Author: Justin Page 51 of 66

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.