I have been running into the office from Finchley Road station in the mornings recently and last week I did 4 days on and one day off.

The route takes about 40 minutes to complete and even though its a little fresh in the morning, after part-way into the run, the cold disappears and you warm up quite nicely. I always find running help me de-stress, particularly when there is something new I have to contend with. Recently we've moved offices, I've had to get assignments in, understand how best to go about understanding/implementing a suitable design/code solution at work and all the while getting ready to go on holiday. 

So all of this sort of clouds my mind a little so it's always great to be able to have an outlet. Quite frankly running is a godsend. 

Speaking of outlets, the other is the gym, computer games and programming:

A change is as good as a holiday so I'll be doing a fair amount of running and programming while on holiday, only it will be different. I've got an 8-week course on C programming when I get back from holiday followed by an 8-week course on C++ in preparation for my game programming course in Sept. So I'm eager to get more C/C++ programming in while I'm on holiday. I hope to balance this with a steady running regime through the hills and valleys of the Drakensberg mountains. 

I started reading two Computer Science articles recently that I need to summarise, one being on the Italian banking industry and the other on assigning "business points" to your user stories. I must say, I've become rather bored with summarising, and analysing articles. This is why I think I'm going to enjoy my upcoming programming courses.

I went for a haircut today at my new favourite barber, in Sudbury hill, just off the station. They had the Ireland/Afganistan cricket match on the big screen and my barber had fixed the Australia/India ODI on his small iPhone 6 screen, propped up by trimmer accessories(I didn't even know Ireland or Afganistan could play Cricket at international level). Earlier, my mom sent me a text saying that she's watching the South Africa/Sri-lanka match. Most of this really was peripheral - same with the Rugby over the weekend that I watched. I wasn't concentrating on it. 

After my haircut (£8 for a skin fade), I popped into the gym for an hour and did a weakling-style workout. I've not been to the gym a lot and so, my body sort of is limp and not feeling powerful - but it's feeling pretty light and runny-like(hence all my running recently)

I watched the Lost City of Z which was quite interesting and then watched about 30 minutes of Noah before feeling too tired to watch any longer. Had breakfast at my pseudo-Italian dinner as-per-usual and not-as-per-usual I decided to have a coffee. I've packed a bit of stuff into a bag and I think I'm just about done really in terms of packing. I need to collect some gifts at the post office and at our old office and then head off to the airport.

I don't think I'll be doing much on the 10-hour flight as it all occurs at night and either I'll stay awake or I'll sleep(unlikely) but I will probably do something on the 8-hour bus journey from Johannesburg to Ladysmith.