A Quiet Saturday
It's mid-way through Saturday afternoon. All I appear to have done all day so far is wash clothes, tidy up, and noodle around on the internet. I had grand plans to write a blog post about something or other, but coming up with something or other has been unexpectedly difficult. Sitting around all morning doesn't really provide any great tales to tell.
I did sign up for something on the internet – although I'm not entirely sure it will be of interest to anybody. An alternative to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr has been growing like a weed on the internet over the last few years – it's called Mastodon. It differs from the other social networks because it's federated, decentralised, and self regulated. That's right – no one individual owns it, or polices it. The source code is freely available – meaning anybody can start their own server, and connect with the rest of the network. If you visit https://joinmastodon.org, you can read more about it. I joined the “mastodon.cloud” server – you can find my profile at https://mastodon.cloud/@jonbeckett if you're interested in trying it out, following me, and so on.
The younger children are on holiday for Easter now – two weeks to knock around the house getting increasingly bored, and fighting with one another. They have been remarkably quiet today so far, which is surprising given the events of yesterday evening. Shortly after I got in from work Miss 15 couldn't find her wallet (containing her bank debit card). This was immediately something that the entire rest of the household should be helping her with, and was not her fault at all. Somebody had obviously either taken it, or moved it. The fact that she had no idea when she last had it, or when she last used it was not important.
Have you ever seen an angry 15 year old “looking” for something? It typically consists of standing in various locations around the house, making a lot of angry noise, expecting the lost item to magically fly from it's hiding place. When that doesn't yield results, they switch directly to throwing, breaking and trampling on other people's belongings with no intention of putting any of them back where they found them.
I don't remember being so self-centred, selfish, unreasonable, rude, or nasty when I was 15. Maybe if you're in the middle of the brain chemistry changes that afflict teenagers you eventually erase all memory of the horrific little shit you could be from time to time. I know that after you've been a parent for a while, your tolerance level for mostly-harmless-bullshit gets turned up to about 20 out of 10.
Before we had children, if we were out to dinner at a pub and heard children shouting or crying, we would wince and wonder why the parents were not doing anything. After having children for a while, you suddenly realise how good you have become at blocking it out. Not only do you “not hear” the shouting and crying, you can distinguish the sound of your own children across a busy playground, and can tell a real cry from an attention seeking cry in seconds. It's all very odd.
Tomorrow morning I'm heading into London with our eldest daughter. She has a month's worth of pay sitting in her bank account, and wants to visit the comic book shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. I have a feeling we'll be coming home with quite a collection of Manga books.
Finally, I didn't want to end this post without making mention of a wonderful blogging friend that's going through a tough time at the moment. She's been in my thoughts a lot recently, and has brought into focus just how difficult this internet thing is sometimes. We forge wonderful friendships around the world, and like to think we can be there for each other – but in reality we are often thousand of miles away, and able to offer no more than a little of our time. Somebody needs to get a move on and invent those transporters from Star Trek in a hurry.