We got The Nugget, which attempts to capitalise on the trend for warm-hearted Australian munter comedies with 'the+noun' titles. It isn't as good as The Castle (despite having two of the same main actors, the ones who played Dale and Con) or The Dish, but it is likeable and amusing, and I found an Easter egg on the DVD, the first time I have successfully and independently done so, so I felt pretty special. There's a lot to like about a movie in which one of the characters is nicknamed Wookiee because he reckons he saw one once. In his yard.

So, the weekend rolls round. I shall have to do some more poking at my admissions essay and check the big Saturday jobs section in the paper, not that anyone ever advertises a job suitable for me. Or gets back to me about my application, thank you so very much New Zealand Woman's Weekly. Still, nil desperandum.

Lunch with two nine-year-olds, a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a one-year-old at McDonald's on a rainy day in the school holidays!

Actually it wasn't that bad, although the magnitude of our order clearly flustered the serving lad to such an extent that he forgot the dipping sauce for my chicken nuggets. Tsk. The problems were just a question of scale, because the kids were all well behaved and cheerful, although Molly and Sarah appeared a bit subdued. They explained afterwards that they find public places in Auckland a bit overwhelming - 'We come from Napier, it's very sheltered.' Too flaming right, girls. Any more sheltered and it'd be airtight. And I am entering a prize draw for about 400 bucks' worth of Finding Nemo goodies, off the traymat.

Then we all headed back to Lynda's house where the four larger children put on their swimsuits (those wetsuit-style ones with arms and legs seem to be a Thing) and had a dip in the spa pool pretending to be otters and seals and fairy penguins and playing with the Squirt the Baby Turtle toy out of Bryony's Happy Meal™, with Kate supervising, while Lynda, Wendy and I drank hot water (well, I didn't) and supervised Christopher as he toddled around, fell over, said 'This! This! This!' and crawled into corners. I have held him while he was trying to squirm away to check out some bamboo (I would've let him, but he could have fallen down the stairs right next to it) and let me tell you, he is a freakishly strong baby.

After the small Mannings and Kate went home, we remaining Cotters and Doves went off to Ezibuy to see if we could find just the clothes we've always been looking for. We couldn't, but Molly and I had quite a thorough talk about space, the possibility of life on Mars, and the importance of respectful first contact procedure. Molly seems to quite like me, which is nice if puzzling. Perhaps it's because we both like Pokémon, although I can't get my head around (or don't really want to get my head around) Yu-Gi-Oh!. Anyway, they are good twins, and if there is any justice and I get married to someone nice, I'll ask them to be flower girls. (It always drove me mad when I was growing up that my older cousins didn't get married so I couldn't be a flower girl or bridesmaid.) Molly will want to be a pirate flower girl, and they may both try to juggle during the ceremony, but that will add to the interest of the occasion. I mean, it's already going to be in the band rotunda at Auckland Zoo, with elephants in attendance and a Chinese buffet laid on afterwards. No point trying to be understated now. And the juggling pirate flower girls will offset the three senior bridesmaids role-playing the Three Fates very nicely.

Of course, if I could get the bridesmaids to cosplay Urd, Skuld and Belldandy, that would rock even harder, but the theme might begin to lose coherence.

Chinese honey marinated chicken nibbles for dinner tonight: good. Nothing to speak of on TV: bad. Hopefully we'll get a video or DVD. I want to watch something spooky like From Hell or The Others.

Surprisingly enough, the fight with Lizzard has been resolved. Thank God for that. It sucked.

Yesterday was supposed to be a pan-generational movie day, as my mother and I met up with my aunt and her granddaughters (my little cousins Molly and Sarah) to see Finding Nemo. However, when Wendy and I got there, we found that the three who had already arrived had got their tickets and now the showing we wanted to see was sold out, due to a block booking by a children's school holiday programme. So I took Lynda's ticket and we little girls went to the movie while Wend and Lynda... did something else. I think they went to my grandmother's house because she was with them when we came out. My mother was quite disappointed because all the children in her class are writing stories and drawing pictures about Nemo and she feels left out! After that we were going to have lunch in the café at the garden centre over the road, but it was busy, the food didn't look that good, and the prices seemed frankly a bit high, so we ended up buying some pies and cakes at a superette/caff at the Half Moon Bay marina and eating at Lynda's house.

I have to say, I am not sure why Ponsonby Pies are so highly thought of and award-winning. I had their Mince and Cheese number for my lunch and the pastry was hard, while the filling... well, it just didn't taste right. Too much Worcestershire sauce, I think. I pined for the mince and cheese pies of the bakery up the road from our house, which calls itself the Bellevue Café despite not serving coffee or having anywhere to sit down and eat.

I have an appointment to see someone at the damned department of Work and Income about the unemployment benefit, next Monday afternoon. I have started on my application essay for the MLIS, and fortunately my old lecturers have both agreed to write references, bless their blue stockings.

Today we were to have taken Molly and Sarah and the children Kate nannies to the beach for a stroll and ice-creams, but the weather is grey and wet and we're going to have to think of something else. How vexatious!

Today, today, I am going to make, I am going to make, a chocolate cake.

It is a nice day out there - sunny and breezy, if still chilly. You can start to see Spring showing around the edges. It's the primary school holidays, and my small second cousins Molly and Sarah are coming to visit their grandparents, my aunt and uncle. Molly and Sarah (they're non-identical twins) were very concerned that I was out of the country the last time they came up to Auckland. 'Big Sarah will be very upset that she missed us!' So it is a priority for me to see them this time, to put their minds at rest! They're nice kids. One nebulous plan is to have some sort of outing combining them and the Manning kids for whom Kate nannies, perhaps a picnic at the beach or (and this is what I'm really hoping for) a trip to the zoo. I sooooooo wanna go to the zoo. I haven't been there in over a year. There are entire new lions that I haven't met!

Last night, since there was nothing to speak of on TV, we rented two videos, Legally Blonde to watch with my mother, and Shanghai Knights to watch with my father. Legally Blonde was just adorable; it's not that Reese Witherspoon needed rehabilitation in my eyes, but Sweet Home Alabama severely pissed me off so it was great to just wholeheartedly enjoy one of her movies again. Her character is essentially a retread of Cher from Clueless, but I always liked Cher from Clueless so that is fine by me. Now we definitely want to see the sequel. Curiously, its subtitle has been changed for our market. In America, it's Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blonde. But the trailer we saw before Down With Love announced Legally Blonde 2: Bigger, Bolder and Blonder. What, people outside America weren't going to get that pun? Some marketing decisions are just so weird.

So was Shanghai Knights. It would have been very, very hard to dislike it, don't get me wrong. After all, could you dislike Jackie Chan? With his koala nose and his peppy little smile? And we are very pro-Owen Wilson in this house. But it was... deeply peculiar. The historical in-jokes weren't. Historical, I mean. Or jokes if you were 'in.' Me being a moderate Ripperologist and my dad being a sort of shambling military historian, we kept going 'Noooooooooooo!' The portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle was particularly weird. That actor wasn't so much playing a character as doing the late Graham Chapman playing a character. Check out the number of goofs! Of course, I guess the very fact that you notice and are bothered by the goofs in Shanghai Knights shows that you are not the intended audience.

I guess I'd better do the up and dressed thing and get started on that cake. The trick is to use more golden syrup than the recipe recommends. You almost can't put too much golden syrup into this cake.

Nekomusume.net has risen from the ashes! HURRAH!

It would be so nice if the Lizzard could just have discreetly removed my link from her page instead of posting a self-justifying rant about it. The good thing about being so mad at her is that it has gotten me past the stage of being sad that we are no longer friends. She was one of the best friends I ever had. I think my best friend is dead.

Today I did just what I'd planned, which tends to happen when my mother is driving you around. But in the opposite order: the bank, *then* Burger Fuel, then Down With Love. Nicer really. The bank stuff, well, it's sorted out. Now for the interesting things.

Burger Fuel. Ridiculously expensive fast food with silly 'edgy' names like The Bastard and Pist (sic) Chick. But the chips were of absolutely first-rate quality - I would recommend them without hesitation. It helped that we were their first customers of the day so we got yummy new clean fryin' oil with no hairs in it yet. The burger itself (a 'Ford Freakout' - honestly, I prefer descriptive names for burgers) was large, fresh, flavoursome and satisfying, but not really superior to what I've had from Burger Wisconsin, which is both a little bit cheaper and MUCH closer to my home. I think the BF edge really is just the chips (honestly, seldom have I eaten such good chips) and the imaginative range of vegetarian options. If I went again I might just have a cup of chips and try one of their malted milkshakes. But there are a lot of other places in Parnell that I'd like to try.

Down With Love, 1:10 PM show at the Village Broadway. We three (mother, sister and me) were the ONLY PEOPLE who showed up for this screening. Kate and I said to each other in Daddy Warbucks voices, 'Punjab, buy out the eight o'clock show. Let's all go to the movies.' Okay, well, maybe some more people came in during the Val Morgan ads but there would have been three or four tops. It reminded me of the time my father and I saw Miyazaki's Spirited Away in a totally empty theatre at the Rialto - and we were seeing it free because we'd been given compensation passes after our previous attempt to see it was disrupted by a fire alarm. So basically, we got a whole theatre to ourselves for free. Beat that Daddy Warbucks.

The movie itself: I loved everything. The aesthetic, the comedy, the casting, the romance. Ewan McGregor and David Hyde Pierce are both adorable and talented to the nth degree. It was a smart, sweet, refreshing little movie that provided moments of sheer delight. (Vikki and Barbara's entrance at the Mahogany Room, wearing, respectively, a yellow coat and a houndstooth one, which they peel off dramatically to show, respectively, a houndstooth dress and a yellow one. An absolutely magnificent Girly Frock Moment.) I do not know how the hell Renée Zellweger managed to walk like that but it was impressive.

Okay, now I would like there to be a movie musical in which Ewan McGregor, Robbie Williams and Orlando Bloom play brothers who have all been reared separately, Ewan in the noble Scottish highlands, Robbie in the working-class Midlands, Orlando in middle-class Kentish countryside, as a result of a complex bet made by their eccentric and wealthy father. Now that the youngest of them has reached twenty-one, the first one to woo and win the girl of his dreams will receive the lion's share of their inheritance. There has to be a number in which people tap-dance up and down a long curving staircase, and the whole thing should feel vaguely as if possessed by the ghost of P.G. Wodehouse. Other than that, I give the screenwriters a free hand.

If they won't make that movie (frankly I feel it would have a lot going for it, particularly if Amber Benson could somehow be involved) I will just have to settle for Romance and Cigarettes, which looks like being a bit of all right. It seems as if the movies are opening up to mainstream musicals once again and I say jolly good!

Still no Nekomusume.net. Grr. Arg.

Email today from Lucia (see sidebar under Nekomusumians) who is going quite berserk for lack of access to our beloved fora. I do hope things will be sorted out soon. The regular posters are quite a closeknit and friendly group and I'd gotten very used to their voices in my day. A lot of us share a feeling of isolation and inability to maintain friendly contacts in the real world. I don't know what this says about social trends or our own social skills, but we do offer each other moral support and I've always thought people who say Internet friendship doesn't count just don't understand. They say 'But you don't really know these people. Isn't it unhealthy to feel as if there's a connection between you?' Excuse me, there is a connection between us. We're humans who live on Earth. Read your John Donne; no man is an island entire unto himself. The more of us who are friends, who feel we are personally involved, the better if you ask me. It won't make it harder to have wars all at once, but I'm betting the next few generations will begin to see a knock-on effect. In Carter Beats the Devil, Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television, asks with touching naïeveté how, if a man in America and a man in Germany can each see how the other lives his ordinary life - how he eats his breakfast - they could still kill each other. The book was written before the September 11 tragedy, but the reactions of people all around the world to TV footage of the towers collapsing - ranging from 'Oh God, no' to 'Bullseye!' - dramatise that Philo was both right and wrong. What I think is that ultimately, the Internet may begin to have the effect Philo envisioned. I'm not saying it will work the same for everyone, because frankly, there will always be nasty people who will spoil things for the rest of us. There will always be someone who thinks that, despite the numerous commandments in major world religions about Thou Shalt Not Kill, God wants him to kill people. (There is a heartbreaking piece on this theme at the normally zippily satirical Onion.) But the more there are people in countries physically distant who have a sense of one another's daily reality, and more importantly, who like each other and look forward to talking to each other, the more there will be a tendency to have a real, personal concern for trouble happening in those other countries.

Perhaps I am just as naïve as the fictionalised Philo and history will prove me just as wrong, but it's still a nice thing to be hoping for.

On an unrelated note, the fun of reading The Crown of Dalemark is increased when you're storyboarding it Miyazaki-style in your head as you go. You know the only thing that sucks about Miyazaki? He's really old. He keeps coming back out of retirement and doing excellent work, but sooner or later he's just going to die. I wish we could get him an extension.

Worryingly, the Nekomusume.net forums have been inaccessible (at least to me) for the last two or three days. I suspect Hurricane Isabel is somehow involved (the forums belong to a chap located in Virginia), and just hope that nothing heavy fell on anyone I liked. I miss talking to the Nekomusumians.

The weather here is pretty weird too, although not dangerous in its extremity. Last night I was woken from a deep sleep by an astonishingly loud roll of thunder, the kind that sounds like it is happening directly above your house and quite low down in the atmosphere, as if it could hit you on the head if your roof wasn't in the way. A few seconds later another one followed, but after that it was quiet. I hadn't heard anything like it since the last night of camp in Pennsylvania, in 2000, when it went on for about half an hour, on the roof of our cabin by the sound of it. It was like being under a giant celestial bowling alley. All the little girls shrieked.

My mother has a school holiday this week so hopefully I may get some treats. At any rate we (she, me, my sister) are probably going to see Down With Love on Monday and then have lunch at Burger Fuel, of which my sister says ohhhhh it's sooooooo great, but I've never even seen their store. She loves Burger Fuel (one of those 'gourmet' or 'designer' burger places) because they have lots of tasty vegetarian offerings. As an enthusiastic carnivore, I have no idea whether I'll also find their menu appealing. On the downside, my mother being at home will mean that my habitual state of torpor will be criticised a lot more. The worried kind of criticism, not the hostile kind. The fact is, when you have as few options as I currently do, torpor is a survival strategy. If you can stay torpid, you won't get too depressed. I suppose the torpor itself is a mild depression but a mild depression beats the kind where you can't stop crying and feeling trapped and doomed hands down. At least you can get some cleaning done.

I have loved the word 'torpor' ever since I was in Australia and reading an interpretation board at a wildlife park which explained that the hairy-nosed wombat endures the Australian summer's extreme heat and dryness by going into a torpor and aestivating (the summer version of hibernating). I can't explain exactly why the word leapt out at me but ever since then I have embraced the example of the hairy-nosed wombat in times of difficulty and stress which cannot be cured, only endured (such as being on a family sailing holiday). The word 'aestivating' didn't stick in the same way, I suppose because you can only do it in one season of the year - and it rhymes so closely with 'masturbating' that people unfamiliar with the word 'aestivating' often mishear one for the other, leading to awkward pauses and much embarrassment. I don't know whether the hairy-nosed wombat masturbates much, but if you are feeling overheated in any case I would not think a quick wank was the answer.

I've been sending out requests for information about courses for next year, and asking my old English professors to write me referrals to get into the Master of Library and Information Studies programme. I'll also have to find SOME way of dealing with the MasterCard people in England, to whom I can't get a payment and they reject all the ways I try to pay them as invalid, but that is another story and one that disturbs my torpor so we won't go into it here. I think I will just have to go to the bank, perhaps on Monday afternoon all fuelled up with burger, and say DON'T you tell me we don't handle that here, you're a bank, you know how this stuff works, I am a customer, help me solve the problem. It is ridiculous how they claim not to be able to communicate with their own branches in another country. Another Commonwealth country, for crying out loud. It is not as if I were asking them to interact with the French.

My sister just did a test on me and my normal reading speed is 500 words per minute. Hers is 202. I taught myself to read when I was four; she's dyslexic and in some ways is still learning at 23. I think we're about as clever as each other.

My hands are stained yellow! (shows them) Isn't that dramatic? I helped at my mother's school this morning, putting a yellow dye wash over squillions of big crayon drawings which are to form the fronts and backs (when stapled together) of the children's art folders. I was permitted to partake of morning tea in the staffroom, and Friday is Special Morning Tea Day with cakes so I got a brownie. (I wished there had been lamingtons.)

One little boy gave me a trying-to-place-you stare before asking 'Which mum are you?' It always makes me laugh when I get a question like that. My sister, who nannies for a child at that school, gets a lot of 'Are you married?' 'Why aren't you married?' and 'Are you sure you're not married?' from the little girls in his class. But my favourite came from the kid she nannies himself: 'Weren't you in Jesus Christ Superstar?'

'Uh, no, I've never been in a production of that show.'

'Oh. That's strange, because I saw it recently and there was someone with exactly the same face as you!'

This, mark you, when he was five. James rocks the party. It's funny, sometimes I loathe precocious children, but other times they delight me. Varies a lot from kid to kid, so it can't be the quality of precocity itself that makes the difference. I guess what I like is a bright kid who isn't self-consciously bright, and has a lot s/he wants to tell you, because s/he is sure you'll find it interesting, because s/he certainly does.

And who, although very bright, doesn't have a total grip on the way the world works yet, at least the world outside his/her head. Call it the Cowgirl Ed factor.

Not sure what, if anything, I'm doing tonight, but I hold out some hope for takeaways and a DVD.

And, in honour of the occasion linked above: Arr. (snogs Captain Jack Sparrow) Mm. Tastes like gold!

Also, I have been searching online for any more information about the forthcoming Miyazaki movie of Howl's Moving Castle. I haven't found anything I didn't already know about the movie, but I have found several Japanese fansites with lovely art. And, to my considerable astonishment, information about doujinshi. 'Chrestomanci' and 'Howl' doujinshi! O, how I wish I could see them! I thought the artist(s) on that site made Chrestomanci look a little too young and bish - the adult Chrestomanci, that is. We only really 'see' him in the books as a child, as an early adolescent, and then an established family man who must be in his thirties - we really skip over the late-teen, twentysomething years of his youth in which he might have been a bit of a goer *^.^* But the clothing design was dead on. Chrestomanci would adore a leopard-spot waistcoat and Inverness cape with matching trim. I'm sure Howl would fully approve of his own portrayal in bish mode; indeed, he is finally depicted being as bishy as he always thought he was. To me, part of the visual appeal of Howl can be defined as: try to imagine Dryden Fassa attempting, without irony, to look like Allen Schezar. Even to the extent of colouring his hair. If I have any serious concern about the Miyazaki adaptation, it's that Miyazaki himself draws in a style that is so clean-cut and simplified that it is hard to convey, well, the rococo quality of bishiness (or in Howl's case, attempted bishiness with something of an air of the rake). Haku in Spirited Away had a little bish thing going on, but not to any greatly pronounced degree. The character sketches I've seen also make Howl look rather young, in fact, as if he is Sophie's own age, and that doesn't feel right to me. I always assumed that they made a good pair because Sophie is old for her age (18?) and Howl is immature for his (estimated late twenties). It will be interesting to see how the whole thing works out, but after all, it is Miyazaki, so it can't suck.

If those fanart sites are anything to go by, the DWJ books most popular with Japanese readers are Howl and the Chrestomanci series, with an emphasis on Charmed Life (a lot of pictures of a sad and vulnerable-looking Cat flanked by the identical Gwendolen and Janet) and The Lives of Christopher Chant (some very cute Goddess Millies), although I did see a few Witch Week and Magicians of Caprona images. I wonder if they like the Dalemark books too? I always thought those would make a wonderful fantasy anime series.