Que?


I had the last lesson in my Spanish course today, a revision of the previous nine lessons. This commenced with a game of dominoes, before going on to a test of vocabulary where I realized I had forgotten key things like being able to ask "what?" or the spelling of the Sppanish for "sixty". Oh well. I have at least a month before I can start again with formal lessons, which gives me a chance to go back and consolidate all the things I should have learned properly by now. Not that I should feel too disheartened; I gave learnt Chilean slang for having bad breath and a sallow complexion, after all.

Our daughter continued to struggle with sleeping at appropriate times. Quite how she managed to cope while we were on holiday I can’t understand, but we’re now in a strange situation where we have to stop her from sleeping too much and persuade her to sleep more. She must think her parents are fickle or callous idiots, but at least she sleeps most of the time. Even with the musical apocalypse that is Saturday evening in Chinatown, she’s slumbering. Though she may just be conserving her energy for a two a.m. start.

I decided it was high time to shed some of my holiday weight, so I fired up the Xbox and had another go on Kinect Fitness. After it pointed out that I’ve not been exercising for a long while, the "game" put me through a brutal warm up and then a punishing series of exercises. I had to quit one set: commanded to do a series of push-ups from the plank position, and incapable of doing so because I was sweating so much I couldn’t keep myself stable, I felt defeated by my body’s perspiration. Since, with cruel humour, the Xbox keeps suggesting exercises that involve waving my hands in the path of the blades of our ceiling fan, I have to keep the fan turned off. But as there was a storm outside, I also had to shut the windows, turning our flat into a sweatbox even before I started jumping up and down like a half wit.

Suitably impressed by this athleticism, my wife fell asleep on the sofa. Incensed, I awoke her and made her go to bed. If my wife is going to be sent to sleep by my exertions, she should at least be on appropriate furniture.

Later, the human alarm clock went off, screaming at us to notify a requirement for more milk. I carried our daughter round to my wife and then beat a retreat, preparing the computer so we could watch the last two weeks motorcycle races that we missed while traveling. On the one hand it’s great to watch lunatics zipping around on high powered motorcycles, but the entire commentary seemingly consists of "a great battle" and "line astern" repeated ad nauseam, making me worried that we’re going to wreck our child’s vocabulary. Lucky, then, that she’s in the other room asleep, rather than watching all of this.


2 responses to “Que?”

  1. I was remembering yesterday the days when I used to think it was normal to fall asleep in the bath. Just as well you don’t have one.

    Isn’t motorcycle racing rather soporific?

    • It isn’t normal to fall asleep in the bath?

      Some of those races this season have been very dull. The ones with monumental errors and angry men running around the pit lane yelling at one another have been rather more entertaining, although for the wrong reasons, if we’re thinking about sport.

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