So yesterday I was bragging a bit about neither of us feeling particular blue because our respective football (soccer) teams both won in the FA Cup round at the weekend. Well, yesterday morning I was greeted by the next round draw news: we’d only gone and drawn against each other in the next round at my team’s home ground. What fun that will be in our house, as the poet takes it all a bit more seriously than I do.
Leeds United are a premier league club and Birmingham City are in the championship league (divisions 1 and 2 respectively in old money). Yes, Birmingham may have the advantage playing at their home ground, but Leeds are usually the better team. (When I worked on newspapers, football teams were always plural. It’s a tough habit to break, so I left them as plural here.) It will be interesting, to say the least.
We still didn’t wake up to any snow and it’s a lot warmer at the moment here. I don’t know if that’s expected to last, but I took a spare bedspread (counterpane?) off the bed as we were way too hot during the night. My cough didn’t seem any better to me, but apparently I hadn’t spent as much of the night coughing.
The poet went off to work leaving me to play with the dogs and clean up after them. Our lawn really is turning into a bit of a mud field now. But grass is resilient and it usually comes back, just as strong as it was before. I didn’t feed the birds because they were still eating food put out the day before. (On trays or on the table, not on the floor for rats to find.)
First actual job of the day was the January newsletter. It all went really smoothly until I sent it. Then it told me the newsletter had gone out as ‘December 2025 (copy)’. Now, I’d spotted that before and renamed it, as I’d accidentally drafted the January material over the December material in Scrivener, and I had to copy and past it back from EmailOctopus. That gave me an extra job to do, although I still squeezed it all in to the 2-hour segment I’d allocated to it.
I went in to change it again, and it somehow sent itself again…only it probably didn’t send itself at all. It’s more likely I pressed a wrong button. Either way, the newsletter went out twice to everyone, and when I checked, they both had ‘January 2026’. So I’ve already started February’s newsletter with an apology. While I was in Scrivener creating the February newsletter, I also created a template for use going forward.
I sent it out (twice!) then went onto BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook to give it a bit of a push. On Facebook, I posted it to my writing page, then shared it to my personal profile page. Then I updated my 40-project spreadsheet with the latest daily word-counts.
After my midday breakfast, which I’m now calling ‘brunch’ in the diary and on the schedule, I revised the next week’s worth of videos for the Writing With Depth workshop I’m doing with WMG Publishing.
With that box ticked, I then went in to brainstorm the short story that’s due in on 1 February. I didn’t get a lot of brainstorming done, but I do have the basic germ of an idea. While I was in the short story master Scrivener binder, I had a look at the short story that’s due in on 31 January. And I decided to make it a Marcie Craig story rather than a Stevie Beck story as the brainstorming and planning for the first one is further forward than it is for the second one. I figured I could do myself a favour and choose a story that didn’t need as much time spent on it in an already busy month.
I then went to make my 3pm dinner, which I’m now calling ‘afternoon tea’. I don’t have a massive appetite at the moment, so I finished off the last of the Christmas ‘biscuits for cheeses’. These aren’t American biscuits or British biscuits, they’re cream crackers or water biscuits. And I had them with just butter on as we’re eating real butter now and that’s just as tasty as it would be with a bit of cheese on.
After ‘afternoon tea’, I started today’s blog post and was interrupted by a phone call asking when the roofer can come and repair the roof. This is the roof that actually needs replacing, by the way…He wants to come for 3 days on the trot, but I’m not around at the moment for 3 days on the trot and, frankly, my hospital appointments are more important than a temporary roofing repair. Or they are to me. We agreed to try and sort something out and she said she’d call me back once she’d spoken with the roofer.
The next job was the next client edit job. I had to save it with my initials at the start, format it for printing, and print it off. That took longer than necessary because the toner ran out less than 5 pages before the end and the printer just stopped. I hate it when they do that. No warning, no anything, just STOP. Good job I keep toner cartridges in stock.
I finally settled down to edit, beneath the daylight lamp, and I cleared 12 pages against a target of 10. Good work so far.
I finished and scheduled today’s blog post and updated the 40-project spreadsheet before calling it a day.
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Good work! Hope you get a bit of a break soon.
It seems like you have to take on an awful lot of tasks that the landlord should be handling. Or are tenants responsible for everything where you are? Or do you just have to manage logistics, but the bill goes to the landlord?
We have to all allow ‘reasonable access’ for maintenance, but they’re supposed to arrange this with us in advance, to make sure it’s convenient. This particular ‘roofer’ just turned up to do the work at about 10am one day, and we turned him away as we were on our way out. We would have turned anyone away. Now he’s being awkward, asking for 3 days on the trot with an 8:30am start…well he didn’t need the 8:30am start when he just turned up out of the blue.
The landlord is responsible for the roof. We obviously don’t want to rock the boat for as long as we need to live here, and we didn’t want to bombard them with a load of repairs when they might have turned around and decided they’d be better off to give us notice and either sell up or let it to someone else. At the moment, landlords are permitted to enforce ‘no fault evictions’ and then let the property out at a higher price to someone else. They can easily do this if they think a tenant is too much hassle.
There’s a bill currently going through parliament to stop this happening, though. It’s why a lot of landlords are cutting their losses and just selling up, because capital gains tax and income tax from rental properties are also going up or being introduced. And it’s why I suspected, quite rightly as it turned out, that our landlord may also be jumping on board that particular bandwagon. We pay a lot of money for this house every month and she does very little in return. We’d be better off out of it, but this house isn’t worth buying…and that’s a different story for a different time and place… 😉
I see, that makes things a lot clearer. Your landlord definitely hasn’t done much since you’ve lived there, to my recollection. I hope the bill passes.
NY had strong tenants’ rights protections. MA, not so much.