Month: December 2020

Today they released Battle Sister for the Oculus Quest. This is a VR game based on Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe, in which you play the part of an elite warrior nun, clad in black power armour adorned with fleur de lys and toting a gun that fires massive exploding bullets. And that’s before we […]

Today we assembled the girls’ second beanbag. My wife bought a pair of these from Amazon last week, and they’re quite neat: they come as a tightly packed roll of foam, which expands once unpacked over two days, until it’s twice the size it was shipped as. Then the girls help me to stuff the […]

I’m not sure how I managed to sleep in until 1030 today. Were my kids off the pace? Shouldn’t they have been jumping on my bed to wake me up? Very out of character.

Every day so far in December it’s been gloriously sunny. I woke today (after staying up too late reading Dead Lies Dreaming, the latest Charles Stross novel) to golden light streaming into the bedroom. It only took us about four hours to get out of the house and over to St Edward’s State Park, where […]

I went to mail a package to the UK today. The girls accompanied me on a walk up to Sip and Ship, the local shipping joint, and to ask questions to distract me while I got the package weighed. Until they told me the price: $215 to send it. As this contained something worth about […]

I made a semi-concerted effort at clearing out my Gmail inbox today, by deleting the first fifty messages in there that I’d didn’t want, filtering for everything by the same senders and deleting that too, and unsubscribing from all of those lists. It barely made a dent; I still have 1,200 priority emails to read, […]

Today was my first day of work after a twelve day break, and the shift from wandering around doing nothing much in particular, to having to focus on specific things again, was really tiring. At least most people were also off all of last week, so the usual titanic backlog of emails hadn’t accumulated. Still, […]

For my birthday I got one of the greatest gifts: a lie-in. I eventually got out of bed just before 8 because I wanted to, rather than because I had to, and opened my presents. As usual, a good haul: I got some books to read, some fancy chocolate, a new t-shirt with the logo […]

One of our friends started his new job today, and I’d volunteered to give him a lift to work. Not realising that this would mean getting up at 6:30 on a day off and driving in a rainstorm to Redmond, where I got confused by my satnav and the complex road junctions, and took him […]