My Nephew arrives, Go Kart Special

Saturday Night and a surprise package is awaiting at my front door. Its J3, the 7 year old. He's here to spend the night.

We play for a while - well beyond his normal bedtime. Then he convinces me to read him a book. He opts for Rumpelstiltskin. He loved it - the voices I put on, the exaggeration and of course the story.

The next morning he gets up early (while I snore away). But he wakes me up to fix the DVD player. He wants to watch Willy Wonky 2005. I put the DVD player together (its new) and leave him watching the movie - promising to get up at 10.20am.
10.20am did not take long to arrive - but i did feel refreshed (an hour's lack of sleep can make a huge difference to the rest of the day).

We had breakfast. We mooched. Eventually I fished out a games pack and, to my surprise, he wanted to play chess. So I set up the pieces and he shocked me by his initial moves (they were good). I was fearing losing at his initial moves. But luckily he went on to make some mistakes - but he showed incredible understanding with every move he made. It took me 1hr+ to finally grind he pieces down to just a wandering KING and a further 25 minutes to pin the king down in a checkmate. Then he said, again to my shock, "Lets play again". We didn't. We had lunch and then his mother turned up to take him home (3pm) - where did the time go?

Around 5pm, my brother rings. He and his pal are going GO-KART racing and invite me. "Yes", says I.
We opted for 40minutes at the track costing each of us 30units of cash - expensive. But we had fun. Only 3 of us on the race track. First few laps we were neck and neck. Then one of the others had a bump and the flags came out. Thence we were spread for about 15minutes. For those 15minutes I wondered if the other 2 had left the track. At the 20minute mark, I caught up to his mate and then spend 7minutes trying to overtake him. Suddenly my brother was at my back. Unlike me, he decided to bump into me, causing me to bump into his mate. My bro races off first, me second and his mate third. For the next 4minutes I'm on my brother's tale, close. Eventually he makes a mistake under the pressure and I overtake. Luckily throughout the whole race I had no major mistakes. His mate had a couple of accidents requiring the marshals on the track. My bro had car failure (a flat tyre). I had fastest average time and fastest average speed 68kph(42mph). My bro had average 64kph(40mph) and his mate had 62kph(39mph). However my bro had fastest lap, beating my fastest by 0.09seconds. We were 2 seconds short of the all time fastest lap on the track.

After 40 minutes the palms of my hands were aching, my inner thighs were aching, my soles were protesting too, my shoulders were tight and telling me they had been well used.

We laughed about the session verging on hysterics at the comic moves we'd all made, the accidents and the circumstances, the adrenaline and the need for speed. We compared times and stories.

On getting home and as the adrenaline seeped away, a tiredness started creeping through me.

It was a good day and a good night.

Good night.