La Serpiente had a sleepover at a friend’s place to celebrate her birthday, and came back in the afternoon after going canoeing. We spent some time with Destroyer in the morning getting breakfast, then went over plans for the house with our general contractor. Come the afternoon, everyone’s tempers were getting short due to the […]

I woke at 5 to find both my daughters in my bed, so I retaliated by going to La Serpiente’s bed to sleep. Except of course I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned and then had to get up at 7 anyway for a call with Europe at 7:30, and then spent the rest of […]

I took my wife out to dinner at La Palmera, a Mexican restaurantnrar my office, along with five of our closest friends. We left the kids behind with a babysitter, and returned just before nine to find them still awake, complaining of the heat, and having somehow removed the screen from their bedroom window while […]

I returned the rental car today, to a very chatty sales rep at Enterprise, when all I wanted was to give back the keys and go. Then I rushed home to spend a day at my desk, attending various meetings and thinking about things, until it got too much and I had to take a […]

The last birthday for a few months is done: my wife had a bad night’s sleep so breakfast in bed was greeted by her rolling over and going back to sleep for an hour, but eventually we cajoled her into getting up and opening her presents. A successful haul: cookery books, new shoes, more books, […]

After a week of being too hot, it drizzled all day today, cold and damp and gloomy. I took the girls down to buy their mother her birthday present this afternoon, and they howled and whined that they deserved a treat, until with Destroyer wailing as she walked down the street I relented and bought […]

Tonight we watched Edgar Wright’s latest film, Last Night In Soho, which has just shown up on HBO Max. It wasn’t quite the runtime pop culture hilarity of Shaun Of The Dead or Hot Fuzz, with a cross between a ghost story and time travel, and horrible fashion students, homesickness-inducing footage of London, and some […]

It’s Destroyer’s birthday tomorrow, so tonight I wrote a series of clues for her, and then we wrapped them up with her presents, and the hope is that in the morning she opens the first present from her sister, then goes downstairs and looks under the sofa for her second, then goes upstairs again for […]

It was stupidly hot yesterday, but the weather broke about six in the evening, and today, despite blue skies it was comparatively chilly. So, rather than being hotboxed in the house, hunched over my computer, I was blessed with a temperate environment to work within.

After all the stress, the party was remarkably relaxed: we drove the kids to the pool, they frolicked for an hour, we went to the park, they ate and sunbathed and ran around, and then they smashed open their piñatas and got more sweets, and then we drove home.