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Exciting news. A pallet of Christmas Emergency Questions books turned up at my house today, which is exciting because I now have another pallet to attempt to chop up for firewood with my axe.
I have to admit that the first pallet is still in reasonable, if not usable shape. I managed to chop off a fair amount of kindling and wrench off some of the slats with my new crow bar, but most of the structure is pretty sound and I’ve managed to rip a hole in my trousers thanks to a sticking out nail (it lightly cut my skin too, so I googled tetanus, but decided I’d probably be OK) and I’ve got cuts and bruises all over my hands. But it’s worth it for the 20 to 30 minutes that my fire gets to burn in my wood burner.
All right, it is also exciting to have the second Emergency Questions book (with all new questions) in my hands. The turnaround on this has been fantastic and thanks to Chris Evans (not that one) and designed Stefhan for working so hard to get this ready in plenty of time for Christmas. We will be selling it on www.gofasterstripe.com, but only once all the kickstarter copies are in the post (what postmen will we irk this time?) So they should be available to order from about 20th November.
I have to sign about 350 copies and write unique and new Emergency Questions in another 160 and then there are about 90 more which either get a question or a personal message. But I can’t let those kickstarter backers down and managed to do about 240 of the signed copies by the end of the day (a day which also included all the parenting and dog walking etc that I’ve found myself trapped in the cycle of doing due to my desire to not have a wasted selfish life.
I felt bad just signing the books though, so decided to draw a little picture in every one (or do something a little different). Quickly I found myself drawing dozens of snowmen with erections. I am 50.
I also had to do another supermarket shop (but luckily avoided parking space issues this time) and then take Phoebe to her swimming lesson. We were trying a different pool (and I thought a different teacher) today. I thought she’d been reluctant to join in before because the other pool was too cold, but this one was lovely and warm and she said that it was too hot this time. She’s a real Goldilocks of swimming. She did get to the end of the lesson today and joined in with a couple of the activities, but mainly just said she wanted to get out or did her own thing. The teacher did make a good effort to get her involved this time, but it just seems like my daughter has gone off swimming for now. I will keep persisting, even though this is by far the most time and energy consuming class she does. Plus you always end up with wet socks.
I got lost in the dark in Stevenage and then got stuck in a traffic jam that wasn’t even going the way I needed to go, in the dark, bamboozled by its stupid system of roundabouts.
It’s fair to say that the newborn is making us pretty tired. He is much more of a crier than Phoebe ever was and there are long hours of trying to make him happy and/or fall asleep. He’s still a little cracker and even at 3am I love hanging around with him. But I don’t know how any baby survives the first few months when they put such pressures on their parents. Somehow you stay awake for the hour or so to feed them. But I don’t quite know how.
Then again, this evening I did manage to find time to build a lego-style diorama of evil Rick and Morty. And thoroughly enjoyed it too. I almost managed to construct something self-assembly without mistakes, but there were two bits left over at the end and I got the plumbus the wrong way up.
I can only thank my lucky stars that I have relatively little work on at the moment. Aside from the stupid self-created work of inscribing childish books with phallic images. I am struggling to even keep up with Warming Up, which has survived all the things I have been through before. Will two kids be the death of it? I mean, obviously it has destroyed the content, but will it actually mean I can’t keep up with the project any more?
I am so close to 15 years of consecutive blogging that I can’t give up now. And I probably won’t give up then either. But I am glad that my life is involved enough to make this solipsism more difficult to achieve.
