Month: May 2020

The weather was beautiful today, and I was very glad to finish work and get outside. I cycled to Sutton Park which was like stepping back in time (not in a good way). There were lots of people there, not a lot of social distancing, and the general feeling of everyone partying and having a great time in the sunshine. When I see something like that I just regard it as dangerous now, so after a little time relaxing in a remote bit of woodland I cycled back home on the roads and got my miles in somewhere quieter. Rush hour traffic shouldn’t be quieter than a park, but that is the world we are living in now.

I also went to a great workshop (via Zoom) exploring how we are all doing working from home and what we may want to change when we get back. I have many thoughts on this which I will articulate at some point.

After work today I heated up a portion of last night’s (veggie) cottage pie and then after dinner I went cycling. I got home before the rain and spent the evening making bread. I suspect I’m becoming one of those people.

I’m just looking at the weather forecast for next week and it looks like it will be warm and sunny. It’s perfect commuting weather, and I realise that my commute is the main thing I miss about not being at work. 17 miles of cycling a day, mostly on towpaths, giving me the perfect opportunity to bookend my day with some exercise in the fresh air. I’ll still try and cycle every evening after work, but it’s becoming harder to find places to go as the roads get busier and the narrow towpaths gain popularity with all the other people who want to exercise somewhere a bit prettier (and safer) than a dual carriageway riddled with potholes. This week I may have to head slightly further north and see if I can find somewhere with a few less cars and people.

I’m trying hard to make weekends different. I have one extra cup of coffee before my morning walk, and generally go to one of the two parks that are a little bit further than I can get to in a pre-work walk. Yesterday I did some computer things but not a lot else. Today I’m making bread, yogurt and cottage pie, and hopefully getting a lock down haircut (which is like all my other haircuts – I’ve not been to the barber for years).

I also made this blog, which contains most of what I’ve written during/about lock down. I’ve been hosting this locally, but I wanted to have a cloud version and thought it may at least be interesting to go back and read when we are in whatever the new normal looks like.

It’s Friday. I finished work at about 3:30 but it was hard. I did manage to cycle though, and cooked pasta and vegetables for dinner. Lockdown is generally better than how life was before, but it would be nice to have some proper social interaction at some point.

Today has been a very long day. Up at 5:30, working until 5, and less exercise than usual. It’s been really productive though, and I also did the disk swaps in my computers so everything is back where it was a few months ago. Having my 2 best computers running the same OS made no sense, so my Thinkpad is back to Ubuntu with i3 and it’s blazingly fast again (and Teams and Zoom work great on it, so I could use it for work in an emergency).

Another 7.5 mile cycle, and a very busy day at work that has bled somewhat into the evening. It’s better than spending the evening dozing on the sofa though so I’ll take it. My observation from cycling the last two evenings is that it’s indistinguishable from my pre-lockdown commute. I went to some of the same places too, so I think it’s a fair comparison.

I cycled today in slightly colder weather (7.5 miles), and it was a fairly productive day at work. I have a new project to keep me busy, and it was very much a day of removing blockers. I’m now sat in the listening party for Source Tags & Codes which was delayed by 15 mins (and then eventually cancelled), but I get to hear some great songs twice so all is well.

It’s been a Monday today. The weather is colder and I don’t seem to have had enough hours in the day. I didn’t cycle, but I did walk this morning and have spent this evening hacking new update and installation scripts for Ubuntu and writing a blog post documenting it all. It’s good to scratch the itch on this side of my brain, but tomorrow I want to be back out in the fresh air.

Yesterday I won at Ticket to ride for the first time in ages. Also we won a pandemic game. At lunchtime I cycled, and found a beautiful bit of river bank to actually have some proper solitude for a few minutes. I really needed that. Today I’m testing the new Ubuntu LTS on all my old computers (this is going so much better than 2 years ago), and trying to teach myself the i3 window manager because once lockdown is over I want to not have to use Windows every day at home. I’m writing this from a 10 year old MacBook Air that has a dead battery but is otherwise fast and responsive.