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A good sleep last night, but still not enough to prevent me from a nap at 4pm. To be fair I think I have picked up a bug from the kids and another day of doing the majority of the childcare (Catie has a writing deadline and we do our best to help each other out when the other is working) is bound to exhaust you. Catie had done an amazing job yesterday of making sure one of the bedrooms is the main play room and as child proofed as we can make it. But Ernie still can’t be left alone even in a padded cell. So there is no rest and nowhere to hide. As always, single parents, I salute you. I’ve had a weekend of quasi single parenting (but with a good deal of help) and I am almost dead.
But also, amongst all the fear and a three year old testing her boundaries it’s an enormous pleasure to spend so much time in the company of these two idiots. I think we had fun. But I can’t really remember.
Some Amazon based fun today. I had ordered a globe light bulb to go in the fitting in the downstairs hallway. This one has blown a couple of times and so I spent a bit more money on an LED bulb. The light has a glass fitting which means only a smallish light bulb will fit in there, but when my purchase arrived I discovered I had bought a bulb the size of a small melon. There had been nothing in the description to indicate this, or anything that gave any scale to the picture. It was not going to fit in the fitting. And I couldn’t be arsed to return it, so it went in a drawer, even though I didn’t think there was anywhere I could use it. It could have been worse and I am sure there are many more extreme cases of items of unexpected sizes turning up.
But then another bulb blew in a lamp (bulbs seem to pop very quickly in this house) and I didn’t have a spare. The globe one was too big but I realised that I could use the bulb from the lounge, which has always been a bit dim for the room…. And then I had a eureka moment. It was like a light bulb had lit up above my head. The big globe light would fit in the lounge fitting AND it would provide more light than the bulb I was replacing.
Inadvertently my mistake had improved my life very slightly.
Hooray for incompetency.
Still no light in the hall, but you can’t have everything.
I also recorded Chapter 2 of stone clearing today, making a nice late find of a biggish stone. But on my night time walk I uncovered an absolute beauty, right near the entrance to the field, that I had to prize up with my trowel and was as big as my size 8 wellington boot. There is no greater thrill than finding a monster stone. It has made me realise that value of anything is all relative. A stone that size makes me happier and is more meaningful than finding a similar sized piece of gold. Or a huge diamond. No one could be more gleeful than me, knelt in a field in the dark, pulling out that baby sized stone from the cold womb that is the void.
