Janus incarnate; they get you leaving and they get you coming back. Not in living memory have I spent such a dreadful year end and start, restricted to my bed by a heavy cold and bronchitis. A couple of days after Christmas I could not catch my breath during standard, easy walks. Tuesday night went badly, shivery and unable to get warm, necessitating a hot water bottle. Wednesday to Friday lying in bed unable to do much of anything and here we are, up and about in a quiet way and already looking forward to wrapping this up and going back to bed. Need to do some good recuperating because tomorrow we head off for 10 days cat-sitting in the countryside and at the very least I need to drive us there.

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Slightly conflicted. The spambot in October meant I was no longer recording my various forms of travel and the need for a new battery for my Apple Watch reduced my quantifiable self to a nubbin. And now I wonder whether I really care enough to do anything about that. Probably not to restore the status quo ante but possibly to have a slightly more meaningful approach to where I've been.

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The highlight was a lowlife spambot attack that I could counter only by putting the site behind CloudFlare, and don't get me wrong, I'm glad I could do that, but I wish I hadn't had to. Also, somehow in that process, while one of the subdomains came through with no further effort from me, the other went AWOL. The certainty of an admin tax is the price you pay for a smidgen of independence.

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I thought I might get this done two days ago, and then yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form. I think that’s fixed, at least enough to recall the glories of September.

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Two for the price of one. Way too idle, and too far from home too much of the time, to get much done in a timely fashion, and this roundup will not offer any great insights into that time. It is, however, a signal of sorts; summer is over.

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