Unsurprisingly I need a lie in after last night’s shenanigans. I still manage to get up at 8am for a morning shift. I’m conscious that my time is limited today, as I need to make to a Zombicide session by midday. However, it turns out that games are cancelled which works out well: I suspect everyone else is as tired as I am, and grateful for the respite.

Nevertheless, I somehow manage to stick to my original schedule. I have breakfast, get some chicken in the slow cooker, and am out of the house by 11am. I’ve decided to pop out to the shops briefly, if only for the sake of getting out of the house briefly. I get the urge to pick up a new clock and a chalkboard for the kitchen, but come back empty handed. This is good: it means no money has been spent, which is the point that I seem to keep missing about no-spend July.

I get back to the house and decide that my project for today will be to tidy up the dumping ground that also passes for the shelves (Expedit, of course) in my main room (the room that has a TV in it, but can’t easily be called the TV room because the front room also has a TV in it … I possibly have too many rooms). I move a few things around and somehow end up with three empty shelves, and a bunch of very much tidier shelves. Success!

I then have some time for a bit of much-needed guitar practice (it’s remarkable how rusty I am), and I even get enough bonus writing time in to finish the current draft of the story I’m working on.

Because it’s still the school holidays, and Rachel will be looking after the Kinderbestern tomorrow, I’ve suggested that they may as well stay over at hers for tonight–which gives me a bonus #childfree night. I decide to use it as a substitute #childfree Saturday night (since I was out last night) which means a steak dinner and an awesome film. Tonight I enjoy the second chapter of my brief Tarantino odyssey, which brings me to The Hateful Eight, which I’ve arbitrarily decided will make for good Sunday night viewing.

I start watching early, because it’s such a damn long film, but my streaming service keeps buffering, which makes it an even damner longer film. I enjoy it, even though it is objectively too damn long. It’s beautifully crafted and, once again, wears its love of cinema on its sleeve, expertly melding genres and playing with conventions. You can see the point midway where it seems as though Tarantino was even managing to bore himself and decided to pull out every single stop. At this point it’s not necessarily a film I would rush to watch a second time, but–as with Inglorious Basterds–I’m glad I’ve finally seen it, and kick myself a little for needlessly depriving myself of the experience for so long.