Your eyes do not deceive you: this entry is nearly two weeks old and I've finally got around to uploading it. I did run the City2Surf but more information will have to wait... holiday time!

Since I keep forgetting to mention this whenever someone asks me what I've been up to: I had a journal article conditionally accepted on Monday. The journal article will also comprise about a chapter of my PhD thesis. This is fairly big and exciting and as soon as I lift this giant lead weight off my head, I'll have a one person party.

My weekends have not been much less insane for the last couple of weeks. I tell people that it's on and off, because I believe it, but it's been mostly on. My last sustained downtime was just after my recompression in March (gosh, March, we do need to start diving again) which coincided, mostly by accident, with what for me counts as quite the low period for my mental health. That took around about a month to really deal with properly, and from the middle of April my calendar says that I've only spent one entire weekend at home. Which means something, when leaving home to do something more often than not means more than an hour's total travel.

This goes a long way to explaining my question to Andrew today, which was: how do people who exercise more than a couple of weeks avoid becoming Oscar the Grouch? Because I've had a grumpy grumpy couple of days. But looking at my calendar I suspect the answer might be, for some of those people, that they have more downtime.

We're off to New Zealand in a couple of weeks. Naturally we will be snowboarding and driving right round South Island rather than properly relaxing, but nevertheless I will relax on the inside.

I'm especially grouchy this evening because I am torn between doing my last long training run before my taper, and skipping said run. I have something which could be a minor inconvenience that my immune system is working on but could also be a cold. I know, intellectually, that we nearly killed ourselves (well not really, but pulse rates of 180-ish are very high for us) sprinting up hills on Friday, and did a 30 minute run yesterday, and 65 minutes on Monday, and the bootcamp yoga guy appeared for an encore on Wednesday and missing the 70 minute run is not exactly make-or-break for me, but at the same time... it sure does feel lazy, sitting at home just because I have a slightly sore throat and a wee headache.

Less lazy, I have to say, now that I've written that down. I had only remembered about two sessions happening this week.

We've been up to a bunch of good things these last couple of weeks. We saw The Dark Knight, which is the first action movie I've ever been able to treat as more than an exercise in adrenaline structure. Even then I had a bunch of trouble with the last 45 minutes or so because it wasn't mixed well in our corner of the theatre and as the music ramped up I couldn't hear what anyone was saying anymore. Before that though, I was very pleased, especially that the Joker's theme is just a white noise-like whine. And to see the Bruce Wayne and Batman personas compete with each other in outrageousness.

We meant to go diving last weekend, but then we just weren't in order for it and it's been the coldest fortnight of winter and we were so keen last year, but that was before I got hospitalised twice, and we haven't missed it as much as we thought we would. When the sun is warm on our backs again in late September I suspect we'll start out slow and shallow and go back. We went to a Christmas in July party at another Andrew's house. Andrew C had a view of the ocean and a virtual fire crackling on his plasma TV. The only dinner party I've been to where people had to perch on the arms of lounge chairs around a table.

Alice and Jamie came over for Guitar Hero — no one likes Mario Kart as much as me. I've regressed in Guitar Hero, although not all the way back to the start. Andrew is better but there was some period earlier in the year when I was away for goodness knows what and he played it for about a week.

We went with Martin and Stephane to Sigur Rós. I wasn't surprised to have mixed feelings about it, I've never been truly madly deeply in love with () either, which is the only album I know. It seemed an odd kind of crowd too; they're not really a band I would have thought to see drunk. (Although in fact I had 600mL of Bavarian beer samplers and then a cocktail before seeing them. Something about also attempting to consume a schnitzel the size of my own face with it meant that I wasn't particularly drunk though.) And kids these days, they like their concerts really pretty loud. But despite being an elderly grumpypants I had a good time. They had a lot of cute touches in the staging too.