On April Fool's Day the kids spent the afternoon trying to sell garden flowers to passing cars. One car stopped. Everyone else got petals thrown at them for declining. Nobody mentioned, until much later, that the flowers had been free the whole time. That was the shape of the day: loose in the morning, then filling up until by eleven the kitchen had turned into something close to a seminar, half a bottle of wine in, everyone agreeing that the machine coming for the job was both terrifying and hilarious, and not resolving which.
By April the bigger job search had already closed itself down, on the one condition I wouldn't move for: an office five days a week. What replaced it was smaller and stranger: a fractional CEO seat at a SaaS company, on the condition I got to automate as much of the job away as I could. Most weeks that meant meetings with titles that made me laugh before I'd opened the invite, like the one that promised, in writing, enough time to explore about 1.5 rabbit holes.
The house kept doing what houses do regardless. Fox went in for a tooth extraction that morning, and that evening Jas and I ended up shouting for each other through a floor plan we were counting differently, her second floor being my first. It dissolved the way these things mostly do here: someone says sorry, someone does a chore, and whatever was actually underneath it goes back in the drawer unopened.
The best afternoon of the month had a birthday boy who wasn't the dog everyone brought over to admire. Bowie turned fifteen, and by six the backyard had sausages going, someone asking for a beer before they'd even sat down, and a near-introduction of the wrong dog as the guest of honour. Three days later it was Jas's birthday, a day cleared of anything that didn't need to be there, until half six when I walked her home a different way than usual and narrated the shortcut like it mattered.
On one of the last Sundays we sat the kids down and had everyone write a letter to themselves in five years. Fox wrote his properly. Dot wrote hers properly. Lou, at two, produced one determined crayon line and called it finished. I sealed all four envelopes without being entirely sure what I wanted the five-years-later version of any of us to find inside.
Somewhere in there, in between an overdue invoice and a book order gone sideways, the thing I'd been reading toward and taking notes on for years finally became a book. Thickening Time, about how time perception works, with a site that has a conversation with you first and then writes your own bookends, an opening and a closing chapter that put the rest of it inside your life instead of mine. ISBN and everything. The first real feedback on it was a friend narrating his reactions out loud while he read it, which might be the only kind of review that tells you anything true. Everything else the factory made that month, the coding agent, the fake restaurant, the AI show nobody's filmed, sat exactly where ideas like that always sit. Waiting.
By the 30th we were at Angry Ramen, which is genuinely what the place is called, and someone said it twice anyway, like saying it once wasn't enough to make it real. It wasn't more than that. It didn't need to be.
