6.30: Arrive home.
7.00: Eat
7.30 – 9.30: Wrangle children into bed.
9.30: Decide not to turn on computer. I will talk to husband or watch television or read my excellent book. Do so.
10.00: Help husband deck the house with laundry. Have my efforts rejected as “laundry does not dry in a bundle”. Mutter darkly about the joy of owning a (very bad for the environment) dryer.
10.15: Husband goes to bed. I tell him I will be up in a minute as I want to read my book in bed.
10.16: Slip over to the computer for a quick look. Cat hops up on my lap with contented purr.
10.17: Stare dolefully at yesterday’s blog post which has received no comments (yes, this remark is addressed to YOU).
10.18: Draft some deathless prose. Post it.
10.35: Trot off to bloglines where I find 630 new posts.
11.30: Still here, reading away, eyesight going, fingers freezing (heat has gone off, haven’t bothered to turn it on again as I will be going to bed in 5 minutes).
11.40: Decide to skip reading the full feed from the Huffington Post, wonder why I ever subscribed. Nearly at the end now. Hurrah.
12.00: OK midnight, I’m definitely going to bed now. Definitely, definitely. Just going to comment on a couple of posts.
12.30: Oh God, oh God, it’s really late, I must go to bed. I’ll be exhausted tomorrow.
12.45: Just going to have a quick look at my sitemeter and then I’m going to bed, definitely, definitely. Look at those readers in China, I wonder how they got here? Oh right, they were searching for wafflemakers. Did anyone look at those links I put in, let’s just quickly check the outclicks.
1.00: Oh God, it’s one in the morning. I must go to bed. I must. I must. Just going to quickly check how does this feedburner/twitter [insert technology of choice here] thing works.
1.15: Too baffling. OK, now I’m definitely going to bed. Just a quick check on the email and then I am definitely going to bed.
1.30: OK, delete the junk mail, tum ti tum. Send a couple of quick mails.
1.45: Maybe just check back to see whether anyone has commented on my deathless prose. Maybe, maybe, but no, oh wait, 45 spam comments. Delete same.
1.50: Just one quick last look at bloglines.
2.10: OK, that’s it. I am definitely going to bed now. Dislodge cat. Try to warm frozen fingers.
2.15: Just going to have a quick read of my book in the bathroom while I wash my teeth and floss.
2.30: God, this book is really good, why did I play on the computer all evening when I could have been reading this?
2.45: Move to sitting on the stairs. No, I’m going to stop reading. I’ll just fill a hot water bottle for myself as I am now frozen to the bone. Filch tepid bottle from daughter’s bed. Go downstairs book in hand and fill bottle up from the kettle. Back upstairs, book in hand.
3.00: Will sit for just one moment on the stairs with delightfully warm bottle toasting my perished extremities. This book is really excellent. If I go to bed now and don’t get up until 8 I will still have five hours sleep which is lots, Margaret Thatcher survived on four (though, of course, that explains why she was so cranky).
3.45: Finish book. Put child on the toilet. Crawl into bed. Husband says blearily “what time is it?” Am frozen. Get up again to refill hot water bottle. Back to bed to instant and dreamless sleep.
5.30: Husband cannot sleep. He tosses and turns and eventually gets up. I say blearily “what time is it?” He goes downstairs to put on a wash and do some work.
6.00: Some child crawls into bed beside me. I swear that tonight I will go to bed early. This can, in fact, be achieved. I say to my husband “help me, stay here and make me turn off the computer”. And he does and then I am tucked up and lights off by 11.
Reading etc.
Homage to Myles
From Frank McNally’s column last week:
“…New metaphors were badly needed at the time. As long ago as 1999 – probably during a wet day on Hope Street – I called elsewhere in this paper for the decommissioning of the peace process’s “deadly arsenal of clichésâ€.
This included an estimated 40,000 windows of opportunity, 50,000 variations on the theme of moving the situation forward, and perhaps half a million phrases to describe nothing happening: including such foreign imports as “log-jamâ€, “stand-offâ€, and the French-made “impasse†(which was smuggled in, probably via Libya, during the late 1980s but never deployed properly because most broadcast journalists lacked the necessary phonetic training).
And this was only the more recent material. If you went back further, there was any amount of other stuff lying around, like those old jokes about the “Carmelite and the ballot box†and the need to take “all the nuns out of Irish politicsâ€.
Rust might have made these unusable, I thought. But even so: most newspaper readers would not rest easy until the material was put permanently beyond use. I recall wishing that we could just dump all the clichés “in a big hole somewhere, and pour concrete over them  ”
Look, nobody said that all of the NaBloPoMo content had to be original.
Linkedy Link
Lesley uses words of which the Academie Francaise would disapprove. However, she has been in France too long: she thinks la peoplisation is an English word. Any native English speakers who speak no French know what that means? I think not. If you do, put it in the comments and prove me wrong. Also, comment, I would like that.
Mr. Kottke has a post about things which are disappearing: “blind dates, mix tapes, getting lost.. looking old, operators, camera film, hitchhiking, body hair, writing letters, basketball players in short shorts, privacy, cash, and, yes, books.” Do you agree?
I watched this woman on the television the other night and found her coping skills to be really quite exceptional. That would probably be in contrast to the woman on “Wife Swap” who looked, aghast, in the cupboard of the other woman’s house and said “the only English food here is a banana and a pineapple”. Quality television.
For your delectation from the wilds of the internet
Norah is dealing with bodily functions of small children.
Another Belgian Waffle is having a miserable time. Obliquely. Be nice to her. Also, remember what I said about naming your blog something that won’t seem like a good idea to half a dozen other people.
This is a worthy, depressing and hard to read blog about the Irish economy. They linked to this though, which is quite cool.
The failblog people: mildly humourous.
If you liked the last map link, have a look at the interview with the creator.
A superb photo essay on East Germany, via Kottke.
Xkcd has advice for physicists.
If u do not forward this to 6 people, u will have 6 months bad luck
I have a friend who, very reprehensibly, forwards these kinds of email. Clearly, I always delete them while making a tutting sound. One arrived today and I deleted it and forgot about it until I got home this evening. I found three letters from the revenue commissioners announcing that they had reassessed my tax returns for 2004, 2005 and 2006 and telling me cheerily (in light of the state of the exchequer) that they calculated that for those years I had an additional liability of €6,000. 6 months of this kind of luck could beggar us.
Very good news
Excited email from a colleague today: Martin Lukes is back – and looking good for an early release and a new career!!
I thought you would like to know.
Links. Let me see. Jon is incandescent about the shocking ignorance of the British press on matters European. However, in the case of the Daily Mail, he has his revenge.
Eoin has a link to a great collection of Irish archive photos.
Look, what can I say the internet is tired.