I planned to have a bit more ready for this weekend, maybe even start my official word count for The Last Days of Earth, but it looks like I’m still getting up to speed after Greyblade and my little blog hiatus. So I’ll just babble for a little while about random stuff.

April has barely started and I’m ready for it to be done. At least we get a public holiday in May, and it might just be warm enough for the bus drivers to turn off the heating in the buses. For reference, it’s still chilly outside right now, but it’s downright warm when you’re sitting in a crowded bus, especially given the warm clothes you still sort of need to wear while you’re getting from home to bus and bus to office and back again. And even more especially given the fact that buses are vacuum sealed and heated to about 35°C, and the sun blazing through the magnifying-windows heats that to about 45°C.

It’s been a busy week, but a fun one. Went to the movies with the kids, had a write night of moderate success, and wrote a lot of blog posts and comments and e-mails and somehow managed to fit at least seven hours of work a day in between.

This weekend, Wump is off at camp (she was excited at first but she wasn’t thrilled when she realised it would mean all her staying-up-and-reading-all-night and sleeping-in-as-late-as-she-wants plans were foiled by the whole camp timetable problem. Sooner or later her genes will out and she’ll stop doing “activities” and “things”, and just wrap herself up in a cocoon and read books like her mum and dad did.

Maybe the encroaching heat of summer will drive her out of the cocoon, but it’s just as likely to put her into an inactive torpor anyway. Just in underpants instead of blankets.

Anyway, with Wump out of the house I have decided to take Toop and Wally to Hoplop today, for a while at least. Last time I was at Hoplop, they had a deal where you could buy your entry fee for next time at Hoplop for half the price. The catch was that you have to use those tickets within a few months. Devilishly clever. So I’m saving something like €20, but also taking kids to Hoplop which will ultimately cost me. But then, I would have gone to Hoplop with them again at some point anyway, and paid full price, and this way maybe I can put off doing it again for a while even though we still need to take Wump and her friends because we oh-so-cleverly gave one of them a “day at Hoplop sometime” gift as a birthday present, and we weren’t clever enough to put a use-by date on it.

So inevitably, sooner or later we’ll be going back. Just have to try not to spend too much cash here this weekend.

We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of writing done while Toop and Wally run around, but these two are a goddamn menace together to they will probably need to be watched.