April 2013 Review

It's the end of April? WTF? It was Easter at the start of the month? What happened? Well, mostly job interviews and the collapse of my immune system after putting up a brave fight for three months straight. I kept up my training schedule in the first week, even though I had the Wednesday off sick, and saw my Osteo that Saturday for yet more work on the right elbow, followed by lunch in Cafe Rouge on James Street. The following Monday I met a friend in Richmond for an early supper on the way home from work, we had a short stroll to the river and back, and I was unable to get out of bed next morning. That Friday I saw the circus NoFit State performing Bianco at the Roundhouse, but was preoccupied with absorbing SAS code for an interview the next Monday, which I followed by a haircut at George The Barber at 26 Bedfordbury. Sis and I had supper at Samarqand: I had the plov, and it was good, filling and nourishing. Then followed the Lisbon Weekend, which had been in the diary since January. For now, I will just say, sunrise through the windows of Urban Beach Sunday morning. I spent most of the next week recuperating, and here we are.

I read Geoff Dyer's wonderful But Beautiful on the Paperwhite during the flights and while others were sleeping it off, and got through Stand Cornyn's Exploding on the train. One Saturday afternoon I saw The Art of Rap, Who The £$@^% is Jackson Pollock?, and Acoustic Routes on DVD - all cut-price purchases at Fopp. I finally got back to my Twelve-Step meeting towards the end of the month. Somewhere in there, the lawn got cut a couple of times, because it was finally warm enough and not raining. 

Sometime at the start of the month, I finally understood why it's called the canonical divisor, and what it has to do with the genus of a Riemann surface. I can be unbelievably dense sometimes. There was a whole thing about understanding how to use and abuse logistic regression to estimate price take-up - needless to say, it's been abused so far - but that's work, and so far what happens at work stays at work and doesn't count. I got back up to 70 kilo benches by the end of the month. Should you think that's a joke, try it in thirty years' time and tell my laughing ghost how you could just push out the single rep. I upgraded to iOS 6.1.3 on my iPhone to use Passbook. Here's a tip: Passbook doesn't work properly unless you have mobile data enabled. Don't ask why. I had a Moment at Lisbon airport trying to get the thing to work, until I tried re-enabling mobile data.

So I have made no more progress with Musil; I am making progress on the pull-up; I did make changes to my diet and entertainment, but the cold took the fun away; and stuff didn't occur to me. Well, except for the afternoon watching DVDs.