Okay. I've hosed enough dev environments now, and I think I've got to a point where my Chromebook is cute but not reliable enough to rely on all the time, and my main dev environment will be via WSL on my Windows machine.

I spent some time this morning trying to work out how to SSH into the WSL environment but I think that's pointless.

I also briefly considered whether I can run eleventy via my own web host's system??? But I doubt it as that's what people host virtual computers for isn't it? Plus I think I understand this setup more.

So here we are. I just want to get back to a stage where I can reliably start blogging without any friction.

Weirdly, one of my biggest problems is that when I want to make a new blog entry, I have to 1) create a new *.md file in my ~/eleventy/src/blog directory, and then 2) give that blank file a small header of metadata:

title: "How many more times will I set up my eleventy environment?"
description: "Don't worry, I talk about other stuff in this post"
date: 2023-03-08

And you'd think I'd be able to memorise three tags and their syntax but... not yet. Maybe I will with practice.

So at the moment I just create a new file, then copy and paste the above from an existing blog post. Maybe I'll try copying it over manually the next few times and see if it sticks.

Or maybe there's a way to use a default template, or tell VScode to automagically insert the header bit into a new file of a certain type/location???

Anyway. It's winter again - after some mild, bright days, and ones in which it felt very tangibly as though each day was getting longer at both the beginning and the end, we have had snow and sleet today, and the temperatures have plummeted.

On that note, I came across the word 'plummet' in a book I'm reading about foghorns. Turns out the words plumb, plummet, plumb bob, plumb the depths etc are all linked.

But the weather had a sudden impact this morning as all the trains to London were cancelled due to a downed tree, so I was at home.

We've had quite an amount of sleet and rain today, and I know that other people around this town will look nervously to the skies - and to the gutters, a ridiculous number of the drains and gullies in the roads are blocked.

I've found where to report these issues (which also tells you, rather worryingly, the date a particular gully was last inspected, including a number which say they were not successfully cleaned, many years ago!).

It just shocks me that in a town where we had unprecedented flooding a few weeks ago due to poorly maintained drains, we have a huge number of gullies in the road that are blocked, and when it rains you can just see the water rushing over the gully onto the next one. On one road near me, about four in a row are blocked, forcing the run-off to just carry on and on.

Meanwhile work continues down on the beach to - what? - find the outflow pipe? Repair it? Build a new one? It is slow progress. But at least it is progress. These things seemt to take a very long time.

In lighter news, the birds ar every active lately, finding food, mates, and potentially new homes. We put up a bird box the other day, which seems like a very nice life-checklist-ticked-off item to do. It is painted in quite vivid beach hut colours and I wonder if it will look appealing to birds which more commonly nest in hidden hedges and so on. But I did see activity near it the other day - either blue tits or long tailed tits - and so I hope it will provide shelter to a new family this spring.

Obviously I now wish I had rigged the thing up with a microphone or camera... But for now it's just nice to have built it (yes, we built it from scratch!), and have it up for potential use.

Training continues for th half marathon I am running in a few weeks' time. A few weeks ago I ran a fast Parkrun, setting my own personal best for 5 kilometres. To be my age and still setting new personal bests is quite something. I know it won't always be possible.

It's also quite a fun concept - I literally ran faster than I have ever run before that morning!

But in more recent weeks my attention has turned to hill climbing - the half marathon route has quite a hilly first third, and I need to get on top of that, strengthening my legs for that long slow climb. There are a few short, sharp climbs and I am reasonably okay with those. But it's the long slow climb that I struggle with. Just need to keep my head down and maintain a good - not fast - pace. And I need to get myself strong enough first.

So some hill sessions are in order, as well as one or two longer distance runs - I haven't run 21.1km in a while, but I am okay with 10-12km. I will try and knock out 15km or so with a few slight hills soon, and then save the full distance for the day itself.