While Jude’s been away I’ve been plugging away at some coding that I need to try and get done by the time we go on holiday (soon!) So today was blocked out as getting my head down and working away.

Lots done, too! We’re handling large objects uploaded to Amazon and then on to third parties to get information and pull in services, and so I’ve been learning all about the way Laravel handles queues. The more I dig into the framework, the more I really like it. I’ve worked with a few versions of CakePHP and Zend — both MVC frameworks, and they’ve been okay, but not what I would call decent coding frameworks. Laravel seems to take that step up, and I’m enjoying how it all fits together.

So my various uploads are handled in the background, I can buy stuff and generally things are working so far.

Jude’s been working on some bits of the code while travelling and so most of this evening has been spent merging the two sets together and checking that everything still works. It does. Thank goodness.

So besides plugging away with the coding, I also did my walk at lunchtime — into town and back — and I went for what was planned to be a 10k run mid-afternoon.

I’d planned to go out towards Aughton and then back again. However, I’d was bored and tired just running along the A59, plus there was a lot of traffic. It seemed that the air was full of fumes, so I took a turn off about 4km in with the intention of zig zagging back home and trying to make it up to 10k.

It didn’t work. Instead, I approaching our house having done just 9.5km. At that moment I also watched Jude drive up Burscough Road and then into our drive. Having not seen her since Thursday evening, it seemed a bit churlish to run past the house to get another 500m in, when the exercise was basically done. Perhaps it just shows that I wasn’t really in the mood.

That said, I did 9.5km in 55:56, so some quick sums on my pace towards the end suggest that I would have finished 10k in about 58:35ish, basically the same time as my run last week (well, 15 seconds slower, but *basically* the same time). So I’m reasonably happy with that.

I sorted out dinner when I got back and then have been consolidating codesets since then. Now it’s about 1:30 and I’m thinking that it’s probably time to go to bed… there’s enough to keep me very busy through the week.