...and finally getting this posted has reminded me to get the next few books in the series I'm reading purchased, as I only have about 2-3 hours left in the current one!

LOL = League of Legends. It's a game of TLA's that is virtually incomprehensible unless you either have a translator to hand, or you happen to have been incapacitated for several months, and resorted to watching pro-gaming to pass the time.

Halfway through 2019 already...doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

It's been a quarter of remarkable change...at the end of March I was freshly out of hospital, on some fairly heavy drug doses, and hopeful that I'd be able to walk soon. Fortunately things have gone well, and I'm definitely on the mend.

1) Financial Stability
a) Record every purchase
Still going well, with well over 300 records now. It's already highlighted some of the financial challenges of the year (for example, I've had to pay over £600 for treatment of my back that was not covered by insurance...this consists of excesses, outpatient treatments, prescriptions and some blood tests when I exceeded my yearly limit!). I've also suffered the downside of having cycling bling, having had to cough up about £500 for diagnosis and repair/replacement of parts of my gear system after getting a persistant battery drain issue.

b) Implement a 2-wek wait for non-essential purchases
After trying this for 6 months, I think that I've probably poorly defined this. It works welll for "big" purchases and items, but when you get to smaller items, it gets a little woolier. For example...does buying food you eat immediately count as "essential"? I normally bring some soup into work for lunch, but will often bolster it with a yoghurt or protein snack. Probably one to think on and get better definition if I continue this for future years.

c) Save at least £10,000
This quarter has had slower savings...as I re-start my training, and getting out on the bike Ive had some expenses (such as the aforementioned gear replacement issue), and weve also booked up some holidays for later in the year (Majorca in October, and a short trip to Nice in January 2020). Despite this I'm still on track, with £5,250 saved so far, and (hopefully) most of the big expenses of the year now done and dusted.

2) Rebuild my Fitness
It's on! I was cleared for travel at the beginning of April (albeit it still on antibiotics as a precaution), and was able to spend a few days pottering around the roads of Majorca on my bike at (for me) a slow, steady pace. I was officially clinically declared infection-free on the 8th May, and began a rebuilding training program just after. That will continue for the rest of summer, with a goal of regaining my cardio-fitness, and rebuilding endurance and leg strength. Alongside that there is physio to work on my core muscles (especially the back and pelvic support...both take a battering during surgery) and regain flexibility around the S5L1 spinal joint. I had my last physio session this week, though I'll be continuing the exercises he's given me for the forseeable future.

My endurance fitness has come back fairly quickly, and right now I would say that I'm at about 90-95% of where I was a year ago. It's not quite a straight comparison...at the moment we are avoiding any high impact efforts (when you're putting full beans into the bike you pull on the handlebars a lot and put a lot of force through the lower back, so that will be brought back in gradually over the next few months), but I've been able to tap out a lot of miles with no discomfort, and my threshold output is at about 305w, compared to 325w this time last year.

This shows my training capacity over the last year. Training Load is a measure of how much effort you can do, on average, every day based on previous training without excessive fatigue kicking in. A score of 100 is roughly the same as doing a 1 hour maximal effort (the sort of effort where you throw up and collapse at the end). A "steady" hour ride outside is about 55-60 TL by comparison. At my lowest I was down to a score of 6. A carefully planned series of progressive overload has me back into the mid 70's in a couple of months. Historically my most effective training has occured when my CTL is around 80-85. My body is slightly weird, and tends to perform better when it's slightly fatigued, on "fresh" legs they tend to block up.

I've also managed to shed about 4-5kg since the middle of May...partly via dieting, and partly due to getting back into training. Weight loss is not a huge issue right now...the goal is to get back down to 65-66kg, but as important is re-building the muscles that atrophied during the ~10 months I was not training. I'm on a high protein diet right now to help repair of the back, so that will partly countact any diets I attempt.

3) Use what you've got
Since I've been back out on the bike, I actually use far less generally. With some (finally) summer weather showing it's face I'm aiming to get outside as many evenings as possible, and projects and games will probably now wait until later on in the year.

We have pretty much sorted the garden, and it looks much better for it. We've had a large raised bed added by the patio, the massive hawthorn hedge has been attacked and reduced down, and the lawn has been replaced with actual grass. It actually looks pretty presentable! There is a general goal to not let it dissovle this time, so sprinklers and a watering system have been added into the beds (Gill has done all of this, I've mainly just watched).

4) Discover 4 new authors
As with other stuff, reading has slowed a bit as I finally escape the house, though still plenty done. FOr new authors I've read;
The Poppy War - R.F Kuang - OK. Felt it went a bit weak at the end, not sure that the sequel will be as good
Blackfish City - Sam J Millar - really liked this, a good, novel twist on Cyberpunk.
The Quantum Magician - Derek Kunsken - again, pretty good. Sort of Oceans 11 in space.
Once and Future - Amy Rose Capetta - Awful. Really bad. Nearly stopped reading it halfway through. Won't be touching the sequel with a bargepole.
The Lost Puzzler - Eyal Kless - I felt the pacing was a bit off, but the core concept is very good. It's a fallen society-based novel, and I reckon that there is a strong chance of seeing TV and/or a computer game based on it, as it pretty much has Instanced Raids as part of the core concept.

I've then been ticking off some more established authors;
EM Foner - Independent Living - just pleasant reading. Deals with humans living in space in a very honest way.
Neal Asher - The Warship - once he stops just making stuff up can really do a good story and characters, and is getting a fixation on overly complex tech.
Edgar Cantero - This body's not big enough for the both of us - 2nd book of his I've read, and again it's amazing. I'd strongly recommend this or "Meddling Kids" to anyone.
Neal Stephenson - The Rise and Fall of DODO & Fall or, Dodge in Hell - he doesn't write too much, as he doesn't have to. These are my current reading list, with "Fall or, Dodge..." currently warming up.

5) Complete 2 Games of Reasonable Size
I was tapping my way through Final Fantasy VII, however watching all the remake footage from E3 has made me wonder if I should continue, or wait for what looks like an amazing version. I could instead start up on another FF (FFXII is on Switch, and by all accounts it's very good). Then there is stuff like Astral Chain coming soon, which looks spiffy (very Bayonetta-esque hopefully).

Weird how this has jumped up top...I did check it at the weekend, as I need to do my quarterly update this weekend.

I've not been doing a huge amount of baking since June, mainly as I've spent a lot of time outside riding. We do have Macmillan Coffee Morning this week, and despite our HR team being a bit naff (zero organisation and planning, and they have a bad habit of bringing in shop-bought stuff) I'm going to whip up a few things. Current plans are a large hummingbird cake, some sausage rolls (as no-one ever does savoury, but they sell like crazy), and probably something gluten-free to sucker in all the "healthy" people...

After the weird self-bumping of this, time for the quarterly update.

1) Financial Stability
a) Record every purchase
Still going strong...over 500 items now recorded, and I've had a bit of a playaround with the data visualisation for January to August data

b) Implement a 2-wek wait for non-essential purchases
I've already decided that this is too arbitary, however I'm working on a set of financial goals for the next year, and as part of that I want to do a couple of things;
1) Reshape the hierarchy
2) Add another layer (there are some ambiguous bits right now...for example...is a cycling training camp "Cycling" or "Holiday"? Is food on Holiday "Food" or "Holiday"). Some of this is currently buried in the free-text description, so I'm going to pop it out into a 3rd layer
3) Start thinking long-term (related to financial goals for next year)

c) Save at least £10,000
Again, currently on target, though it's going to be a bit closer than I thought, as I've taken on a couple of additional financial commitments. It will be a goal for next year, but I've decided to do Lands End - John O-Groats again, a decade after the last time (they go the other way now, so starting down south, and finishing up in Scotland). A fair chunk of the cost comes out this year, including the return trip back down south (I've treated myself, and I'll be taking the sleeper train from Inverness to Euston). I have ~£8,000 saved, but I know there are some large costs coming in the next 3 months.

2) Rebuild my Fitness
It's probably nearly there. I've been irritating people on Strava by naming all my rides and training sessions "Rebuild xx", starting back in mid-May when I returned to structured training. As of last night I'm on 88, and trying to work out if I can hit 100 before I go to Majorca in a couple of weeks time. I probably peaked in August, and I've had a couple of niggling injuries (a tear in the left quad, very tight calf muscles), combined with the cooling weather and loss of daylight means that I'm slightly off the boil, but this is a normal time of year for this sort of things, and I can now look forward to December, when I'll actually start racing again!

Strava suggests I've had a 1,200% increase in fitness over ~5 months...admittedly I was starting from a point of "can barely walk, and someone's been tinkering with my spine", but still fairly happy with where I am right now. The trip to Majorca will be good to compare against the trip in April, when I'd only been back in the saddle for a week. The focus for the next 2 months is getting to December with some race fitness, and then looking into 2020 regaining my 2nd Cat license, and making sure i have some miles in my legs for LE-JOG in September 2020.

3) Use what you've got
I've started looking at the Hydroponics lab again, as it's approaching the time of year where that some of thing becomes more viable. The big thing we've done this year has been the garden (I say "we", Gill did 99% of the work). The lawn has survived, and is mainly grass (new record), and it generally looks pretty decent.

I also spent some time learning a better video-production workflow. I use Lightworks, which is a lovely bit of kit, and has recently been updated to work natively with HEVC 4K footage from my GoPro7 (previously I'd had to process it via Handbrake first to generate new intermediates, but that took a long time, typically overnight for 4K -> 4K)...however working with 4K video files is fairly intensive work for a laptop (even a decent one!), so I've been practicing with using proxy files. Turns out they are a complete godsend, and once they were generated for ~30 minutes of footage I was able to put together a montage clip of cyclocross footage for RCC in a few minutes, as I could quickly scrub through the footage, find interesting clips and throw them into a timeline. Expect some "hurtling down mountainside" footage from Majorca!

4) Discover 4 new authors
I've ened up reading some larger books, so the volume has decreased. Whiles it's not technically a fully new author (a combined effort from Neal Stephenson and Nicole Gallard (who is a new author to me), I think "Fall and Rise of D.O.D.O" is in contention for my favourite book of the year. Other stuf that has been ticked off;

• Sylvien Neuvel : Sleeping Giants Trilogy - really liked the first 2 (the style of writing is similar to "The Martian", with a story that is partially reminiscent of Pacific Rim)...the third was a bit weak, suggesting that the idea had run it's course.
• Mark Hodder : Burton and Swinburne - I'm currently halfway through this 5-book series (and they are all huge). It's an alternate history of the Victorian age, where it justifies Steampunk elements by adding in time-travel. It's actually pretty good (I'm always wary of time travel as a plot device, as it often leads to lazy storytelling and the dreaded Deus Ex Machina finisher...yes, I'm still looking at you Peter F Hamilton, and Brian Herbert), but so far hes handling it well.

5) Complete 2 Games of Reasonable Size
Again, not a huge amount of time to really settle into games. I tend to play some stuff on the Switch (they've recently released a back catalogue of SNES games, which is approaching my early gaming sweet-spot), thought I have also played through Hitman 2 on the PC. I'm going to go back and do some of the alternate murder scenarios, as they are generally hilarious when they come off.