After convincing my son to let me destroy _upgrade _his toy robot, I was quick to order a bunch of Arduino-related gear online. A month later and “Bingo” is still sitting in pieces, but when the parts started arriving last weekend I was able to make a minor breakthrough: I installed the Arduino …

This weekend I finally convinced Jules that we should take his robot apart. Admittedly, he might have been less enthusiastic if Agent Bingo didn’t already need surgery — one of the DC motors in her legs had stopped working, so the poor thing could only walk around in circles. “Don’t worry,” I …

A long, long week is finally done. I worked from home today, and Dee is sick, so we went to get Jules from “after-care” at about 4pm. (We could have picked him up at 3, when school finishes, but (a) he loves after-school care, and (b) we pay for it either way. Oh yes, Jules has (finally?) started at …

The house is dark, and quiet. It’s peaceful here at the moment — almost half-past midnight, so not entirely unexpected. I’ve googled for a reason to drink an admittedly small single-malt (antioxidants! protection from dementia!) and snuck into the bedroom to retrieve the bottle. “Cinematic Chillout” …

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. It was …

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. …