What I have discovered is that the thrill, excitement and anticipation I used to have on receiving those tickets has been replaced with jaded cynicism. No longer do I wonder if I’m an overnight millionaire, now I just assume £10. The reason is pure and simple. With the exception of one time when I matched 4 numbers and got £60 something I have either received £10 (lotto), £5 (thunderball – which I no longer play) or some pathetic amount like £2.67 (Euromillions, which for me has really been Europence with a total winnings of under £10).

Of late we’ve rather been on a bit of a winning streak with 3 lotto wins (totalling £30) and two Europence wins (totalling just over a fiver) which seems to have turned me into an ungrateful bastard. After all, £35 is better than a swift kick in the teeth and it means we’re only a few quid down on those two months (£9 per month lotto via direct debit and £18 spent on Europence). But no, the green monster looks at the odd couple who won one hundred and something stupid million and seven fucking pence (because when you’re that rich 7p is important) and says “why couldn’t that be us? We have a baby to house and a desperate desire to replace work with a series of five star adventure holidays round the world, we deserve that money!”. I mean, have you seen how much it costs to go on safari in Africa? And I mean properly on Safari, not slumming it. It’s close to £100,000 for a month. That’s not going to happen without a proper Lottery win.

So yes, Camelot have got it right now; it is news about my ticket. Hey ho. There’s always Saturdays draw.

Buying is also awkward. We’re in a God awful limbo whereby tens of thousands of pounds are tied up in other property and yet more money will be coming… at some point². If I could release all of that and go buy somewhere tomorrow we’d be laughing. But we can’t and actual money available for a deposit is small and may need to be used to make Little Cottage fit to rent.

So, our options are:

• Do nothing. Stay in a 1 bedroom house with a little one who lives in the living room.
• Rent and wait for a deposit to either arrive or be saved before buying.
• Buy something cheap temporarily, possibly pushing the budget so we could be asking parents for money if we don’t have rental income one month.
• Sell Little Cottage, almost certainly at a slight loss, but somewhere new with the money that unlocks.
• Sell everything (for a big loss), go buy something (ironically smaller than if we just sold Little Cottage due to lost money) and no longer have multiple mortgages to deal with.
• Sell everything, do a runner, enjoy a year abroad before returning home destitute.

I don’t think selling my flat is really an option so well take that off the table. We’ll know more about the rental and sale potential of Little Cottage on Thursday and in the mean time we’ll just have to continue scouring the rental and property markets. The only thing I assure of from the entire process is that what the meticulous spreadsheet I’ve put together says I should have left in my account each month and what I do have left in the account don’t match. I need to curb my spending :S

¹ Internet, somewhere to set up and play on the play station, that kind of thing
² With some point supposedly last August but actually being any time between tomorrow and… well, whenever really. Could be years.

This thought rolled around for a while before dislodging some random factoid regarding the naming of the week days and was replaced with “Thor’s Day”, that is, the day named after the Norse god Thor. For some reason this factoid irritated me. “Why”, I thought to myself, “why does Thor get a day?”

At this point a flood of tangential thoughts ensued. Half remembered details of Norse mythology were marshalled in defence of the name; the fact that other gods, such as Freya were also given days; and simply that the week days were named long ago which means their roots had lost much of their meaning, and is also evident in the degradation in pronunciation and spelling. What stood out for me in this cacophony of internal monolog was that Thor had a big hammer. This quickly joined forces with the notion that he was probably over compensating for something and simply added to my ire over his having a day named after him; logic and evidence be damned.

From there is was but a short hop to deciding that I too should have a day. After all, I am the third most important person I know (after Willow and The Zozo) and, since there are 7 days in every week I should easily get a look in. Me, being me, voiced my concern over Thor having his own day, his overcompensating the hammer and my demands for my own day on Facebook. It was here that I first named the day and saw it written down: Domsday.

Upon seeing Domsday I was instantly reminded of “doomsday” and, noting how Thursday was in fact a derivation of Thor’s Day I wondered if my own day might similarly suffer from a deviation from the initial spelling. Could it not be, I surmised, that Doomsday was derived from Dom’s Day and that I already had a day?

Further examination of this postulation had me thinking that not for me some common or garden, run-of-the-mill weekday that was simply churned out once every 7 days with more significance placed upon things happening on the day than the day itself. No, I had the most important of days: I had the last day. After my day there are no more days. Ever.

This addendum to my train of though, and initial complaint was posted as a comment to my Facebook status. In order that I might drive home the victory that I had achieved of one of the more senior Norse gods I felt it necessary to end the missive, in capital letters: IN YOUR FACE, THOR!

While my initial irritation was not with her, and while I did not explicitly state it, it should also be noted that my train of thought also bested Freya, another god. Having, as I had, gained the better of two gods, albeit rather old ones who, in the case of Thor at least, are not really actively worshiped any more, in the space of time it took me to disembark the train, negotiate the ticket barrier and exit the station, I was able to replace the annoyance I had felt with a feeling of jubilation and triumph which placed a smile in my face and a spring in my step.

And so it is that I headed to work, completely and happily oblivious to the fact that my daydreaming and bizarre thought processes had caused me to forget to send my usual morning text to The Zozo wishing her a good day and expressing my love for her, usually via the shorthand notation of x’s for kisses. This failure of memory on my part allowed me to unwittingly clutch defeat from the jaws of victory without even knowing it.

As such the moral of the story is this: do not take on the gods, no matter how old or minor in today’s pantheon, you will lose. #LFMF

These spiders need feeding on a fairly regular basis and are fed a diet of live, or very recently live insects, mostly cockroaches and crickets. For a long time The Zozo was breeding a colony of cockroaches in the bathroom (safely ensconced in a double walled container before you panic) but it seems the wee beasties have munched their way through these as they no longer appear to be there. The current dish de jour would seem to be crickets. These live in a small box within the spider containment unit to keep them happy until such point as they become food.

We’ve recently had to move things about in the house. Willow will very soon outgrow her Moses basket so the living room has been reorganised to house the cot (Willow resolutely refusing to sleep upstairs). To accommodate this the spider containment unit has been moved upstairs onto the landing, which has presented a hitherto unexpected problem: chirping.

Crickets, as you may or may not know, make a chirping noise using their hind legs and you can quite often hear one of the crickets in the house doing this, especially during the night as my head is about 2m from them. What is surprising is its not the noise that I find disturbing, it’s that there is not enough of it. Having lived in many foreign countries and having, as I do, colonial roots, I am quite used the night sounds of the tropics and rather enjoy hearing the night time chorus of crickets, frogs and cicadas. It tells me that outside there is a tropical paradise, warm weather and good food. Hearing a single cricket somehow has the opposit effect. It causes to remind me that I am not in tropical climes, it’s cold outside and I’m going to have to leave the house in the dark and go to work in a few hours.

That said, the chirping does have one useful purpose: it tells me the internal holding cells of the spider containment unit have not failed and we do not need to look towards implementing the Hammer Down protocol should the second level containment fail. Its not quite the motion sensors and laser tripwires that I wanted, but The Zozo won’t let me have those because she thinks I’m being silly.

Sadly, despite owning two properties, I’m not really in a position to sell. My flat is still in negative equity (although less than it was) and I’d really like to see it go up in price another £40K before I sell it, something that could take a few years. Little Cottage has held its value, but moving is expensive and I’d like to recoup that.

A plan that solved everything did materialise out of the death of my grandmother since the money left to me easily covered the cost of buying a third property and would allow us to simply rent out Little Cottage and, in a few years time when the housing market was out of the toilet, consolidate the 3 houses into a forever home. Sadly illness in the family has meant sorting of the will is taking rather longer than expected and we can no longer wait.

The interim solution is, of course, to rent a place ourselves. The initial outlay is less meaning our savings are intact should we not have tenants in our properties, or if they need work, and it’s cheaper than the repayment in the mortgage we’d need to get on a similar property so we can continue to save for a future purchase.

I rather suspect we will end up in a soulless 1980s box, but it will be a soulless 1980s box with a room for guests (and my desk and a computer), a room for Willow, a parking space and a garden that delivery drivers can find without detailed directions and me standing outside. I’ve no doubt The Zozo will start looking today, but we plan to start looking in earnest this weekend. Scarily this means we could be moving in a matter of weeks! Thankfully, since we’re not selling we can take our time moving out, and then, when it’s empty, get Little Cottage tarted up ready to rent out. This takes a lot of the stress out of proceedings.

As I’m sure i’ve mentioned before the path outside the front of our house acts like a wind tunnel so when it’s windy out there’s a gale blowing down the front of the house which just aids in sucking the heat out of the house even faster and, with last nights weather, I’m surprised Willow wasn’t sucked out of the vent it was blowing so hard. It’s calmed down this morning but it’s still strong enough to stop me in my tracks when it was really blowing hard on the way to the station.

Being a Tuesday That Was Really A Monday and being upset about not being able to foist a full week of work on us after informing us that Christmas Is Over, Monday took it upon itself to really get stuck in by giving me the gift of hard drive failure. In my laptop. The computer I now use at home since my big computer is at work. That computer I now do all my photography and freelance work on. Cock!

Thankfully this is not quite the end of the world. Short term I have my iPad for day to day use (which has pretty much replaced the laptop for much of my computing activity at home) and, push comes to shove I can either stay late at work to do stuff on my big machine, or steal The Zozos laptop and use that. I may even be able to coax enough life out of the drive to copy stuff off it before it fails completely.

Longer term there is a complete set of backups. Much of my stuff now lives in the cloud and so will simply sync automatically onto whatever computer I tell it too. The rest lives on an external hard drive which was last attached to the machine the last time I had it on. So my data is safe.

The problem is more one of cost. The period between Christmas and March is a phenomenally expensive one, what with Christmas, most of the birthdays in my family, service charges on my flat, the need to purchase a new rail card, accountants fees and the pound of flesh HMRC invariably wants (or, on good years, the accountants fees are covered by the rebate). Much as I’d love a shiny new, high speed solid state disk in my laptop it’s not something that’s going to happen without dipping into the savings. Sadly, nor is simply buying a replacement hard drive. It doesn’t help that disk prices have skyrocketed due to flooding in Thailand. While I’m sure the accountant can write off the cost of the disk against freelance earnings that’s not until next year, which doesn’t help with the needing the disk now.

Like a few places I’ve lived in Little Cottage can often trip the entire lighting circuit if a bulb blows. But that’s when you turn the lights on and the bulb blows. No one had been turning on any lights, and besides, with the exception of The Zozos laptop, the entire house was off. One of two things had happened: power cut, or something had blown the fuse box. With the latter being the easiest to check I grabbed my phone, turned on the torch [power cut? There's and app for that] and checked the consumer unit. The fuses were all fine, but the RCD had tripped. For the initiated out there the fuses will blow if too much power is being drawn in order to protect that circuit. Usually only one circuit will trip (which is why it’s just the lights that go out when a bulb blows), but there is a master fuse which can go and take out the entire house. The RCD checks for short circuits and will turn off the entire house if one is found. Putting the RCD into the on position simply had it flip back to the off position. Not good. Something in the house was shorting.

Two culprits spring to mind. We’ve been running an electric heater in the living room practically 24×7 and the last, admittedly much cheaper, one we did that to blew up when The Zozo tried turning it on once. That was straight off at the mains, along with the TV cabinet as that had a lot of kit plugged into an eight way that was unceremoniously rammed down the side which could have a loose wire. Next up was the kitchen. Our kitchen tap has developed a slight leak and while there is a little pot to catch the drips I wondered if something had leaked and shorted out the washing machine.

On entering the kitchen I found the floor had water on it. But this water was soapy, which wouldn’t have come from the tap on the sink. The washing machine wasn’t actually going, so that wasn’t the issue. No, the only soapy water of late was… Willows bath.

Willow has a foldaway bath that we use with a plug that has an annoying habit of popping out. For this reason it’s used in the bathroom, with the theory being that if it leaks it’s not a huge issue. The theory didn’t quite take into account the age of Little Cottage. Soapy water was coming out of the bath,along the floor, down through the wall and out throught the light switch it the kitchen, down the outside of the wall and onto the floor. We had our culprit.

First things first, damage limitation. Willows bath was dumped in the shower and a towel put down between the rest of the water and the, until now, unnoticed 5mm gap between the tiles and the floor on one wall. Next up totally isolate the house electrics by turning off every fuse before unscrewing the switch faceplate in the kitchen and laughing at the juxtaposition of bubbles covering all the wires. Happy that it was just the lighting circuit and not trunking for anything else I then turned all the fuses apart from the lighting circuit back on and flipped the RCD. The house came back on.

The PS3 really doesn’t like being shutdown improperly so I then tested that was happy and not going to whinge about verifying its disk and spend hours doing that (priorities, people!) before digging out the torches because, let’s face it, an iPhone, the Christmas tree lights and a gummy bear LED light weren’t quite going to cut the mustard when it came to adequately lighting the place. We then sat down to not watch Pat die on TV because we had now apparently missed the start of that.

Before heading to bed I replaced the light faceplate as it looked drier and less bubbly. I didn’t turn the circuit back on though, figuring I’d give it another few hours to dry overnight just in case. The next morning I flipped the switch and all was well. Mad for a fun evening. To avoid a repeat of the fun The Zozo is expermimenting with putting the bath in the shower. I suspect judicious use of sealant may also be in order to blog the gap between the floor and the wall.

This year The Zozo is on maternity leave so we didn’t get up until gone 7 (even Willow had a lie in), had a lazy breakfast with bucks fizz and then proceeded to open our gifts, which this year consisted primarily of chocolate We still ate at The Zozos parents, but then it would be foolish to pass up a home made full roast with all the trimmings and three different desserts.

Willow wasn’t too sure what to make of Christmas, but seems to like her new toys. I suspect it will be a couple of years before the true magic of Christmas kicks in. We did also try venturing further afield with her to eat over the bank holiday and during this week Willow will be coming all the way to Norwich to have lunch with me and her uncle.

I, on the other hand, knew exactly what to make of Christmas and filled my days eating far too much chocolate and sugar and playing loads of Skyrim. It’s back to work today, but this week is rarely taxing and will also involve lots of chocolate, if not so much Skyrim.

• The Jawbone UP, which is supposed to track how well you sleep, can easily be fooled into thinking you’re asleep even when you’re not.
• Willow is an incredibly noisy sleeper and makes all kinds of odd noises.
• Someone has performed an objective study into the usefulness of a chocolate teapot.
• I should have got up and played Skyrim.