Yesterday was a day of looking after George and going to see flats. The one in the morning wasn’t very spectacular, but in the afternoon, Lisa got home a bit early and we went to see three different flats with a slightly lower price tag than the ones we’d seen in our road…. These are the kind of thing that might be possible as a way to make ends meet in a couple of years when Lisa stops working, we have two children and the mortgage deal on our own house runs out forcing us to buy into what I think will be a much worse deal (property prices are falling and interest rates are getting worse – it’s time to get security for the coming storms, I think)

Anyway, more on that as it develops.


What I should have done today:
Sorted out my tax for the last year (which for some reason ends on the 4th of April every year) and filed all my recipts ready for sorting through later.
Got my invoicing up to date and chased up outstanding stuff.
Talked to some of the magazines about what work I should be doing over the next month.

What I did today:
Did most of the illustration of the end Permian extinction I’m making for Raoul at the Natural History Museum.
Designed some prehistoric creatures for a long overdue series of illustrations for Science Photo Library – on evolutionary missing links (the first land creature, the first bird, the first mammal – that kind of thing). Actually, it turns out they’re not really missing at all – there’s good fossil evidence for most of them – lucky really otherwise I wouldn’t be able to reconstruct them.

It’s a whole lot more interesting than doing my tax.

The trouble is that everything is more interesting than tax, so it’s usually the 20th January before I do it… not a good move since I have to pay the bill on the 31st and it’s almost always a huge shock!


I also can’t help thinking I need to update my website – I’m putting a lot of money into advertising it now, so it probably needs to look a bit more corporate….

Anyway, tomorrow is another day with George… so Friday is tax day…

Well, maybe.

I also (very briefly) tried out secondlife for the first time. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do as everyone keeps going on about it and as someone who does 3d stuff most of the time, I really ought to be aware of this major phenomenon…

In case you’ve never met secondlife it’s basically a 3d videogame in which you make up the rules yourself. You pick a look for your character, then wander around in a virtual world meeting other virtual people controlling their characters anywhere in the world. The idea is that you can buy, or build objects, places, whatever you like…It’s not all that advanced, but there’s a huge variety of places and events built by people, so it’s probably worth exploring once I get time….