Keeping ticking along

Joy & Forgetfulness has been quite quiet of late - so much so that some of you wrote to ask why.   Mainly I've had my hands full - delightfully full in fact.  Unfortunately Mrs Kinch became very seriously ill immediately after the arrival of the twins, so there is a little bit more to be done around the place.  She is on the mend, but it will be a long time before she's back to her full Mary Poppins like efficiency.

Matilda (left) and Edward (right, underneath the chair)

He tells me the clutch is gone and that I'm going to have to send to Germany for a replacement. 

I've managed to make a great deal of progress since I was injured, but unfortunately a full recovery seems to be eluding me. My balance is slowly returning, but my ability to focus my eyes is taking its time to return.  This means that I can not read for very long and have to ration my screen time quite bit.

However, writing in some form or other is a sickness that I have yet to be cured of.  The last eight months have been the longest period of forced inactivity I can remember and still being able to write, even in some form has been a good way of remaining chipper.

It means that I have to be more selective about where I put my screen time.  I've been able to keep up my column in Miniature Wargames, but its been a bit of a struggle. Joy & Forgetfulness has taken a bit of a back seat - however, I'm hoping to blog a little bit more often now that the symptoms are abating somewhat and I'm getting better at managing them.

My laptop is no doubt beaming details of my darkest secrets to the CIA and the Intelligence Section of the Chinese Communist Party as I type this.  You'd be astonished at the number of things that come with a camera and a microphone these day. Siri, the assistant on my iphone, is perfectly capable of taking dictation.  This does occasionally lead to hilarious typos - my favourite occurred while I was writing a piece on Spanish guerrillas, which Siri rendered as Spanish Auto Giros.  Presumably it is my thick and incomprehensible Irish accent - perhaps a course in colloquial Californian might be in order.

MMMMmmmmm....kay?

One of the tricks I use to get the most out of my time, is to set up the computer and just come back to it for ten minutes.  The machine is on a chair because if I have one of the Kinchlets in the sling, I can type standing up.  I set an alarm on my phone so that I only work for ten or fifteen minutes, thus avoiding the concomitant headache, as it's very easy to overstay my welcome, get lost in what I'm doing and end up with a ringing headache for the rest of the day.

On the whole the system is working relatively well.  I get a couple of hundred words done a day and get to feel like I'm keeping my hand in, while still keeping an eye on the Kinchlets.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to up J&F to at least one post per week - we'll see how it goes.