You know how, in a family, there are certain catchphrases and injokes that come to be used as semi-serious vocabulary, without people laughing, because you're all so used to them and they've become part of your household dialect? For instance, my mother's best friend Di's son is called Sam. On one occasion an Asian lady of recent immigrant status was praising his nice clean hair. (I don't know the context, I think she was the mother of a friend or something like that.) 'Oh Sam,' she said, 'your hair is beautiful. It is just like sick.'

She meant 'like silk,' in case you're really puzzled. Well, Sam repeated the remark to his mother and sister, they had a laugh about it, they shared it with us, we had a laugh about it, and now 'your hair is like sick' is used as an almost straight-faced compliment around our place. We didn't realise how extremely odd it sounds until the feast last week, when an old friend of my father's joined us for dinner and the term came up in conversation and he looked very, very confused (and a bit nauseous).

Sometimes one of these malapropisms attains the status of folklore. For example, in my family, the hero of The Matrix (which was on telly last night so it's on my mind) is called Neil. Well, to be precise, in my family the hero of The Matrix is called Agent Smith, but the Keanu Reeves character who we're supposed to think of as the hero is... Neil. This arises from my sister's mishearing of the name the first time she saw the movie (it was on a VCD at home, and she thinks she was in the kitchen getting a drink when Trinity sends Neo the computer message with his name spelled out in it). She said afterwards 'I couldn't work out why he was so proud of being called Neil. Was that really worth fighting with Agent Smith about?' Based on a similar mishearing of mine, the first time Morpheus calls Trinity by name, we know that she has a twin sister called Unity who got smooshed in the telephone box at the beginning but evaporated mess-lessly, and no-one ever talks about what happened to her. Spoooooooooooky.

The Matrix was a pretty decent movie. It had its moments of naffness ('There is no spoon'). But it was a pretty decent movie. One hopes Revolutions can recapture that pinnacle of pretty-decent-ness after the plummet that was Reloaded. One also hopes Smith wins. C'mon. He wants it more.

This weekend I might get to see Intolerable Cruelty; my mother is talking about going to it when she finishes writing school reports. She also wants me to hit the supermarket for her this morning. Okey-doke. I'm just glad my uterus has stopped hurting; yesterday was a period première day and I was uncomfortable for several hours. The only good thing about cramps is that when they eventually die out you temporarily feel the absence of pain as a positive pleasure. 'Wow, not hurting feels NICE!' And of course, I'm lucky, since apart from these unpleasant premières my periods are untroublesome and regular. My sister's are all over the place at the moment, they think she might have polycystic ovary something-or-other, which means she produces too many eggs (I think; I haven't researched this) and not on a regular schedule. And my childhood friend Amy Rose (I still think she has the prettiest name in all the land) has just been diagnosed with a large ovarian cyst that will have to be operated on. At least that's better than ovarian cancer, which is what she first thought it had to be (due to family history with Big C) when the doctor said there was a growth on the ovary. Likewise, my family has a history of troubles in the feminine plumbing, so every month I sustain nothing worse than cramps and a moderate flow of blood for about four days I think phew, I'm still getting away with it.

My father just came in and asked me in a reasonable tone whether I could search online for a particular DVD. I opened an Amazon.com window as a starting point and said okay, what are you looking for? He put on a smirk and said 'I was wondering if there is a Director's Cut of the Care Bears Movie.' WTF? That's his A material now? (rolls eyes)

I did nothing much for Hallowe'en; stayed in, handed out candy (I laid some good stuff in because I never want to be the house that everyone says sucked when they compare loot bags) and watched two appropriate-seeming movies, Sleepy Hollow (which I will love forever) and Blade (which is one of the better vampire movies but doesn't get a Love rating like The Lost Boys). The best thing about Blade for me is the character of Karen - how she acts as the audience's need-to-know character without appearing dopey and intellectually passive like Harry Potter (I share Hermione's astonishment that he has never done any background reading about the secret society he's entered), how her profession as a haematologist makes her far more useful than Blade is at first prepared to allow, how she is never really combat-proficient but copes better as the action progresses and she adapts, how she is permitted by the script to develop a relationship with the hero that doesn't have to be 'justified' by love interest. They end up as comrades, and frankly, you can tell that although Karen thinks Blade is an interesting person, she doesn't fancy him one bit. I find that refreshing. So for me the most disappointing thing about Blade II is that while the writers strain credibility like a really really strained thing to get Whistler back into the action, no-one ever even mentions Karen, despite the fact that Blade must now be using her improved serum on himself and her vampirism-by-infection cure on Whistler. Whistler's death scene in Blade is so effectively final that I would have been happier if he had just stayed dead and Karen had stepped into his role as sidekick/tech support, with an emphasis on biological rather than ballistic weaponry. Instead, we're just supposed to forget about her, rather like Kate in Angel, I suppose. And damn it, I liked Kate too.

Maybe Kate and Karen can be friends.

Another odd thing about Blade which I suppose I may have mentioned before: I always think that Blade's magnificent dismissal of Deacon Frost would have been so much better if it had been 'Some [silly bugger]'s always trying to roller-skate uphill.' Ice-skate uphill? That's not a really plausible concrete image. This is the problem with all that close reading they trained me to do at university; it crops up when I'm just watching movies and makes me criticise word choice.

Not that I propose 'silly bugger' in place of the epithet Blade actually used.

I cleaned my grandmother's house. It were that awful, I 'ave to talk about it wi' a northern accent. There were stains on the toilet lid an' all. 'Ow d'yer get stains on a toilet lid? It skeeved me, it really did. Mine's a G and T. Ta, luv. 'Ave one for yourself, Shelley.

But it was interesting to note that I really do see dirt and mank more clearly when I am in Cleaning Mode. The place didn't look that bad to me when I was just visiting a few days ago. I think the worst situation to be in re: other people's squalor is when you're staying with someone and you really don't approve of the state of their bathroom. You can't say 'Geraldine, your bathroom smells funky and I have to shut my eyes and hover when I go to the toilet. Do something.' If you're staying there long enough, sometimes you can get away with cleaning the place under the guise of showing gratitude for your keep. But it is a very very touchy area, criticising your hostess' housekeeping. Better often to hold your breath and bear it.

For tonight's dinner I did Chinese honey marinated chicken wings, which I had bought under the impression that they were the little, jointed 'chicken nibbles' popular hereabouts. (Chicken nibbles are made from the first two joints of the chicken wing, eliminating the pointy end bit with no good meat on it, and are particularly enjoyed by children, as gnawable finger food. They are not the same thing as chicken nuggets; they've got their bones in and skins on.) I suppose I could have jointed them myself before putting them in the oven but time was getting on when I discovered my mistake. They were HUGE chicken wings. Evidently somewhere out there were some HUGE chickens. My mother said they were buffalo wings, despite the marinade, on account of they were big enough to have come off buffaloes. We make our own fun in this household. (Groan.) Anyway, we had those with the remains of salad from last night's feast, and there was reheated spaghetti bolognese for them as liked it, to use up leftovers. My sister is miffed because the Kellogg's Crunchy Nut packs have a new cookie recipe on the side, and she hadn't saved a copy of the one she liked and wanted to make again.

I have been spending too much money on Clinique skincare products (got some makeup remover and SPF15 day-cream). My only consolation is that they are jolly high quality and tend to go a long way before being used up.

Incidentally, I have a clever name for Dominic Warner in Shortland Street. Since he began to behave as if channelling the late Richard Hillman, I have been calling him Demonic Warner.

Yep, I need a man.

I've drawn something for the first time in ages: a sketchy pencil gift-art on the occasion of the Lizzard becoming a homeowner. You can see it here, if you've a mind to. (As you know if you at all know the Lizzard: She likes Allen Schezar. Really, really likes Allen Schezar.)

The Big Dinner went off very well. I even baked a pavlova for dessert. Everyone ate and ate and ate. Umm... not much to tell, really. This afternoon I have to go and clean my grandmother's house, as previously mentioned.

Say, want to read my latest rejection letter?

I'm Reject #87! Woot!

Well! The Australians have done the dirty on me!

As Grytpype-Thynne would say in The Goon Show, it'll brush off. To clarify: as I've outlined before, in New Zealand we get the Australian feed of Cartoon Network. Due to time zone differences, this means that a show which is advertised on CN as screening at 8:30 actually gets onscreen here at 11:00... or such was the case until this weekend, when, without my knowledge, Australia began Daylight Savings Time. Consequently when I tuned in at eleven PM on Monday for The Powerpuff Girls, it was already Johnny Bravo and I was most vexed. Now that I know about the change, of course, it's actually a little more convenient. I've missed the middle segment of the Samurai Jack pilot movie broken into three TV episodes, so I didn't get to see him actually receiving the nickname Jack, or get to form my own opinion on whether, as people say, the ruined city in which he emerges after being zapped through time looks like Townsville. (For the record, there is at least one real city of Townsville in the world. It's in northern Queensland, Australia, and here's the Port Authority's website.) Certainly, the leader of the dog archaeologists had a Mayor of Townsville-esque monocle and tie. Perhaps he looted them out of the Mayoral Mausoleum.

This poses an interesting question for people of a certain, nerdish cast of mind. It's a bit like a contemptibly nerdish conversation I once had with my friend Kevin in which I was able to point out that the stand-up comedian in Neil Gaiman's 'The Sound of Her Wings' (collected in both Preludes and Nocturnes and The Dolls' House because hey, Sandman fans just can't get enough of the Gothette) making jokes about Batman's origins is not being ignorant when she suggests he could be just a quixotic guy from the suburbs having a rather unique mid-life crisis. She lives in the DC comics universe, where Batman is a real person (he is even a guest at Morpheus' funeral in The Wake) and his backstory is not common knowledge. She does not merit the fanboy scorn which Kevin was, at the time, pouring upon her. For a moment I felt a frisson of victory and satisfaction. Then I realised what a nerd I was to be able to correct another nerd. Blah.

But I think the nerd thoughts anyway, because it's more fun than thinking about my prospects in life, and here's another: if the city we see in the Samurai Jack pilot is Townsville, does this mean that a) Aku has defeated the Powerpuff Girls and wrought havoc upon their hometown, or that b) Aku has never had to face the Powerpuff Girls because Samurai Jack takes place in an alternate timeline, to be corrected and deleted when Jack finally makes it back to bump him off in mediaeval Japan, in which the Girls may never have been created because of Aku's centuries of dominance? In which case Townsville would be ripe for the trashing... even Mojo Jojo would not be there to make it a point of pride, honour and macho bullcrap to challenge and vanquish anyone who dared set himself up as a superior evil overlord, since his creation as a supervillain was simultaneous with the Girls'. I always think it's a shame when a city loses even its more evil natural defenses. At the première of the naff Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie in New York, then Mayor Rudolf Giuliani was bragging that if the movie had been set in a New York prior to his administration, Godzilla would never have gotten as far as he did - 'the gangsters would have stopped him at the fish markets.' And he thought this was a good thing. No! Noooooo! Deluded man! They were like a layer of your city's immune system! Actually, the Mafia helped American counter-espionage substantially during World War II because of their unrivalled control of and contacts in the East Coast docks. I think the moral of the story is, when Godzilla or Hitler or Aku is bearing down on you, don't tell someone they can't help just because they're Tony Soprano or a very repetitive chimpanzee with an enormous exposed cerebral cortex.

Getting into one of those utterly wretched fanthing tropes of wondering who would win a fight with who, I actually don't think Aku could destroy the Powerpuff Girls; popping them into a dimensional oubliette or sending them further on in time, making a mental note, 'Defeat bobble-headed little girls sometime after pesky samurai,' seems more probable.

I wonder if the plot of the PPG episode 'Speed Demon,' in which the girls' race home from school turns into flying so fast that they leap forward substantially in time and find themselves in a post-apocalyptic Townsville where their intervening absence allowed the demon Him to take over, had anything to do with the inspiration for Samurai Jack? In both cases it is necessary to go back in time to re-establish one's presence and prevent the demonic being's ascension. It's just a lot easier to do this when your veins are full of Chemical X rather than the imperial blood of Nippon.

Today my mother stayed home from work because she's still sick and my father too because... I don't really know why, perhaps he feels he's still recovering from The Big Race. He spent a lot of the day cleaning up in the workshop under the house. I've finally got a new SIM card for my cellphone and it is supposed to start working tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow is a big day, housewifery-wise; I have to get up early, make a pavlova, then go and clean Jannie's house (I'll be sure to let you know how the Dyson does, I'm sure you are all just squirming to know), then come back via the supermarket and roast a leg of lamb and a chicken because there are going to be six people to dinner. Oh, and decorate the pav and make a salad while the roasts... roast.

I was a bit worried today about the fires in Southern California, but it turns out that my friends in San Diego are safe so hurrah.