It’s been mostly business as usual today, breakfast with Jude around in the morning, and aiming dinner for her getting back shortly after six.
I had a meeting in Manchester at lunchtime which was timed perfectly for clobbering the rest of the diary. It takes about an hour each way, which is a big slug of the time when the children are at school. Plus the morning was spent preparing for what I thought would be a bit of a bollocking about not doing enough… which would have been unfair, but deep down I thought that I could have done a lot more over the past four months or so. As it was, the meeting went very well and apparently the servers and software have been running better than ever and requested software changes have been done to their satisfaction. I was very pleased and suddenly the journey didn’t seem so bad.
The meeting left an odd shaped hole in the diary before my eye test later in the afternoon, so I popped to the Trafford Centre to check out some smart clothes. Since I’ve been losing weight, I’ve had to send a lot of my old baggy clothes to the recycling. This has left me with an empty wardrobe and a hankering after some nicer clothes.
In my head, I picture myself at the kitchen table typing away at the laptop in a comfy old three piece suit. The reality is likely to be very different, particularly after being measured up. It seems that I’m almost perfectly proportioned except for my elephantine thighs and calf muscles. Having dropped eight inches around the waist counts for almost nothing as I needed to find a pair of trousers four inches bigger than my waist so that I could comfortably get them to fit around my legs. It was all unsatisfactory and I came away empty handed. It probably requires some proper tailoring or a change to my leg work at the gym – if the doctor ever lets me go back.
My appointment for the chest clinic is tomorrow evening, so hopefully I’ll be allowed to start running and exercising again after the appointment. I’ve no idea what will happen or how it will go, but fingers crossed it’ll be fine.
The afternoon wrapped up with an eye test which could simply be summarised as “I’m getting older”. The eyes, along with the rest of me, are deteriorating – but at a slightly slower rate than might be expected. I think I was supposed to be delighted with this nugget of relatively good news, but with the recent heart and allergy problems, I couldn’t bring myself to high-five the optometrist.
Tonight’s walk was the regular Monday evening Cubs and Scouts changeover. Joel does Cubs between 6 and 7:15pm, Lily does Scouts from 7:30 to 9:00pm. So I walk Lily to Scouts and then walk back with Joel. I don’t get any complaints, so it works quite well. It’s never the quickest walk, but it’s always good fun spending a bit of time with them both. It was 3.8km in 42 minutes. The pace out being 10:45 min/km and the pace back a little under 12 min/km. To be fair, Joel does have shorter legs.
Joel also has his own blog now, which I need to show him how to use. Once he’s got the hang of it, I’ll post a link.