Overall a good month. I did my exercise (150 active minutes per week) for the whole month. The weather was alright. This was however the month where Kid A chucked the TV remote at the TV thus wrecking said TV. It was gone way before it’s time considering I got like 15 years out of my previous one.

It was an accident. So we have had to move on.

First Weekend

It was hot. It was very hot. It was the kind of hot that I moved back to Scotland to avoid.

On the Saturday we went to a kids’ birthday party across the road for a bit until our kids’ behaviour was so appalling that we had to leave. Not helped by the heat tbh.

On the Sunday I was supposed to go out for date night but for us that is like at 5pm. It was so damn hot that I got as far as the train station before freaking out. Retreated to our house which is easily 4c cooler than outside.

Second Weekend

On the Saturday we were supposed to go to a fair at the nursery.

But we couldn’t get them to agree to leave so it became a mad flash point. The kind that just winds me the heck up. In the evening the kids refused to sleep until like 10pm so the evening was a washout. Until I hopped online for some counter strike with a friend. I still cannot shoot for shit but I will try the objectives every time and think the team winning is better than the number of kills. So that was going well.

Third Weekend

Scotland played and beat Norway. That was about all I can remember lol.

Fourth weekend

As with the rest of the house the kitchen is a bit broken. We are about to get the bathroom replaced and the kitchen is in the plan but it won’t be ripped out for a few years.

One of the annoying things is a perfectly good fridge/freezer we bought that is presenting problems where water gathers inside it.

It is outside of warranty (so not easy way to replace it) and annoyingly one of the screws seems to have been stuck on by a rather assertive machine. I cannot get it undone to properly look at the right part of the fridge so the best we can do is take the water out every 3 months or so and give the inside a clean. Now.. this would be fine. But the exact drawer we need to take out to do this needs the fridge door to open slightly more than 90 degrees where we have it installed it can open exactly 90 degrees. To clean it we have to move the fridge out a bit which is a massive massive pain in the butt. I have to empty an entire kitchen unit and move that to get the fridge out every time. So that is what we did on Saturday.

Played some football manager too. I have gotten all the way to 2025 and my team is now established in the premiership and somehow finished 4th putting me into the Champions League. This weekend I got through my summer transfer window and finally have three quality choices for every player. This means I am gonna go for every single competition as best I can since we can weather any injuries and 3 matches a week with smart rotation.

Other bits

• DIY Guitar Kit – I have *still* not started work on the kit guitar finishing like I thought I would. I have all the items. But I lacked the energy to sand a guitar for hours and hoovering up the dust from the living room is going to be an ongoing chore. I will get on it in March April May June July August!
• Football Manager 2023 – I have progressed the Birmingham City save to season 3 having survived in the Premier League and somehow won the Carabao cup. This success really broke the game as I had made so much money for the club but they still gave me 0% of transfer revenue to spend. With the cup win we qualified for the UEFA conference league (of which I had no experience before). This would put even more pressure on my small and young squad. This league has been amazingly easy so far and each victory pays you £400k a match. The wins in this have easily covered the wage bill this year several times over. This has massively boosted the financial might of BCFC! To cope with all the fixtures I have had to heavily rotate the squad such that everyone is going to play around 30 matches this season. As I write we are hovering around euro qualification via PL, in the UEFA conference league, in the Carabao and FA cups and just about to complete the January transfer window. The board *finally* gave me a transfer budget this January (when they finally realised how we are insanely profitable). However, the club’s prestige is such that we cannot attract better than we have and about 6 of the first team have release clauses that make them tasty targets. I added 3 players to the squad of similar quality to what I had. That has helped the team continue to perform with boosted quality from the bench. Yes I have to rotate but now you are basically full strength every match.
• Fubar – A TV show on Netflix. This was like a live action Archer in many respects and I am totally here for it. The humour isn’t the same but I got a lot of fun out of this.
• Spiderman Life Story – I periodically try to get into graphic novels. This one had an interesting idea that Spiderman had aged in real-time through the events that occurred so they could show him interacting with real-world events. It was a nice afternoon’s diversion reading it out in the sunshine.