It’s been maybe twenty years since I last had one — before the kids went to school, I think. And I don’t know that we used it much, because we already had plenty of books at home. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. Eventually, I realised I hadn’t used it for a couple of years, didn’t know where the physical card was, and didn’t think about it again for a couple of decades.
I think I was eating a sandwich… No. No, it was a wrap. That’s right. I had some leftover rice and maple-baked salmon, and I decided to heat that up for lunch. And thus, for the forty-second year in a row, I missed the Melbourne Cup.
Normally I do it on purpose, because I’m weird. (I missed it when I was 19 and felt quite special, so I kept on missing it, each year, on purpose. But this year, I just forgot it was on.
Slow day on the keyboard today because the house is full of tradies doing roof repairs. It’s an insurance claim, thank god, because it looks like a very, very spendy job. There’s at least a dozen guys, a crane, a shit ton of scaffolding and new roofing iron, new insulation, a new solar hot water system and… now… a new ceiling for my library after one of the roofers stepped through it.
It took a while, thanks to that perfidious leasing company we used a couple of years ago, but we finally traded in the Mini (genuinely sad trombone) and picked up the new car: a fully electric Volvo EX30.
I dunno that I’ll get a single word written today.
Man, it turns out writing a book in less than seven years is really hard work and takes quite a bit of time each day. Not seven years, of course, but quite a few hours every day if you want to deliver it in less than seven years
I first noticed the story about the epidemic of phone theft in London about a week ago because of some Aussie chick who chased her thief (unsuccessfully) and was so pissed off she tracked down all the CCTV footage of the crime and posted it, after which it went viral.
Hey. It’s me, JB, apologising for clogging up your inbox if this means nothing to you, but… if you’ve been waiting until World War 3.2 appeared on Kindle Unlimited so you can read it for ‘free’ (whereby ‘free’ I mean you agree to give Jeff Bezos your credit card number and possibly some of your DNA every month)… your time is here.
I just spent a very satisfying hour entering every verified instance of Anthropic stealing my books to train their AI into the official settlement claim site. Not so satisfying? I only had five claims to make because my useless publishers didn’t register the copyright of most of my books.
