I’m having some unusually vivid, but strangely banal dreams when the Kinderbeast tears me from sleep at 4:30am asking to be tucked in again. One day I’ll work out what it is that wakes him at that same time on seemingly random nights of the week. I go back to sleep but wake up again at about 6am, 20 minutes ahead of my alarm. I can hear something at the front door, at the fly screen. I then hear scratching on the roof. I don’t hear anything else especially worrying, so I wait for the alarm to go off and then get out of bed.

There’s no signs of what was making the noise, but the cats sniff our patio fly-screen intently before going outside so I figure a local tom has been around to claim our property. I’ll expect our eviction orders presently …

The day starts off with three plus hours of web-based training. It’s perfectly fine, but I am dead after sitting at my desk for three plus hours, even with regular tea breaks and distractions. While the rest of the day is perfectly productive, my energy levels don’t really recover and once again I’m dead on my feet by home time.

Rach and the Elderbeast have already gone to the cricket by the time I return home so it’s a fairly typical domestic evening of cooking dinner and putting the Kinderbeast to bed. I don’t really feel like watching anything, so I continue to struggle with Plex–which is clearly the root of all evil in the world–and try to get it to load posters for all my media correctly…

I plan to spend the rest of the evening rereading The Martian. My reading has slumped since the Christmas break, and I decide that revisiting a book I thoroughly enjoyed would not only be a good kickstarter, but it means I can also devote some of my attention to studying exactly why it proved such an unputdownable read. In the end I get stuck into a final edit of one of my own stories (Between The Devil & The Comfy Chair) and don’t end up starting anything.