6.30: Arrive home.
7.00: Eat
7.30 – 9.30: Wrangle children into bed.
9.30: Decide not to turn on computer. I will talk to husband or watch television or read my excellent book. Do so.
10.00: Help husband deck the house with laundry. Have my efforts rejected as “laundry does not dry in a bundle”. Mutter darkly about the joy of owning a (very bad for the environment) dryer.
10.15: Husband goes to bed. I tell him I will be up in a minute as I want to read my book in bed.
10.16: Slip over to the computer for a quick look. Cat hops up on my lap with contented purr.
10.17: Stare dolefully at yesterday’s blog post which has received no comments (yes, this remark is addressed to YOU).
10.18: Draft some deathless prose. Post it.
10.35: Trot off to bloglines where I find 630 new posts.
11.30: Still here, reading away, eyesight going, fingers freezing (heat has gone off, haven’t bothered to turn it on again as I will be going to bed in 5 minutes).
11.40: Decide to skip reading the full feed from the Huffington Post, wonder why I ever subscribed. Nearly at the end now. Hurrah.
12.00: OK midnight, I’m definitely going to bed now. Definitely, definitely. Just going to comment on a couple of posts.
12.30: Oh God, oh God, it’s really late, I must go to bed. I’ll be exhausted tomorrow.
12.45: Just going to have a quick look at my sitemeter and then I’m going to bed, definitely, definitely. Look at those readers in China, I wonder how they got here? Oh right, they were searching for wafflemakers. Did anyone look at those links I put in, let’s just quickly check the outclicks.
1.00: Oh God, it’s one in the morning. I must go to bed. I must. I must. Just going to quickly check how does this feedburner/twitter [insert technology of choice here] thing works.
1.15: Too baffling. OK, now I’m definitely going to bed. Just a quick check on the email and then I am definitely going to bed.
1.30: OK, delete the junk mail, tum ti tum. Send a couple of quick mails.
1.45: Maybe just check back to see whether anyone has commented on my deathless prose. Maybe, maybe, but no, oh wait, 45 spam comments. Delete same.
1.50: Just one quick last look at bloglines.
2.10: OK, that’s it. I am definitely going to bed now. Dislodge cat. Try to warm frozen fingers.
2.15: Just going to have a quick read of my book in the bathroom while I wash my teeth and floss.
2.30: God, this book is really good, why did I play on the computer all evening when I could have been reading this?
2.45: Move to sitting on the stairs. No, I’m going to stop reading. I’ll just fill a hot water bottle for myself as I am now frozen to the bone. Filch tepid bottle from daughter’s bed. Go downstairs book in hand and fill bottle up from the kettle. Back upstairs, book in hand.
3.00: Will sit for just one moment on the stairs with delightfully warm bottle toasting my perished extremities. This book is really excellent. If I go to bed now and don’t get up until 8 I will still have five hours sleep which is lots, Margaret Thatcher survived on four (though, of course, that explains why she was so cranky).
3.45: Finish book. Put child on the toilet. Crawl into bed. Husband says blearily “what time is it?” Am frozen. Get up again to refill hot water bottle. Back to bed to instant and dreamless sleep.
5.30: Husband cannot sleep. He tosses and turns and eventually gets up. I say blearily “what time is it?” He goes downstairs to put on a wash and do some work.
6.00: Some child crawls into bed beside me. I swear that tonight I will go to bed early. This can, in fact, be achieved. I say to my husband “help me, stay here and make me turn off the computer”. And he does and then I am tucked up and lights off by 11.
And a good morning to you too
5.45: Princess arrives into our room coughing and chatting.
6.15: Mr. Waffle gives up the struggle and gets up, goes downstairs hangs out the washing and makes the children’s sandwiches [yes, I know, a treasure]. The Princess follows him.
6.20: The Princess returns; her father would rather hang out the washing than talk to her.
6.30: I decamp to the Princess’s bed.
7.00: The Princess wakes me and says she is going downstairs, I can go back to my own bed. I do.
7.05: The cat jumps on me and starts running up and down my person.
7.10: The cat finally settles on my head with her tummy purring over my ear and her paws kneading my cheek.
7.30: Mr. Waffle gets into the shower. The cat leaps from my head so that she can stand outside the bathroom door meowing loudly.
7.45: I get up.
7.50: Mr. Waffle leaves for work – mercifully, it is only one day a week that he has to leave so early.
8.00: The Princess re-emerges. She asks for a hot water bottle. I give it to her.
8.05: Daniel emerges. He takes me by the hand and shows me that the cat has settled in his bed. He demands pancakes for breakfast. Their father, the only person who can make pancakes, has gone to work. Daniel gets cranky. I remember that my sister brought Ikea pancakes when she came to stay. I root around the freezer, find these and deploy them. Revolting though they appear, they meet the identified need.
8.20: I leave the pair downstairs and go upstairs to wake Michael. I decide, in my ultimate wisdom that now would be a good time to put away laundry. Because I have so much spare time. That must be it.
8.30: I get Michael up. He has wet the bed (alas).
8.35: The others come upstairs. I persuade them into their clothes. The Princess is helpful – hurrah. She reads a page of Dora for every item of clothes the boys put on. They are all dressed. Rejoice.
8.50: We go downstairs. The cat has, as, alas, is becoming her habit, used the time while we were upstairs, to do a wee at the bottom of the stairs and cover it with plaster from the ever growing hole in the wall. I stop the children (all in socks) on the stairs and mop up the wee.
8.50: Michael has to have breakfast. I start my morning refrain “The school has already opened its doors, there are children there already, classes are about to start.”
8.55: Pack the Princess and Daniel into the car. The Princess insists on bringing her hot water bottle. Daniel brings a library book.
9.05: Pack Michael into the car. The Princess has stolen Daniel’s library book. I tell her she can hang on to it on condition she reads it aloud. She does so.
9.15: Arrive (5 minutes late) at school. Daniel refuses to budge from the car until he has had a chance to flick through his library book himself. A free and frank exchange of views follows which ends with both parties glaring at each other. I bring the other two to the door of the school and go back for Daniel.
9.20: Ensconce boys in classroom; make up with Daniel and have a quick word with the teacher. Emerge to find herself waiting in the corridor. She wants me to accompany her to her classroom – four floors up. Do so. Am then sent about my business and told not to kiss her as this is embarrassing.
9.30: Arrive back to car (hazards flashing – I am that annoying driver) and zoom to work. Traffic miraculously light allowing me to be at my desk at the breath-takingly early hour of 9.45.
9.45: Colleague telephones to give me a blow by blow account of her difficult meeting. Sympathise. “Is it only 9.45?” she says. ” After going through that, I feel like it’s four in the afternoon.” As do I.
10.00: I realise that I forgot to feed the cat. Ring Mr. Waffle to see whether he can get home during the morning. He reassures me that he fed the cat before he left.
Today’s lovely links:
One of my favourite bloggers is back. Hurrah.
Pretty pictures.
Knowledge of French and Belgium required to appreciate this one; but very much worth it, if you fall into this category.
Dot supplies the answer to a question that has been plaguing the Waffles.
Our Justice Minister is
upset about yesterday’s soccer match.
I really like these little google videos. Health warning: my husband thinks that they’re creepy.
A lesson in gender equality
Male friend with whom I am having lunch: I have to fill in one of these pointless EU gender equality things.
Me[neutrally]: Mmm, what do you mean?
Pause to pass up a folder to older gentleman struggling to reach it from his barstool [lunch in the pub, some stereotypes are true].
MF: Ach, you know, just ticking lots of boxes and really, do we need it?
Me: Well, it depends, I suppose.
Pause to pick up the umbrella which has tumbled from the older gentleman’s grasp.
Older gentleman in patrician tones: Thank you very much young lady, you are like [pauses to search for top compliment from range available to him], you are like a really excellent P.A.
MF: Bite your lip, bite your lip, ok we need the gender equality thing.
Homage to Myles
From Frank McNally’s column last week:
“…New metaphors were badly needed at the time. As long ago as 1999 – probably during a wet day on Hope Street – I called elsewhere in this paper for the decommissioning of the peace process’s “deadly arsenal of clichésâ€.
This included an estimated 40,000 windows of opportunity, 50,000 variations on the theme of moving the situation forward, and perhaps half a million phrases to describe nothing happening: including such foreign imports as “log-jamâ€, “stand-offâ€, and the French-made “impasse†(which was smuggled in, probably via Libya, during the late 1980s but never deployed properly because most broadcast journalists lacked the necessary phonetic training).
And this was only the more recent material. If you went back further, there was any amount of other stuff lying around, like those old jokes about the “Carmelite and the ballot box†and the need to take “all the nuns out of Irish politicsâ€.
Rust might have made these unusable, I thought. But even so: most newspaper readers would not rest easy until the material was put permanently beyond use. I recall wishing that we could just dump all the clichés “in a big hole somewhere, and pour concrete over them  ”
Look, nobody said that all of the NaBloPoMo content had to be original.
Oh very funny
From: Me
Sent: 16 November 2009 12:13
To: IT Helpdesk
Subject: My printer will only print instruction pages in Swedish
Any advice?
From: IT Helpdesk
Sent: 16 November 2009 13:19
To: Me
Subject: RE: My printer will only print instruction pages in Swedish
Learn Swedish.
Regards
Helpdesk
And a couple of links:
Don’t be a nanny in Dubai.
Belle de Jour outs herself as a scientist, what a surprise, we were sure that she was an arts graduate.
The Americans are excercised by Obama’s bowing.
From the PhD comic people, so true:
Car games
Boys [singing]: Stop, in the name of love, before you break my heart.
Me [singing back]: Think it oooover, haven’t I been good to you?
Daniel [speaking]: I don’t know.
Daniel: I spy with my little eye…something lovely.
Michael: Mummy!