I've now done my second run of the official UK “Couch to 5k” programme, using the podcast rather than the app. I used to run but it's been over four years now since I was a regular and since then I've put on 20 lbs due to middle age finally catching up with my once fast burning metabolism. Although my mind remembers many 5ks, 10ks and even two painful half marathons, my body will appreciate the slow pace of the 9 week gradual build up to 5k!

My daughter is apparently at the stage when she starts to find other people eating fascinating. I guess we never completely loose this, which is why I've found myself tuning to the comforts of the Food Network late at night and in the early hours of the morning when on shift with her. Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Man v. Food. The joy we find in eating and the discovery of places that feed more than just our bellies.

It's hot in the UK right now. Not hot on the global scale but certainly hot for a relatively northern island used to a temperate climate with an old, old infrastructure that isn't set up with AC in houses etc. I'm sticky and a little grouchy but I've not blogged in awhile so this will help lift my mood a little!

I read a blog post elsewhere on Write.as mentioning podcasts the other day and realised I had got out of the habit of listening to them. I started while I lived in the US. My commute to work was one and a quarter hours each way, a mix of walking, train (the BART – Bay Area Rapid Transit) and shuttle bus. This left me plenty of time to delve headlong into an immersive world of podcasts spanning serious to comedy, daily to weekly to bingeing on serials. It was a great way to transition to and from the working day.

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.