So, after a long time without updating, here I am in New Zealand. Whew. Gawd, I don't know what to talk about.

What I have on my mind right now is my difficulties in updating my websites. I was hugely looking forward to this on getting home, but there are unforeseen complications. My deal is, I have free space (lucky me - before anyone asks, it is not in my power to hook anyone else up) on a privately owned server. The actual physical machine that Air & Angels is on is somewhere in Massachusetts and belongs to a chap called Brian, who I don't know personally, but I can tell you this, Brian is one careful chap when it comes to computer security. The type who installs protection against things that almost never happen, because it is conceivably possible that they may happen. Well, I'm not criticising, his server, his rules, but I am having a problem at my end, and my blog, my whinge.

In order to upload or download any files from my webspace, I need to use a secure FTP client, and most FTP clients, particularly for the Macintosh, are not technically 'secure.' Before I left home, I was doing okay with a Telnet program recommended to me by Patrick, but on my return, this program no longer seems to work. I don't know if it's just that Brian has upgraded or changed something about the server, or what, and because the two people I would normally ask about these matters, Patrick and Lizzard, are currently occupied on the US summer anime convention circuit, I can't find out. (Just as I know of but don't personally know Brian, he doesn't know me, so I can't just prance up to him [electronically speaking] and ask for the straight poop - and anyway he doesn't know Macs, which Patrick does.)

So my sw33t new index design (guest starring Buttercup from The Powerpuff Girls) just sits on the G3, along with a bunch of other updates and improvements I wanted to make, and I can't do a thing for the time being. I found a MacOSX SFTP program that got good press, Transmit, and hey, it has a cute Tonka-like moving-truck icon, but when I try to make the connection I get a message saying '
Could not connect to server
Channel request failed.'

It is deeply frustrating. I hate it when error messages don't give you any idea of what the error type means or what you could do about it. The worst of this accursed breed are the ones that use numerical codes - an error of type -1023 occurred, so what're you gonna do about it? Oh no, don't tell me what I omitted or entered in error, or if this is the kind of thing that might not happen if I just waited and tried again later, just hit me with that sweet -1023. Grumble.

So I can't fix my webpages, which have fallen into a state of dustsheeted, Miss Havisham-esque disrepair in my absence, and I have to wait for other people to physically return from across a continent to their homes before they can answer my questions, and again, I'm not criticising or blaming them for this, but I lament the situation. Graowr!

Also my mother and sister think our elder statescat, Robin, has stomach cancer, like her mother afore her, and is not long for this world. My relationship with this particular cat is not close (she never forgave me for introducing a new kitten to the household after my Jedi Cat Rose died - in the intervening months she had become convinced that she was all the cat this family needed, thank you very much) but it's depressing all the same. When you pick her up she feels so light it's like she's made of paper.

Thank God Meg the Bad Grey Monkeycat is still very sturdy.

And I'm home, and these problems will get sorted out in time, if I can be patient. I suppose I'd better go and get dressed, then I can try to pummel my father into taking me to see Spirited Away at the Rialto this morning.

It's the Weekly Wednesday Waffle. This kao-ani eloquently expresses my state of mind as the work fails to flood in.

I've put things in order for my departure: booked the flight, given notice to my employer and landlord, started planning things like offloading some clothes at the Oxfam.

I'm pleased to be going home.

Nothing interesting has happened for a while. Mark's gone to his new home in London, so we can't watch DVDs any more.

I should cut it out before the chick from Tine NeoHelp comes over here to kick my ass for using so much bandwidth. Her problem - she's the one giving out direct-link images.

Oh yes. I like kao-ani. I like them very much.

Cured by a peanut butter sandwich! Thank goodness. It was getting gastrically very scary there for a while. Having nothing solid in your intestines feels horrid.

God, this must be the most appetising blog on the Web, I don't think.

(groan) Terrible rumbling stomach cramps. You remember that episode of The Simpsons, 'Homerpalooza,' in which Homer went on tour with a music festival freak show? His act was having a cannonball shot into his big fat tummy and surviving. But after a while his stomach began to make strange noises and quiver as if in an earth tremor. A veterinarian told him that if he took one more cannonball to the stomach he could die. Well, what keeps happening in my tummy feels just like the noise Homer's tummy made. And I can feel movement in my intestines, as if cargo is shifting. When I go to the loo it's mostly just bubbles bursting. I don't know what the flip is going on in there but I disapprove!

Which Agent Smith are you?
By Madeline Elster

It's good to know these things.

Well, it's another Wednesday morning with not enough to do at work, so here I go again.

I received quite a nice letter from the CUP this morning, informing me that I am not to be their new electronic publishing princess. I am okay with this. In fact I am quite cheerful. I sang. It is a beautiful early summer day today - I just hope it holds over the weekend. I have given notice to my employer and my landlord; I'll book my plane ticket home soon.

I am on a semi-liquid diet in an effort to lose some weight, but it is a bit unpleasant and beginning to feel pointless since I will soon be going HOME where the food doesn't make me fat and I can go to the gym. Maybe I'll have some crisps. I just fancy some.

And my cyst is shrivelling! Hurrah!

I am deeply annoyed. I am annoyed by an aspect of my genetic inheritance. From my father's side, my sister and I have both inherited the Demon Sebaceous System. We are not as bad as he is. He leaves a residue where he sleeps. (Really. Have a look at his pillow sometime.)

Sometimes we get... cysts. They are not pimples - you can't pop them or cure them with a topical cream. Under the deep layers of the skin, a blockage of some kind forms and a sac of fluid forms. There is redness and swelling and a peculiar feeling of congested pain. My father got two very bad ones on his neck once, either side like the bolts on Frankenstein's monster. They got all infected and foul and had to be dug out by the doctor. Those suckers had roots.

My own cysts have never been so disgusting, but they have been red and sore and embarrassing. They appeared on my temples and just in front of my ears. One, near the outside corner of my eye, was so embarrassing that while it was at its worst I wore a Band-Aid over it - the Band-Aid looked bad but the unconcealed cyst looked worse. Fortunately, they have always gotten better by themselves, even if it took a few months. And now I've got a new one, but not anywhere I can conceal it - it's on my face, front and nearly centre, under the eye and beside the nose, just under the lower bone-rim of the eye socket, where the skin is particularly fine-textured and sensitive. I am constantly aware of its weight and pressure. It looks like a huge pimple that just hasn't come to a head yet. It never will, they never do.

I've got an interview for a position in the Electronic Publishing department at the above august press. Oldest publishing company in the world, as it happens. (They sent me a little brochure with my invitation.) I'm uncertain about this. It's the type of job I wanted to get when I first arrived here, and I just get an interview now when I've been making up my mind to go home. (Researching fares and everything.) I mean, I'm going to go to the interview and all and do my best, but I'm all upsy-downsy about whether I really want to stay here. I wish I could have that job, just in New Zealand. I don't want to turn down the opportunity because this could be the beginning of the career I want (not that I can tell from outside the industry). Argyle. I'm not good at this life thing.

Well, I have decided one of the things I'll do with my week off is to start a diet. It ought to be easier to start when I'm not at work. It's amazing how hungry you get when you have to sit in one place all day doing something rather boring.

It's always bothered me that so many of the important functions of my body are involuntary. I don't want breathing and heartbeat and digestion to leave the 'involuntary' category, that sounds like too much scary responsibility, but I think two that could definitely stand to be brought under my conscious control are sleep (both going to it and waking up from it) and fat-burning. Wouldn't it be neat if you could just decide to go to sleep when you got into bed, and wake up completely at the right time in the morning? And it would happen that way? Apparently some people's lives are like that. Phooey to them. And then there's getting your body to stop screaming for more food when it has all this perfectly good fat stored that it could burn for energy. I'm okay for vitamins and minerals. All it wants is energy, and it just ignores these perfectly good stockpiles. Wouldn't it be nice if your body presented you with a sort of dialogue box when it got hungry or tired, and you could either choose to eat something, or just select 'Burn fat for an hour' and click OK? No-one would ever have to be overweight. And there would be a failsafe built into the system so that your body wouldn't burn any more fat if it reached the minimum healthy level, so the anorexics couldn't whittle themselves down to nothing. (Unless they learned how to hack the program, and frankly anorexics can be pretty determined, but this is a problem for their psychiatrists to solve, not me.)

I'm hungry.

And bored.

Been a while, eh? So, updates.

I am growing fat. This troubles me. My normal, healthy weight means that I wear a UK/NZ size 10 on top and a size 12 on the bottom; although my top half is not much different my bottom is starting to outgrow a size 14. (Americans: For size 10 read size 8, for size 12 read size 10, for size 14 read size 12. I think one of the most useful things the United Nations could do would be to establish a uniform, one-world system of clothing sizes and get manufacturers to stick to it.)

We now have a full house again, with a dull but inoffensive poussin-cooking astronomer called Alex in Ilke's old room, and some as yet largely unknown chick who's learning to be a civil surveyor for the Ministry of Defence (a likely story) in mine. Mark is still a fixture despite continuing to occasionally say that he really is going to move out. (I'm glad, I would miss him if he went.) Katie and I ain't going nowheres, although we are both on the prowl for new jobs. Today I've applied for a gig at the Cambridge University Press as Assistant Controller, Electronic Publishing; here's hoping.

I have this coming week off from work; not sure what to do with it yet.

I'm probably going to go home in the next few months; I want to see what happens with this CUP thing first, but if I don't get an interview I think I'll start getting ready to return. As well as giving notice to my landlords and at work, I'll need to ship home a bunch of things I've acquired here that it would be wasteful to discard, like my feather and down duvet, my CD/cassette boombox, the half of my wardrobe that I can't fit in my luggage. I can wrap the duvet around the boombox to protect it in transit. Neah, eh.

Getting home will mean a return to comfort and convenience and my own community, and also that I can start doing school visiting to support my application to the Auckland College of Education; I've pretty much resigned myself to becoming an English teacher. My parents are going to help with my fees and it will be a vocational qualification; employers don't seem to give a shit about a Master of Arts with First Class Honours, despite the work ethic and intelligence to which it attests. When they are trying to recruit you to the Faculty of Arts, they will tell you that employers respect these degrees because they show you can learn anything and think independently. This is not true. Do a BA if it's what you're interested in, it would be sad not to, but you need a vocational qualification too, or a conjoint degree in something scientific or financial or legal or technical if you want any employer other than a university to look at you twice. This is the sad voice of experience speaking. I am becoming a teacher in part because I appear to be unemployable in any other capacity. Frankly they are lucky to get me. First Class Honours, jimmy. But I wish I could have found a job that was more of an adventure for me, rather than just continuing with English education, which has accounted for most of my adolescent/adult life, only on the other side of the desk.

The problem is that I haven't the faintest clue what that job should be. I was always hoping I would be able to find out; that someone would mention it in conversation or I would read about it, which is how I've always found out about everything worthwhile and interesting. I want to do something creative, but I can't play an instrument and wasn't trained in art (and it would be unsporting to go into that field since it's what my sister is doing) and don't have an idea for a novel yet. And the problem is that to be creative professionally is in nine cases out of ten to be poor and nomadic, a lifestyle which I detest. I am a comfort-loving person and one who is not happy without a secure home base. The unexpected and spontaneous elements of my life come in intellectually; for the quotidian, I want certainty and plenty. Call me unadventurous if you will. I'm from New Zealand; what do we know about hobbits?

I also hope to be able to deal with my encroaching fatness more effectively when I am at home. Living on my own like this I turn to food for comfort; I don't have much else. I have a theory that people who can regularly have hugs and convivial company are much less likely to have indulgence-type problems like overeating or alcoholism. Last Thursday night Mark came out of his room to watch Buffy with me and Katie in the conservatory, so we were sitting three abreast on the dreadful busted sofa with our arms touching, and I could slump over and lean against Mark, not in a flirty way (he's homosexual) but just feeling so so happy to be cosily close to someone friendly. Everyone needs affectionate contact. You go strange without it.

Mark and Katie are good flatmate friends, but you can't puppy-pile with flatmates you only met when you moved in the way you can with siblings or people who have been your friends for years.

When I leave home at home it's going to be so much easier than establishing myself here has been... I'll have a bloody good bed to take with me, a brown couch if my sister hasn't moved out first and claimed it (it goes to the first to fly the coop), pots and pans, maybe the electric wok with the broken handle, and even a second-hand computer and printer. I shall feel quite rich.

Peace out!

Know why I just did that? So I can keep a copy of the link somewhere. Another reason I HATE not having a computer of my own: I can't bookmark anything.

It's raining, I made bitchin' roast lamb with garlic and rosemary last night, I finally got my replacement Amex card and I'm lookin' pretty good thanks to some judiciously applied fake tan. Peace out.

It's getting on for four PM and I've not eaten anything yet today. I feel funny! I'm buying vegetables on the way home.

I never did get to cook that Easter lamb I was dreaming of; they never had a leg of lamb in Sainsbury's when I went in, all weekend! To a New Zealander that just feels disturbingly wrong. But I did get Easter eggs, because I bought myself one at my mother's instigation, and dear Downstairs Mark gave one each to me and Katie.

Today I did Halal Shopping - that is, my regular supermarket was closed in observation of the resurrection of Christ, so I went to the small but astonishingly stocked mini-supermarket near my house, run by a Muslim Asian family. Got me some guaranteed halal chicken nuggets! *smacks lips* Those'll go down great in the bento box - which arrived the other day along with the puchi onigiri press. I am just tickled pink with my new Japanese lunch kit. Although I realise now I should have bought two boxes, so I could pack a lunch and a dinner to bring to work. Oh well. All things in time.

Have bought a book - curse these expenditures, but I just had to get it. It caught my eye when I was browsing in Borders: Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History of Feral Children by Michael Newton. I had to get it because it contained accounts of the Wild Boy of Aveyron and Genie, of whom I'd read tangential mention in other books and never been able to find more. I find Newton's style of writing mildly irritating, because he treats the historical accounts of feral children more as literature to be interpreted for discoveries about the state of mind of those who wrote about the children than as accounts of the children themselves, and I really don't give a damn about how the people who dealt with the Savage Girl of Champagne, say, felt about her and what this said about them psychologically (Newton is very hot on this) so much as how Memmie herself felt and exactly what she said and did, as best we can tell at this historical distance. It begins to read like padding where Newton has run out of solid information but wanted to reach some kind of preset word-count or show how clever he is. Sometimes it's better to acknowledge a void in meaning or knowledge than to attempt to fill it with creative writing.

But the children themselves remain utterly fascinating. I think that's the source of my frustration with Newton, that he seems to stand between a knowledge of them and me. He would no doubt have something to say about that.

Oh, and I watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on DVD the other night, and I just continue hope and pray one day when the fad wears off people will come to understand what poor fiction and fantasy (both) those stories are. As books or as films.

Also, the girl who plays Hermione Granger is going to be a major hottie one of these days, in a Helena Bonham Carter/Julia Sawalha way.

And I'm re-watching bits of The Fellowship of the Ring special edition DVD, reviewing the extras before watching the movie again, and loving every single juicy bit. Now that's how to make a movie!

You know what's kind of odd? The way Americans pronounce 'mirror.' They say 'meer.' How did they ever start doing that?

Monday at work this week was quite dreadful. There was a lot to do, I was feeling exhausted and depressed (I think it was PMT), my hair looked just awful, and the colour printer decided on some form of go-slow industrial action, so that it took hours to get our colour proofs out.

Then on Tuesday, everything was fine. I woke up feeling well and perky, the printer apparently came to some sort of agreement with management because it started working again, the jobs ran smoothly and we finished a bit early. My hair was not quite perfect but it was a damned sight better.

And today seems to have been cast in the mould of Tuesday, with the added bonus of some downtime between assignments (in which I'm writing this) and even better hair.

I'm very hopeful for this Easter weekend in terms of weather, and I plan to enjoy it as much as I can. I'm going to roast some Easter lamb on Thursday or Friday, probably a nice leg, preferably from New Zealand, with garlic and rosemary poked into slits in its skin to infuse it with delicious flavour, and I can feed off the carcase for the rest of the weekend. I don't think I will be having any Easter eggs, though, for the first time in my life since I was old enough to take solid food. It doesn't seem right to buy one for myself, and there is no-one within cooee to give me any. This will probably do my figure good.

We do have to come in to work on Easter Monday, but as it is a Bank Holiday Monday the schedule is different: we're to show up at 9:30 AM and leave as near 6:00 PM as feasible, so we'll actually get to have an evening to ourselves.

Beautiful lipstick-red tulips are growing in our front garden - unfortunately, their little cluster is right between the normal resting places of our two wheelie bins (one black for crap, one green for compostable crap) and they keep getting run over. I salvage as many blooms as I can and put them in the Dolmio sauce jar in the conservatory (we don't have such a thing as a vase in this rooming house) where they look very bright and pretty. Out in the back garden there are also some slightly tatty daffodils and what I have tentatively identified as grape hyacinths. And some potatoes that I have planted under some old, semi-composted mats of turf left over to one side from some past resurfacing of the lawn. They were sprouting in the cupboard so I thought I'd put them in the ground and try to become self-sufficient in potatoes. I will watch their progress with interest.

And that's about it, for now.

One final thing: to the person who stole the American Express card my mother sent me in the mail for emergency expenses, and used it to buy petrol several times before it got cancelled: you'll get yours, dickhead.