Sunday?

After staying up with the slugs two nights this week, it should have been about Friday today, but somehow it's Sunday. What the hell? The phone keeps ringing while I'm asleep. Sometimes I answer and explain briefly that I'm asleep, sometimes the ring incorporates into a dream. Once the ringing became the buzzing of a swarm of beetles that I kicked off a ladder and then followed me while navigating the labyrinth under New St garage. Then I'm awake in the early hours when the decent people I should be phoning back or (in the case of the kiddos) feeding are safely asleep. I gather the poor weans got themselves pizza last night while I was out for the count. This reminds me how work and drugs serve to anaesthetise proles so they can no longer think or plan for themselves. Since not working, I can't believe how much I used to pack into a day, especially when the kiddos were little. Amazing!

Three developments this week, all of them mixed blessings:
1) Driving licence returned
After an unfortunate and shameful misjudgment, I can soon drive again and the poisoned chalice of my wee banger (used by H-who-is-very-good-to-me for the last year) will revert to my care and concern. Therefore yesterday in a dream I couldn't remember how to drive properly, and was caught in a police trap the first day at a complicated multi-roundabout, somewhat like the Maybury. Suffice it to say that this was not the actual cause of my ban, and that the car has been well tended by H-etc. over the year. The Cooncil has re-zoned my area into pay-fer spaces over the year, adding to the old costs (insurance, road tax, upkeep, MOT, petrol). The last year without driving hasn't been that difficult, truth to tell, cushioned by H-etc.'s supermarket runs and an excellent central bus network in Edinburgh.

2) Family Mediation meeting
Attended this straight after a nightshift with the slugs, an intervention suggested by the kiddos' Dad and gratefully taken up. The focus of Family Mediation is childrens' well-being after a family break-up. We have separate interviews at first, then will meet later to try for agreement in the kiddos' best interests. The counsellor was used to orders of magnitude greater discord and dysfunction than we present, and in conversation it's clear that the bulk of their work is court-ordered interventions between truly warring parents and damaged kiddos. Meanwhile, over the last week kiddos' Dad has made several conciliatory gestures regarding kiddos' activities and social involvements. In the cyclical nature of his censure, I predict that this battle was a feint and an anxiety pang on his part. Because history is contingent, I can expect another such in approx 18 months' time and I shall gird my loins accordingly.

3) Jobbies

The slug-watcher corp seem to like me and took me to dinner at a posh bar with pumping music to reinforce this. The dining room was so dark I couldn't read the menu. They made me an offer to make me provisional slug researcher, which I do anyway. I happen to like the workers they've employed, which helps bed in.