The Kinderbeast once again prompts a distressingly early start for my writing, but I complete the second draft of my short horror story, so all is well.

I achieve several small goals for the day: I clean the barbecue (rarely used, but it’s still satisfying to see it once again bereft of grease and cobwebs); I update my writing tracker spreadsheet ready for another year of writing, and I even blog about it;  finally I draft a length post reflecting on my writing progress over 2016. Maybe three people at most will read it, but it’s still good to remind myself that I did manage some writing achievements during what was ultimately a fetid shit of a year.

Twitter is aflame with stories about the GOP gutting the ethics committee in what can only seem like a transparent bid to get away with the sort of corruption that they’ve been so busy accusing the Democrats of. As someone tweets: every burglar knows that you kill the guard dog first.

One outing for the day: a drive to Harvey Norman’s so the Elderbeast can spend some of his Christmas money on some new, much-needed bluetooth speakers. As much as I dismay at giving HN our money, I’m gratified that the headphones (spotted via a casual browse through the junk mail) are 50% off, which makes it feel like HN won’t be creaming too much profit from that particular transaction.

For the evening we watch the new episode of Sherlock. Still entertaining, still first class TV, but occasionally rambling and lacking in focus in the way that Sherlock almost never is. Nevertheless, it’s sufficiently good to inspire the Elderbeast to show interest in the earlier episodes, which pleases me.