I hate doing accounts. It’s something that I’ve never enjoyed, but reluctantly accept that has to be done. Today was accounts day. The only thing that makes it bearable is using Xero. It has to be one of the loveliest web applications that I use regularly.

After years of using Sage at mytechie, my accountant pointed me over to Xero. It’s a delight to use – light years away from Sage which tortured me for years with an array of accounting jargon and an interface that harked back to the early nineties. I spent most of my time with Sage swearing and trying to find someone else to do the work for me. Xero, on the other hand, is like being eased gently into a warm bath of invoices and purchase orders, by someone who knows that you really don’t want to be there. Whoever wrote it deserves the web app equivalent of a Nobel peace prize.

So it’s been a mix of pleasure and torture – followed by a visit to Morrisons with the children, who seemed determined to make the visit mind-bogglingly stressful. Normally I’m a big fan of the self-service area. But with two children grabbing items and trying to scan / pack, constantly alerting the assistant and then dancing (I think) while surrounded by increasingly agitated shoppers, it was an ordeal. I just about managed to hold it together, but next time I will put out a large drink to be downed my return.

No such tasty drink today. The daily exercise hadn’t been done, so strong alcohol had to wait until we caught up with Game of Thrones – which it turns out was probably necessary.

After two days of torturing my legs by following the parkrun route, I went for some upper body and core exercises. Nothing too unusual – the New Rules of Lifting break in workout ‘B’, which has some decent upper body stuff. Not all that lunging and squatting that turned my legs into jelly. A couple of weeks of the break-in workouts and then I’ll take a look at their hypertrophy workout – which should probably take me through to August / September.

I quite enjoy the weights, although I’ve taken to looking at benches on ebay. This is probably very bad.

The final terrifying thing of the day is that I’ve installed “weight diary” on my phone. Yet another weight tracking app, but at least I don’t have to convert into pounds or kg. Instead it works in good old fashioned stone and pounds. The downside is that the stark reality is presented in large 100pt narrow sans serif font. It has also helpfully calculated that if I cut 500 calories from my diet every day, then I’ll hit my target weight sometime near the end of NEXT YEAR. Not 2014, but October 2015. The absolute impossibility of this makes me want to bury my head in a bucket of ice cream. However, I’m encouraged that when I was last exercising in January, I lost a lot of weight quickly. The trick is keeping it off (ho ho!) – or not getting injured. Or both.

Running again tomorrow. God knows when I’m going to get time to do it, but that’s the plan. Let’s see how the legs hold out.