Let’s see: what happened this week? (My mum has reminded me that I forgot to mention the parental visits in my last post: we’ve had two two separate instances of “nannie/nanna” visiting, and Jules insists that he went to the moon with grandma, so perhaps you can understand how I forgot.

My last post here was July. /me sighs. It’s not that we haven’t been doing things that are worthy of writing about — things I might want to remember later, to read and reminisce, to recall what it was like to be “young and free” (read: almost 40 and a parent) in my (hopefully short-lived¹) dotage.

Today we spent over 20 minutes in traffic to go the 1 kilometre from home to preschool — it’s time to start looking for a house on the other side of Parramatta Road again.

We’re all recovering from a stomach bug this week. You may have already seen the photo: Jules bumped his head on Saturday, playing with a plastic crate we’d bought to allow us to put some of his older toys into storage ahead of his birthday.

Another late night for me. My project at work is pretty demanding, with very tight deadlines and quite a bit to do in each sprint. I’m trying to keep on top of it, but it does mean I’ve done a bit more “out of hours work” than I’d like.

More house-hunting today — I think we saw five places today (might’ve been more, as for a couple of them I stayed in the car with a sleeping Jules and let Dee scope it out on her own).

Finding a new house is proving difficult. We applied for a place on View Street, just a couple of blocks from our current place. Nice little three-bedroom, with a big enough yard, nice kitchen, good little deck outside — in short, perfect for our little clan.

It’s 2016, and I’m dusting off the ‘blog again. Sure, I might not be able to keep up with writing here, but I’ve got to try — it’s something I actually kind of enjoy, after all, and being able to go back and revisit my thoughts from a year ago (or ten!) is illuminating in the least. This is a year for enjoyment, I think: I’ve been giving too much focus, if not time (what parent has time, after all), to my work, and feeling guilty at both ends when I don’t give enough to EITHER my projects or my family — let alone carving out that tiny bit of personal space required to recharge, reflect, write, meditate, be alone, be myself. And while I have given up the late nights and energy drinks, mostly, I’m still finding it hard to say “it can wait until Monday” … and to be happy with that decision.

Last night I had a (free) trial class of “Northstar-style” jūjutsu at the local recreation centre. Fun, and I was drenched in sweat inside of five minutes!

 Ah, beautiful, delicate irony. I becomes apparent that I spoke too soon when I confessed to feeling satisfied for the first time in years — within hours of my last post, our landlords called to tell us they’re selling our home.