Sunday Afternoon
It's Sunday afternoon. The kids are playing with their friend in the park outside, the Kindle Fire is playing “Halt and Catch Fire” while propped against the lamp in the corner of the desk, and I'm writing this blog post in Focus Writer on a fresh install of Ubuntu on the geriatric desktop PC under the desk.
I have partitioned the PC to boot into both Windows, and Ubuntu – I still need to hot-wire it to boot into Windows by default (although saying that, the kids now have their own laptops with Windows on – if the desktop didn't have it, it might encourage them to use them).
The greater part of the morning was spent in biting winds on the touchline of a rugby pitch – watching our middle girl do battle with the boys once more. She got picked to make up the numbers for a visiting team, so spent the entire morning doing as little as possible to help them. Sure, she was in the right places on the pitch, but she expended no effort what-so-ever. I questioned her about it on the way home, and she started grinning.
The kids have come home. I just banned them from running round the house – so they are effectively imprisoned in the “playroom” (read: spare room) downstairs while I try and tidy up. Our house is kind of like “The Burrow” from Harry Potter on a good day – more like a hovel on a bad day, and I often seem to be the only person that really cares about that. I guess that's what happens when you both work full time, and have three kids that are involved in clubs and sports pretty much every day of the week.
Changing subject wildly, I weeded out the “Blogroll” page yesterday evening – cutting out everybody that didn't post regularly. Of course, being a software developer, I made a tool to help me do it – the Python script referenced at the top of the Blogroll page now lets you know how many days it has been since a blog in an OPML file had any posts. I cut out anybody that hadn't written in about 10 days.
I somehow managed to not write a blog post yesterday. I guess one day off in a month is allowed, right? I'm about to take part in the Blogging 201 course at Wordpress, which is all about marketing – I can't imagine any of that is going to be about writing anything – it will be about all the peripheral tasks, such as name dropping yourself on the social networks, guest posting, and all that crap. We'll see.
Oh dear... Miss 11 just arrived behind me, asking for help to fasten a belt around her waste to tuck a sword under... only the belt came up about two inches too short. She then arrived back in the playroom with her sister's school tie knotted around her waist. Needless to say, it got confiscated immediately.
I'll transcribe the conversation that just happened, because you can't make it up:
Miss 11 – “Is anybody hungry?”
Me – “You're not allowed any snacks this close to dinner”
Boy – “We are allowed snacks at my house”
Miss 11 – “Shall we go to your house to play?”
They just left – under strict instruction that no snacks would be eaten. I don't believe it for a second.
Now I'm stuck in the house alone. I can't go and buy cat food (we have run out) until my other half comes home (she's out shopping). I don't think we actually have any food for the kids dinner either. I'm guessing I'll end up walking into town as soon as she arrives home to go and get something.
Why is everything so complicated?