Welcome to 2018

I don't know about you, but my 2018 seems to have only just got going properly.  I'm STILL coughing like a horse, blowing my nose like a foghorn and generally sounding like a sickly person after what seems like months of on-and-off below-par bodily performance.  As soon as I feel better, I naturally celebrate by slightly excessive (or, when other people's birthday celebrations etc. require it, extremely excessive) drinking and staying up late, and - would you believe it - then I feel worse again afterwards.  This has been going on (and off) for the whole of 2018 (at least it feels like it) so I haven't been reporting much.  Meanwhile the weather has precluded any outdoor activity of note.  Honestly, you wouldn't want to know, for the most part.  I didn't run at all in March, what with the snow, the horsing around, and the foghorn.

However, recently the weather had a little fit of being OK for a day so Leo and I leapt at the chance to rip the garage roof off.  Overnight rain was expected, meaning it had to be weathertight at the end of the day, so I invested in a pair of bolt croppers to save time dismantling the old roof.  Being an inveterate cheapskate, I chose an almost-unfeasibly cheap 18" model from Screwfix at a bargain £9.99.  When I got them home I discovered that actually, although 18" sounds like a lot, it doesn't actually provide enough leverage to get through an 8mm bold.  No problem, I just made them into bigger ones with two pieces of aluminium tube (actually bits of old hang-glider uprights (hang gliding came next after windsurfing in my adventure sports history, in about the 1990s)) cunningly secured internally with a bit of paracord.  This turns out to actually be better than buying longer ones because they work just as well, and they collapse to go in the toolbox.  Here they are, hanging from a wall with one leg extended (a bit like the birthday celebrations actually):

They happily hacked their way through all he old fixings with a very satisfying thunk, as well as providing the warm glow of a special tool constructed.  Here's the garage with the roof off (showing just how little holds the roof up when it's there!) 

And here it is now:

Still a few bits to fix but it's functional.  I used expanding foam to fill the gap up to the concrete beam across the front, with the totally amazingly marvellous Bostik Flexacryl Grey roof repair paint (which is like flexible fibreglass reinforced paint) to make it waterproof; the same paint around the edges where the insulation shows; a couple of bits of shaped plywood to match the doorframe to the roof line, and it's pretty much done.  I still have to replace the guttering, as you can see.  Oh, and get rid of the old roof: 

which is distressingly heavy stuff.  It all need to be packed up in double-wrapped polythene and taped which requires dry weather (which we have) and someone else to help lift the bloody stuff (which I don't).  So the drive is still not fully available for vehicles - bah!

But at least I'm back to running.  Yesterday I crushed my previous PB up the hill with a stonking 19:31 (1:24 quicker than my previous PB) and today I ran 4.1km in 28:52.  Still no prospect of Olympic glory except unless the opposition are required to hop, but I'm feeling quite chipper about it all.  So, roll on 2018!