June, 2017 - cushtie.com

Month: June 2017

  • Further tears before bedtime

    So tonight it was my turn again to put Destroyer down. This would be the last time before her second birthday, and she marked it in style by being quite copacetic while I read her the story of Little Miss Magic, and then literally climbing the walls, screaming constantly for her mother, once I put […]

  • The Ballad Of Black Tom

    I finished The Ballad Of Black Tom this evening, after putting the kids to bed. It’s a rare Lovecraftian story that has a happy ending, and the most positive we can say of this one is that the protagonist defenestrates himself, rather than having his mind eaten by eldritch horrors.

  • Tears at bedtime

    I tried to get Destroyer to go to sleep tonight, but she was unsatisfied with the replacement offered for her mother, and screamed and screamed and screamed. She lay on the floor (carefully) and then kicked her feet, still screaming, almost knocking down the old blinds, and then went to the pile of books on […]

  • Coffee doesn’t always work

    This morning we woke about 7:30 and watched yesterday’s Dutch MotoGP race, and after screaming at the screen (the last fifteen minutes were full of nailbiting action, even if we were watching a recording from yesterday) we ate the remaining food in the house (some yogurt and two cupcakes) and then went out for our […]

  • Fighting to sleep

    I failed to heed my own advice and didn’t stay awake for long on the flight; I was unconscious by halfway through Miss Congeniality (just like the scriptwriters, ironically enough) and slept soundly for eight hours. Which meant I woke about midnight Singapore time and couldn’t get back to sleep, and so I arrived home […]

  • Up up and away again

    I had an anthropology graduate drive me to the airport today, so that meant I got to talk to somebody about colonialism for half an hour. Roughly half my Lyft drivers have been interesting on this trip, and the rest hardly spoke; there was an ex-domain broker, a political agent, an ultramarathon runner and a […]

  • Remote sickness

    My wife called me this morning (or this evening – I’m now tired enough to not be able to comprehend timezones) to tell me that the girls were sick. La Serpiente has mouldy feet, and Destroyer is coming down with foot and mouth disease. It’s enough to make you want to stay put on the […]

  • Gin is the thing

    This evening I got a Lyft to Redwood City, where my friend lives with a mound of dogs and some peach trees. My Lyft drivers seem to becomimg more and more unreliable; the first one I tried to book got lost and drove around the carpark at the office, then drove off down the highway […]

  • Not Quite Drinking In LA

    Tomorrow I’m visiting a friend for dinner, and since I failed to take anything with me the last time I went to see him, this time I’ve overcompensated by fetching two bottles of wine and a triplet of different gins from BevMo, some sort of beverage supermarket. This was as not much fun as it […]

  • Return to comedy

    After work today I went with an old friend from Hong Kong (and now a co-worker) to a comedy night in Santa Clara. Even getting there was the stuff of hilarity; there are identical Hilton Garden Inns up and down Palo Alto, and instead of being picked up outside the one I stayed in, we […]