This weekend sucks. My mother and sister are both sick, with a fluey sinusitis thing that gives them a particularly pathetic weak cough, reminiscent of my cat's when she picks up another dose of lungworm from her prey. (The last bout went away by itself - perhaps she has antiparasitical nanites now.) So while we were planning to have quite a nice Labour Weekend doing girly things with my father gone, it's just been them coughing and me looking after them. I don't begrudge the looking after because hey, they do it for me when I'm sick and pathetic, but it's disappointing because I was looking forward to stuff.

My mother and I were going to see Intolerable Cruelty with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones, but she says she can't go to a movie with a cough like this, and it's true, someone might bop her on the head with a frozen Coke. And Kate and I were thinking of seeing Down With Love again before it closes (if it hasn't already), but well, same objection. My mother keeps saying ooh, I hope you don't catch what we've got. Well, of course I will. I live in the same house and rarely get to go out. A pattern is well established of my mother bringing home diseases from school and my sister bringing them home from the children she nannies. Just as they start to feel better, I begin to feel terrible.

I would prefer it if this didn't happen. I have two houses to clean this week which will get me . (For those of you who just tuned in: I have a Master's degree! I got first class honours, the equivalent of magna cum laude at my university! One IQ test I did gave me a score of 129! And the only work I can get is cleaning my relatives' houses, a pop. They ask for me because I'm good at it. Wanna be like me? Do an Arts degree.) In addition to honorary maiden aunt Jannie's bachelorette pad, there's my grandmother Joan's house, which she says she doesn't bother to clean for herself any more, but it might be nice for when we visit. Shudder. SHUDDER. Unsanitary old woman! Somehow I hope she will go out while I clean. I prefer to have a house to myself for this process, so that I can talk to myself without feeling self-conscious or having that 'Did you say something, dear?' conversation multiple times. Cleaning is a lot less onerous if you can have a lively non-sequitur-laced conversation with the vacuum cleaner. Our vacuum is named Ruth, because it is a Dyson; at the time we bought it, a cabinet minister named Ruth Dyson was in the news due to a drink-driving scandal, so the connection was obvious.

I think the most important thing I do when I clean Jannie's house is to open both sets of ranchslider doors so that the place gets AIRED for an hour or so; it can't remove the cigarette smoke odour but it reduces it, a bit, temporarily. It is pathetic how eager I am to see what results I get from turbo-Dyson-ing her carpets. I think they will be satisfyingly gross. One of my favourite obscure programmes is How Clean Is Your House?, in which a sort of Chanel-suited Valkyrie and a wee Scots vixen descend upon a squalid British dwelling and expose its filth to the nation (including bacteria and fungus cultures and a parasite and vermin census). Then, not being heartless, they clean it up and teach the inhabitants how to keep it nice. That's my kind of makeover show. Clean Eye for the Dirty Guy. Not that they target solely men. There were some very squalid women as well. Salinger's Esmé would be enthralled.

This is handy if you're the indecisive type:

Automatic Halloween Costume Generator by kendokamel
Your name
Your costume	A Pirate (ARRRRRR!!!!)
Created with quill18's MemeGen!

Fortunately I already have a lot of bandannas, so putting together this costume should be relatively simple.

Edit: This thing isn't displaying properly, although I don't know why, since it's just a copy and paste. There should be a button you can click to see your own results (if you fill in your name where my copy says 'Sarah'). You can find one that does work properly here.

I've been watching the anime Kevin included in my box of stuff... there are hits and misses, but I particularly like what I've seen so far of RahXephon. In his review on RevSF, he says it runs the risk of being seen as a ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but you know, as long as it doesn't rip off the part where all the characters I like kill each other, I do not give a hoot. The Tokyo-Jupiter/real world scenario is more of a ripoff of The Matrix, anyway, and I'm curious to see where they go with this music-sound-song leitmotif. Also, oh yeah, all right, go Maaya!

My mother and sister have both got sinusitis for Labour Weekend. Tony phoned home this morning sounding very chipper, to say that they finished the sailing race about eight this morning (about four hours earlier than the last time on the same course) and had had a fine time. Now they will wend their way home at a more leisurely pace. Kate and Wendy are both rather wretched. We rented two DVDs to cheer them up and they both fell asleep at various times; only I actually know what happens in The Good Girl and the Scooby-Doo movie, the latter of which I was only prepared to watch because James Lileks allowed as how it wasn't as bad as all that (and he hates Scooby-Doo). My major beef with it is simply that they discarded the cardinal rule of Scooby-Doo, one that was also ignored in the later animated series that jumped the shark: that there is always a natural, human explanation for the apparently supernatural phenomena, generally one involving motives of greed or spite. There are no real ghosts or monsters or aliens and magic doesn't really work. In the Scooby-Dooniverse, Agent Scully is proved right at the end of every episode of The X-Files. (Speaking of which, I've always held that Agent Scully represents a perfect hybridisation of Daphne and Velma. And the one episode of X-Files that absolutely SHOULD have had a Scooby-Doo ending was 'Arcadia.') Otherwise, it was a fun, silly movie for early teenagers. And the boy playing Shaggy had the voice nailed. And I'm sure Casey Kasem was very proud when he specified that his burger had an eggplant patty.

I think I'm roasting a chicken for dinner tonight... not a great deal else to report.

Last night's Samurai Jack was the first chunk of the original TV movie. It was interesting to note that at that stage Phil Lamarr was doing Jack's voice with a lot more of an American accent - it was really noticeable in the vowels, which were allowed to stretch and wander. I like the later Jack voice much better; although it sometimes sounds like a caricature of a Japanese accent, it's less jarring than having him sound like a Yank. It's partly the vowels and partly the fact that he sounds more soft-spoken and restrained; even when he shouts it is more of a controlled sound. Which fits in with the character as a person of supreme self-discipline. I babble.

Well, I might go and watch what's left of the RahXephon, then.

Welp, Jannie's house is clean. However, her vacuum cleaner sucks. Just not the way it's supposed to. The suction is weak and the segments of the pipe keep slipping out of each other so the whole thing falls to the floor in bits! The bastard dustbunnies laugh at me. Well, next time we shall see how they fare against a fully operational Death Star, and by that I mean a Dyson DC05 Absolute with its turbo head on. I think I'll start with an empty bin so I can see exactly how much stuff comes out of her floor; always one of the small satisfactions of using a Dyson.

Before going to her house I'd done the boat provisioning, and this evening Wendy and I had to take loads of crap out to the boat at the yacht club, including, because my father is a forgetful nong, the OUTBOARD MOTOR. When we got there, contrary to what we'd been led to expect, we had to clean up the cabin, still littered with tools and dirt and... litter. I was not impressed and nor was my sister, who had already had a long day nannying (and trod in baby poo) but was needed to help with the transportation. My father needs to buy a cheap old ute and use that to haul the boat crap. He is abusing his nice silver Audi.

Aaaand... well, not much else to tell of today. Nothin' good on TV. My mother's friend Di is over. Kate has gone out to buy some chocolate which she says will help her to recuperate from her breast reconstruction surgery *^.^*

Tomorrow will be a busy day. In the morning I've to do all the shopping for my father's sailing expedition, taking part in a race which I think is supposed to be this weekend, Labour Weekend, so at least once all this frenzy of preparation is over he will be out of our hair for three days. Once I've done the provisioning it's on to Jannie's for my cleaning job. Only this week, the initial was because of the shocking state her house was in initially. I made it much nicer. I think I might take our vacuum cleaner, though, because hers is frankly not up to much (aye, well, it isn't a Dyson). And I will clearly have to actually stand IN the bath to clean the walls surrounding three sides of it properly. Should be good for my heart, at any rate.

Last night I did Impulse Baking, which is what happens when you're reading the New Zealand Woman's Weekly while you eat dinner off your knees watching Shortland Street (a real multimedia New Zealand experience) and spot this recipe for 'Chocolate Peppermint Moments.' That is, a chocolate and peppermint version of Melting Moments, those little sweet biscuits sandwiched together with butter icing. The difficulty is, I hadn't made such a thing before and badly misjudged the size of the individual biscuits once they had baked (and spread and swelled a bit, as they do). They are more like Melting Minutes, and a bit daunting to chew your way through. Next time I hope to get them more succulently bite-sized, because they're otherwise sound.

An example of my father's crashing insensitivity: last night he said that, since he was having trouble finding anyone to crew for him on this race, perhaps I would have to come: 'After all, who else do we know who isn't working?' I would not have wanted to go on his poxy race anyway but there was no question of it after that. Tony really has no concept of anyone else's time being valuable to them. It probably sounds as if I don't like my father very much. Sometimes I really don't. I still love him but from my late teens onward we have clashed more and more often, not over the normal issues of father-daughter conflict like independence and privacy, but over him mostly behaving like an annoying younger brother and then attempting to pull rank as a father. Well, whatever.

Pitas.com had some kind of horrendous server kablooie and some recent entries here were lost. You can see a Google cache page that has some of the missing material... some of it is just gone into the void. Such is life.

Today my sister and I went to the Auckland Regional Botanic Gardens because we felt like doing something outdoors in this beautiful weather, and she wanted to take photos of white blossom and green leaves for an art project she's getting underway. It's a darn good thing we put on sunscreen before we went or otherwise we would have been very burnt indeed; wonderful sun. We got a picnic lunch of sushi from Botany Town Centre on our way out. The gardens were beautiful, although in the transitional late-spring period after the first blooms have passed but before the summer flowers really get going. And we saw ducklings, which is always good. Well, unless the duckling is walking into danger and you can't get there in time to avert disaster. Not good seeing a duckling in that context. Also not good seeing a duckling where no duckling should be and it just appears wildly sinister because it's so freakishly out of place.

I see the Lizzard has bought a house. In fact, is having a whole new house built. Apparently the dog is going to have a bedroom of its own.

I have applied for two more jobs, both as a sales rep for a publisher of children's and educational books - the two different companies advertised on the same day, how weird is that? Haven't heard back properly from either yet. Still haven't heard from Victoria but this is probably because the due date for applications was October 31. Also, I have new sneakers, so yay.