Ian

Yesterday, I had a headache all day which obviously wasn't great. I still went shopping in the town center with R. but was more content being a beast of burden than making any choices, also for busier or more cramped shops I was happy enough to wait outside in the space and the breeze. My headache finally improved somewhat in the evening, after some paracetamol. I don't think that my head was affected by fasting for Ramadan, the previous day and today were fine. One of our errands was to pass by the newer Asian grocery store (our neighbourhood has many Middle Eastern and South Asian people) to pick up more fast-breaking dates. At this latitude, I could get used to these winter Ramadans.

My annual appraisal at work went decently, especially given that it includes a period of my finding my feet. At the moment I'm working mostly in my comfort zone, on somewhat mathematical/algorithmic code that does not require figuring out other complex aspects of our system. I'll probably help out with some other random thing too, this coming (Agile) sprint.

I finally bought a cross-trainer, a JTX Strider-X8. It's smaller than the previous NordicTrack Audio Strider 500 from before moving to the US, it just about fits in the flat, and the flywheel's also rather smaller so maximum resistance gets it up only to being just about worth bothering with, but it's somewhat affordable and far better than no cross-trainer. I look forward to planning it into my weeks.

We've been bad at festivals again. This weekend featured excellent meatloaf yesterday (it happened to be just to my taste) and a variant of kedgeree today, thanks to R. as usual. At some point, we will get around to eating Asian round things for the Chinese New Year and pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, but delayed as usual. As we're not exactly observant of the wider context of these, such flexibility doesn't exactly detract from whatever authenticity there is in our celebration.