Tl;dr – basically a normal Monday. Some bits of work at my parent’s house, some bits at home. Didn’t stick to Kitchen Revolution plan and then went to break myself at the gym in the evening.

The day has drifted through three distinct parts. House-sitting this morning at parent’s place this morning, while waiting for an engineer to arrive; working back at home through the afternoon; and then dealing with a sudden avalanche of questions and support issues from about 5pm – just as I was lobbing the lamb into the tasty tagine I was making. Oh, and then the usual Monday evening routine of cubs, scouts and gym.

Last weekend saw the re-opening of the camp-site in Abersoch where my parent’s caravan is pitched. Mum and Dad were keen to get out there as soon as they possibly could and had departed first thing Sunday. There had been the risk that this joyous moment would have to be delayed by 36 or more hours because an engineer had to come and fix their washing machine, and he could only come on Monday — sometime between 8am and 8pm.

Given that they are so generous with their time looking after the children when Jude and I are away, doing a stint of house-sitting seemed like the least that I could do. I could take the laptop and it would be just like working from home — and it worked fine, except I couldn’t find a way to make coffee. It’s a miracle that I survived.

Apart from the lack of caffeine, it was no great burden. The engineer turned up at 10am and was gone by 10:30. I cracked on with what I was doing (taking snapshots of 3D models in browser canvases – yay!) and then went for a walk around Up Holland. I must have been a bit quicker than previous strolls, as I had to weave in and out of the neighbouring streets to get to 30 minutes.

This afternoon’s work was unremarkable. There were some server problems which caused a bit of a panic, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted with either a backup or a reboot.

Everything was basically going to plan with the day and then at 5pm the phone started ringing and when I was talking to one person, I could feel the phone buzzing as someone else was emailing me with another problem.

It wasn’t a tsunami of problems, four different issues seemed to simultaneously hit at 5. It would usually be fine, except that I’d just started to soften the onions on the lamb tagine that I was making. So had to juggle stirring and lobbing ingredients into the pot alongside some quick connections to servers and digging around to find problems. Plus I had to get the kids shortly after 5 so that I could get them ready for cubs and scouts.

I suppose if something is going to go wrong, then it will always be at the worst time — and with a bundle of other things going wrong simultaneously.

I had enough time to get the children and get Joel back to cubs, plus have dinner ready for when Jude got home (and had most of the problems sorted). So the madness didn’t last long.

Those who know the Kitchen Revolution will recognise that I’m off-piste this week. The big meal from scratch had a sad face etched next to the recipe and I was also juggling a couple of busy nights where there was very little time to cook and another three nights when Jude would be away. So I lumped for some simple and quick recipes. Lamb tagine and chilli. The plan is for some of the KR recipes later in the week. I got enough shopping done at the weekend to get us through to Thursday… by which point, anything could happen. If the children have their way, we’ll spend the rest of the week eating Subways.

It felt like a long hard slog at the gym tonight. In a good way, of course. I’d done the dumb-bell parts of the programme last week at home, but there was a lot more interesting things. I’ve never really done the machines, so using the shoulder press, chest press and leg press machines was a whole new world, and still hard. I think that I like using the weights for the shoulder and chest press, but I’m willing to give it a go.

My programme also instructed me to hold a plank for as long as I could. I had done three minutes in the past, so I aimed for that. I felt relatively fine passing three minutes and then it was like someone flicked a switch and my stomach muscles suddenly felt like they were working really very hard. I stopped at four, but that was mainly because my shoulders were aching. The side planks were difficult after that, and then after all the leg work I couldn’t bring myself to do a single leg raise. That said I hammered away at it for over an hour and it felt like it was all hard work.

The rest of the evening has been spent plugging away at new project stuff and a couple of quick fixes that had come in through the day. Nothing out of the ordinary. Mostly a normal Monday.