1. Pemulis's best blogger friend is Mr. D.C. Rain Maker (www.dcrainmaker.com) and in between his widely-read and highly-influential posts on product reviews of "consumer fitness technology" he also has a weekly feature called "Five Random Things I did this Weekend" (not sure on which words should / shouldn't be capitalized but it's something close to that). Because Ray (his best friends know his real name is Ray [ED: Pemulis has not actually ever met him though he did reply to one of his e-mails once]) is an international jet-setter who lives in Paris in a huge apartment across the river from the Notre Dame cathedral and makes (presumably) millions of Euros from his DC Rainmaker blog the 5 items in these weekly features are things along the lines of "Flew to Majorca", "Dined at a 3-Michelin-Starred Restaurant", and "Spent half the weekend skiing in St. Moritz followed by a quick flight down to the Seychelles". Interestingly (and this is true) he was until recently a colleague of mine (only in that we worked at the same multinational corporation) but he quit about a year ago because somehow I guess he was making more or "enough" from being a blogging superstar. Something to aspire to, I suppose. But anyways, it would be nice if Pemulis could have such a feature but some problems with that idea include (1) he would have to write a post every week instead of every month or so which has been the standard lately; (2) he would have to somehow find 5 things to do every weekend; and, most difficult of all probably, (3) they would have to be somewhat interesting. He could definitely pull off a feature called something like "The 5 Times I took Helga to the Doctor this Weekend" except that the Doctor's not there on the weekend but 5 times every two days is about the average lately. Another possible feature might be "Five Times that Helga Woke me Up Last Night" but it would be really difficult to choose the five to highlight each time. For now, Pemulis will stick to his ad hoc approach to posts and just hope that somehow the frequency and interestingness of the posts will start to increase.
2. Pemulis heard somewhere along the way that grown-ups typically get mortgages to buy houses/flats rather than continually giving most of their pay-cheque away to evil landlords. He's also pretty sure that he's in the category of "grown-up" due to all the signs pointing to same (e.g. bad back, lack of hair on head, not managing to do 5 things on a weekend that one might tell others about, thinking that he should buy an apartment one day but not being able to afford it, wishing he could yell at kids to get off of his lawn but not having a lawn, etc.). Unfortunately while he is widely regarded and known as the world's foremost deception expert, that skill doesn't seem to translate (yet) to Dollars and/or Euros.
3. Helga has missed 2 weeks straight of Krippe and counting. She learned how to say her name though -- which is good -- but being away so long the only German word she can say is... her name. Nevertheless, even if she had been healthy and been going to Krippe, for some entirely inexplicable reason the teachers speak English to her even though we've told them about 75,000 times to speak German to her and treat her like all the other kids. Our next plan is to try reverse-psychology. Pemulis has a theory that since the teachers spend so much of their lives surrounded by very tiny children who (he's heard) are very susceptible indeed to good old fashioned reverse-psychology, maybe it's been ingrained in them as some kind of norm and the way to get them to speak German to Helga is to tell them not to. It might be worth a try.
4. Pemulis signed a contract a few months ago to write a book (not an interesting book -- a computer book) and the draft is due in exactly 10 days. It's with a few other co-authors though and he is only responsible for two chapters, but each chapter is meant to be around 40--60 pages each. Normally people probably would have started such a thing by now, and if they were so crazy to have not started at all then any tiny moment that they might scrounge up along the way they would probably use to devote to chapter writing in any way, shape, or form that they could, and they would most definitely not be using a few free moments in the evening when they really should be sleeping to write some silly blog post instead of working on the chapter. But no one ever accused Pemulis of being normal people.
5. Tomorrow (actually in about an hour) is Joelle's really-old-th birthday. She is turning really old and if Pemulis were paid what he's worth and deserves then Joelle would be getting a brand new house and an Aston Martin but since he's not paid either what he's worth or what he deserves then she'll be getting whatever he can find in the basement when him and Helga head down first thing in the morning before Joelle wakes up. But if he wants to do that he had better get to bed ASAP or his entire plan will be foiled.
6. Pemulis is now going to bed.
