My wife is knuckling down on a new draft of her second fiction novel, Sorrow’s Knot. She’s written about it on her blog. To that end, she booked herself into a hermitage on Wednesday and will be writing furiously until Sunday. This is your classic cabin in the woods, though it’s still within easy walk of the retreat centre, which has wi-fi.
So, I’ve been in charge of handling the kids, and they’ve been total troopers. Yesterday was their grandma Rosemarie’s birthday, and we managed to get in touch with her over Skype and sing her Happy Birthday. We also oo’d and aww’d over her gift of new puddle boots (from the kids).
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been in charge of the kids for an extended period, but they seem to be getting into the routine of it well. Bedtime in particular is always good, as I feel as though it’s a great triumph of being a good father. Of course the truth is, the kids are putting a lot of effort in cooperating, since Mom isn’t home, and we’ll just have to pull together until she gets back.
Another assignment of mine has been to take some of the content I’ve written for my real estate brokerage client, and bolster their social media presence. It’s been a great learning experience for me . I wouldn’t have known that purpose-built rental apartments survived the 2008 recession in Canada and much of the United States with hardly a scratch, and that apartments have been the best performing real estate asset class in the past five years — a lot of it due to demographic changes that are causing the lustre to fade off the single-family home in the suburbs (something that I’ve been wondering about for a while).
Here’s a blog post describing one of the findings of the ROCK Apartment Report that surprised us: northern Ontario is an excellent place to invest.
All in all, it’s been good getting my mind back into the urban planning background that I’d largely left behind for so many years. This is not fiction writing, but I feel as though I’m exercising a part of myself that I’d forgotten existed.
And there is progress on the fiction front as well — slow but sure, and nothing that I can report about, yet. Hopefully soon. Stay tuned.