Last Saturday was Verity's birthday party, which was a lovely relaxing party with barbecue. I had fun meeting a new baby (and was amused by Charles's patent lack of interest in the baby until he saw me paying it attention at which point he came over and joined in). I stayed up far too late having interesting conversation and got up hideously early for

... taking James and his friend Pete to Lincolnshire to run in the Seabank Marathon from Boston to Skegness. This was a silly idea they had had at very short notice, right down to James recruiting me to drive at Verity's party. The weather was dreadful - very strong headwind and lots of rain. I had quite a lot of fun navigating to checkpoints, and less fun waiting in the rain to see people come in. (I also, finally, got my new 3G dongle working on my tiny laptop, but that is a topic for a different post.) Pete ran fast and mostly beat the rain; James ran slower and came in soaked to the skin and shivering. Shortly before he arrived, the organisers shut down the marathon due to the high number of people arriving in similar condition.

On the way home I voluntarily ate McDonald's for the first time in years (opinion: boring but not actually unpleasant), the passengers went to sleep, and I had to stop at Peterborough for a break, a drink and a wake-up walk as the early start and lack of sleep were catching up with me. I went to sleep not long after getting home.

The week has been pretty busy at work, and I've really not got much done around the house after getting home, leading to temptations to stay up too late to improve that. It doesn't work, and intellectually I know it doesn't work but apparently I have to learn it in practice every few months. I've spent a lot of my 'spare' time reading the Great LJ Rape Discussion, and also thinking a lot based on what I've been reading.

And so somehow it's Saturday again and in about 30 minutes I'm off to see a play with Tony: a local am-dram company is staging Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn. One of my colleagues is in it, and so quite a few of us from the office are going along, including our lift.

I've spent a lot of the day feeding CDs to Tony's newly restored Mac Mini so I can finally have a digitised music collection again for the first time in a couple of years. I've been rediscovering all sorts of music I'd half-forgotten I owned, and shortly I shall be loading it onto Tony's old iPod and listening to it e.g. on the way to work or when I need to shut out the office noise. I've also been filing away the many cds bought since Charles was born, which is deeply satisfying in a nerdy alphabetising kind of way.