday morning. One being a 4- outing with some hard 2K pieces, and then a 2- outing, just to keep things interesting. That meant I was then free to have a nice lunch with some old rowing friends in town before going home, doing the Tesco thing, and then collapsing for the afternoon. Sunday was then a long 4- outing over the lock to do some fartlek-type things, as well as a sneaky little bit of side-by-side racing with the 4+. As we only decided on one outing on Sunday I was able to go home and have a second breakfast before Rachel arrived having run near her house in the morning and then taken the train to me. Both of us were pretty tired from the day (and travels, in her case), so we settled in with hot chocolate and marshmallows (in my new shipping forecast mug!) and watched some Daniel Craig Bond films in preparation for seeing the new one next weekend. This morning Rachel headed out for a day of training before she'll be coming back here for the evening. I did a slightly abbreviated morning exercises thing and then got to work to firefight all of the minor issues that go on with servers when you leave them alone for the weekend. Nothing too problematic, but we've got a few things to puzzle over that're going to carry over until tomorrow. I was going to run with Max at lunch time but he's still suffering DOMS from getting back into running after about three weeks of not doing so because of a foot injury. So I did a moderately fast 8km on my own and went back to work. Disappointingly, whilest the run was fairly OK in terms of bits of me hurting (although my left achilles was quite sore right down where it attaches to the heel), after I finished and did my stretches my right adductor started hurting again, which it hasn't done for almost a year now. I'll have to make sure that doesn't flare up again. Anyway, for now it's weights time, then home to see Rachel again! Sadly tomorrow morning I have to be at the boat house for 05:40 so that we can get in all of the work we want to do on the water before all the novice crews get out too and get in the way. That means an early night and definitely no lie-in tomorrow.

23/10/2015 [16:55] Today was a Friday. I guess that's as much as I can say about it. I mean, I haven't done (and won't be doing) any exercise today, which feels a bit odd. However, I think my body definitely needs time to recover from the last week and a bit of continuous pushing. I would have done the erg last night but as I think I said, I was just too tired. I promised Rachel I wouldn't do anything today, so it'll probably go wanting. Someone who's gunning for me in terms of performance beat my current season's best for that distance last night, but I think with some actual effort I can beat him in return... if I need to do one before I stop officially rowing on the 8th of November (following my last rowing race before I begin marathon training properly). Anyway, I went home last night by way of Tesco and tried to tidy the house a bit, did some washing up and waited for Rachel. I was very glad when she arrived. I hadn't realise how much I'd missed her until she came in the door. We had a lovely evening of food and relaxation and went to bed early as we were both pretty exhausted. Disappointingly, I slept incredibly badly, and when I did I had some very odd dreams. Hopefully they were both as a result of over-training and taking things a bit more easily next week will help things settle down somewhat. Between now and then there's the weekend to consider. Two mornings of early rowing, with Saturday morning being some full on bridge-to-bridge 2K pieces at various different rates (but always at 'race pressure'). Hopefully we'll have a working rate meter fitted so that I have something to concentrate on (I'm stroking the 4-, if I neglected to tell you before now). Rachel will either come on Saturday evening (here's hoping) or Sunday around lunch time. Either way it'll be wonderful for her to be back again and I'll try to make it more than worth her while. We probably won't go for a run on Sunday afternoon... but you never know.

22/10/2015 [17:35] I spent a lot more of today standing up that I thought I was going to be doing. First thing this morning was the amount of time I expected. I got up (too) early and cycled to work so I could do my long run of the week. Without my GPS watch I have to estimate it being about 22km. Or between 21 and 22 anyway. No idea of the time. After a shower and some protein drink I was able to get on with my day, which ended up being about five hours of trying to get the fourth of the four identical servers to boot when told to use the serial console to show things. To cut a very long and dull story short, it turned out that this server behaves differently based on whether console redirection is enabled or not after boot. I've no idea why. After standing in an overly air-conditioned prep room all morning I've spent what remained of the afternoon back at my desk doing post-install configuration on all four servers. I was going to go and do a 10K erg after work, but I just don't have it in me to do a good job at it, so I'm going to go home instead and wait for Rachel. This may involve going to Tesco for dinner supplies, too. She's seeing her parents off at the station, so hopefully she'll get the train on time. Tomorrow's an actual rest day, without any exercise at all. I think I need it. Especially considering how full-on both weekend mornings are going to be in terms of rowing.

21/10/2015 [17:10] It may not have come until two minutes ago, but I finally achieved victory today with the installation of the four new servers I got yesterday. For some weird reason, Oracle Linux 6.7 would not install (initrd.img wouldn't unpack) unless there was a fresh copy of it on the USB stick. If I'd booted from it once then the next server I tried to boot with it would lock up and then kernel panic repeatedly. I've absolutely no idea why. Anyway, I finally got the last of the four servers past that step about five minutes ago. It's now merrily on its way to installing and configuring and upgrading itself as I write this. In other news, the 4- outing last night was surprisingly good. Speeds on the five 500m pieces we did (should have been eight, but our bow man had both a bad back and a healthy fear of us hitting the bank at high speed (he steers the boat)) were commensurate with a much stronger 4+ (contains a cox) that's been rowing together for much longer (it's the one I was in, and will be in for Vets 4HoRR the day after 4HoRR). Hopefully we'll repeat the quality of the rowing in tonight's outing (when we'll probably just do some steady state with a few bursts). At work another member of my team seems to be being given loads of work to do and I don't seem to be getting any of it. I'm not entirely sure why. It may be that he has a higher profile than me, or that people think I'm not capable of doing what they're asking for. Either way, it's a bit disappointing and makes me feel somewhat disregarded and surplus to requirements. I'm going to have a word with my current line manager (as opposed to team leader, who I guess is also my immediate line manager) and see if I can't get more involved in new projects which come down the pipe. Right, I think that's it for today. Tomorrow is a running day, and potentially a 10K erg in the evening day as well. We'll have to see how everything fits in given Rachel's also here tomorrow evening as well.

20/10/2015 [17:20] Weights last night was... efficient. I think that's the best word for it. I got in, did my thing, showered, and went home. I'm pretty sure I was sitting on my sofa by 19:00, which isn't too bad. Dinner was leftovers from the roast on Sunday with fresh vegetables. And home made crumble for pudding. Made by Rachel, not me, of course. As I wasn't going to have time over lunch today, I got up early and got in to work for 07:00 so I could run from work. As I'm running without a GPS watch until the St. Neots half marathon I'm not exactly sure how far I went, and definitely no idea how long it took. Given the route I ran I'd guess it was about 12km or so, though. Far enough. There were only a few MySQL replication issues today so I was able to spend the morning building a RHEL7 VMware guest (from scratch, as we still haven't got templates and customisations working) for a colleague. Then it was home to wait for an E.ON engineer to come out and replace my gas and electricity meters with smart meters. Other than him being a bit late everything went very efficiently. Back at work this afternoon I had enough time to unbox four new servers and get their out of band management settings in place and set up their hardware RAID configurations. I'll leave them soak-testing their disks tonight and make a start on installing them tomorrow. I'm off shortly to have my first full crew outing in the 4- we'll be taking to 4HoRR (not the crew/boat I was hoping to be in, but it turns out that the reason I'm not is that I won't be trying for a place in the actual HoRR (eights, rather than fours) crew next March. Yes, that doesn't make much sense to me, either. Anyway, we'll see how the outing goes tonight. Then I'm home for sweet and sour chicken and rice, and a spot of television before a moderately early night.

19/10/2015 [17:00] Another full weekend. Saturday was two races on the river in two different 4+ configurations. Both races were recorded on my new fake Go-Pro clone (yes, really). I need a better place to mount it next time, but it was a good proof of concept. After the rows it was time for a very big meal at one of my crew's pub (he's the landlord), then home to do video editing, to Tesco, and finally home again for a fairly lazy end to the day. Sunday morning was supposed to be an outing with the landlord in a 2-, but both of us were shattered (he'd raced three times). We ended up coaching other crews as we were already up and about. That meant I was home in time to do a bit of washing up and tidying before Rachel arrived. We went for a moderately long run (without GPS watches), she carried on a little further after I headed home with achilles issues, and then we went into town for lunch. After that it was a short ride home via Tesco for roast dinner ingredients, she made a crumble, we watched a film, made and ate dinner and ended the weekend far too quickly. This morning I've been mostly concerned with trying to get VMware to apply configuration settings to RHEL7 and 6 templates. Nothing seems to work, which leads me to believe that there's something wrong with our installation's permissions, rather than the virtual machines I've been whipping up to turn into templates. With that and trying to keep on top of the MySQL replication issues I haven't been able to get much else done. I'm off to do weights now, then go home for a quiet evening.

16/10/2015 [18:25] I'm at work a little later than I'd like to be, really. But given I had to reschedule my physio appointment from yesterday to today, and 19:15 was the only time they had available, it makes sense to stay at work rather than go home and come back out again. I was a little peeved that I was going to have to do my 30min AT erg last night as I really wasn't feeling it. But as seems to be the case quite often, that meant that I put in a really good effort. In fact I was only 1m off my all time PB. This was a bit of a shock, but quite pleasing. I went home and celebrated with a huge stir-fry. I didn't feel all that tired when I got up this morning for morning exercises, so did those and headed to work with my running stuff. After a morning of repeatedly fixing the MySQL replication on one of our main, live, servers, my team got fed up and got the developers to move the site which was affecting it to another server that doesn't have replication. Hopefully they'll fix what they're supposed to and put the site back again next week. Once things were semi-stable I was able to escape out into the world and run a reasonable 10K before heading back to my desk. Most of the afternoon has been spent playing with my new knockoff/clone/fake SJ4000 camera (after charging it), and trying to work out why just one of our switches doesn't seem to want to report CDP information to Observium, when everything else of a similar marque does. As I said, I'm at work late, and frankly bored of work at this point, so I'm going to stop working in a minute or two, catch up a bit on articles and things and then head off to my physio session. This weekend I'm racing twice in boats tomorrow (hopefully with the camera mounted to a rigger), going to Tesco, hoping Rachel arrives on Saturday night (and if not then Sunday morning), going out in a 2- on Sunday morning, and then hopefully relaxing for the rest of the weekend (or what's left of it). Potentially I might put a long, slow run in there (possibly with Max, if his foot's OK and our schedules match up) somewhere, but that might not happen.

15/10/2015 [16:50] Last night's outing wasn't too bad, all things considered. I was back in the crew I like, and we started off quite well. It was only when we were asked to bring the stroke rate down somewhat that we started to expose some of the minor flaws in our syncing up. Still, for it being in the dark and us not having been out together in a while it was quite pleasing to get some power down and know that everyone else in the boat was trying their best. I'd planned on being in an outing this evening rather than doing the dreaded 30min AT erg. The outing's been cancelled, so I'm erging instead, although I only remembered after I'd said I could do the erg that I had a physio session at 17:30. Instead I've had to move it to tomorrow evening, later on than I would have liked. Work-wise I've been fiddling with VMWare tools and RHEL7 installations in an attempt to find some way to create a configurable template image (configurable within vSphere). I'm running into a few issues with regard to permissions and potentially some kind of pre-installation stuff, but my team leaders swears blind it's perfectly achievable. I just wish I knew what frobble I'm missing. I'm heading off in ten minutes though, so I'll take a fresh look at it tomorrow.

14/10/2015 [17:10] A lot more happened today than I was expecting. It started off normally, with Rachel leaving at a horrible hour of the morning and me doing my morning exercises. However, once at work we had some kind of DDoS which caused a fair bit of consternation until we got it dealt with. This bled into lunch time somewhat, but did mean I was still at my desk when the heavens opened, rather than out running. I therefore got to go running in the sun instead, which was nice. Just before I left I was asked to sub into a crew this evening, which meant that I felt it was probably smarter to do a shorter run than I'd been planning. That turned out to be a doubly sensible idea as even at a slightly slower pace I still felt the effects of the week's cumulative training (including last night's ergs) in my legs. Given we all want to make a good impression on the coach this evening in the hope that he'll move me back into this crew for 4HoRR it makes sense for me to be at my best. In other news, one of the UPSes we brought back to the office yesterday has extremely swollen batteries. It's a wonder they haven't completely split open and exploded messily everywhere. I'm hoping they don't before I WEEE them out of here. I did a RHEL7 install to be used as a VMWare template, but had no idea what I was doing with regard to the templating aspect, so I'll be doing that from scratch again tomorrow. Happily, an upgrade of Chrome on my linux box means I can now use the vSphere web GUI again, which is nice. Other than that there's been the usual day-to-day stuff going on. I need to head off shortly though so I can go home and get my rowing kit for this outing. I'm desperately hoping it doesn't rain this evening. I was really looking forward to going home and watching television of an evening for once.

13/10/2015 [17:00] Thus far I'd say today was fairly successful. It started off last night with weights at the boat house going well. Then I went for dinner with Kate to celebrate the beginning of her birthday (she's going for a few weeks of celebration as its her 30th). I made the slight mistake of having a glass of wine, so ended up crashing out in bed as soon as I got home at around 21:30. I did manage to wake up in time to make it to the boat house for 06:00 for a 06:15 outing in the coxless four (a 4-). The row was surprisingly good, considering. I got to stroke it, which is making me feel a little less worried about the 4HoRR experience in a few weeks from now. After the outing it was straight to work where, after a few hours more of sitting around doing desk work than I thought I'd be doing today, I and my Networks team leader went into town to get various and sundry UPSes either back on the network or into the back of the car to bring back to the office. Out of the fourteen UPSes we needed to do something about we managed maybe seven, which leaves seven or fewer (not sure about some of them) for the next time. I also decided to finally splurge on a Go-Pro HD camera... Although I actually went with one of the perfectly servicable knock-offs for about a tenth of the price. It should arrive before the end of the week, so I can mount it on the boats I'll be racing in this weekend on my home river. For now though, it's the end of the day, so I'm off to do some ergs, then home to wait for Rachel who's coming over this evening, yay!

12/10/2015 [17:00] Back from seeing my family and all is pretty good. The trains there were numerous but all on time and uneventful. Although I slept on the floor for two nights it was lovely to see everyone and welcome my nephew into the family officially at the family court. There had been some issues with extended family coming/not coming, but in the end the event was only about a minute long anyway so it was better that the grouping was small. We had a quiet get-together, enjoyed each other's company, and I got to see some more of the newest member of the family. The trains back were much less complicated and I was home in good time such that I could go to Tesco and get the house in order before Rachel arrived hot off the back of scoring two of the four goals in her hockey game win. Coming as she had from a transatlantic overnight flight I was very impressed. What impressed me even more was her beating me by a good 40-50 seconds in the 10K race we did the following morning. A new course after the previous six years, it was flatter in gradient, but had more off-road sections. I still don't have the fitness to keep up with Rachel on race day (or, if I'm honest, on some training runs, too), but she gives me something to strive towards. If I'm honest, I can't wait to knock rowing on the head for this year so I can concentrate on running and get my body into running mode, rather than this halfway house between strength and upper body mass, and lean running physique. I think it's likely that following 4HoRR, and Vets Head the following day in early November, I'll stop rowing until at least after Boston (April 2016), other than when someone needs a sub. I'll probably throw in an erg now and again though, just to remind myself what they are. I should have done a few pieces of work today, but decided to concentrate on getting a few other things done instead. That, coupled with two of my coworkers being out for various unplanned reasons today, has meant that I've been able to stay at my desk whilest we've been shorthanded. Theoretically, tomorrow is a day dedicated to UPS fettling. We'll see if that happens... Now, I'm off to do some weights before dinner with Kate, did 8K at lunch time (quite handily) and apparently am now rowing at 06:00 tomorrow morning. I do like it when things are sporty-busy, as opposed to work-busy.

08/10/2015 [17:05] This morning's work went fine. I had to get up a little earlier, but it wasn't much of an issue. Nice to have that done before I go away for the long weekend. Nothing else really went on today other than some new work coming down the pipe in the shape of some VMware guest installs. It's always a bit of a hassle working on VMware when you don't have a primary Windows workstation to do things on. I end up having to use a terminal server, which is never entirely satisfactory. Still, never mind. Right, I better go home and get packed for heading off to see the family. My brother officially adopts his son tomorrow and we're all going to have a party to celebrate, which is fantastic. Then I come home again on Saturday, Rachel arrives back from America late on Saturday evening after getting back to Croydon and playing a hockey game, and then we run a 10K race on Sunday where I expect to be roundly beaten by her as she's in far better running shape than me right now. See you on Monday.

07/10/2015 [16:40] I'm beginning to feel some of the ache from the exercise I've been doing recently. So obviously the best thing to do is more exercise. Hence the (light) weights session this evening before I'm out riding up and down the bank for a 4+. I hope the outing is short, or at least shortish, because I've been ragingly hungry all day, and doing weights on an empty stomach isn't going to help that. There's things I can eat at the boat house, but I'd much rather go home and have steak. I put the final bits in place for my hopefully incredibly boring and short bit of work tomorrow morning. This included getting the Service Desk to send out an email about it, getting confirmation from the person in charge of the buildings I'm going to be dropping off the network for five or so minutes, and making sure I can either get into the building at 07:55 or know where the person who can let me in will be. Otherwise the day has been fairly dull. The highlights were probably seeing Rachel briefly on Skype, and emailing her replies to the messages she sent me whilest I was asleep and she was returning from the first day at her conference.

06/10/2015 [16:45] Today probably could be classed as a good day given all of the things that've happened (or not happened). After last night's return to doing weights I got home aching slightly and was very happy to have the first portion of leftover Moroccan stew that Rachel made on Sunday as I was absolutely famished. Getting up this morning wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be with regard to DOMS, etc. Maybe that'll be tomorrow morning instead. Anyway, morning exercises, breakfast, cycle to work before it started raining. All good stuff. Then a morning of getting two hardware problems fixed without even leaving my desk, recovering a PC and RHEL subscription, a monitor upgrade for my test workstation, and even a nice moderately quick 6km run at lunchtime which didn't seem to bother my achilles tendons at all (plus I barely got rained on). I've had a useful afternoon of emailing people about things I want to do on Thursday, or that they want to do (like ordering a UPS and network card for it), caught up on other emails, cleared down a few tasks and even updated all of our linux workstations and a few of the servers that aren't involved in live functionality, so are fine to be fiddled with as well. I'm off in a little while to do the usual Tuesday 3x 20min ergs, at which I'll be pushing a little harder, then home for more stew and a relaxing evening, I hope. About the only things on my mind at the moment are what crew I'm going to be in for Fours Head of the River Race, whether I'm going to be doing my UPS switch over on Thursday morning, and of course how Rachel's doing over in America at the moment. I've had a few emails from her to say she's there, OK, and things are happening, but I'd much rather she was back here. Still, roll on Saturday evening.

05/10/2015 [16:25] Exercise-wise I wouldn't say the weekend was 100% awesome... but it certainly wasn't too bad by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the awesome was down to the fact that Rachel was around from Saturday evening until this morning (when she had to get on a plane to the US for most of the week), so we were able to run together on Sunday morning. The next largest part was because I managed to run basically a half marathon distance before I just ran out of useful energy and stopped enjoying the run. Rachel could have gone a lot further, I think, but it was good for me to stop at that point. I just haven't done enough long runs yet to have the kind of cardio and stamina that I had around the time of my marathon earlier in the year. Still, as I wasn't rowing on Saturday morning either I did go and do a set of ergs at the boat house instead which got me nicely hot and tired. After that it was mainly about relaxing and enjoying a weekend without anything scheduled other than relaxation and reading. After getting up late on Sunday, we went to Tesco, then did the run, taking in the 10K course we'll be racing on next Sunday morning. Hopefully the weather will be as perfect as it was yesterday. Rachel's about 1000 miles, near as dammit from her arrival airport in the US as I write this. She seems to be on time and going well. Hopefully she'll have a useful and safe time there and come back not too jet-lagged by the Atlantic hopping. I'll be heading off for a weights session shortly, then home for food (I'm weirdly very hungry today) and an early night. This week, I hope, should be fairly normal, other than the fact that I have an early start on Thursday (UPS changeover) and then won't be here on Friday as Thursday evening seems me heading to see my brother officially adopt his son on Friday, with me returning on Saturday afternoon in time for the race on Sunday.

02/10/2015 [17:00] Sadly, last night's erg did not go as well as I hoped. Not only was I well off the split I wanted, I had to stop with ten minutes to go to make an emergency pit stop. Coming back my heart just wasn't in it, but I only had 7.5min left, so I just did what I could. Hopefully I'll do better next week when I don't have anything going on that might interrupt me. I went home in a tiny bit of a funk and tried to enjoy my dinner. I therefore considered going for a long run before work this morning, but just before I dropped off to sleep remembered that all my running stuff was at work. That meant I could sleep in (or at least lie in bed) until the usual time, do my morning exercises and get in to work at a vaguely sane time. I ran at lunch time instead. As everyone was out of the office I felt justified in running a bit further than normal and getting back to my desk post-shower a little more than an hour after I left it. No-one cared, and I felt better about myself for having gotten in a reasonable run, even if it did get slower as the distance mounted. Anyway, I'm off home for the weekend now. No rowing for me this weekend for various reasons, and in fact at all next week and weekend either (for other reasons). That means I can both sleep in on Sunday morning, and then go running with Rachel, who'll be here from Saturday evening to Monday morning, all being well. What I do with Saturday is still to be determined, though. Maybe a cycle.

01/10/2015 [16:50] Sadly, last night's outing was not the culmination of a great day. I mean, it was a great day, but the outing was most decidedly sub-par. The cox and one of the rowers were from my usual boat, but the other two weren't, and I could tell. Theoretically mixing the crews up all of the time makes for better rowers all through the squad, but I was really hoping to have a nice, balanced boat and some good rowing last night... and we didn't get it. Still, I didn't get too soaked and was able to get home in reasonable time to have dinner, watch a bit of television and look at Boston Marathon accommodation for next year. This meant I didn't get to bed much before midnight, but it was a useful exercise. Of course, in the end, all the AirBnB searching I did was for nought, because I ended up booking a hotel for Rachel and I this morning instead. Certainly not the cheapest option, but all of the AirBnB people I contacted either didn't reply or said they were going to be putting their prices up for the weekend of the Marathon. That just made me sad. The hotel's a good choice for knowing what we'll be getting, and the location is pretty hard to beat, so all in all it's probably close to the best we could manage. Like I said, it's not cheap, but this is probably a once in a lifetime experience, so we're going for it. We'll try and make the rest of the trip post-marathon as cheap as we can to claw back a bit of budget. Work today has mainly revolved around providing support for a colleague dealing with a machine being dealt with by an engineer. That and doing restores from backup for fumbly-fingered database administrators. I'm off in a few minutes to do a 30 minute AT erg at the boat house, then go home as I really can't be bothered to do circuits this evening. Tomorrow's Friday, a running day (hurrah!) and hopefully one where I won't set back the healing of my blisters.