Tuesday 14 November 2023: Full of cold again

We both had a very late start yesterday. I’m full of cold again, the poet seems to be just getting it. Oh, how we like to share things in our house. The poet, however, was also off on another several-day business trip – fortunately the last one this year, and hopefully they will be fewer in the future.

Storm Debi whipped up a right storm here too, and I had to go out in the wind and rain to secure our fence and gate between the house and the garage. This fence isn’t just for security and aesthetics (although it could look a lot nicer than it does). It also contains the dog in the back garden. But the wind was whipping it backwards and forwards and it kept on rattling not one but three latches free.

At first I tried securing it closed. But then I remembered back to my old building maintenance days that the wind needs to go *through* a fence if it can, and securing the fence just gave the wind a solid target to blow down. So I opened the gate and secured that with the garden incinerator, then I put our three wheelie bins up against the gap to contain the dog.

It worked. The fence didn’t blow down. And when the storm had blown itself out at about 11pm, I went out again in the rain to close the gate, secure it, and put everything away again. And I’m sure that didn’t help the cold at all – well, it probably helped the cold immensely, but it didn’t help me.

In between the storm I was watching events unfold in our parliament.

I was surprised to see, when I switched the laptop on, that I hadn’t finished Monday’s blog post, so that was the first thing I did. I shared the gig list post reminding bands to add their gigs to the gig list, and I shared the poster and the event for Monkey Dust’s next gig.

The rest of the day was spent brainstorming short story ideas for up and coming calls for submissions. There are some I’m itching to get on with, but others I feel a bit meh about. It was good to sit and write in longhand in one of my touchy-feely notebooks. With the storm raging outside, it was nice to feel at peace with the world.