It’s Monday morning and our guests left yesterday evening without any major incident. I took on the role of punchbag in order to deflect some of the attention from Emma and everything seemed to go as expected. Highlights of the conversation included being told that Cornwall isn’t to their tastes and that on those grounds we should move to Devon instead. I also made the decision not to shave off my hobo beard for their arrival which, as of this morning is 1 month old. It’s going to be gone by the end of the day, or at least carved into some amusing face fuzz that will delight some adults and horrify others. Perhaps a Spurlock horseshoe or Selleck, I don’t know. I fear it will ultimately just be buzzed down to stubble as I don’t have the will or spirit to maintain anything fancy. On the plus side, if I’m as slack on shaving as I have been it won’t be too long before I have enough to start playing around with it again. See you in a month, Mr Beardie.

My ankle pain is still niggling, and was a factor in yesterday’s preparation for our guests’ arrival. I couldn’t walk very far or very fast, and even having a day off from walking (at least during the daytime) it was still somewhat painful. It eased off over the day as I used it a bit more, but the speed at which I was able to do stuff (tidying, hiding, the usual things before folks come round) was far slower than I’d‘ve liked. I still don’t have full movement this morning, so I’ve provisionally moved my daily walk to late afternoon and reduced the distance/duration to get around my aches and pains. The weather also makes using power tools in the garden more risky with the high chance of rain, so garden thuggery has been postponed for a while. I can, however, tootle around the house at a slow speed and get work done on my computer, so I’m not at a complete loss. There’s no impending work from toxic clients today, and this has a positive effect on me in a number of ways: chiefly that I’m still in bed at gone 9am and not wondering how I’m going to squeeze all the things into the day with the element of unpredictability. There’s a definite calm after the storm feeling in the house today. We were both pretty beaten up after yesterday’s visitation, so there’s an inevitable recovery time that’s already started. A little retail therapy – the functional sort rather than the fancy sort – is on the cards. The pound shop in town is where it’s at, we know how to party in this household.

In other news, I found some archives of this website from a while ago as I was skimming the access log files. I was getting hits to pages that didn’t exist on the site and I’d completely forgotten that I’d bought this domain some years ago and had a bash at running a website for a short time before getting cross with it and canning it. Anyone paying more attention than me will likely already know this, or at least have a recollection of it existing, but I’d genuinely forgotten about it. Anyway, I present the Wayback Machine archive of petecooper.org – everything seems to be safe for work, but I can’t make any guarantees. I can guarantee that it’s not very interesting or comprehensive, however, so you really shouldn’t spend any time looking. One interesting aspect is most of the blogs I mentioned in my blogroll list are dead. Indicative of the power of social networking sites, I guess, but it was also a bit sad to see all the people I once knew and followed with interest not being part of my life any longer. Perhaps sad is the wrong word, it’s inevitable with the situation I’m in that this sort of thing will happen. People come and go, friends change over time and those people who are so deeply entrenched in your life will be around for what seems like an eternity. I found it hard to explain to our guests about the idea of moving to a new place because of the mentality of the people living there, so I gave up after a few sentences and switched to something that they could wax lyrical on, which filled over 20 minutes of yammering. It’s a subtle thing, but even with the knowledge we have a few good friends in Cornwall is better than not knowing no-one and starting afresh, even if we end up at opposite ends of the county for whatever reason. On a related note, I’ve been invited to a stag night of someone I used to know and haven’t seen for a number of years. I have absolutely nothing against the guy, and to be frank he’s pulled a real hottie so I’m really pleased for him, but I do wonder what the day’s going to be like. There are certain people I know that I can pretty much instantly reconnect with, even after a year or so of not seeing them in Real Life; in that instance there’s not much a hug and lunch can’t fix. I’m not so sure about this guy – it’s been 4 years since I saw him, and probably another 3 years before that the time before, so I’m not sure how it’s going to pan out.

Some things change and some stay the same, as they say. I’ve got a bit of both going on. From the stuff stashed in the Wayback Machine link above it looks like I’ve made some progress from the Pete Cooper of 4 years ago, but I’ve got a whole slew of other stuff to work through as I continue my journey through life. Assuming my ankle doesn’t hurt too much, of course.