The house was gloriously quiet and still today, allowing me to get back to World War 3.3. As I expected, I wasn’t able to spin up from nothing to seven hours of two-fisted manuscript punching. But I managed four hours of concentrated work, and I’m gonna take that as a win.
It’s been three long, very long weeks, but the scaffolding finally came down around the house this morning. It went up so the roofers could get up top and repair some damage I didn’t even know was up there.
Although I’m not quite sure how much I can offer Mr Zhang’s steel and ironmongery…
It’s been maybe twenty years since I last had one — before the kids went to school, I think. And I don’t know that we used it much, because we already had plenty of books at home. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. Eventually, I realised I hadn’t used it for a couple of years, didn’t know where the physical card was, and didn’t think about it again for a couple of decades.
I think I was eating a sandwich… No. No, it was a wrap. That’s right. I had some leftover rice and maple-baked salmon, and I decided to heat that up for lunch. And thus, for the forty-second year in a row, I missed the Melbourne Cup.
Normally I do it on purpose, because I’m weird. (I missed it when I was 19 and felt quite special, so I kept on missing it, each year, on purpose. But this year, I just forgot it was on.
Slow day on the keyboard today because the house is full of tradies doing roof repairs. It’s an insurance claim, thank god, because it looks like a very, very spendy job. There’s at least a dozen guys, a crane, a shit ton of scaffolding and new roofing iron, new insulation, a new solar hot water system and… now… a new ceiling for my library after one of the roofers stepped through it.
It took a while, thanks to that perfidious leasing company we used a couple of years ago, but we finally traded in the Mini (genuinely sad trombone) and picked up the new car: a fully electric Volvo EX30.
I dunno that I’ll get a single word written today.
