Terribly sorry - I fell off the world

Yes, I know it's more than a month since I last posted. I have no excuses, other than being busy. I still am, so this is just a quick update on what's been going on.

J finally returned to work in late May, and managed about three weeks without needing to take time off. Then he got a stinking cold with a temperature, had to stay at home to recover, felt exhausted and weedy and became despondent again. However, he saw the doctor yesterday and she thinks he has post-viral fatigue syndrome - which is quite plausible as he's had it before. The possibility that there might be a physical cause for the way he's feeling is actually making him a little more cheerful. We'll see how things go.

Meanwhile, I have had an awful lot of reading to do for my current module, which is hard work, and also a fairly busy time at work. Which doesn't leave me much brain left for blogging. Also, my digital camera continues broken-ish (it seems to think the battery is depleted almost instantly).

I got my orthotics on 4 June. They're quite sturdy chunks of plastic, but only half-length, for which I am duly grateful. They have foam insoles which go over them to stop me sliding about. I was able to break myself in to them quite quickly (thanks to my bendy ligaments) and now have two new pairs of shoes. No sandals yet. I may blog the Shoe Search in more detail later if I feel like it.

I completed my detox week and felt a lot better in myself, although I didn't lose even a tiny bit of weight (although I did lose about a pound and a half the next week - some sort of delayed effect?) But I have now gone back to my coffee-drinking pasta-eating ways, although I am eating less sugar.

One interesting thing that came out of it was that I avoided cow's milk during that week, and when I ate a wholemilk yoghurt after the week was over, I felt really weird, digestively. Almost immediately. I'm used to this feeling, but hadn't thought it might be caused by anything specific before. I tend to be sceptical about the concept of "food intolerance" - it seems like an example of the modern tendency to find quasi-medical descriptions for everything - but will concede that it might be worth cutting down on cow's milk a bit. I have since had a couple of lattés* with soya milk as an experiment, and can't say I notice any difference in taste or texture. That's probably as much milk as I ever take in at any one time, anyway. I think if I gave up cow's milk completely, I'd want to take a calcium supplement, though.

The next thing on the plan: get back into running. According to the podiatrist, my current trainers are rubbish, not "foot-control running shoes", and too big for me. Which has been apparent for about three years**, but I'm dense and also unwilling to spend money on running shoes when the current ones hadn't fallen to bits and there are so many nice books waiting to be bought.

Oh, and go on holiday. I am going to the Lake District in early July. Looking forward to that quite a lot.

*I came of coffee-drinking age in the 90s, naturally.
** Yes, three years is a long time to go without replacing running shoes. But I haven't been running at all for nearly a year because of the foot issues!