Thirty-nine days ago it was my Dad’s 70th birthday. What I failed to mention in the blog post that day was that I didn’t yet have his present — a portrait of my parents painted by my incredibly talented cousin, Jim Hanlon.

It arrived yesterday and we finally got to give it to him this evening. The delay was totally my fault. I didn’t realise how long these things take and only contacted Jim a few weeks before Dad’s birthday. Quite reasonably, he had other things to do, but having said that, I think that he did a brilliant job and it was well worth the wait.

I’m off out with Dad tomorrow for a meal in Liverpool. It’ll be interesting to hear what he thinks of it after the initial surprise has passed — he seemed delighted, and hopefully he will after a sleep, too.

The rest of the day was relatively quiet: working through some coding and fixing a few things that came up in the day; checking backups and making sure that everything was ticking over. I realised at 4pm that I had neither walked, nor had my daily run. What with dinner preparation and eating, pancakes and present giving, it was all looking very tight.

In the end, I got out for a quick 3.7k run. It was fine and the pace was reasonable, but I think that the 20 minute runs are starting to feel very short and I’m going to increase the distance. I then prepared the dinner, ready for when we got back from Mum and Dad’s. Once we got back, the dinner went in the oven and I rustled up the pancake batter. By the time we had finished eating and making pancakes it was 9pm. So I pulled on the new DMs that I’ve been breaking in and headed down County Road for my 30 minute walk — to the clocktower in the centre of Ormskirk and back again. Just in time for some Walking Dead.

It’s been a good day, on the whole: work went well, some lovely family time, tasty dinner and a reasonably paced run. Oh, and the weight is starting to come down again, yay! All good so far.