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Second stone clear in two days (it's like the amazing daily stone clear of 2023) as I heard last night that the crops had been harvested. Though the stones were still largely hidden by the detritus of harvest. Listen here flag hagf. Sadly no joy riders.
A full morning of parenting as I took the kids to ten pin bowling, mini-golf, the arcade and for a pizza, all before 1pm. Phoebe somehow won 800 tickets playing the 2p Tipping Point machine and we were able to get some knock off ear pods for her. One of them didn't work as it turned out and we'd spent £25 in the arcade, but she was still delighted.
I was still very tired and my dizzyness has returned which made life a little irksome (and explains my sub 100 performance on 10 pin bowling) but still great to have this time with the kids, even if they were arguing or crying for loads of it! Phoebe is very competitive (where does she get that from?) but Ernie is very much in stuff for the lols (which made it more annoying for Phoebe when he kept sinking the golf ball in two. Ernie loves to wind Phoebe up because he loves her so much that any kind of attention is welcome. As a younger brother I recognise that compunction.
Phoebe professes to not love him back and I think she's fairly sincere about that. For now at least. Poor little Ernie. He hardly deserves that at all.
Phoebe had a bit of a wobble about moving schools and the possibility of death at bedtime, so I got to do some full on fathering as I talked it through it all. As my recent entry showed, I do empathise and it was around the same age that I became aware and fairly obsessed about my own death, convinced I would die young. I am going to have to get on with that pretty quickly or I am going to look like a right fool.
I think I reassured her a bit and it's good to be there for her and to still be in the brief period of parenthood where your kids still need you. It's at times like these that I am glad I didn't die of cancer. Times like these and all the other times.
Instead of going to bed I watched Palm Springs again.
It's only 3 years since I last watched it, but I could barely remember anything about it at all. Better than Thunder Force which I apparently watched on the same day and have absolutely no memory of whatsoever. I couldn't tell you one thing about it, whereas I knew I'd liked Palm Springs. One of the great things about getting old and losing the ability to remember anything is that you get to enjoy stuff all over again. Like in Palm Springs (or Groundhog Day) except that you wouldn't remember having lived the same day before. Which might be a good twist on the genre. A man lives the same day over and over again, but his memory is so shot that he doesn't realise - just gets the odd sensation of deja vu. Maybe that's what our lives are.
