For Valentine’s Day I did the tediously predictable thing of buying Jess some flowers. Except these weren’t just flowers - they were fake flowers. And not only that, but if you plug them in, they light up! You’re probably thinking “Cor, I wish I had a boyfriend who bought me fake flowers that light up", but it’s not as good as you might think, because every time we plugged them in, within an hour or so the electricity would cut out and I’d have to grope my way to the fusebox and flick the switch back into the ‘On’ position. It now seems to have started doing it even when the flowers aren’t plugged in, but they certainly seemed to be the common denominator to begin with. Or maybe that was just a coincidence and they’re innocent. Could they have been responsible? Most of you probably know more about electrics than I do, so I’ll let you answer that one.

Jess has got her friends staying this weekend, so I’m in a house overrun with teenage girls at the minute, if three is enough to overrun anything, which it probably isn’t. Either way I’m outnumbered. Seeing as how I seem to have forgotten to do any work for the last couple of days, I should probably leave them to their raves and pyjama parties or whatever it is teenagers do, and try to catch up on things. But it’s more likely that I’ll spend all weekend playing on the internet instead.

Speaking of playing on the internet, I mentioned a while ago that PuzzleDonkey might be making a comeback. The only snag is that we seem to have, er, lost some of the puzzles. I don’t suppose any of you happen to have them all scrawled in a notebook somewhere? No? Thought not, but it seemed worth a shot.

Luckily we’ve still got all the donkeys. I’m not drawing them again.

Jess has banished me from my office while she does some kind of secret valentine related thing on my computer, so I’ve had to come into the bedroom and steal her laptop. And since her laptop doesn’t have what I need to do any of the more pressing things that usually keep me from blogging, here I am.

One of the pressing things I’ve been doing lately is trying to organise my finances a bit. My system for keeping track of such matters has always been fairly crude, amounting to little more than scrawling a few dubiously calculated numbers on a beermat every time my bank statement comes, and filing them down the back of the sofa. This, combined with two major lifestyle changes in the last year, when I moved to Lancashire and then to York, has made it difficult to do anything clever like budget. And as my recent inability to pay my income tax without parental assistance illustrated, budgeting is probably something I ought to do. So I decided to get some proper money management software, and after a bit of research decided to go for Tesco Personal Finance.

Well, I didn’t remember ever seeing this particular product in the shop, so I figured I’d buy it online. That proved problematic, due mainly to the fact that you have to have a Tesco Clubcard to buy anything from the website, and while I have got a Tesco Clubcard, in the four months that we’ve been living here I haven’t yet got round to updating my address with them, so the site insisted on sending my purchase to Lancashire. I managed to phone them and update the address, but the change must take a while to propagate through the system because the website still claimed I live at the old one, so I registered for a whole new Clubcard, at which point it let me make the purchase, but then I discovered it was going to cost me £5 to have it delivered - or even to pick it up in store - which seemed a bit steep for software that only costs £10 in the first place; so then, beginning to have my doubts as to whether the purchase was a prudent one, I did a bit more research and found lots of reviews saying that while it’s a pretty good bit of kit if you can work out how to use it, the documentation is severely lacking, and working out how to use it is well beyond the intelligence of anyone without the highest ranks of Mensa. Being a person with only the flimsiest understanding of how money works, it seemed unlikely that I’d be one of the select few who can get the hang of it, so I decided not to bother after all.

A couple of days later I was in Tesco and saw Tesco Personal Finance on the shelf. It seemed like destiny, so I bought it.

It turns out that the people who wrote all the negative reviews were talking a lot of nonsense. It’s thoroughly documented, and dead easy to use, and about a million times more useful than my old system. I’m now in the process of entering all my records for the last year or two into it, which is mind numbingly dull, but I have the incentive of knowing that once it’s finished, I’ll be able to look at all sorts of pretty graphs demonstrating why I’ll never be rich.

I’m back on my computer now. I wonder if I should poke about and see if I can work out what Jess was up to. No, I should do some work, that’s what I should do. So I’ll go and do that now. Bye!

Last night, it being Pancake Day and all, we went to Tesco to get some ingredients. Jess wanted a big bag of Mini Eggs, which wouldn’t have been very healthy, so I convinced her to get one of the little plastic tubes instead, which still wouldn’t be very healthy, but less not very healthy than a great big bag. I put it in the basket, and we headed to the pancake mix aisle.

I was hoping they’d have run out so I could finally make use of my knowledge that pancakes are yorkshire puddings in disguise, and get some yorkshire pudding mix instead. But they hadn’t, so I couldn’t. We got some of the pancake mix they did have and I put it in the basket with the tube of Mini Eggs, at which point I discovered that the bottom of the tube had come off, and the number of Mini Eggs in the tube was rapidly approaching zero.

Our trip to Tesco was thus enhanced with an impromptu Easter egg hunt, as we retraced our steps around the store and spotted Mini Eggs all over the place, hiding under displays of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and in the shadow of Colgate Total Protection. I don’t think we found them all, because the tube was still far from full. I had no intention of paying for this tarnished product, which I suspected of having faulty packaging, so I replaced it on the Mini Eggs shelf - right at the back, so that hopefully no other unfortunate shopper will purchase it and die of contamination from the one that rolled under the rat poison aisle - and took another. The bottom immediately fell off, scattering Mini Eggs everywhere.

I collected them up, put it back on the shelf, and let Jess have a big bag.

Then we came home and made pancakes. They were surprisingly successful.

I told you she wears her hat indoors.

Two years ago today, I got out of bed in Leicesecesestershire at some hideous hour of the morning with what anyone familiar with my typical reluctance to remove myself from between the sheets any earlier than midday would consider an implausible degree of enthusiasm, put some clothes on, and drove to Lancashire, where - arriving with time to kill, having allowed unnecessary leeway for getting delayed or lost - I parked in Whitaker Park, tipped the driver’s seat all the way back, and had a bit of a nap. An hour later, bang on schedule, I received a text from Jess, saying: “Where are you?”

I got out of the car, took a couple of steps, and there she was walking towards me. And so the next chapter of my life began. Or possibly the first chapter, because everything that came before feels more like the prologue, or a different book altogether, of an entirely different genre. I like this one better. I think it’s chick lit.

Anyway, to celebrate our anniversary, I skived off work and we went to Brimham Rocks, which was a jolly nice setting for a romantic day out, and the weather was ideal, in that it was cold and rainy. Which was ideal for our purposes, because it meant everyone else had been put off by the hostile climate, so we had the place to ourselves, and we were feeling far too loved up for a bit of wind and rain to bother us.

I warned you that this would be a mushy one. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again for another year. Have a less mushy picture of Jess in a hole:

Today’s another day that I’d set aside for administrative type things. I’ve got a lot of them to do, having allowed such matters to slide for several months - bank statements to trawl through, spreadsheets to update, exciting things of that nature. Unfortunately, such things aren’t really exciting at all, and they involve sitting in front of my computer, which is also capable of doing things that really are exciting, and the amount of will power required to do the things I’m supposed to be doing is therefore far far beyond the amount that I possess. With the best, er, will in the world, it would be like me trying to lift a washing machine with one hand, or walk past a pizza shop. It ain’t going to happen.

I think I’ll have to instigate some kind of reward system. That could work, but the boringness to will power ratio is so skewed that the rewards will have to be quite magnificent. “Update this spreadsheet and you can spend the rest of the day lying on the sofa with an infinite supply of Coke, Maltesers and Christopher Brookmyre novels, while Jess massages your feet and performs puppet shows for your amusement", or “Reply to those emails and you can have a fortnight’s holiday in the Caribbean", that sort of thing. Which would get the job done, but over a period of several months, and at enormous expense.

I had this problem every day when I had a proper job. At least then the possibility of being sacked if my boss walked past when I was looking at hotnakedsexygirlswithoutanypantson.com provided some incentive not to spend all day playing on the Internet, but when you’re your own boss, that isn’t so much of a concern. Fortunately I enjoy the actual drawing part of my job, so no will power is generally required, but on days like this… meh, who needs up to date spreadsheets anyway? I wonder when the next flight leaves to the Caribbean.