Category: Diary Page 19 of 47

Today heralds another #childfree weekend and, with it, my usual determination to maximise my ‘doing nothing’ time as much as possible. This weekend’s strategy started with me getting my food shopping done on the way home from work last night, as is becoming the #childfree weekend tradition. This, in turn, freed me up to plough straight into my other shopping first thing on Saturday morning–and, after finding out that the local mall was opening at 7am each Saturday until Christmas, first thing really was first thing.

Now, I’m not actually insane, so I didn’t get down there for 7am, but I did get down there closer to 8am than most rational people would choose to on a Saturday morning. Naturally most of the smaller shops were closed, but the places I needed to shop at–and, most critically, get coffee from–were all open.

My main task for the morning was to get presents for my team at work. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten in the habit of putting together little gift bags for everyone (mini-stockings, if you will). I already had plenty of chocolates to go in, but I needed some fun trinkets. After a bit of hunting around I found some suitable items, along with the gift bags themselves. I also happened to find that Big W was selling all Blu-rays half price for the weekend, so I picked up a few recent release that were on my wish list: Baby Driver (which I was really excited to see until the Kevin Spacey stuff happened); Wonder Woman; and War For The Planet Of The Apes.

After that, I made it home for a little after 10am for breakfast and a day of chilling out in front of the TV. Awesome!

Tonight’s Friday Night Horror Movie was Don’t Breathe. It’s a film I’ve wanted to see ever since I saw the trailer, but apparently didn’t want to see all that urgently as it’s taken me until now to do so.

It’s an excellent example of a high concept chiller–a movie in which the premise can be boiled down to a single line: a group of teenage thieves burgle the house of a blind war veteran, who then promptly locks the doors and proceeds to hunt them down.

There’s a teeny bit more to it than that, but I love an economical horror movie that takes a simple premise and runs with it. There’s also some clever playing around with the concept of victim and villain here; just enough to toy with your sympathies, but not make you feel too cheated at the way things end up.

A day of odd contrasts.

It was the ‘celebration assembly’ at the the Kinderbesten’s school today. Both of them had songs to sing, alongside the rest of their respective classes, so naturally all the family came along. We go their early, but all the ‘good’ seats (i.e. the plastic chairs lined up at the back of the hall) were already taken. We grabbed a couple of spots on the metal benches (literally outside the back of the hall) but before the assembly even started it was starting to get uncomfortably crowded, so I ducked away to stand yet even more furtherer at the back.

The assembly started. And then just kept going. And going. And going. Class after class got up to do their christmas numbers. Various announcements were made that I couldn’t hear a word of–partly because the speakers didn’t reach beyond the back of the hall, and partly because all the other restless parents had started gabbing.

There was a definite highlight however: all of the teachers getting on stage in front of the school and performing deranged ballet while wearing sparkly tutus (yes, even the men).

Still, after all of it I was exhausted by the endless procession of things I couldn’t see or hear, and generally uncomfortable at the mass of people around me.

Then I returned to work. We’d had a maintenance related power cut that morning, so everyone else had decided to work from home for the day. We also had workmen in fitting a new air conditioning unit. So I spent the whole day being the only person in the office while being surrounded by workmen drilling and bashing all day.

It was strangely peaceful. Somehow I was able to shut out all the noise, get on with work, and enjoy having the office to myself while not remotely having the office to myself.

Last night I had one of those occasional nights where I just couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t overly stressed; I hadn’t drunk a mountain of coffee during the day; it wasn’t even especially hot.

I. Just. Couldn’t. Sleep.

So, of course, today was BRILLIANT!

In something of a remarkable turnaround from his attitude towards school earlier this year, the Elderbeast has decided to try out for a spot as Student Representative for 2018. In short, this means he’s gone from being someone who thinks that school is possibly the worst place in the universe, to being someone who wants to spend the next year actively contributing to that school. He’s wavered a little bit along the way, but I’ve done my best to help persuade him that simply getting up there and giving it a go is an achievement in itself and I will be immensely proud of him whether he gets one of the eight spots or not.

We’ve gone back and forth on the speech a few times, sometimes with a little resistance, but tonight he wrapped it up and it’s pretty darned good: funny in parts; humble and self-reflective where it needs to be; upbeat and positive in all the right places.

Tomorrow he gets up there, alongside 33 other candidates, in front of his school and all the teachers, and gives it his best shot.

(Spoiler: he didn’t get it BUT he came home the day after doing his speech absolutely brimming with delight at the response he got, and talking about all the other kids who had come up to him and said they had voted for him. Hopefully he’ll remember that feeling the next time an opportunity like this comes along).

Today I went to help out in the Kinderbeast’s class for the morning. He’d impressed his teacher a while back with photos of some geometric shapes he’d built out of his Cranium Super Fort building set, so we decided it would be fun to take it in one day, so his whole class could have a go.

Today was that day.

It also happened to be the day that one of the Kindy classes got to spend a morning as a pre-primary class, meaning that the Kinderbeast’s class ended up relocating to one of the kindy classes–which also happened to be same class (and teacher) that the Kinderbeast had last year. Confused yet?

The children did a drawing exercise to start off with, then split off into groups for different activities: one of which was building with the Super Fort. I ended up with a group of about six five-year-olds, most of whom got really into building with the toy, and wanted to build everything, and each of them wanted to build as many parts as possible. We managed to make a house, a castle and a boat before it was time to pack away, and even then the kids wanted to do as much of the packing away as they could. And managed to repeatedly thwack me in the face with the foam poles as they did so. Which was just …. fine.

After that I ran away back home.

This weekend I’ve watched two very different, but oddly similar, time travel stories. Next to horror, time travel is fast becoming my most-watched genre. Yes, it’s totally a genre. I’ve made a habit of trying to dig up Netflix curiosities to watch on a Sunday evening, and many of them seem to end up being time travel stories (maybe because it allows for interesting, grandiose sci-fi tales that can be told on a limited budget).

So, yesterday I began watching Dark, and this evening I watched The Man From The Future. Dark is a grim small-town drama that kicks off with a child murder or two and then gets seriously timey-wimey. The Man From The Future is a romantic comedy.

Yet, they have things in common. Both have a relatively small scope; encompassing a discrete set of main characters across two or more different times. Both have a central theme about about the past can not only affect the future, but how the future can affect the past. Both embrace the darker side of time travel, albeit with radically different takes.

And yes, both are also very enjoyable too.

I was expecting this to be a hugely stressful weekend. It’s one of my Kinderbesten weekends, which is fine. However, between them they have two birthday parties to attend this weekend–which means noise, socialising and leaving the house (three of my favourite things! Twice!! So … six???). I’ve also got to fit in the traditional Saturday morning weekly shop before the first birthday party happens. Finally, the Elderbeast is having his best friend sleep over on Saturday night. As I’ve probably written before, the best friend is a relatively excellent child BUUUT the noise levels when they get together are something else. I should really look into appropriate medication for it. Or headphones.

Anyway, as you’ll have gathered by the title of this post, it all turned out to be far less worse than expected. Shopping happened nice and quickly. The first party was a drop and run affair, which meant the Kinderbeast and I got some quality PlayStation time in together (which essentially translates to a Plants vs Zombies session in which he tells me what to do, and I generally fail to do it with any degree of success).

The Sleepover, later that day, was probably my most dreaded part of the weekend … but the beasts ended up spending most of the evening in their room playing on their Switches. It was so peaceful, in fact, that I was able to start watching the first couple of episodes of Dark on Netflix–which is definitely not the sort of show to watch when you have limited capacity to pay attention to it .

That just left the party on Sunday morning (yes, I’m actually writing about tomorrow right now, what’re you gonna do about it?) This party was in a park by the beach, which means it was not the sort of party I could slip away from (because I generally prefer it when the Kinderbesten don’t disappear into the wilderness). It was also late in the morning on a roasting hot day, meaning that everyone would be heading to the beach and there would probably be nowhere to park.

Yes, I will embrace the doom and gloom in the face of a child’s birthday party!

Furthermore, it being post-sleepover I also had to take the Kinderbeast and his friend along, with the inherent risk of them getting (even more) bored and whiny (than me). I will freely admit that I spent much of the morning wishing I had an excuse not to go, but fortunately I’m not (yet) evil enough of a parent to deprive my kids of some birthday party fun.

Parking was a mess, as expected. But we parked. The weather, in the best twist of the day, was almost perfect: it was hot, but the sky had clouded over (which meant there was no need to spend the whole morning hunting for shade) and there was an excellent breeze coming off the sea to keep the heat away. Furthermore, some genius had brought along a box of water pistols, which kept the kids entertained for a ridiculously long time. Even the Elderbeast and his friend managed to last the whole two hours without complaining once. Things got so okay that I even ended up being sociable: I started chatting to the mother of one of the Kinderbeast’s friends and found out that she feels much the same way about these parties as I do. A kindred spirit!

So, a weekend that I was partially dreading, but pushed ahead with anyway. And my reward? Everything was okay …

One of best things about watching a horror movie every single Friday evening is the opportunity it offers to stumble across previously unseen gems. So far, among the old favourites and classic choices, we’ve watched a handful of movies that had either slipped under my radar or that I just hadn’t gotten around to watching. Many of these come from ‘best horror movie’ type lists that I research every now and then, just to make sure that we have enough horror movie choices lined up.

Tonight’s movie was Raw, which had turned up on more than one of these lists. It’s questionable whether I would have even heard of it, let alone watched it, if it wasn’t for Horror Friday–which is (almost) a shame, because it’s a great movie. It’s very different style of film than most of our Friday viewing, which shows how versatile the horror genre is (when it tries). Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a good stalk’n’slash movie now and then, but I also love seeing what can happen when someone plays with horror tropes but is equally happy to leave the other genre markers at the door.

That’s what Raw is: a horror film that isn’t really a horror film. It has some impressively gory moments, but it relentlessly avoids any manifestation of the stalker-victim scenario. The closest analogy I can think of right now is George Romero’s Martin–the vampire movie that isn’t really a vampire movie, but is absolutely steeped in vampire [movie] lore.

So, in summary, if you want to watch a horror movie that isn’t really a horror movie, but is also relentlessly and undeniably a horror movie, check out Raw 🙂

Today I spent the whole day in training. These training days can go one of two ways: a complete waste of time, which finds me fighting to keep my eyes open by the end; or the chance to enjoy a break from the usual work routine and learn something new.

Fortunately, today was the latter. It was a small group, the training schedule was relatively informal and–most importantly–there was catering.

Definitely not a bad excuse to escape the office for a day 🙂