Today has been hot. Much hotter than yesterday and by the looks of the forecast, hotter than the days ahead. We’ve made the most of it by lolling around by the pool, reading, swimming and more sitting around.

Today’s walk, the 97th of the streak, was uphill and along the cliffs until we ran out of space to walk; then back again downhill and up the other side of the shoreline, and then back down again. There was some serious short but steep walking that took place. Tomorrow should be flatter and further.

I’ve been very remiss in not taking many photos. In fact, I only have one or two photos that could probably be shared and maybe one or two others where I’d be in serious trouble if they turned up here or on the Facebook.

Here is some sexy wine from the supermarket:

and here is the bbq furnace I constructed from beer packaging to help the charcoal light (which worked a treat):

Altogether a quiet, warm, day.

Mostly resting today. The weather isn’t looking great for the second half of the week ahead, so we were mostly sitting in the sun or playing in the pool with the children.

Lorna and I walked in the morning, down to the beach and back. Conveniently it was a 15 minute walk down to the beach – ever so slightly longer to return, uphill, back to the villa.

We barbecued in the evening, and were off to bed before 10! The first day in weeks that I’ve got to bed early. Of course now it is 4am and I’m wide awake. Ah well. There is sun forecast for today, so plenty of time to rest later.

So, it seems that a week ago I said that I’d keep the blog updated and then what happens? I go and fall off the wagon completely. No updates for a whole week! There’s good reason I suppose — I think that it was obvious that I was finding it difficult to update this when I was starting to write at about 1 or 2 in the morning… having said that, it’s 1:18am now, but there’s a good reason for that.

We’re away for a few days in Carvoeiro, Portugal, and so we spent the second half of the day travelling.

Jude was off today and we had some stuff to sort out at the bank this morning. After taking a walk after lunch, it was time to go and get the children from school. Last year I had taken the children out of school for two days so that we could get out on the Thursday, and I felt so bad about it that I resolved to try and avoid it if at all possible.

This year was a bit easier. Tomorrow is Good Friday and the children would have been off, so I booked the afternoon flight which meant that the children only had to leave school an hour or so early. It all worked fine. We got to the airport in good time and sailed through security — there was hardly anyone there and it seemed like the Gods of trouble-free travelling were on our side.

To be honest, the journey was pleasantly unremarkable. We got to Faro airport without many problems, unless you count Joel’s desire for snacks not being sated while on the flight. Thanks, mostly, to me being grumpy and wanting to feed him the satsumas that I’d packed.

So we’re at the villa that we’ve stayed in each Easter for the past few years. We came here in 2012 and thought it was a lovely place, so much that we’ve come back each year since.

The broadband is still as unpredictable as it was in the past, but I’ve been able to fix Jude’s blog and also take another look at some Shapie uploading which wasn’t quite working when we left the house at lunchtime.

There’s something odd happening with it. When I fire a Laravel job from the website under some circumstances, the job appears to stay in the queue but doesn’t get processed. Something obviously is happening because the counts go up, but nothing happens and the job stays in the queue. Kick it off by hand, but via an URL, it processes fine. I need to understand what’s happening.

Anyway, the most important thing right now is that we got here in one piece and everything seems to be ok. It’s good to be back here and hopefully the weather will be bright and warm when we step out in the morning.

Just at this very moment I could quite easily fall asleep. It’s only just after 10pm, but after a run of late nights and early mornings I’m starting to feel the lack of a good night’s sleep.

It’s been a productive day – a lot of the financials for the new project are working now and it feels like there is one last big bit to do before a run of small functional parts.

I walked to pick up the children this afternoon again. On the way back, Lily wanted to walk home by herself — so I let her walk about 20/30m in front of us. Joel got a stitch and consequently I walked about 1km with him on my shoulders — I’d wanted to keep Lily in view and Joel wanted to stop and let the stitch ease. It was a lot easier to carry them when they were smaller!

Then dancing this evening. More getting to grips with the basics followed by more tandem charleston and a face to face charleston step which I hadn’t seen before. All good, but I probably ought to get an early night.

Oh, and no gym and no run – it’s been a busy week. Some things are having to give, for a few days.

This evening I’m making a special effort and wearing my glasses as I write. Not because I’m struggling to see what I’m writing — goodness, no. Instead, I’m using Jude’s lovely shiny new laptop that I got today. It’s a 13″ macbook pro retina, which has just the most wonderful screen.

When I got my laptop, the retina screens had only recently been available on the macbooks and I couldn’t see the difference between the resolutions. Two months later I discovered that I needed glasses for reading. Great! All of a sudden the slightly blurry but perfectly fine screen was now a crisp platter of teeny tiny pixels. Each one perfectly visible and mocking me in crisp, clarity. Not now. The smaller sibling of my much loved, much hacked, bashed, upgraded and tweaked 15″ MBP has a crystal clear screen which looks even better when I don a pair of specs.

So tonight I shall write bespectacled.

The only reason that I’m using it is because I’m supposed to be installing apache/php/mysql, but that took about five minutes. It’s more fun to play with!

Anyway, I spent the morning working on shapie.me again — while trying to turn off all other devices that were trying to coax me to do other work. This afternoon I was at the hospital for a follow-up on the nut allergy diagnosis a couple of months ago.

Long story short, I’ve been told that I need to avoid hazelnuts (and birch pollen). All other nuts are fine. It’s an oral sensitivity thing, for which there’s a term and I can’t remember it. Basically, I scoff hazelnuts and apparently my body mis-interprets the proteins as birch pollen and then reacts. So no more Nutella, which I was resigned to anyway, but I can go wild on the salt and vinegar peanuts — which I thought were written off for good. This makes me very happy.

They also asked if I would consent to being involved in some medical research into allergies and asthma, which I agreed to. To start with, it involved a long series of questions into my medical background with particular emphasis on when I would have reactions and from what age. I confess that I’ve never been one to be in tune with his body, and so I wouldn’t normally notice when things were right or particularly wrong. I did a good job of frustrating the consultant by shrugging, waving my arms and generally being unable to identify when I would have an allergic reaction. “Well”, I would say, “my eyes get all gloopy in the spring, but that’s just what happens isn’t it?”. “No Mr Hanlon.” she said, too many times, “It’s because you’re allergic/asthmatic. That’s not normal.” Hmmm. We didn’t hit it off as well as last time. Also she seemed quite cross that I wasn’t carrying my antihistamines around with me. I felt like I’d disappointed her. I’ll have to keep some in my wallet.

However, I shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture here. The consultant told me that I could scoff most nuts to my heart’s content, and this makes me very happy.

Most of the rest of the evening has been fairly run of the mill. My Mum had picked up the children because I couldn’t be at the school in the afternoon. We’d also had a pre-first-communion session with Joel at 6pm at the Parish Centre. So I’d grabbed the children, had a chat with Mum and then zoomed over to the church to get to the session in time. When I finally got home, I heated up the chilli that Mum had super-kindly made for Jude and I. I’d been panicking a couple of days ago, not knowing how I would fit everything in, and so she came to the rescue.

It was about 8:15 and I realised that I hadn’t been for a walk yet. I checked my phone and it was as flat as a fluke. Panic! (Again…) I couldn’t walk if the phone was dead because then I couldn’t measure it with runkeeper and therefore it would never have happened. In the end I got the phone charged to the point where it turned on again. Then I threw my trusty old macbook into my rucksack with the phone plugged into the USB and I headed off, with the phone charging from the laptop and with me listening to audiobooks as I pottered. I also grabbed some milk, wine, biscuits for the children and some test peanuts at Nettos down the road, so I did the subsequent 30 minute walk weighed down with the weight of the laptop and the groceries. I had to remind myself that I’ve lost a lot more weight than that over the past 12 months, which helped – a bit.

Tomorrow is more of a clear run at things. I’m hoping to get some reporting into the shapie.me system so that I can then make a new set of code live. If there’s no reporting, then it’s as if all the other stuff isn’t actually happening!

Until then, best wishes.x

It’s about 1:30am which seems to be the new normal time for writing these updates. Not that it’s a bad thing, but I’m due to be up early in the morning to get my walk in before breakfast. Let’s see how that one goes.

It was an early start today, too. Up at 6am and out for a 3.5k run – down the “long mile”, just past the Booths and then turning around and heading back.

It feels difficult doing intervals outside. I know that I should count lamp posts or similar, but it’s very difficult to judge. Instead I decided to try and improve the tempo that I run at. I’ve recently been running at about 155 steps per minute according to runkeeper – pretty consistently too, when I start digging into it. I’ve gone back to last November and the rate stays the same. So I thought that I should try and pitter-patter along with a higher tempo to see how it went.

I’d read that one should aim for 180 steps per minute, which seems like a lot, and it’s hard to judge, but with nothing to gauge it by I set off and took smaller, quicker steps. The idea was to try and get used to moving my legs quicker – even if I’m not striding out. I got there and back at 157 steps / minute, which is a reasonable increase. I could certainly feel it in my legs at the end. It was also my fastest time over the distance (19:30) which I’m pleased with, given the teeny tiny strides while running.

The rest of the day has been just getting on with things. I spent most of the day and evening working on the Shapie project. With some time this afternoon put aside for some WYZ work and following up some problems that had been reported over the last day.

We had music lessons as well. I was hankering after going out for a meal, but in the end I started boiling a ham while Joel had his lesson, and then roasted it after my lesson. I’m glad we didn’t go out now, as it was very tasty and I’ve got lots of ham for the children’s sandwiches for the rest of the week. The lessons were ok. Joel’s starting out properly on his grade 1 piano pieces now. Whereas I had been terrible and hadn’t practiced all week. Instead, we spent the lesson listening to Professor Longhair “Go to the Mardi Gras” and playing it on the piano. So I’ve had my first piano lesson and some twelve bar blues (in B#, apparently). It was good fun, and also a relief to do something different from the work and the cooking and sorting out the children.

On top of everything else, the day started with a discussion about possibly going over to Amsterdam (for some 3D scanning), and ended the day looking like I’ll heading out to Las Vegas at the start of May to the Collision conference. It’s been busy… and interesting.

The countdown to our holiday is well and truly on. It’s 10 days before we head off, and it can’t come soon enough. 

It’s been another day mostly wrangling code. I pushed out the work in progress for the new project. It’s using Laravel Forge to manage the server. Not because I can’t maintain or administer a server myself, but because it wraps things up beautifully. Especially the queues and deployment. Commits to the master branch are automatically deployed and notifications are sent to Slack. It’s a nicely put together system. 

I’d planned on finishing off another script this afternoon, and then a trip to the gym. However just 15 minutes before I was due to leave, and with one final bit to code up, I realised that the library, Python xlrd, couldn’t do the very last part and therefore the whole piece of work was consigned to the bin. It can’t detect the formatting in Excel2007 formatted spreadsheets, which was needed for tottin up a final figure from a sheet. 

After some tests with PHPExcel I realised that I could script something up, and I had the logic already. But it meant that I missed going to the gym. 

I did get my 4kms in by walking Lily to scouts and walking back with Joel. Lily and I spent most of the time wishing away the days until we’re in Portugal. It can’t come soon enough.

So I’m knackered now. I was up way too late yesterday and Saturday, so it’s an early sleep and hopefully an early start tomorrow. I need to get my 3k run in first thing.

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.

A quiet Saturday today. A walk to the bank this morning to get my 30 minutes in relatively easily. I’d left the house without a form and remembered about five minutes in, so walked back got the form and then headed back into town by a more direct route. I still had to do a quick loop around the town centre to get up to 30 minutes, but not the greatest of walks ever.

I got some very lovely and unsolicited comments about my weight loss from the rep at the bank. I’d last met her about a year ago, when I probably looked like I scoffed lard for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was very satisfying — although I’ve got no doubt that she was also angling that I should remortgage with them.

We also had our first lunch sat outside in the garden today. When the sun was out it was lovely and warm, so it was a real treat. I also grabbed my laptop to get a bit of work done outside afterwards, but the sky turned grey and it got cold quickly. There’s still a long way to go before Summer.

I’ve mostly been working on the new project today. All good fun and I’ve made progress across a number bits, but I’ll want to see what J’s done while she’s been away before merging code and seeing how it looks end to end. There’s still a lot to do and so I spent most of the afternoon and this evening working on it. We even ended up having pizza delivered, which is a rare event these days.

The other highlight has been getting the children to the hairdressers today. Lily has been talking about getting her hair cut short for a few weeks and as I was walking back from the bank this morning I thought that I should just get it sorted. I made an appointment for her this afternoon.

We dropped her off at three, and I left her to talk possible hair cuts with the stylist while Joel and I popped over the road for a coffee and a slice of cake (juice and cookie in Joel’s case). For the record, the ginger millionaire’s shortbread that they serve at Source is delicious! We came back about 40 minutes later to find the stylist still busy and Lily sporting a bob and a side parting. She looked delighted!

While it looked like we were going to be sat around for another 15 minutes or so, I bounced Joel into getting his hair cut as well. It wasn’t the transformation that Lily’s cut had been, but it was shorter — and as a grumpy old dad, that made me happy.

So I missed two days posting here, which is a bit of a pain. There wasn’t ever a decision to post every day, but when I got to 50 days in, it felt like it was becoming a thing. However, the past couple of days have been very full and I was both up early and late to bed, and on both days, I simply forgot that I would normally post something here.

I had reached 74 days in a row. However, I’m not going to start posting things as day 1, day 2, again as that was really only ever the day of the year; but I’m now wondering if I can get through to the end of the year only dropping two days. As it stands at the moment, it feels like that could be a challenge.

The past three days have been full. The main problems have been distractions from the main work. So there is the new project that I’m working on, but I’ll still get calls and there is the flotsam and jetsam of other projects that will insist on getting in the way. I’m not really complaining, it just means that the days can get long when dealing with everything.

Alongside the missed blogs, the other casualty has been the training. I missed my 3.5km run on Tuesday and had good intentions to do it on Wednesday at the gym before my strength training programme. However, it was late when I got to the gym on Wednesday and so it didn’t happen.

Today, however, I did get out to do my 8k run — which had been originally scheduled for yesterday. There should have been intervals in it, but that’s quite difficult when running around Ormskirk at midday, and so I was happy just to get from point A, back to point A via the other side of Edge Hill in less than 48 minutes, which meant that I kept under the 6 minute / km threshold. The first half was all uphill and the second half was downhill, but peppered with road junctions and crossings. At the junction by the Cricketers, a car ran a red light as I was crossing the road which almost hit me — not cool. Then crossing Derby Street I was waiting for what seemed an age until I could get to the other side. It felt like I was the target for every car, bus and lorry hurtling through Ormskirk, but at least I got out and did the run.

I’m feeling a lot more positive about my weight as well. It continues to creep downwards, and while I’m still sporting a delightful spare tyre around my waist, the scales were reporting a fat measurement of 17.7% today. I suspect that is a mis-reading, but is in line with previous readings of 18 point a-bit last week. I know that the fat measurements can be thrown by hydration and recent exercising but it looks like those effects are to add fat to the measurement. I’m not really complaining, the scales are basically telling me that all my extra weight is around my waist, which I sort of knew… just by looking.

Yesterday’s dancing lessons went well. We were pulling things together in the starter lessons — mainly six count and eight count basic moves; and we were doing similar work in the improvers lesson — this time it was running and tandem charleston. It’s all very well but at tonight’s social dance I still found myself unable to put them together into a coherent dance or to feel confident about different moves.

This worries me less than it used to. When I started I would get terribly self-conscious and I wondered if I was actually learning anything. However I learned to give up worrying. The couples at the dance this evening seemed to be split into two groups — the ones who started the same time as Jude and I, and others who had been doing it for 3,6 or 12 months longer. The ones who had started around the same time were generally dancing with their partners and were conservative in what they were trying. The others seemed more adventurous. I had a few dances plus some with the children and then we went through the “shim sham”. The last time we had tried it, I had felt like the whole world was determined to make me feel incompetent, and that the dance was invented to remind me how rubbish I was. I hadn’t enjoyed it. However, tonight it was much more fun. I was still a bit crap… getting out of step and unable to keep up with the “break”, but this time it was fun to try rather than it feeling like some terrible burden (which didn’t exist in the first place). I put this down to personal growth! Unfortunately we couldn’t stay for too long and we left at about 10pm. I’d left the children at the bar, talking to Peter the barman, who did a sterling job of babysitting while I was dancing.

The other fun thing today was the meal that the children and I went out for this evening. I’d got my 30 minute walk in by taking a long route to pick up the children from school. I picked them up at about 5:30. On the way home, Joel was complaining about having been bullied in after-school club. As soon as I had arrived a staff member had asked me to sign a book that had a report of another child grabbing Joel and pinching him. When he told me about it, it sounded all harmless and like a bit of fun. Later, when Joel recalled it, he was in tears and said that he had been bullied, that he’d been jumped on, pulled to the ground and then pinched, then they’d taken his bag and sat on it. It didn’t sound like the happy accident that I was told about earlier. However, I’m aware that events can feel different and be recounted differently depending on the point of view. I’m minded to ask a few more questions on Monday.

So Joel was upset as we walked home and nothing would console him. I didn’t have anything planned for dinner and I thought that taking some time out and having a nice meal together would be a pleasant thing to do. Plus, I’m quite happy for any excuse for a tasty meal. We checked the menus outside the different restaurants in town and settled on Left Bank. We piled in, with rucksacks, book bags and a slight sense of chaos. But we were seated and things settled down quickly.

The children seemed to really enjoy it — I was asked “why do we never come here?” and “can we come again, soon?”, etc. as we left. Basically if they get parma ham and melon as a starter then they’re happy, regardless of what else they’re presented with. Joel hasn’t mentioned the problems at after-school club since we had our meal, so in that sense it worked. Also, it felt like some proper decadence to be walking home and then going for a meal with the children. It’s one thing popping into the sweet shop and getting a bag of sweets for the children to share (bad, I know…) but I felt like I was taking it to another level. Less bad, and much tastier.

So Jude is away until Sunday, I think. Actually, I realise that I’ve got no idea when she returns from Twickenham. The weekend looks like it will be mostly working on the new project but the children will be happy with that, as it means being left to their own devices, on their own devices.

Whatever way the weekend unfolds, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t have time to post something at the end of the day. I don’t intend to break the chain, again, any time soon.