Category: Diary Page 45 of 47

It’s time … time to buy the Kinderbesten new shoes for the start of the new school year. We get to the shops at opening time. Even so, we still have to wait to be served, despite getting into the shoe shop almost as soon as the door opens. The Kinderbesten pick out shoes within minutes, which makes them about a million times better at shoe shopping than I will ever be. The assistant is also super helpful. All in all it’s a stupendously successful operation.

Rach and the Elderbeast head off to the cricket final in the afternoon. The Kinderbeast and I chill out for the rest of the day and watch some films (including The Secret Life Of Pets). Since my newly vegetarian wife is out for the evening, I’ve made the executive decision to have steak for dinner. I’m generally as happy with vegetarian food as I am with meat, but the steak turns out so well that I have to resist the urge to send my wife send photographic evidence for fear that it will cause her to revert to her carnivorous ways.

I pack the Kinderbeast off to bed and settle down to watch Predators, which I borrowed over the xmas break but haven’t had a chance to watch yet. I enjoy it a lot, but I see why it didn’t quite kick-start the franchise again, even if it did keep the flame burning. It’s easily the best Predator film since the original, but by hewing so close to the original it ends up doing little more than providing a very well crafted vignette.

A successful, albeit slightly reluctant, morning shift is achieved. The new story is still a struggle but it’s slowly, painfully coming together–like extracting a nugget of truth from Trump’s cabinet. I manage just over 500 words, but the greater victory is the gradual dissolution of the fog that lies between the story in my mind and the words on the page.

On a random urge I check the EB Games site and see that the game the Elderbeast wanted last week (Skyrim) is on offer and finally within his means. However, in a sign that the universe is definitely against us, our local EB Games store was without internet and unable to process the Elderbeast’s gift card. I’m not the kind of person to get angry about things that retail staff have no control over, and I’m pleased to say the Elderbeast took it very well too.

Without Skyrim to waste the day on we needed a backup plan. It may still be the case that every day lately is finding me wanting to go straight back to bed, but I still mustered up enough conviction to propose a trip to the swimming pool. In the end a trip to the in-laws, to collect the bike that they had given the Kinderbeast for Christmas won the day. I stopped by the park on the drive home, but the Kinderbeast’s cycling game is currently poor. More training will be required.

Determined to make some further use of my day off I bake some banana bread and clean up the more flagrantly cluttered areas of the house. I also make a futile attempt to fix our water cooler, which no longer cools. Hey, it’s the thought that counts.

The alarm wakes me up at 6:20am. I prepare to get up … and the next thing I know it’s an hour later and I’m still in bed! I figure I must have needed the extra sleep, so I don’t beat myself up about it. It does mean I’ll miss my morning shift, but there are two mitigating factors: it’s Australia Day, which means no work, which in turn means I may get some writing in later in the day; I’m also mildly stuck on the new story and some more time to work my way (mentally) through the impasse might actually be useful.

We don’t celebrate Australia Day with much vigour in our household: it’s too complex a day to either celebrate freely, or protest blindly. For all the talk of changing the date (which absolutely should happen) the real discussion needs to be about what Australia Day should mean, and how it can be a positive celebration for everyone. For now, I can’t celebrate a day that has come to symbolise the massacre and displacement of the indigenous population. We do, however, happily devote our day to the Triple J Hottest 100, which is something worth celebrating.

It’s otherwise a deliberately lazy day. I make one excursion: heading to the shops for some mid-morning pastries and other sundries. I play with the kids intermittently and draft a blog post about rejection (I still need to get my fourth ‘blog like a yoyo’ post in this month).

We cap off the day by watching Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with I’ve never seen. It’s ok, but I feel it’s one Alan Rickman performance away from being another Waterworld or The Postman. Kevin Costner is likeable enough, but I find myself wondering how he managed to end up one of Hollywood’s biggest stars way back when. He seems like The Guy who got the lead role just because he’s The Guy, and not because he able to carry the movie or bring any real conviction to the proceedings.

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.

Another Monday, another meeting in the city. The steaming heap of minor delays to my morning reaches a peak when I discover that the petrol station has run out of petrol (for the second time in a week). This is inconvenient as I need to drive into the city in a car that is hovering perilously over the empty line. In the end I’m half an hour early, instead of very nearly late–one of the benefits of paying minimal attention to your work calendar over the weekend.

While I’m happy not to have to drive into the city every day, I miss my London days when you could see the city starting to wake up as you walked to work. Cafe owners putting out chairs, people making their various ways to their various jobs; all the tiny things that keep the world turning.

It proves a relatively unsurprising Monday, insofar as many trivial things go wrong. I manage to reverse the car into a tree (causing very, very minor damage to the bumper). I endure a huge energy crash in the afternoon. I’m unable to get Plex to index all of my media properly! For unrelated reasons we can’t get the next few episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine to play at all. I admit defeat and we watch the ‘Bob’ episode of Blackadder II before despatching the Elderbeast, who is being particularly tiresome, to bed so we can get in another episode of Luke Cage.

Despite a late end to my Saturday (somehow I end up reading until past midnight) I’m still up at 6:30am. This is partly at the behest of the Kinderbeast, who demands feeding. Regardless, I’m as surprised as anyone to be up and writing.

I’ve had a few thoughts about how to frame the story I’m currently struggling through, and I put some of them into a rewritten first scene. It’s still far from what I’m hoping for, but it’s better.

I continue to be obsessed with Twitter. History is taking place this weekend, and it’s compelling being able to have a front row seat.

We have a slow morning, letting the various Kinderbesten play after their sleepover. I take the plunge and start reformatting my PC. The job mostly goes well, but some of my backups haven’t quite worked as planned. It’s ok, there’s nothing that can’t be restored, but it proves tiresome as the day goes on.

By the afternoon my early start, and the tedium of restoring my computer, is wearing me down. We eat some tagliatelle with pesto, make some banana bread, I drink as much wine as my relatively low tolerance for alcohol will accept. Then we watch some more Brooklyn 99 and the day is done.

I start the day with a glorious lie-in. Saturday is designated lie-in day, but on this occasion a the Kinderbeast gets Rach up to prepare his breakfast and she even brings me tea. It’s a fine start to the day. We briefly consider joining the Women’s March in Perth–I’m very keen to activate the Elderbeasts’s activism, and this is a fine chance–unfortunately, as Rach puts it, we are unable to human today.

A idea at the back of my mind to reformat my PC, to hopefully deal with its various quirks, develops into an actual commitment. I start backing up things and making lists of what will need to be restored. The preparation takes most of the day, especially as my first attempt to create a USB Windows installer (after about an hour of downloading Windows) fails.

In the afternoon we are introduced to Risk by a friend whose son is in the Elderbeast’s class at school. The Kinderbesten tire quickly, but we enjoy it. The Elderbeast’s friend ends up staying over for a sleepover, which is a novel experience for all. At one point the Elderbeast complains that he and his friend can’t get to sleep, and I remark internally that he doesn’t even do sleepovers like a regular child. Which pleases me. I have no idea how much sleep they actually get in the end: I can hear them prowling around the house even after I’ve turned my light off.

We confine the kids to the secondary TV room to watch Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey. We entertain ourselves by finally starting Luke Cage, which is glorious, retro-fuelled, slow-burning and every bit as good as I hoped it would be. Two episodes down and I’m looking forward to more.

The news of the Women’s Marches filtering through on twitter fills me with hope. The inauguration of Trump will eventually become a moment of deep shame for the US, but the unexpectedly massive turnout for the marches shows that the majority have bigger ideas that Trump and his minions are trying to enforce upon people.

Also, a nazi got punched. It can never be a bad day when you’ve seen a nazi get punched.

Overslept! Normally I’m up and about by 6:30. This morning I wake up and my phone’s telling me it’s already past 7am. I don’t even remember the alarm going off. It’s too late for a worthwhile morning shift (a.k.a writing) so I opt to make some tea and ease into the morning instead.

I get to work and am highly relieved to confirm that a mishap on my behalf the day before has not, after all, resulted in major chunks of my colleagues’ work being irretrievably deleted. And the less said about that …

Understandably, the rest of the day requires two coffees. It is one of those rare working days with not quite enough hours in it (as opposed to about three times too many), but I am still evidently battling the Office Plague (or suffering from Not Enough Sleep) so I head home when the appropriate hour comes.

Brief dilemma for the evening, now that we’ve exhausted the Sherlock vault, but it is quickly resolved when we remember we still have season 4 of Brooklyn 99 to watch.