Hola granola! No beer for me, fellas; I'm off the sauce for Lent. Though I'm going to a birthday party the weekend after next, so there's a chance my resolve will break just as I'm about to enter the home stretch. We'll see.

I woke up today feeling like my brain had been replaced with lead, because I didn't get to sleep until around five in the morning. At one-ish I started reading Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, got about fifty pages in, and decided I wasn't going to finish it. Too much "Xkrymia gingerly picked up the Thunderfang, forged in the purple hills of Zemydon where the milkbeasts roam, being careful to use only his left hand, because using the right would make his soul break into twenty-nine pieces". Then I opened Forgotten Beasts of Eld and made it as far as the prologue. I tried The Three-Body Problem but couldn't swallow the physics professor's weird second-person brainspeech to his wife about Einstein. Gardens of the Moon put me off because of the author's own claims in the preface about the ambitious scope of his work, but I did proceed to the text itself and was put off by the world-building efforts (i.e. dropping lots of weird names and replacing profanities with phrases like "Kamalon's beard!"; I know it only makes sense that they wouldn't say "Jesus Christ!" when they stub a toe, but it all feels very forced).

I was trying to read a little more fantasy and sci-fi, to diversify my reading a little. Maybe they're just not for me. To think that I've recently been feeling pangs of guilt for downloading these off of libgen; now I'm glad I didn't buy them. In the past I've rarely stopped reading books; usually once I'm a few pages in, I feel that need to see it through. I've come to realise that there's a limited amount of books one can read, so you might as well make them ones you really want to; anything else is a timesink.

So I switched tack and moved onto The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, and while it sounded fascinating, I realised after ten pages that I didn't particularly want to read another five hundred on the subject. Which led me to move on to the shorter and snappier The Soul of an Octopus, and the decision soon after that I really should try to sleep.

I was bogged down in January with a pain in my left knee; the discomfort was less annoying than the constraints it put on my physical movement. I haven't been out to climb Croagh Patrick but once since. Thankfully, a couple of weeks ago, the time - and a few funny-looking but effective stretches I found online - seemed to have cured it. Then I started doing some barefoot walks to strengthen my soles, and experimented with different walking forms - enough to give myself peroneal tendonitis. So that's great. I'm chasing pain around my body just as I'm freaking out that I only have a few months to prepare myself for this:

It took me about four days to make that in paint.net, so don't judge it too harshly. Gonna put it up on the auld Facebook page in the next few days. My main concern now (other than actually getting fit) is organising accomodation along the way. Luckily a friend of mine has agreed to do the driving. Some of you might laugh at the "mountains" (only one of them is over 1000m), but look here - in Ireland, that's what we have for mountains.

I have no other news. Oh yeah, I've been doing a little bit more writing on My Book About That Walk I Did Nearly Two Years Ago Now: God, There's A Depressing Thought and have made it as far as finishing a first draft of... chapter three.

There is no hope for me, my friends.