The Family Business

My wife, bless her, is making great strides in the business she is starting. She’s moved on from the t-shirt idea, and grown obsessed with chemicals. We are currently bottling and labelling thousands of bottles of room freshener at the coffee table in front of the TV. There’s a barrel full of bath salts in the corner. My house smells like a brothel. There’s even an undercurrent of disinfectant from the hand sanitisers we did last week, for added authenticity.

For those of you who have not been following this blog for a while, my wife fell victim to the wave of electronic readers crippling the book industry, and was retrenched by the publisher she worked for. Instead of trying to find another job in a shrinking industry, she decided to try her hand at producing a line of book related products. Turns out that she’s actually very good at it. Since our whole family has a vested interest in her success, I decided to try and help.Turns out I’m a frikkin’ genius at it.

Crashing back down to Earth.

Today started out very well indeed. I had posted on my blog just before going to bed, and checked my stats first thing in the morning. I thought WordPress was broken, because I had over a hundred views. It turns out that I had been Freshly Pressed by the happiness engineers.

For those of you I have just lost, the happiness engineers are the shadowy, sinister organisation that controls the blogging world. Think of them as a slightly more cheerful version of the thought police from George Orwell’s 1984. If your blog is not quite positive enough, they might just pay you a little visit.Freshly Pressed is a page where they put up the very best blog posts in each category. The categories today included neuroscience, books, fatherhood and civil liberties. Mine was the very best in the shoplifting category. The other three shoplifting posts were just not up to scratch.