September 30th – 828,352

A total of 4,777 words today takes me past the 825k point and on my spread sheet I can see I’m now over 80k words ahead of schedule. In fact, according to the metronomic schedule of 2,740 words a day - tomorrow is the day I’m supposed to reach 750k when in fact I’ll be passing 830k, so I’m almost a full month ahead of schedule, despite having had three weeks off during the year. Not bad going even if I say so, myself.

Oh, dear, that sounded smug, and it wasn’t meant that way. I’m proud of having got this far with the challenge and I’m starting to feel confident about completing it in good time too.

As always, with the building trade, you can’t rely on things happening when you expect them too, so despite expecting today to be the day they started on the external work – nobody has turned up. To be fair, they did say they would ring the day before and confirm, and nobody did, and we did say any time this week would be fine, but still, it’s irritating having waited so long to reach this point and having been given a start date of 30^th September as far back as July.

There again, they’ve done nothing wrong, it’s about managing my own expectations rather than chasing the work. I guess it allows me to get other things done, instead.