BOFHJournal - January 2014

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31/01/2014 [17:10] Again, last night's outing wasn't too stunning for me. In fact, it was probably one of my worst in a few months. I couldn't tell you why. I was at bow, somewhere I haven't been in a long time. But that wasn't the reason, I'm sure. Anyway, even the coach on the bank acknowledged that sometimes it's just not your day. Got home, had food, went to bed a little later than I wanted to. It was lovely to stay in bed until 08:00 again this morning. I was probably on the day 2 effects of Wednesday's 20K run, so felt somewhat tired. That mostly went away over the course of the morning and I was able to run a reasonable 10K 'recovery' run at lunch time. The rain even managed to pretty much hold off for the whole time I was out on the Path, which was really nice of it. It boded quite seriously the entire time though, which probably helped me keep my pace up somewhat. Not a full power run by any means; enjoyable. There's a cardio circuit session tonight at the boat house. Only an hour (the boat house is busy most evenings now so we have to squeeze it in). After that it'll be shower and home in time to find Rachel (I hope) already there and getting warm and dry after being in the atrocious weather we have going on here right now. It really is pretty grim outside. Chances are it's going to be similar at 07:00 tomorrow morning when I'm out on the river. Joy. Better get an early night tonight, I think. Other than rowing on Saturday morning (and then more skills circuits), I'll be doing the usual weekend chores, and then seeing if I have the energy for a social thing on Saturday evening. Sunday morning is more rowing (a 4-, then an 8+), then I'm off to see Rachel for the rest of the day. That'll mean a very early train on Monday to get to work in time. Hopefully that should all work out OK. I'll let you know.

30/01/2014 [17:20] After leaving work last night feeling like I might collapse, it was a pleasure to find that I had more than enough energy to do a reasonably good weights session, derig and prepare half an 8+ for transport, and even go to the pub and be sociable for a few hours. However, despite that I left the pub and was home and in bed before 21:30 because, frankly, I was beat. I really think I came pretty close to the red line over the course of yesterday. Sleeping in and not getting up unil 08:00 this morning (missing morning ergs) was definitely the right thing to do. As was not doing anything at lunch time today. I'll only be doing a quick 10K tomorrow lunch time. It'll be a real pleasure, I think. Today's work has mainly been about sorting out antivirus stuff, looking at more SSH issues, and giving servers which were assumed would only need a certain amount of disk space... more disk space. In other news, the GatorSkin tyre set I put on over the weekend seems to be cursed with some kind of invisible slow puncture (the rear one, at least. Every time I go to use the bike the rear tyre has gone down. It can't be the weather. I've had the inner off and on twice (breaking one tyre lever per attempt) and submerged the whole thing in water while overpressured and not seen a single bubble. I'm loathe to take it off again while I don't have new tyre levers, but something's making it deflate. 8+ outing this evening. I should head off shortly and try my new plastic bag between my lycra layers to see if that keeps me a little drier when I'm sitting behind the splashy stroke man.

29/01/2014 [17:00] Rachel came over last night, arriving just a little bit after I got back from a very hard 30 minute erg. It was lovely of her to come and just what we needed after the hectic and slightly off-kilter weekend. It was also nice to just have some dessert together and then end the day. I was shattered. I'm definitely feeling the training at the moment and need to seriously look at making sure I don't overtrain. This could mean stepping back the running somewhat (fewer long runs, more shorter ones),and being careful which rowing training I do. I ran 20K at lunch time, only 35 seconds or so slower than the run on Monday. This shows me that I have the strength and stamina when I need it. But not that I can therefore push through and do more in short order. It means I now deserve a rest. At least for a short while. So, weights tonight will be barely anything other than a stretching session and some very light weights. Then helping to derig a boat to send half of it away for repair after it was punctured by another boat. Hopefully that will be followed by food in a pub run by one of our rowers, then an early night. I may not go to tomorrow morning's erg. Work today has been mainly about puzzling through a technical issue which has been able to stump even my team leader (who's entirely too knowlegable about pretty much everything). He may have solved it at time of writing, but I'm heading off before I find out. I'm going to sleep like the dead tonight.

28/01/2014 [17:10] Thus far today hasn't been too bad, as days go. It started off with a better-than-expected 4- outing in the cold. I didn't get too soaked by the person in front and we weren't awful. This counts as a win in my book. Everyone needs a bit more cardio stamina (including me), but otherwise, not too shabby. You can't hide in a 4-. It certainly felt more efficient without a cox in the boat, too. Last night's weights session, after 20K during the day, actually felt perfectly OK. I don't think I was off my 80% weight bracket (which is what this week's weights plan dictates) so, hurrah. Tomorrow's 20K run, potentially with this chafing not having healed, could be interesting. I'm going to bring my Skins shorts to wear, in the hope that compression clothing without any rucking up might be just what I need. I'll tell you what I need right now. To not have eaten that chocolate and caramel bar quite as quickly as I did about 30 minutes ago. That would have been much better for me in terms of the indigestion I appear to have at the moment. I'm sure a cycle to the boat house for a 30 minute AT erg will help. Rachel has wonderfully decided to pop over and see me this evening, which is wonderful. Hopefully we'll both be awake enough to enjoy the experience and at least share dessert.

27/01/2014 [17:00] First 20K run completed, and other than the usual aches and... aches (just lots of aches really, no pains), it didn't go too badly. I can't say I'm totally enamoured of the fact that as I finished I'd only completed half of a marathon, but with a 1h26m11s run time (taking off maybe 40 seconds for a fence I had to traverse owing to flooding), I'd like to think I'm well on target for a 3h05m00s finish time for the full fat distance. Maybe. We'll see how I feel tommorrow, and maybe after a few more of the same length and longer runs. The weekend was interesting. Rachel was in town, as were two of her sets of friends (school friends plus their significant others). So, meeting them for the first time was what happened. My impressions of them changed over the course of the weekend. An increase in positives, and an increase in negatives. So on average things worked out pretty much as I expected they would. Sadly I was at a bit of a low ebb for most of the weekend. I don't think the friends noticed, but Rachel did (and dealt with it incredibly well), as did I, of course. Still, we seemed to navigate it without too much incident, I think, which is something of a rarity for me and still makes me feel like there's another shoe to drop somewhere. It's odd to find someone more self-effacing and forgiving than myself (when it comes to dealing with someone who's down), but Rachel seems to be one of those people. She's quite wonderful in that regard. Anyway, there was rowing and a cooked second breakfast on Saturday, socialising and a cooked breakfast on Sunday, afternoon tea on Sunday afternoon, and delivery pizza in the evening. I certainly think I've had plenty of calories (and another rest day) this weekend. Weights tonight should certainly be interesting given how my legs are feeling. Still, at least my cough seems to be slowly (too slowly) receeding. I only really coughed for about five minutes after today's run. Early early 4- row tomorrow morning, then potentially a 30 minute erg with the person who's bank partying us.

24/01/2014 [16:55] So last night's 2K test went pretty much exactly as I predicted. And that was with me trying a whole new 'race' plan. Anyway, it's over and done with now and I can concentrate on my running a bit more. As such I was able to shave off another minute from my 15K time, which has left me feeling pretty good, but with the usual ache/pain in the top of my right leg which goes away after a few hours. There's rowing on Saturday morning as per (2K pieces, as usual), and then I'm off for the rest of the weekend as I'm part of a Christmas present for one of Rachel's best friends (no, not like that). Apparently the friend has been wanting to meet me for ages, so there's a whole dinner and hotel and afternoon tea thing being arranged with her and her partner and me and Rachel. So, all my chores need to be done on Saturday afternoon so that Sunday is free and clear. Then I'm back on Monday and beginning 20K runs. I'll start off a little slower as I did with the 15Ks and see if I can increase the pace over the course of the week as I did with them. Oh, and I'll be working, of course. There's some off-site stuff I'll need to do next week. Nothing too strenuous, but should be a break from the norm if nothing else. Have a good weekend.

23/01/2014 [17:00] An entire day without regulated exercise yesterday (I don't count cycling to and from work). It felt... weird, but good too. My evening went on forever. That was very strange. I got an early night of course, seeing as I needed to be in work for 07:00 this morning to patch my Oracle VM Servers. That didn't go 100% according to plan, but neither was it a complete catastrophe. In fact, I think everything ended up being OK. Which is how I like it. I managed to sleep through most of the night, except for a moderately early wake (before the early alarm) due to thinking about tonight's 2K erg test. It's at 18:00 this evening and I'm really not looking forward to it. My Facebook feed is beginning to fill with notifications of people who have completed it already. I really wish I was one of them. I don't anticipate it being PB territory. Not by a long chalk. I can only pull my best, and try not to die to terribly before the end. I'll try to think about the reward of dinner with Rachel afterwards, and sweet, sweet lying down and getting my breath back immediately afterwards. Other than that the day has been fairly mundane. No exercise at lunch time, obviously, and for the most part the servers have behaved themselves. I'm anticipating a fairly quiet day tomorrow too, with a 15K run at lunch time, or after work, depending on how the weather looks at around 12:00. Between now and then, pain and pizza (and other nice things).

22/01/2014 [17:35] If last night was anything to go by, tomorrow's 2K test is going to be abysmal. I don't know why I was so bad, but it really doesn't feel like I have the fitness to do this well. Which is a shame considering a fair amount might be hanging on it. I cancelled the 15K I was going to do at lunch time in an effort to make today a proper rest day. Here's hoping I manage to pull something out of the bag. As it is I appear to have done something to my right wrist which has made it rather painful to flex. I'm not sure why or how. That's probably not going to help, either. Today has been mainly about preparing for tomorrow's four Oracle VM Server patchings. They're either all going to go really really well, or horribly horribly wrong. I'm hoping for the former so that the rest of the day goes smoothly and leaves me ready to do the erg. After the erg I'm meeting Rachel for pizza at Pizza Express where I will almost certainly proceed to cough all over everyone and every thing. Then it'll be an early bed. Anyway, I need to go now so I can get some chores done before I go home, eat lots and get an early night!

21/01/2014 [15:50] So initially I texted someone to say that I wasn't going to be down to do weights last night. The top of my right thigh was still aching and I thought a night off would be the best thing for it, and me. Only by the time I was cycling past the turn off for the boat house (which is on my way home) I felt fine enough to go and do the session. So I did, and I actually think it helped loosen things up a little. Which was nice. I got home as quickly as I could, had a smashing dinner and was in bed by 22:00, like any sane person would be who had to be back at the boat house for 06:00 this morning for an outing. It was freezing cold, dark, and foggy. And I was sitting behind someone who splashed a lot. Happily, he didn't splash all that much, so I was able to concentrate on the 3 x 2min race pieces we did on the way to the lock and back in between exercises. Plus there was a nice hot shower at the end of the outing, which helped warm me up, too. Workwise today I've replaced DIMMs and RAID batteries, run up a OS on a spare box so we can extract some data from a MySQL databases without crushing another server under the load it's going to create to do so, and replied to a lot of emails. I'm down to 14 in my inbox, and only three of them need active email replies (as opposed to doing things in real life). Anyway, I'm out of here now as I've got a haircut. Then it's down to the boat house to install some new heads on old ergs, then a 2K prep, home for dinner and some television and then bed!

20/01/2014 [17:00] That was a very long weekend. Not quite as much rowing as I thought there would be (only two outings per day, not three), but nevertheless, with the extra core work and boathouse cleaning I was definitely glad to see the back of the place by the middle of each afternoon. I'm also very glad I managed to drag myself to Tesco on the Saturday afternoon as there was no way I was going to have been able to make it on the Sunday. Sadly the rowing really wasn't all that good, given that we have been mixing crews again in an effort to get everyone on the water. We all got an email today which said that there's going to be some settling of crews come next week (after this week's 2K test, argh). So all I can hope for is a reasonbly good result on Thursday, and for the coaches to overlook my height and weight (both lower than others) for my technique and ability to move the boat. Rachel came over on Sunday afternoon. That was wonderful. It's shame we don't get longer together most of the time. She had to leave very early this morning. I had considered going to do the morning erg, or 15K of run, but in the end did neither. It turns out there wasn't an erg planned for this morning anyway, so that was good. The 15K lunchtime run went well. Well enough that I knocked 1m30s off last week's run. Given I know there were significant portions of today's run where I really slowed down I think there's scope for squeezing out a little more at this distance before I knock it up another notch to 20K. Of course, I still need to work out what's causing the discomfort at the top of my right thigh where the quads connect to the pelvis, but given that goes away in a few hours I think I'm OK for the time being. Weights now, then home.

17/01/2014 [18:20] Today was One Of Those Days. Everything happened. I'd planned on getting up early and doing a 15K run before work, but that didn't happen for at least one very good reason. Then I got to work and immediately found that things had gone wrong. The lights flickered and an alarm went off in one of the server rooms. I wandered over there to find that all of the air conditioning units had failed to restart after the blip. Most of the servers were close to shutting down due to overtemperature issues. I opened what doors I could could and tried to get the air handlers back online again. In the end I resorted to isolating each one and turning it back on again. Happily, this worked. Unfortunately the fallout from this was two servers which had powered themselves down, and two servers which then developed major ECC memory errors. Once the replacement RAM had arrived from a box previously afflicted and I had that one back up and running, its RAID card battery died. I also had to field a fire alarm engineer, find out why a delivery I was expecting hadn't arrived, and all my normal work. In the end it was something of a relief to get changed and slip out for my 15K run at lunch time instead. This went surprisingly well, considering I haven't run more than 10K since the St. Neots Half Marathon. My next 15K is on Monday. All being well, anyway. Between now and then I've got a mini stay-at-home rowing training camp based out of my boat house which will mean three outings both days this weekend, starting at 07:00. It's going to be pretty tough. I think Sunday afternoon will consist mainly of me eating a lot and lying down. Rachel's due mid-afternoon and apparently intends to make sure the relaxation is enforced. I can't see myself fighting her too hard. These next few months are going to be a long and tiring period of time. Oh, and last night's outing wasn't terribly good. Not only was the standard of rowing below par, I was behind someone who splashes an awful lot at the catch, so I'm going to be getting wet a lot for the forseeable future, unless the seating is changed again. Anyway, dinner with Kate now. I will attempt not to fall asleep into my steak.

16/01/2014 [17:15] Made it up in time to get to the boat house for two 6K ergs this morning. Was mopping the floor of the men's loos (there's a leaking water thing going on) and heard everyone starting the second of the two. Cue me having to dash back and row somewhat harder than UT2 to try and finish at the same time (or a few minutes afterwards, at least). Not hugely impressed. Anyway, after that it was in to work and second breakfast. Second breakfast makes everything better. Reinstalled the last of the servers I had to do this week, then realised that I have, in fact, not been running anywhere near long enough distances for the marathon I'm going to be doing at the beginning of April. So I spent a few minutes mapping out a rough and hopefully useful set of runs for between now and then. The first one greater than 10K is tomorrow morning, before work. Here's hoping it's a plan I can stick to. Between now and then is an outing, Rachel arriving (yay), and hopefully a good night's sleep.

15/01/2014 [16:55] I said to myself when I got home last night that I'd get up early and do a 15K run by getting in to work early and showering there afterwards. I said this even after I'd done a PB for a 30 minute erg at rate 20. I went to bed full of enthusiasm for this course of action and woke with the alarm at 07:00 this morning only to find that I had absolutely no desire to get out of bed at all. In fact I didn't actually stir my stumps until 08:00. it turns out that getting a PB tends to leave your body a little bit tired the next day. Still, PB eh? I made it to work on time and got two more machines reprepped in the minimum amount of time due to further streamlining the install process. Tomorrow's final installation should go pretty well, I think. Sadly, the machine that had its motherboard changed yesterday is now complaining about one of its chassis fans. I'm due over there with a replacement hard drive for another server, so I'll go and give it a wiggle just to see if it's a loose connection or something. I hope it is. So yes, tomorrow's work is fan wiggling, hard drive replacing, operating system reinstalling and, just maybe, some of the actual work I had planned to do this week. Also, no lunchtime run as I did one today and - while the time was neither awful or excellent - I'm pretty pooped. I have an outing tomorrow night (where I won't be at stroke as we've rerigged the boat to stroke rig again) and it would be best not to be utterly broken for that. Weights tonight though, then home to collapse, and eat. Definitely eat.

14/01/2014 [16:55] This morning's outing was brilliant. Even though I had a bit of an issue getting up at 05:40, I was still able to get out of the door and to the boat house for about 06:05, well before all but one other person. The outing went well, which was nice as it was probably my last one as stroke in the boat. Apparently we're re-rigging it to stroke side again, which means I'm either further back in the boat, or out of it completely. I don't think the latter is all that likely, but even though it's ostensibly to try new things in the top boat it still feels like a slight against me and the work I've put in for the last season. Anyway, here's to not having to concentrate quite as much on rate for a while and getting back on with improving my technique. Also, getting wetter as I'll have people in front of me taking bad catches. Oh well. So yes, weights last night, outing this morning. Nothing over lunch except for watching a streaming media version of the seminar which went on downstairs detailing how the two halves of our once two separate divisions work. This was mildly interesting, and much better watched from my desk, with music, and the internet. Tonight is a 30 minute AT erg, then probably helping rerig the boat, before I go home and eat a lot. Even with an early night last night I'm still pretty tired. I'm not sure how awesome tonight's erg is going to be, but this is why they're here, to keep us pushing. I don't actually get a morning off until Friday. Or any evenings off before the weekend. Remind me why I do this again?

13/01/2014 [17:05] For being utterly under the weather with tonsillitis and a cold over the weekend, I had a pretty good one nevertheless. Saturday morning I was up and down at the boat house to bank party a coxless four, which was no problem. However, then my second outing was cancelled because people thought I was too ill. I can't say I was totally disappointed. What made the day even better was getting out of Tesco alive, with a raging temperature, and all the family shoppers to find that Rachel was going to come over 24+ hours early. That was pretty awesome all on its own. I was able to get home, with all our food for the weekend and even tidy the house a little bit before she arrived. Sunday morning, after a night of barely any sleep at all due to coughing, I then got to sleep in until close on 11:00, have a leisurely brunch and then wander down to the boat house for midday to compete in our first head race of the year. I stroked the boat and I have to say, it wasn't all that bad at all. Rachel even came down to watch and follow along on a bike. Given she's had tonsillitis far, far worse than I (antibiotics, etc.) this made me incredibly grateful for her efforts; she's brill. After the race (we can third out of about 204 entries) I headed home and we had the remains of the day to relax. I've been coughing on and off after exercise for a good few days now, and this morning's cycle in and 10K run at lunch time were no exception. I imagine it'll be like this for a few more days, at least. We had power work over the weekend, which didn't go all that well. This means that most of today has been about pickup from that. Hopefully tomorrow will be more about the work I should have been doing. Like rebuilding servers and replying to important emails! Anyway, weights time, then home for food and relaxing. Tomorrow morning is our first weekday outing of the year, and I don't think the weather is going to be kind...

10/01/2014 [17:10] Honestly, nothing to report, really. Last night's outing was reasonable. I was famished when I got home, and the salmon fillets were slightly too heavy on the sweet chilli. Still, hunger won. For not feeling like I was too tired last night I was pretty shattered this morning. Pretty useful to not have anything too strenuous to do before this evening's 4+ outing, thankfully. I sent some flowers to Rachel this afternoon. She's still feeling under the weather so I thought I'd make us both smile a little more. I really hope she's feeling well enough to eat something soon. Work today consisted mainly of replacing a RAID card battery, fielding a lot of emails about a variety of small sysadminly tasks you really don't care about, losing control of my inbox somewhat, and not getting around to replying to any of the personal mails I wish I'd been able to. This weekend there's rowing, some Tesco shopping, some erging, a rowing race, and then hopefully Rachel, if she's well enough. I'd go to her, but I'm also still not doing 100% well, and I've also got training on Monday morning. That may sound like a poor excuse for not going to her (and I think it is, too), but an email which should have been trimmed got sent to most of the men's rowing squad yesterday which detailed the 'ranking' of the men, and frankly, I'm not as high up the list as I would have liked. It's likely I'm going to be shifted out of the stroke seat very soon, I think. Part of me doesn't mind as it's less pressure, but it does mean I'm going to get wetter in outings as I'll be behind people who make a bit of a mess when they put their blade in the water. Anyway, that's for the future, for tonight - hopefully - I'll be at stroke, we can get this outing done and I can go home and have some dinner and an early night.

09/01/2014 [17:15] Throat even more sore today, but still tolerable. Even after last night's weights session and this morning's 30 minute erg I'm still feeling... well mostly OK. I do think it's something tonsil-related, rather than a cold, just like Rachel has. I wonder how we got it. Anyway, she's pretty much laid up with it and I'm just about getting by, which is helpful considering I have an outing tonight and tomorrow night. A few things I wanted to get done today I haven't managed to do, but I should be able to do them any time tomorrow I want. This includes going over to the other server room and changing a RAID card battery. A small but fairly essential job. Maybe I'll do it first thing in the morning as soon as I'm in and have made sure there are no fires to put out. Anyway, not much going on today to talk about. Just the morning exercise and this evening's outing. Oh and lunch with Anna where we shot the breeze for a while and caught up on stuff. That's about it, really.

08/01/2014 [17:00] Rather than try my back out before it was ready I swapped with someone last night and was bank party for my crew, rather than in the boat. To offset the lack of exercise I did manage to sneak in 40.5km of watt bike action in an hour beforehand. That left me nicely tired. That's probably also why I slept like a log last night. Morning exercises when I got up. A quick cycle in against the wind, and a 10K gentle run at lunch time. Just the weights session to go this evening and today will have been a pretty good day. Happily, my back seems to be doing OK at the moment, so I'm going to try the weights this evening to see if it is, in fact, healed. Nothing to strenuous, I think. Work today has been nice and light. Nothing too strenuous there, either, thank goodness. I did have to pop over to the other server room half way through eating my lunch to let some network techs look at fibre end points, but otherwise it's been a lot of small, easy to handle stuff.

07/01/2014 [17:00] I'm not certain, but I may have completely broken a server in a way which won't become apparent before it's next rebooted. But that was around midday. Before that was last night's 2 x 6km ergs, where I retwinged my back after 3km of the first one, and then managed to hold myself together until the end of the second erg, somehow. Then it was home, track down something to have for dinner and then not get to bed until midnight for no readily apparent reason. This was even more silly than you might think when I had to be up and in work for 07:00 this morning to patch two important database servers. The patching went really well. Flawlessly in fact. However, this awesomeness was offset by me potentially buggering up a KVM guest by catting possibly harmful data to the end of one of it's disk images in the KVM host's filesystem. Thus far everything seems fine, but we'll have to wait and see on that score... The rebuilds I'd meant to be doing seem to have gone pretty well, except for me also forgetting to copy off the SSH host keys before blowing the installations away. Hopefully this hasn't been too much of an issue for the DBA-developer to whom I handed them off to this afternoon. Now all I have to do is get to the boat house in weather which is hopefully better than the torrential downpour I came to work in in the dark this morning, do a watt bike session, shower and then bank party an 8+ I should have been stroking (back still a little suspect), before going home. Currently it seems to be dry and clear outside...

06/01/2014 [17:10] A wedding, a weekend, and a windy, windy day. I'm back at work for real now and really not enjoying the amount of things that've gone wrong since I went away before Christmas. There's masses to do and not a lot of time to get everything done in. On top of that there's a very large amount of wind and rain I'm going to have to battle through to get to the boat house this evening. I'm just very glad that I'm not out in a boat tonight. The wedding was lovely. Out in the countryside in a converted priory. It was great to see one of my best friends (and one of my best men) getting married and being so very, very happy. Even when doing the reading during the ceremony I didn't really think all that much about my wedding. Although it was on my mind now and again, and made me... melancholy. Although I guess I knew exactly the reasons why I was sad. Still and all, the wedding was a success, getting to and from the wedding was achieved sensibly despite not owing a car, and my back is feeling very much better after the slight pull I gave it during the rowing outing on Thursday evening. It's time for me to leave as it's well past 17:00 now. Today I've reinstalled two servers with old versions of RHEL (which is annoying), helped work out why a whole slew of switches just decided to stop working, fixed some Ruby/Rails and HTTPD stuff, and made a heroic attempt to deal with my email. I'm in early tomorrow for patching, which I seriously hope goes without a problem. We'll have to see. After that, more rebuilds.

02/01/2014 [11:50] I'm back! It's a new year and everything is different! Or not. No, not really. Pretty much nothing has changed. Of course, I took a bit of time off work, and a little bit of time off rowing training, but I did managed to get two 10K training runs, a 5K parkrun and a 10K race in Ely on New Year's Eve. So not totally sitting back and eating lots of turkey and Christmas pudding. I did quite well in the Ely race, but was nowhere near a PB owing to a serious amount of wind. And probably not being totally race fit. But mainly the wind. Christmas with my family up in Manchester was lovely, restful, etc. Presents were exchanged (I've got some awesome running socks now, which I'll be using for the Paris Marathon and everything else). Rachel came over a day or two before the new year, we ran the race, did the new year's eve party thing, and will be going to a wedding tomorrow where I'll be one of three best men. Other than that, one of our racks had the MCBs trip on it, twice, over the festive period, requiring a fair bit of work to get everything back each time. That's what most of this morning has been about. We appear to be getting on top of most of the things that'd broken or otherwise gotten bent out of shape. Everything else is waiting on parts, and engineer, or both. It's a fantastic day, and I wish I'd brought my running stuff, but instead I'm going to sit here, have my lunch early, and wait for tonight's outing which hopefully won't suffer from a degredation in weather between now and then. I'm not in work tomorrow (being at the wedding), but I'll be back at work, and doing the normal rowing (and running) training schedule from next Monday. I hope you all had a nice festive break from whatever it is you normally do that you needed a break from. Let's see what 2014 has in store for us, and whether it seems to pass even more quickly than 2013 did...