This is my January month notes, nearly a week late. I’m not very good at this.

January’s theme was me saying “we’re laying low”. But I/we actually did quite a lot.

We started the month in Wales at fforest, we spent New Year there. As always we had a great time. The weather was pretty miserable but that didn’t really matter we still made it out for walks and frequent saunas. We cooked a lot of good food and did quite a few big jigsaws. Maude basically gets to roam free with Bru and Kaya. We spent quite a lot of time in the new (old) pub too which is brilliant. I had my first ever Guinness (and enjoyed it).

Once we got back we quickly got back into our normal routine: working from home, morning park/marsh walks with Maude, cooking dinners and watching TV. A few months ago Bec did the Zoe blood sugar / gut health thing and it’s definitely impacted our eating for the better. We’re eating a wider variety of vegetables and pulses and less meat and carbs. We’re enjoying it too, we’ve folded new recipes into our staples and it’s increased our repertoire. All in all, a worthwhile exercise.

We watched the fifth and final season of The Wire we really enjoyed it. It was satisfying to see everything round up in the end, it wasn’t happy endings for a lot of characters but at least Bubbles is ok!

We had a belated Christmas dinner with friends which turned into the twelve of us adults plus four kids completely taking over The Anchor and Hope in Clapton, was a fun and slightly wild night. The kids took a lot of funny photos on my camera.

We went to lunch at Mambow (also in Clapton) with Colin and Emma, really good food. Would recommend it, lots of delicious sambals. That morning we had been watching Saturday Kitchen and one of the guest chefs was some scruffy looking guy whose name I’d missed. And then when we were in Mambow he walked in, was weird seeing someone from TV hours after you’d first seen them. Weirder still Bec knew he was Tom Parker-Bowles, son of the now Queen Camilla! Madness, so weird (and wrong) that we still have a royal family.

The rear displays on my camera stopped working in December, the ribbon connecting the flippy down screen to the main body and split. This is supposedly quite common and is quite expensive to have repaired. I sort of enjoyed not having the display as it made it feel more old school or whatever. I decided to try and fix it myself though and ordered the replacement part from eBay. It was a bit hairy but I managed it. The tricky bit was pulling back its of leatherette to find the right screws to undo. There’s a moment in the middle when you wonder if it will ever turn on again but when it did it was very satisfying.

I didn’t get much running or cycling done due to laziness and it being icy and I’m a bit phobic about the ice having fallen off too many times. But February will be better. I want to be in better shape for Ffondo in April.

Work wise after two and half years of working on the blazor app I dislike, our project to replatform onto Next.js has reached the point that I too can make the leap and it’s so refreshing to back in React land. We had a “dev day” to kick off the new year where we all got together in person to talk about things and make some actions to change the things that we felt important. I thought it went well especially seeing as we hadn’t done anything like that before, Jason, our new head of engineering led the day in a unconference format, I didn’t really know what that meant but it was good anyway.

Anyway it’s February now so I’ll stop.