I am so excited!! My boyfriend just got approved for a loan to purchase a new boat! I’ve been wanting him to apply for the loan for so long now and he’s kept putting it off. He was saying that he wasn’t ready and it made me really concerned about the future of our relationship. I just didn’t know if I wanted to date someone who wasn’t willing to buy a boat or get a loan in order to do so. I want someone with a bit of drive, you know? And now it’s clear that he has it!!!! He got a loan!!!!!
I am definitely more excited than he is and I’m not even really that excited FOR him, I’m more excited for me and for the fact that this really suits my plans. Our relationship is going somewhere! He just has to buy the boat!
So I’ve just spoken with him and he’s let me know that he’ll be picking it up in two weeks. He has a lot to do before then to get organised. For example, the boat he is buying comes pretty much like a blank canvas. He’s going to need to get the best snapper racks available for purchase in Melbourne to ensure that we can fish once we’re on the boat. I want this boat to be absolutely perfect and I’m going to make sure that it happens! I’ll even go pick out the snapper racks for him if that’s what it takes. I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to make this happen. I can’t even begin to explain my excitement. This is the BEST. DAY. EVER!
Now that I think about it, I might oversee the boat catch installation too. Anyone who loves boats knows just how important it is that the boat latch is right. It can really set you up or make you fail, so I think it’s important that I’m involved in this process. WOOO.
Harvey didn’t particularly need anything from the hardware store, but given that the narrator could only tell him more about the nature of his existence in their stories if he went there, he didn’t have much of a choice. Harvey figured that it must be time to put sheep in the barns for some sort of hardware store in the Bayside area.
After thinking things through in the field for a while, Harvey got into his car and started driving toward the City of Bayside. As he drove, Harvey noticed something quite odd: his intense sense of rivalry and jealousy with the house builders of the Mornington Peninsula was starting to fade. Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure he had ever actually been jealous of them. Why would he have been?
“I’m on my way to the hardware store based in Cheltenham,” Harvey said when he was about halfway there. “Can you tell me more about why you chose to write about my boring life?”
Hoping it wouldn’t startle Harvey to know the truth, the narrator continued to explain what had led them to tell such a story. The truth was that the narrator had been getting quite bored of the job lately and, in an act of sheer desperation, had decided to write some sort of parody of a video game called The Parable of Stanley. In The Parable of Stanley, the narrator gives directions to the titular character, Stanley, and the player has the choice to follow or ignore those directions. It was a brilliant commentary on the nature of video games and free will, and quite frankly the narrator wasn’t sure they were doing it justice with stories about a man named Harvey going to get some timber supplies near Cheltenham.
Harvey, upon realising that his existence could be snuffed out at any second by the narrator simply deciding to move on to another story with a new character, became desperate to please the narrator by keeping the story interesting.
Hop awoke in a garden of ash.
Their head felt heavy from what they assumed to be smoke as a result of the burning. Before them sat a crumpled piece of paper, half scorched. Picking it up, Hop found the text illegible, the damage too great. Shaking their head, Hop wondered what on earth had brought them here and how the crew’s garden had managed to burn so badly.
Sitting up, Hop pulled out their phone and checked the crew’s log, but the previous day’s entry had been left completely blank. Gideon hadn’t assigned Hop a mission after the last one, so they supposed that meant the day was free.
Hop had never loved gardening – that was a job for the servants – but these last few years had them doing all sorts of lowborn jobs thanks to the Collapse, so they supposed planting some new roses wasn’t too far beneath them. Wondering where they could find hybrid tea roses for sale, Hop started toward the garden shed, which had miraculously survived the inferno.
Hopefully, Iris had left some spare rose seeds in the shed, given that would make the job a lot easier. If Hop had to go all the way to the store to buy seeds, they’d probably abandon the task altogether. Where did one even go to buy seeds? It was at times like this that Hop really wished their servants were still around. Of course, they could always buy seeds online, but then the job wouldn’t be done today and who knew how long it would be until Hop had another chance?
By Glob, Iris was going to be so disappointed when she found out that the garden had been destroyed. She’d spent so long delicately planting and guiding each of those climbing roses – an impressive feat considering she only had, on average, a chance to look after them once every five days. The least Hop could do was get the roses started on the road to recovery, especially considering what Hop was planning to do next.
Frankly, I’m not too impressed by this…’Home of the Future’ tour. Things got off to a bad start when I realised that I’d be taking the tour with that young woman who tricked the organisers of the competition into thinking she was twenty years younger…and they just let her have her prize anyway. Whatever she designed must’ve been pretty darn good.
So I’m there with my daughter, Abigail. She’s a really bright kid, loves to draw and design things, hence why she won the competition for our state. But then we start the tour, and honestly…it didn’t seem that impressive. The tour guide was saying impressive stuff, and I guess we were supposed to understand it. The whole house was decked out with energy saving industrial LED lighting. That was…fun. I know what all those words mean, and when I explained to Abigail what ‘commercial’ meant, then she got it as well. Still, we’re not industry experts, so we had no point of reference. I guess the fact that they had commercial LED lighting was something futuristic, but…why? The other parents didn’t know either. The only person who DID know was that young women, who spent most of the tour practically salivating. Once the guy started explaining how the place was powered entirely by industrial-grade solar energy, I thought she was going to pass out for a moment. Well, at least one of us was enjoying themselves…and unfortunately, it was the lying women and not the actual kids. Ah, maybe I’m just underestimating what kids learn in school these days. Maybe Abigail just had a class where they explained the many benefits of industrial solar systems for Melbourne businesses, and it’s us grown-ups that are the silly ones. Maybe I’ll talk to her later, see if she understood more than I did.