Rachel did her First Holy Communion yesterday, the high point of a long week of preparing the house for invasion by relatives. We are anti-houseproud. We just don’t care. Except on special occassions, then we rush around like mad things painting, decorating, cleaning and tidying. My week has been consumed with refreshing the woodstain on [...]
Lisa went over to London yesterday for the press launch of Britain’s Got Talent. And got stuck there, due to huge clouds of volcanic ash which have caused airports to shut down all over the UK. At the moment, it looks like it may be Saturday or later before she can fly home. Luckily, her [...]
I am an Atheist Dad, and I’m coming out of the closet. Actually, I was never really in the closet. I parted ways with religion when I was roughly 16. The provability of Christianity’s claims was a sticking point. Growing up in Northern Ireland was a large part of it. I grew up in the midst [...]
Frazzled. That’s how I feel today. It’s been a crushing week in Daddyville. It’s been tough going for a couple of reasons. First: the kids have been off school for Easter, meaning they’re constantly around the house looking for food and entertainment. Second: our second car broke down, leaving me stranded in the house whenever [...]
It’s the end of a tough week here. The cancer situation continues to impact our lives in ways we’d never imagined. Lisa’s spending increasing amounts of time in Belfast looking after her mother. It’s a life of shopping, doctor and hospital appointments and tending to her mother at home. She fits in work when she can, [...]
It must be said – since about April last year a ton of things have gone horribly wrong for us. We’ve been worried about money, whether we can continue to run a home business. My father was diagnosed with cancer and died. Phew, that should have been the worst thing to happen, right? Wrong. After [...]
Rachel had a memorably epic meltdown a couple of days ago. We’d gone to one of the local outlet shopping centers where there’s a Subway that we frequent. Afterward, we let the kids run round the pirate park for a while to burn off some of that excess energy. Before we went, Lisa and I [...]
Right, let’s talk about the night of 1st July 2009 and the bloody, wrist-slashing adventure that ensued. We’d only buried my father at the weekend, and with that rather large event behind us, there was suddenly a metric ton of paperwork to take care of. Notifying all the various companies he had accounts with, getting [...]
Let’s come straight out and say it: Lisa’s mother has been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. The events that led up to this have been unfolding over the past month, and a fairly concrete diagnosis came something over a week or a fortnight ago. Lisa, naturally, was devastated. She didn’t help herself much by doing some [...]
You may recall that back in May we took in a dog called Tommy. Well, I came to call him Tom, because that sounded more manly when calling him in the street. Anyway, the thing with Tom is that he was a total nightmare. Without an enclosed back yard, we had to tie him up [...]
