I had another good night’s sleep. Surprisingly, the inflatable bed has held its pressure so far. Whenever I’ve slept on an inflatable surface before, I invariably woke up on the hard ground after it slowly deflated overnight. This inflatable mattress is clearly better quality than the ones I’ve lain on.
All the kids, except the baby, were already off to school when I stirred. Shortly thereafter, Sandy and JL set out for some retail therapy. Undoubtedly, Sandy would be spending my salary, which had just landed in our bank account. We split things evenly. I earn the money, and she spends it—evenly.
The salary landed right on cue. It was the usual amount, which was less than I’d expected, because the 96 hours of excess accrued holiday time I converted into salary about six weeks ago still hasn’t arrived. I put it down to missing the monthly cutoff date when it didn’t arrive in August, but that can’t be the reason anymore. I reached out to my company’s HR department and CC’d my boss. Hopefully, they’ll pick this up, and I’ll get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later.
I tried to upload Day 1’s blog entry to my website, but things soon went south. An innocuous-looking update was waiting to be installed, so I installed it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, updates install without incident. This was apparently the one time it didn’t. It left my website in a semi-usable state. Fortunately, I’m an IT guy, so I tried to log into the back-end to sort it out. Alas, I couldn’t connect to WHM in a browser, even though I could log in to the server itself via SSH. I eventually had to raise a ticket with my hosting provider, so the website will remain in its current state until they wake up in Australia. In the meantime, I will upload the blogs to my Facebook timeline in full, rather than posting only the link to the respective website pages.
After temporarily giving up on fixing the website, I took Joey out to Maccas. He wasn’t hungry, but I was. I also needed to recharge the car again to keep as much charge in the battery as possible.
I did want to sit at Maccas and spend some time on my laptop writing up the blog. Alas, I forgot my laptop, so I wrote a few notes on my iPhone instead. We packed up and left once the car was nearing 80% charge again.
Back home, I finished writing up the notes and started putting the blog together. For the rest of the morning and afternoon, I chilled at the house, sitting at the kitchen table on my laptop. Jay was working at home, as he normally does, glued to his work laptop too.
JL and Jay have a system that lets them see on a kitchen screen if someone approaches the front door. A voice message stating that fact is also played. It’s a neat system which I’m a tad envious of. It went off a few times today. One such occasion was when Sandy and JL returned from their shopping jaunt. Evidently, they had been to Primark. It’s been scientifically proven that no woman can enter Primark and leave without at least one full bag of apparel and other bits and pieces. Sandy and JL are no exception. Both walked through the door carrying bulging bags.
Sandy and Joey had left not long thereafter for Smyths Toys again. Joey still had some money, which was burning a hole in his pocket. He still hasn’t learned impulse control when it comes to spending. To be fair, neither has Sandy. I got a message from Sandy saying they had decided to head to Toby Carvery for dinner, and that we didn’t need to dish them up a dinner here. Jay whipped up a lovely plate of gammon, eggs and potato wedges, so that was their loss. Yum!
Since some of the kids had after-school activities, the house was decidedly less hectic today after the school run. I managed to find a few minutes to give one of them some tuition in how to use Bambu Studio, the software to operate their 3D printer. Like us, they have a Bambu Lab P2S printer, but they tend to use the Bambu Handy iPhone app, which has considerably fewer settings to tweak the prints. The computer app gives you much more control over a wide range of print settings, some of which I demonstrated.
Eventually, JL brought the remaining kids back to the house, which livened things up even more. I picked up where I left off yesterday and played a few more games of chess with one of them. JL quietly confided that this child mentioned this morning that she was hoping Uncle Chris would play more chess with her today. I’m loving how the kids are opening up to me. I really feel like I’m making genuine connections with them all, so this is starting to look like I’m achieving what I set out to with this trip. Honestly, I’m not sure who is getting more out of it all—the kids or me.
Today was originally to be the day I treated all the kids to a trip to Maccas. After discussing it with JL, we pushed it to Friday (tomorrow), since some of the kids had after-school activities, and it wasn’t logistically possible to get everyone in the same place at the same time, despite our best intentions to make it all work. JL noted that tomorrow would be just as challenging, so we’ve had to adjust our plans slightly to make everything work. The children with the extra-curricular activities tomorrow will still do those as planned while the rest of us have our Maccas meal. We’ll then bring something back to the house for those who miss out. It would have been nice to get everyone together at the same time, but that’s the challenge of managing a baby and six school children, all different ages and with different busy schedules. Honestly, I don’t know how JL and Jay manage to juggle everything all the time. Hats off to them both for somehow pulling it off while keeping their sanity intact.
I spent some time this evening figuring out why a 3D print one of the kids had started was going astray. The corners were lifting, which eventually caused the print to fail. The model was printed using the Bambu Handy mobile phone app, and I didn’t have access to the original 3MF file to tweak the settings. After thoroughly cleaning the build plate and slightly raising its temperature, which was all I really could do, I restarted the print using the printer’s physical control panel. Fortunately, it seems to be printing well now, so hopefully that will be ready by morning, and nobody will have to wake up disappointed.
Everyone else has gone to bed, and I’m now the last holdout. Since it’s now 23:20, I think it’s time I turned in. Nighty night.