Today I took Mary Motorcar, my trusty Nissan Pulsar, to the carwash. I've had her for more than a year and never bathed her (she didn't look dirty, and it's not as if she's a child, people!), so I felt she deserved a treat and lashed out on the $8 Prestige Wash, which includes 'pre-wash foam,' whatever that may be. Brought her home, cleaned her windows from the inside, vacuumed her thoroughly with the cyclone-power Dyson, hiffed out all the strange rubbish that accumulates on the backseat floors of cars, and misted Febreze about to dispel any musty or peculiar odours that might linger within. Mary is as clean as I and the BP Super Wash machine can get her, and she looks pleased with herself.

I am missing the Auckland Anime Club meeting tonight, but I can deal. After all, there's Coronation Street to be watched! There's reheated leftover pizza to be eaten!

I keep on applying for jobs - writer/researcher on the Ministry of Culture and Heritage's new Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Writing and Communications Role for Cook Executive Recruitment, full-time Library Assistant at Howick Public Library...

Autumnal weather is closing in on us, and I love how it feels. Okay, rain is inconvenient, but what's nicer than weather that makes snuggling under your duvet a deep and hedonistic pleasure?

And I've started on Roaccutane, a rather lethal little medicament based on Vitamin A, to tear out dermal pestilence root and branch, or to put it another way, to cure my lingering acne. It goes away, it bubbles up, it forms deep nasty cysts that never come to a head and just sit there looking tumorous for months, it repeats this pattern until I'm utterly fed up. I underwent a blood test to make sure I was okay for this, and I'm sure you'll all be delighted to hear that every level of blood gunk they tested was normal, and I have very healthy cholesterol. Hurrah! Everyone come and have a bite!

In Worrying News, I accidentally slept until 12:45 pm today. Is this mere sloth, or have I got some sort of imbalance?

Sloth probably.

So I'm trying to update this blog more frequently because if James Lileks manages, and looks after his baby daughter a lot of the time, and has a job at a newspaper, and writes books that get published, and I can only dream of having any of those things in my life (he's a lucky sonofabitch, but at least he knows it), I should be able to write a little more each day.

Though of course James' daughter, job and books give him things to write about, not to mention his dog and his techno music and his video games, and sometimes his wife. I've got a watermelon and I can't tell if it's ripe; I kind of live in dread of plucking it prematurely because I think the watermelon weather is pretty much over here and I don't think I can expect another melon from this vine.

I am staying home from work (as a market research telephone interviewer - yes, I interview telephones) today because I threw up this morning, and I believe a day on which I throw up is a day on which I need to rest. I only threw up water, because that was all I had in my stomach at the time, but it was still puking and I say it still counts.

I have been trying to register online for the US State Department's Green Card lottery, so I can get a Diversity Visa (though I think I'm probably too white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant to be diverse) and get over there and then get a job, instead of having to secure a job with employers who will sponsor me in before I can move, which is a bloody fiddle. But the wretched thing gives me a 'Tranzila' message saying it won't accept transactions from this location. What location, pray? Auckland? New Zealand? Oceania in general? My family's combined laundry room and information technology centre? (My father continues to insist that we just put the washing machine in the computer room because we had nowhere else to keep it, but the sink in the corner calls him a liar.) This is annoying but hopefully it can be resolved.

Last night I watched L.A. Confidential on TV, or at least most thereof, because I missed the first eighteen minutes or so. It was bloody marvellous. Why did they stop making movies like that, start again for just one movie then stop again? Now as well as fancying Russell Crowe something rotten I also fancy Guy Pearce. Will go to The Count of Monte Cristo come hell or high water; Guy Pearce with a sword, dribbledribbledribble.

I also had a Solitary Extempore Wit Moment, which is that annoying thing where you say something rather clever and only the cats hear you. When the corrupt police boss played by James Cromwell is finally shot and falls dead, I said, 'That'll do, pig. That'll do.' The cats exchanged glances.

I still haven't got FTP access to airandangels.com, but apparently the problem is in the process of being solved.

I still don't have a job, in case you were wondering, but I'm taking steps to get one, as always. Phoned TMP Worldwide Recruitment on Friday, left a message, and the beggars have still not called me back. If they do not do so by Monday lunchtime I'll call them again. They are a big company and there is no excuse. Grr. Arg.

On Tuesday I'm going to my dermatologist in the morning, to discuss the possibility of going on Roaccutane (US equivalent Retin-A). I am not as spotty as this makes me sound but I've had a persistent problem with acne since the age of 21 (specifically, it erupted on January 2, 1999) and I've had enough of it. Hopefully Roaccutane will tear out the pestilence root and branch. Of course, it will also give me three months of uncomfortably dry and itchy skin and eyes, and may plunge me into a depression, and would cause atrocious birth defects if I fell pregnant while taking it - but who wants big painful spots?

If that is the nadir of Tuesday, the zenith will be that night's meeting of the Auckland Anime Club, at which I will cough up my membership dues (I just paid non-member admission last time) and we will watch some more of Key the Metal Idol, which rocks the casbah, and may I just say I want Tomoyo. If only because he's the spitting image of Gaddes from Escaflowne. I like AAC! Some of the members are a bit odd (there, I've just described every anime club in the world) but they're nice and welcoming and you get to watch Key the Metal Idol so who's complaining? And it was this blog that got me into contact with Zeb who takes the money and is a jolly good sort, so there's another reason why I should maintain it with more assiduity.

Eh, I'll write more later.

Interested to note that the brilliant Kiwi band Shihad have changed their name to assuage the Americans who squeal in terror at a word which sounds like 'jihad.' To pacify them the band have taken the name of one of their more anthemic songs, 'Pacifier.' Somehow this annoys the crap out of me. I love 'Pacifier' but it really bugs me that an excellent rock act whose actual music contains nothing remotely jihaddy (they are not even Muslims, the name is taken from the science-fiction novel Dune)have to change their name to spare the tender sensibilities of the Americans, if they are to have the worldwide success they richly deserve.

Depressed at my continuing lack of a proper job.

Annoyed at TMP Worldwide Recruitment who have failed to return my call of this morning despite assuring me that the answering machine is cleared hourly.

Have upset my best friend. She forgives me but we both feel like crud.

This is not a very good day, is it?

Also I think my watermelon may be ripe but I am not at all sure.

A lot has been going on and I've been too slack to write about it, so I'm going to try to squeeze a lot out in one go, especially because someone emailed me about this blog today so now I know at least three people read it sometimes.

Okay, so I had this dream where Muhammad Ali came to stay with my family. He didn't have Parkinson's disease any more and he was very cheerful and jolly. He body-slammed my dad to say hello when we collected him at the airport. He seemed to be a kind of grandfather to us. In the mornings my sister and I went and sat in his bed with him and he told us stories and made us laugh and gave us presents, and a monarch butterfly flew in at the window and landed on my nose.

An aunt sort of woman also came to stay with us, a Japanese one, quite young for an aunt, like about thirty, and a bit melancholy. She showed me a picture and told me a story about it that were meant to be some kind of sad omen for my life. The picture was of a truly enormous elephant, with a very ugly open bum (it was a black, gaping hole that seemed to have suckers around it like those on an octopus' tentacle), walking through a willow-ware-blue-and-white snowy landscape towards the sea. Riding on its back were two elephant people, a man and a woman (I mean elephant-headed like the god Ganesha, not 'Elephant Man' like poor deformed John Merrick), trying to eat chunks of watermelon with chopsticks and having great difficulty. I didn't understand it at all.

I didn't understand last night's dream either, in which I was fired from my market research job, and everyone I work with was furious with me, and no-one would explain to me why. I couldn't think of a single thing I had done to warrant it, and they were all so angry that I began to think I must have had some kind of blackout, done something appalling and woken up with no memory of it. There was also something about a beautiful necklace of little bright-red coral fish.

And there was another dream I didn't get, about the Coen brothers making a movie with David Schwimmer in a Georgia swamp, and progressively finding out that there was something really weird about the only local town, parts of which were underwater.

Returning to my waking life, I am still waiting to hear from Aspac about the travel writing job, but am losing faith in them. I've put a few more irons in the fire as a precautionary measure.

I've developed a passion for making pikelets and pancakes, mainly because frying things in a pan is so simple and satisfying. I'm still watching Coronation Street semi-religiously, and this evening my sister informed me (to my embarrassment) that I make little faces while I watch it, little happy faces whenever something sweet or funny happens. I do it particularly when Roy and Hayley are onscreen. She said it was cute, but she was laughing at me. I'm just glad she didn't see me on Jack and Vera's 44th wedding anniversary in the allotment shed. The two of them sitting on the little shed verandah, under a full golden moon, softly singing 'My Old Dutch' together, defined middle-aged romance. I cooed.

Things in Coronation Street that I currently find ridiculous or puzzling:
- Hayley is obviously pregnant. I don't begrudge the actress the opportunity to have a baby, not one bit, but I do think it's a bit daft of the writers to think they can get away with it. Hayley, for the information of non-Street watchers, is a transsexual woman who started life as Harold. You see why it's a bit rich?
- How can Sally sleep with Martin when he keeps wearing that awful old tracksuit jacket with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows? Never mind the fact that he's her best mate's ex-husband, that jacket should be the deal-killer right there!
- I almost fancy Fred Peacock. Am I mad?
- I know Karen is awful, but I can't help liking her rather a lot. She's just got that brazen 'naughtiest girl in the school' appeal.

What else, what else... my cat has been sick. She had lungworm (a parasite which she picked up from her prey, being a mighty huntress) and it made her cough most pathetically in the night, but the vet has cured her with little white pills and tomorrow I'm taking her back to show him how well she is now.

I watched The Fifth Element again last night, and dagnabbit, I love that movie so much. It's totally a clever fifteen-year-old's fantasy, but so wonderfully executed that one doesn't care. The only scene in it that strikes me as completely pointless is that of Ruby Rhod seducing the space hostess as the shuttle/plane prepares for takeoff. That's there to, what, reassure us that he isn't as screamingly gay as he looks, sounds and acts? Who cares? Though even then, Ruby manages to get in a little ambiguity - 'I've never felt this way with a - human.' *^.^* I love Ruby - the perfect caricature of the screamy useless annoying heroine, as epitomised by Willie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Everything else, every single thing else, I love. The costumes. Jean-Paul Gaultier must have had so much fun. The art direction. For effing fantastic futuristic world design it's up there with Blade Runner and Wings of Honneamise - well, Honneamise isn't so much futuristic as a sort of alternate Earth, but one that's completely and convincingly imagined in the same sort of impressive and enchanting way. The casting. Oh, how I adore Ian Holm. This has just come over me recently, I think because I rented the DVD of Alien (25th anniversary edition) and shortly afterwards saw Lord of the Rings and rented the VHS of The Madness of George III so I had an intensive dose of Ian Holmy goodness. He's such a dear little kipper of a man, and such a superb actor both sinister and comic. I want a full movie of The Hobbit with him playing Bilbo! Well, anyway, poor harried Vito Cornelius is probably my favourite movie priest ever, with second place going to the poetic twerp played by Pete Postlethwaite in Dragonheart.

Incidentally, it pissed me off that I couldn't get a DVD copy of Aliens - and the VHS copy I was able to rent wasn't even the Director's Cut, so I missed out on Ripley's lost daughter Amy and lots of other extra goodness that enriches the movie enormously. (I saw the full version a couple of years ago on Sky.) Anyway. Bloody brilliant movie. Can't love it too much.

My brain is tired. I go now.

Garden Update
I'm growing eggplants! Six seedling plants have gone into the vegetable bed. I'm not an eggplant fan myself, but I bought them thinking it would be a nice treat for my father and sister. Then my mother told me that Kate's gone off eggplant. Oh well. If all else fails, I can put them out on the sidewalk in a box labelled 'Free to a good home.' One doesn't feel guilty about that with aubergines as one does with puppies.

I've had an interview for a job I'm really really hoping to get, as a travel writer for Aspac Vacations - it seems like terrific fun and very satisfying. They're interviewing one other person, that I know of, and since my personal code of ethics prevents me hoping she'll fall under a bus, I have to resort to hoping that she'll land another job she likes much better. Wish me luck!

Progress with getting my own domain up and running continues slow, so http://www.airandangels.com/ remains dormant. If Patrick or Brian reads this - please, guys, you are the ones who can figure this out, I'm relying on you to make it possible. Both Lizz and I will be deeply grateful. I bake really yummy pecan and key lime pies for people who help me. Think on, lads.

Emmm... that's about all for now. I'm not that interesting, am I?

Today I'm making key lime pie, except of course I have no idea if the limes I'm using are 'key.' They're just limes. From the supermarket. The only other use they see in this house is when people put slices of them in their gin and tonic. Furthermore, the recipe calls for a graham cracker crumb crust, and of course, graham crackers, like key limes, seem to be one of those things that are known only in the United States of America. Fortunately, when I ate my first s'more as an American summer camp counselor, I discovered that in flavour and consistency graham crackers are more or less identical to plain digestive biscuits (you can make a fanriffic cheating s'more by sandwiching a large marshmallow between two chocolate digestives and microwaving them on high for thirty seconds), so I was able to make a substitution. So that's all right. For lunch I had cup ramen and green tea, because not all of us can be Japanese but anyone can eat like it, and I'm enormously enjoying reading Carter Beats the Devil, a story of mystery, revenge, genius, betrayal, true love found, lost, and found again, and possibly murder, all centring on a stage magician in the 1920s. It's by Glen David Gold and as many people as possible should read it. I've made the piecrust and am waiting for it to chill sufficiently before I mix up the lime filling. Last night I had an interesting new adventure - previously, I've attempted Drunk Shopping, with pleasing results, and last night, because we decided to drink two bottles of Lindauer méthode champenoise left over from New Year to show that we don't care that two members of the household are between jobs, I ventured upon Drunk Cooking - specifically, Drunk Baking, and the orange-chocolate-chip muffins were yummy. We ate them while they were still so hot that the chocolate chips were runny. I'm going to submit the recipe to Allrecipes.com now.

In 'oo-er' news today, someone has committed suicide in the bush gully down the back of our houses. There were three police cars in our street this morning. I didn't have much attention to spare for this, though, because I was taking my cat to the vet.

Meg is normally the liveliest little scamp in the world, so when she spent all of yesterday sleeping quietly on my bed I thought it was odd, and when I got back from helping Tony with the boat in the evening Wendy told me Meg felt quite hot and seemed very lethargic. Her nose was bunged up with snot - at one stage I had to soften it with a warm wet paper towel and then pick it for her, which was not pleasant and just goes to show what a devoted mistress I can be. Mark Twain reckoned that if man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man but deteriorate the cat. I reckon that if you could just give cats the humane gene that makes us able to blow our noses when they're runny, everyone would be happier.

A cat that can't smell its food and water won't taste them, you see, and so sick cats often die more from dehydration and starvation than their actual illness. When Meg was a kitten she had a form of cat flu called snuffles (it was not as cute as it sounds) and nearly went off this way. I kept her going by squirting fortified pet milk down her throat with an eyedropper, so she had to drink it. I repeated this method with water last night, and although she really didn't like it I think it helped a bit.

To the vet first thing this morning, then. We got the nice very handsome young man vet. Last time we had him I remarked to my mother as we were leaving that he was a bit of all right, and she shook her head and said 'Wedding ring.' But I had a good look at both his hands while he was examining the cat and I was pretty sure he didn't wear any rings, and I had another look today which confirmed it. Why would Wendy lie about this? Doesn't she want me to fancy a vet? It's very mysterious.

Anyway, he said that Meg seemed to have a bacterial infection in her upper respiratory tract, and she definitely had a fever, which was why she was lethargic and clearly not feeling happy. He gave her shots of antibiotics, multi-vitamins, something to reduce her temperature, and subcutaneous (that means under the skin) fluids to fix up the dehydration. She didn't like this either but when we got her home she seemed a little fresher and had something to eat, which was very pleasing.

She also sneezed and got snot all over her face, so I had to wipe her nose for her again. Still, I think that may have been what made her breathing clear enough to smell her food and thus be willing to eat it, so no hard feelings.

When Tony and I got back from the vet's (the nurse mistakenly called me Mrs Dove - I always cringe with embarrassment when someone mistakes me for my father's wife) we couldn't get in because Wendy had gone to work, leaving the house locked, Tony hadn't thought to bring his keys and I had lost my house key. The street was still full of police and I had to go round the back of the house to break in - there's a window I can get through if I climb like a monkey. I would not recommend it to any burglars reading this - it's quite dangerous and you need to be small and know the terrain well. I explained to a policeman what I was up to just in case.

So that was a bit of inadvertent adventure.

I still don't know who the suicide was, but I feel sorry for them and their family. I expect it'll all be in the papers tomorrow.

Good News: my friend Lizz is giving me my very own domain (www.airandangels.com) for Christmas. Unlimited space is all lined up on a privately owned server, with no restrictions on bandwidth.

Bad News: the server requires a secure FTP client (that is, one which encrypts my password when it sends it to the server, rather than sending it 'clear'), and the very convenient FTP doohickey that is part of my web editing program, Claris Home Page 3.0, is not 'secure,' and because my computer is a much-loved Macintosh, Lizz (a PC user) doesn't know what I should be using.

Good News: you can make the FTP application Fetch secure by the use of a clever thing invented at MIT called Kerberos.

Bad News: few servers support Kerberos because it's new and designed for Macintoshes and everyone who uses a Macintosh must be ruthlessly penalised for wanting a computer with a little bit of elegance in its operations and appearance, not to mention one that crashes less often, by international law.

I'm still in limbo on this one. Funny how even a perfect scenario can manage to include unexpected imperfections! Yeah... real funny. I'm busting a gut here. It's nobody in particular's fault (definitely not Lizz's), but it's deeply unfair.

Meanwhile the United States of America now have a President who cannot even chew a pretzel and sit still at the same time. At a time like this I feel it is best to concentrate on happy thoughts, e.g. the cucumbers in the garden are coming along beautifully, and the watermelon vine finally has little yellow flowers.

Things that totally rock about the 1999 movie Idle Hands:
- Seth Green and whatshisname Henson, Elbow Henson? - the big kid from The Mighty, anyway, as zombie stoners. Without them, this movie would so not be funny. With them, my sister and I cry laughing. 'Once again, marijuana saves an otherwise disastrous day.' The introduction, in a parody of horror, of two characters who don't give a cuss about anything, was a stroke of genius.
- Seth Green and Elbow? Henson as stoner angels. They appear only briefly, but their entrance, to Sublime's 'Santeria,' is brilliant.
- Getting to hear the Offspring, as the band at a high-school Hallowe'en dance, play the Ramones' 'I Wanna Be Sedated.'
- The Offspring's lead singer subsequently being scalped by the evil zombie hand.
- Jessica Alba's angel costume. It's our second favourite after Claire Danes' in Romeo + Juliet but faces stiff competition from Drew Barrymore's in Ever After.

Things that totally suck about the 1999 movie Idle Hands:
- Most other things, but particularly Vivica A. Fox.

You know what I want now? A movie with Seth Green and Melanie Lynskey as the romantic leads.

Oh, and I looked it up, and he's Elden Henson. Sorry Elden.

What Kind Of Pokemon Are You?

Well, that was a revelation.

My cucumber vine has gone rampant.

It seemed innocent enough when I planted it, y'know? I had visions of yummy cool crisp bits for sushi and salads and tired puffy eyes. But now it's sprawling all over the vegetable garden, menacing the baby oakleaf lettuces, invading the watermelon vine's personal bubble, and going feral down the scrubby bank where it will bear its warty fruit out of my reach. Which perhaps is its intention; it wants the cucumbers to rot there and their seeds to germinate and a vast feral cucumber colony will spring up, like a cucumber Watership Down.

Doesn't mean I have to like it.

I'm particularly vexed by its tendency to crowd the watermelon, which is my pet project. My mother says it won't work and I say it will. I like cucumbers but watermelons have more glamour. I spent a goodly chunk of this morning weeding the veg. garden and my right arm is still sore from wielding the Mighty Claw Implement which is very good for breaking up the ground and uprooting weeds but requires quite a bit of oomph from the wielder. My right forearm is the dirtiest part.

I like yoghurt now, and I didn't like yoghurt for years and years and years. Who knows what I'll like ten years from now. Fell-walking? Oyster-sexing? Stalking people who fall asleep on public transport and gently gently so as not to wake them swabbing out their ears with a cotton-bud? (Q-Tip, Americans and other aliens.)

I need to go and have a shower and wash my right forearm.

Hi, did you miss me?

This evening I went to an aerobics class, the first time I've done so. The only thing I can think of to top it for combined confusion and boredom is a mathematics lesson, and at least maths doesn't make you sweaty. (Unless it's the code-word 'maths' that my friend Lizz and I use in a wink-wink nudge-nudge sense.) I quickly become bored when confused, and soon I was so confused and bored that I left about a third of the way through, thinking I might come back with some company or when drunk, but otherwise, blecch.

Things I Don't Understand About Aerobics Classes
1. Loud music plays to provide you with motivation and a beat to move to. The instructor wears a microphone headset so that she can be heard over the music. But she shouts into the microphone, so her voice becomes distorted and I can't understand a thing she says. She would be easier to understand if she took off the microphone and just shouted as Nature intented.
2. Each new sequence of movements is run through only once, rapidly, with a high-speed demonstration but no explanation. When, pray, is a beginner supposed to learn how any of the movements work or how to do them properly? Everyone says 'You have to come to a couple of classes and you just pick them up.' I invite you to imagine my consequent level of frustration. I hate doing things badly; I'm acutely conscious of the waste of time involved, whereas if someone would just give me a clear explanation at the beginning (which surely wouldn't take more than five minutes) I could do it properly from then on. When I say badly, I mean badly. At one point I took three leaping stumbles backwards and then fell on my bum. I usually manage to have at least one spectacular trip-and-fall like this when participating in any physical activity; quite often I manage to hit my head on the floor too. My most spectacular one was when trying to skate on rollerblades at a rink in Delaware. My feet went past the point of no return in opposite directions, I sank into a very pretty sideways split, then toppled neatly forwards and struck my chin sharply on the floor. But it was also pretty good the time I tried to play indoor soccer, ran after the ball, aimed a kick at it, didn't even touch it and continued in that arc of motion until the back of my head met the floor. And I achieved a cross between these triumphs - that is, falling backwards, but on skates - at an ice rink just as I was beginning to think 'Hey, I can do this!' I was pretending to be a Rebel courier carrying an important message across the frozen wastes of the icy world of Hoth (which I think must be named after the noise you make when you breathe on the car window to write your name or draw a face with your finger).
3. How am I supposed to learn the movements by watching the instructor or other class members, when by the time I've sorted out what they are doing, what its name is and how I could do it too, they've started doing something else? I might as well spend the entire first class standing still and watching, but this is discouraged.

I think aerobics were designed for people who enjoy mindlessly imitative and repetitive activity, such as marching. I start to feel like Holden Caulfield, staring at the back of the neck of the Boy Scout in front and hating it.

It doesn't help a lot that I have always found it easier to be told how to do something than to be shown and have to imitate. If someone says 'Starting with your elbows close to your body and your fists up under your chin, do two short sharp punches in the air in front of you and bring your arms back to the starting position. Those are jabs,' I'm fine. But when I just have to watch another's movements, I genuinely don't know if I'm doing the same thing when I try it.

I admit that I have a prejudice against gym-type people, because of their tendency to act wildly excited and shout 'woo!' when doing nothing more exciting than skipping in place. Either they're being phoney, or they have very low thresholds of enjoyment, and either way it doesn't make me like them. I can be quite perky myself, but only about things that actually inspire perkiness, like going to the Philadelphia zoo and getting to ride on an African elephant called Angel and scraping my knee on her harness as I dismounted so for the next three days until it healed up I got to say casually 'Oh yes, I did that climbing off the elephant,' which struck me as madly exotic and adventurous. That was a very rewarding experience.

Why can't I spend more time riding elephants and less time being bored and confused by loud phonies?

Pleased to meet you; I'm Prisca Bracegirdle of Hardbottle, apparently.

Random thought: if Robbie Williams wants to be taken seriously as a crooner for the bobby-soxer set, he's going to have to call himself Bobby Williams.

I've just vacuumed the floors, cleaned the bathrooms and kitchen, and am putting off the dusting.

I want lunch. Anyone else want my life?

Agreeable dreams last night - the part I can remember was a new season of 'Cowboy Bebop,' following - um - I shouldn't spoil the ending - anyway, Faye, Ed and Jet finding each other again. The curious part was that the part of Ed tonight was played by Merle from 'The Vision of Escaflowne,' and Jet had acquired a wonderful tail like a snow leopard's. Ed had ended up holed up in a cave halfway up a mountain, very unhappy, and Jet climbed up to take care of her, which was very hard work. (The climb, not the care.) For some reason he was carrying a sword instead of a gun, a bright silver-blue thing.

Anyway! Superb Christmas haul this year! So far I have (not counting presents from uncle, aunt and grandmother, which are opened in the evening):
- An umbrella with Starry, Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh printed on it - looks smashing and has a lovely brass-tipped ferrule for poking things with, and van Gogh is my very favourite painter
- A wind deva, which is a spirally piece of acrylic plastic stuff that you hang up and it twirls and looks beautiful in the sunlight. It looks like green glass
- A large blue gauzy butterfly as a decoration for my room - I love butterflies
- A pair of black Chinese slippers, which I have wanted for years and not been able to find in any shops, thanks to my lovely chum Nariya
- A little stone with a frog painted on it, which is supposed to bring happiness, a Chinese lipstick case, and a tube of strawberry lip-balm, also from Nariya, as stocking stuffers *^.^*
- Absolutely smashingly, can-never-thank-her-enough-ly, my very own web domain, from Lizz! There's nothing up yet but you can see the splash page at http://www.airandangels.com/
- A little bag of chocolate money *^.^*
- A car chamois from the Christmas Ferret, an anthropomorphic personification unique to my family
- A Remington electric shaver, which is nifty and came with a bonus manicure set
- The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
- Swing When You're Winning by Robbie Williams
- Magic Line by Stellar*
- A little candle-holder for the Fire point on my altar, which I really needed.

I am a lucky girl!

The beloved dead remain with us in so many ways. For example, today I used my late grandfather's underpants as a dusting cloth.

My grandmother is still recovering from her ankle-joint replacement op, and although she's now living at her own house rather than staying with Lynda (aunt) she's not up to cleaning it all herself, so she offered me $20 to do some cleaning for her (that's about ten American, and believe me I was glad to get it). In a beautiful example of marital togetherness that even death cannot part, a pair of Derek underpants and a pair of Joan underpants share the dust-cloth basket. He used to wear each pair two days in a row, inside out the second day because that side was still clean.

My grandmother doesn't do that with her underpants, but she is a rather unsanitary old woman, surprisingly so for one who used to be a nurse - she doesn't clean her toilet properly, scrubbing out the bowl and disinfecting the seat and so forth, just flushes some Janola (household bleach) from time to time. She also tends not to wash her hands after going to the toilet if she only peed. So I felt some gratification in getting her bathrooms and kitchen properly clean, or as clean as I could get them without CLR liquid. I washed the bathroom and kitchen floors too - God, those Pledge Grab-It wet-wipe floor mops are wonderful!

What a super blog. Christmas is the day after tomorrow and I'm telling you how squalid my grandparents were and are (and I love/d them both enormously) and what delight I find in disposable floor-cleaning wipes. Tsk tsk, I say! Well, I've had a small lunch (peanut butter sandwich and orange juice) and next I'm going to the gym. Tonight I look forward to seeing the lion cubs on 'The Zoo,' the only reality TV show I will watch. Everything else is pretty fluid. I've finished my Christmas shopping and just need to wrap the stuff. Next I would like to win a large sum of money.

Last night's dreams were frankly gross and writing them out here probably constitutes Way Too Much Information but I've got to put them somewhere or otherwise they'll only be in my head and I'll be trapped alone with them.

First I was a writer of poetry and short stories in the nineteen-thirties who had been sexually abused by her father all through her childhood, and her father was played by *my* father, which is bullshit but made me feel rotten and squirmy, and then I could hover through the air and go anywhere but Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez were trying to force me to take part in a team-building exercise inside an electric fence like cattle, then it was this bizarre long epic where I spent years inhabiting the minds of about four sisters (on the run from the law for stealing a boat and a lot of TV sets and stuff like that - it was my mother's idea! she was the one that fought the sharks and orca that tried to stop us!) trapped on board a kind of floating baroque nightmare city that was a pirate whaling ship (hideous, horrific introductory scenes of a whale being killed, mauled so that I couldn't even tell it was a whale at first, its tongue torn out, and I was in the water being bashed around by its death struggles and sprayed with its blood, and there were huge waves and I thought I would surely drown) inhabited by murderous pestilent freaks (oh, and a few good-looking but nevertheless murderous people) who were constantly killing each other or themselves with sharp pointy thngs for no apparent reason. Disembowelling (of a pet tiger in one case), genital mutilation, literally cutting off someone's nose to spite their face... it never happened to any of my characters but they saw it constantly and lived in terror of it the moment they put a foot wrong or looked at someone the wrong way. Sex was the only thing that brought any of these people together and yet it didn't create any loyalty, so you couldn't even take the prison-society route of becoming 'bitch' to someone important and thus having their protection. One of the sisters, the youngest, prettiest, dumbest one, tried to do this with a princely man called Marc Anthony (with whom she was actually infatuated and loved having sex) but he abandoned her just as they were supposed to be running away together and committed suicide because he had Issues. And it turned into this freaky thing where the Earth was a giant spaceship (not even Earth-shaped at all, just big and shiny purple and blobby) and blob-shaped cannibal aliens were the real inhabitants of Earth and humans had come from somewhere else with all these ideas of literature and chivalry and wearing shoes and stuff and had gradually gone mad and become mutually destructive and self-destructive because none of this bore any relation to the world as they experienced it. Marc Anthony's body was floating dead in space; he was one of those chivalrous men who just couldn't deal with it. And there was just all this shit that didn't make any sense (vast teams of zombie Amazon warriors stuck full of arrows and knives rowing long canoes in pursuit of us) and the dream would keep confusing me by turning sexy (I had this one great red silk outfit to wear, and was invited to play with very beautiful marble dildoes lubricated with the spermaceti oil of the whales they killed - how Melvillean is that?) and then going gory and horrific again. In the end all the pirates were defeated in a truly horrible running sea-battle and we escaped with the pirate queen's handsome son as a prisoner, and even though he and I fancied each other like mad he kept trying to kill me with hidden weapons and also murdered a young woman who I'd thought was his best friend to further our escape and FLENSED HER BONES.

I think I am mostly quite a nice person, so why am I having the dreams of a psychopath?

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS. Rrrgh! I know I need to do something, but I don't know what it should be, and I want someone to do something with. My sister would do, but she has to go to work early every day so she's not up for evening outings, and I don't have any friends in this city. I have friends in Alabama, New York State (unless I'm confusing it with New Jersey) and Maryland who would be only too happy to do something nice of an evening, whether going out to a bar or sitting on a big fat couch with a dog (called Xander) or cat (called Malkovich) across our laps watching anime DVDs or getting the hoarded fireworks out of the Catacombs and going down to Cockle Bay to shoot Roman candles out over the water, but a fat lot of use that is when I can't get anywhere near them.

Well, I tell a lie, I have a friend in Auckland called Sam, but I think he's still getting over mono, poor pet.

The Catacombs are the disorganised and labyrinthine basement/workshop part under my house. There's one corner behind a partition that my sister won't look at because she says it's like The Blair Witch Project. There's a sort of pit and a b/w 1980s Macintosh SE that might one day be reincarnated as a home for fish and a Mysterious Package of White Powder (plaster of Paris with the label come off) and oodles of old tabletop wargames models (some D&D ones too I think) and a box stuffed with obsolete telephone directories that I shoot at for archery practice and all sorts. I would rather have an attic of the old school, but the Catacombs are pretty good.

But NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.

Maybe I need a chinchilla.