To my own surprise, I had a jolly good time at the gym today. Energy to spare, sense of achievement, you name it. I blame last week's vile humidity for my previous exhaustion and despair. I felt so perky I wrote a letter to the editor (New Zealand Herald) tearing a new arsehole for a miserable old git who wrote a letter saying fantasy books and films are 'weird' (in his universe, this is a bad thing) and people are stupid to 'encourage' them. At least he didn't roll out the classic 'they draw people away from the truth of God' argument, but really, I was *most* exasperated. Hope I get printed.

Oh God, oh God, I garden, I bake, I write letters to the editor. I'm twenty-three years old and I'm RETIRED.

Hey, guess what, I'm pregnant!

Nah, not really, I just have no news. (whistles) Oh well, guess I'll write again when something happens.

It's funny what makes you feel better (besides a good person who read this blog emailing me to say some kind things) - I made dinner for my family, the spag-carb recipe above. It was yummy, as it always is. Instead of a skillet, I use an electric wok and stir-fry the bacon, onions and so forth - I also trim as much of the fat off the bacon pieces as possible, and use extra-light olive oil, so it's not quite such a cholesterol bomb as it might otherwise be. The parsley over the top came from my own little vegetable garden. I like that.

Tomorrow I'll have to weed the vegetable garden, now I think of it. There's a lot of opportunist growth there. The cucumber vine has taken off like a rocket, which is gratifying, but the watermelon is still looking kind of puny. I'll give it some fertiliser too. Ah, gardening. It's so ravishingly dull!

What's really nice is when my cat comes along to supervise and help me, and rolls around on her back in the clear patch where we were going to put a lemon tree and never did, showing her tummy to the sun and looking wriggly and happy. Wriggly happy furry animals and sunshine and freshly-turned earth are good.

Now for a random, rambling rant. I often listen to a radio station called Solid Gold, on 93.4 FM in Auckland, because it plays 50s and 60s music, which I love. Unfortunately, practically every time I tune in this one moronic DJ is in charge. He calls himself Big Tony Amos and crikey he's annoying. Especially when he starts trying to make up fun nicknames for musicians. He called Dusty Springfield 'The Duster' and Chuck Berry 'Chuckleberry Hound.' Show some respect, you plonker! In fact, the Dusty Springfield bit was, from memory 'Hur hur hur! That's the Duster, she's like that!' ('Like what?' said everyone listening.) If you've seen the old Harry Enfield skits about Smashie and Nicie, the two DJs addicted to 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' by Bachman Turner Overdrive, he makes them look bright and witty. I find it most vexatious that I have to put up with him in order to hear 'Spring Little Cobra' or 'Judy In Disguise.' The other station I mostly listen to is Channel Z, 94.2 FM, although then I have to stab buttons whenever they have a lapse of taste and play something by Eminem, D12 or Stained.

I'd listen to tapes, except I have a deeply crappy car stereo and when you try to play a tape, you have to turn the volume up as far as it'll go to make the music audible, and then every hiss and crackle on the tape is amplified too, and when you finally get fed up with it and switch it back to radio you get deafened. There's no CD player, good Lord no. Everything else about my car is lovely, from the spearmint gum in the glovebox to the Eternal Sailor Moon figure dangling from the rear-view mirror, but that stereo... grrr.

This afternoon has been a bit better than this morning was, not least because I got to talk to my chums Lizz and Kevin, but still, I am not a happy camper. I have no idea how to get out of this funk. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do and no money to spend. It's highly frustrating.

Do me a favour, go and download some recipes and make fudge and Christmas cookies (or Hannukah cookies, or end-of-Ramadan cookies, or Yule cookies or I-like-cookies cookies, whatever fits your lifestyle and belief system). The world needs more fudge and cookies in it if you ask me.

A bad morning. I went to the gym and had very little energy; what I was doing physically felt pointless and that expanded to a feeling that everything I'm doing at the moment is pointless, simply an exercise in getting tired with no reward at all. No-one that I can talk to and touch, besides my immediate family, cares who I am or what I do; I don't look or feel any different.

I was so bummed (not to mention so hot and sweaty) that I didn't bother trying to do the weights part of my programme and just drove home, wondering why it is that I live in a world that I can see is beautiful, wondrous and full of possibilities, and yet I can't seem to access any of those possibilities myself; I just seem to be stuck interminably, getting tireder. I ended up sitting in my parking space in the street outside our house, staring at the neighbour's yellow dandelions tossing in the breeze under a bright sun, with tears trickling down my face and a thumb in my mouth. (I was biting it, not sucking it.)

Anyway, I can't just sit here feeling bad because I need to have a shower, get dressed in non-gym clothes and go and run some errands for my grandmother, who is recovering from ankle surgery. Whee. My days are so full and rewarding.

I know that sounds very selfish. I love my grandmother and I'm happy to help her. I'm just very, very fed up with being unemployed and unable to engage with the world. I feel autistic. No offence meant to any autistic people reading this, but I don't want to live that way.

Goodbye, George Harrison. You were really, really cool. You wrote great songs, you were a good sport when Eric Clapton took your wife off you with the song 'Layla' and you were possibly the funniest Beatle, just in a quiet, understated way that people didn't always notice.

I had really weird dreams last night. I dreamed almost a whole nother season of Sailor Moon, incorporating characters from The Vision of Escaflowne, for no reason I can understand. Dryden and Hitomi were now characters in SM; Dryden was exactly the same as he is in the series but Hitomi had grown her hair a little longer and taken to wearing it in two low ponytails. She looked good, and was apparently over her Allen crush to the point of having given him a mocking nickname, 'Mr Card.' My dream also seemed to have given Mamoru a bit of a character makeover; he was much more interesting and likeable, and while he was still an orphan, he had a younger brother that he had to take care of. I can't really remember what any of the stories were about, except an extended thing about Rei getting a car, but it was spending all its time at the mechanics' so she had to find alternate means of transport, which resulted in her riding around on a huge motorcycle with no helmet. She looked extremely cool but I worried about her skull. Oh, and a story about Queen Beryl being reincarnated as a businesswoman and seeking reunion with her lost love, a Viking who had reached thirtyish and stopped aging and lived forever, and was now a scientist posted at the South Pole and going mad from boredom. This had something to do with Beryl attacking Dryden's Tokyo apartment with a space-time disruptor bomb while Mamoru was visiting him, placing everyone in danger, and Dryden had to do something to save them all but I wasn't clear on what. The animators drew Beryl's eventual reunion with her love in a very beautiful Art Nouveau style, and he turned into a giant bird of ice while she was an enormous purple batwoman sort of thing and they flew off together.

I wonder about my brain sometimes.

Flipping Ada. Nepal's been declared a no-go zone and Maoist rebels are trying to overthrow the monarchy. I like Nepal. I just like the idea of Nepal. I wonder if they'd stop if Sir Edmund Hillary asked them to?

Why would anyone still bother with being a Maoist in this day and age, anyway? Talk about uncool. To quote the Beatles' 'Revolution,' 'if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.' Don't they listen to the Beatles in Nepal? Are they nothing but a pack of heathens?

Sigh.

I suppose the monarchy of Nepal is not all that flaming hot, especially since rather a lot of it is dead, but I'd still rather have monarchs than Mao.

Something just happened that really annoyed me - there's this chica who's been building an Allen Schezar shrine for a while. She asked me to help in the beginning and I did the best I could. (Really, I should have avoided any contact with her, since her first message to me was proposing that I should make an Allen-themed music video to the song 'Bootylicious.') Then she got her site up and asked me to add it to *escaboys - I found it copied several features in sense and style from my shrine, The Allen Schezar Project, and besides that didn't even make sense in places. (She thought Millerna and Allen were brother- and sister-in-law.)

So I said sorry, no, work on it and try again later. She tried again later when I was very busy dealing with final exams for my MA degree and such things, and I asked her to reapply in a little while when I would have more time. Today I get a message from her calling me 'IGNORER' (first time I've heard that particular epithet), accusing me of elitism and generally being quite snotty. I go look at her shrine and find that not only does she still have material that's a reworded copy of mine (compare her 'Fashion Sense' with my 'Accoutrements of a Knight of Heaven'), she's copied my kiwifruit design theme!(Don't tell me that's a coincidence. There is no logical connection between Allen Schezar and kiwifruit. My use of it was a reference to a private joke with a friend.)

This girl is obviously pretty immature; from the way she expresses herself and the fact that she doesn't have an email account in her own name I'm guessing she's in her early teens. She also can't spell. 'patiend and cooropative '?

The upshot of it is, I guess I shouldn't let a kid who doesn't know how to make an original webpage bother me, but it's irksome, and the worst part is now she's going to tell people I'm a big mean bitch. I bet this is how all that elitist/newbie shit on Sailornet got started... maybe I should opt out while I can and close *escaboys.

Nah, that's an overreaction. My record can speak for itself. People like my shrines. Besides which, jeez, they're just anime fansites...

Bizarre dreams last night; something about a riverside rock festival attended by Jay and Silent Bob, and Bob was courting me, which Jay found highly amusing. We all jumped in the river in the end. Then I was living in a college dorm/university hall of residence with a really stupid bathroom because when you went into a toilet stall, shut the door and turned what looked like the lock knob it turned on a built-in shower. I tried two or three of these things, hoping to find one without the shower, before giving up and going back to my room in damp pyjamas. Bob met me in the hall and put a paper wrapper from a carton of KFC on my head, which he thought looked cute. Suddenly everyone was dressed in red and white stripes and carrying boxes and buckets of KFC and this had just happened since I went to the toilet. For some reason I kept thinking of Bob as a New Zealander, which was of course because he is played by director Kevin Smith, but there is another Kevin Smith who is an actor, from New Zealand (played Ares in 'Xena: Warrior Princess'), and who I actually quite fancy - so naturally my dream's casting director got it switched. In the dream I kept thinking, 'but wait, American Kevin Smith has a wife and a small daughter called Harley Quinn, which is a damn' stupid name for a person in real life, even if her father is the world's most famous comics fanboy. He should not be flirting with me like this. Shouldn't I say something?' but I couldn't work out how to broach the subject. (Of course, Kiwi Kevin Smith is also married with progeny - indeed he's married to his first girlfriend, and they've been together since they were fifteen. I think that's very sweet.)

Also, I got back my final MA grades. A+ for 19th Century American Prose and Fiction (the paper everyone hated) and plain As for Restoration Literature: Aphra Behn and Milton (now there's an odd couple) and Literature and Society 1350-1550. I am happy with these. Further updates as events warrant.

Well, something did happen. First, my father came home and told us that he's being made redundant from his job. His employer (New Zealand's biggest ISP) did a reviewy thing and decided there were four management positions they could do without, and his is one of them. Two new positions are being created and he's going to put his name in for those, so he may stay there, or he may need to find a job elsewhere. Not long after this, my sister's boyfriend called and dumped her over the phone. She was understandably dismayed and sent him a rude text message afterwards. So it was a bit of a double-whammy evening.

Kate didn't want to do a spell for her situation, but we decided to come up with one to help Tony get a good new job. (I'm bloody lucky to live in a family that respects this stuff - my mother Wendy is quite keen on it, and Tony, well, he makes a bemused face but he doesn't say anything rude and he gives it a chance.) So I brought my altar stuff out to the living-room, devised the form of a ritual (filling in blanks from one in a book) and did it with Wendy, Tony and Robin the cat as contributers to the energy-raising bit. I don't know if a spell has ever used the football chant 'Ere We Go, 'Ere We Go, 'Ere We Go for energy-raising before, or if the energy of the magic circle has been put into a gingernut biscuit and a bowl of pecan nuts and eaten by the person the spell is designed to benefit (some more of the nuts were wrapped up as a job-getting charm for him to take with him to interviews and the like), but it seems quite likely; plenty of witches in Britain after all. Land of gingernuts and football.

Anyway, it worked for us. In my family we always sing 'Ere We Go together whenever we set out on a trip (including on planes - but we do it quietly there) so it has lots of positive connotations - and when you start quietly and build up so it's nice and loud, it really does work for creating a sense of positive energy and enthusiasm and Getting Things Done.

One thing that I really like about magic is that you can put it all together from stuff you have in the house anyway - tonight's spell only needed the afore-mentioned gingernut and pecans, the altar bits I talked about before, and a white wax candle. (Orange would have been good, since that's the colour for jobs and prosperity, but white is an all-purpose substitute if you can't get hold of the right coloured one. I also imagined lots of orange light in the energy we raised, and got Tony to draw a picture of success in orange coloured pencil.) Oh, and I appealed to the Gnomes of Earth, which I rather enjoyed doing. I like gnomes. And they take care of money and employment stuff.

I know a lot of people will think all this candle and orange coloured pencil business is a lot of twaddle, but think about it - we all got behind Tony and gave him moral support and helped him focus on his goal, in a way that was fun and meaningful for our family. No twaddle about that!(And hey, I bet it'll help that I was wearing an orange teeshirt and orange underwear, and drank a big glass of orange juice immediately beforehand. My clothes weren't on purpose, just a happy coincidence. I love my orange underpants.)

Dumb Things I Gotta Do Tomorrow: drive Tony to get the ferry to the city in the morning now his car is at the panelbeaters', go to the gym, buy a book token on behalf of my grandmother for her friend's birthday (she's recovering from an ankle operation and can't go to the shops herself), put Advantage on the cats to kill their fleas, etcetera.

Belatedly I keep my promise - that's my best male friend's website, and I love him too. To be precise, it's the section of a larger website of which he is Editor. I think it's nifty that he gets a forum in which to mouth off about anime, and I nearly always share his taste - with a few exceptions, like how much I hated Gunbuster. Basically, if I ever meet Hideaki Anno I'll have to be restrained from punching him in the nose.

And if I ever meet Shoji Kawamori I'll have to be restrained from hugging his knees, but that's another matter.

Today has been quiet. I lazed about in the morning and ran errands for my mother in the afternoon. I bought myself three sheets of Stickopotamus stickers in a toy shop. (Tropical fish, seashells and hibiscus flowers - I had a theme.) I have an immature love of stickers. I couldn't find any red wine in the house, which is very unusual (my grandmother was staying here this weekend, so maybe she drank it), so the steaks for tonight are marinating in soy sauce, olive oil and crushed garlic alone. I enjoy crushing garlic but it makes my fingers smell for days. Ponky ponky poo.

Emmm... that's about it. Hopefully something more riveting will happen tomorrow.

You know what would be good? You know the advertising pop-ups attached to GeoCities and Tripod free membership sites, how they appear when you first access the site? I'd like it if they detected when you left and disappeared accordingly. I have no great love of pop-up ads. One day, of course, I'll have my own domain with no ads at all. (sighs happily)

That's my newest webwork! Hurrah, let everyone enjoy the magnificence of Jet and his pointy facial hair. Today I conceived an ambition to grow old-fashioned roses, love-in-a-mist, foxgloves and other such antique garden flowers. I'm getting old and I'm only twenty-three.

I like flowers that look a little bit like aliens. Love-in-a-mist is all green and whiskery and there are things like octopus legs poking out of the purple or white flowers. Foxgloves are frankly freaky. And I like roses that look the way roses did before people messed around with them so bloody much. Damask roses. Nothing salmon-coloured, nothing floribunda, nothing with a name like Sexy Rexy. Roses that know their ancestors were wildflowers growing through the hedgerows of Europe and show it. Roses with dear little open faces and flyaway petals and not a scrap of pretension.

Still looking for a job; didn't get the Woman's Weekly writing one. If nothing good comes up in next couple of weeks will have to go back to old market research job. Don't want to. Beginning to sound like Bridget Jones.

Tomorrow is Monday so I shall go to the gym, finish 'Cowboy Bebop,' look for jobs in the paper and... I don't know. Maybe make a cake. I like cake.

Okay, haven't done this for a bit. Still getting the hang of keeping a regular record. What have I done in the last twenty-four hours or so? Well, I sorted out the candle-holders on my altar. This is a little Wiccan altar that occupies the top of my chest of drawers. Got me a seagull feather for Air, which I picked up on a New Zealand beach, a tealight candle for Fire, a Japanese glazed bowl with water and fragments of New Zealand paua shell in it for Water, and a chunk of marble that I found on a beach in Italy with salt on it for Earth. They all have deep sentimental value except the tealight; maybe if I could find something I like to put it in. Also two ex-Moccona coffee jars filled with silica sand with tall candles stuck in, and a larger Moccona jar with flowers in, all sitting on top of a crochetty cloth salvaged from Dead Auntie Mary's house.

Candles currently white (all-purpose and all I could find without spending money), flowers currently pink patio roses from a bush that used to be planted over my cat Rose's grave, but was moved because it wasn't doing well there, and is now flourishing. Rose had many wonderful qualities but apparently being fertiliser wasn't one of them. Anyway, I used not to have sand in the candle-holder jars, and held the candles in them with blobs of Blu-Tak. I knew I wanted sand (my aunt has some very cool hurricane lamps that work on this principle) but didn't want to forage it off the beach where dogs and small children have peed on it, so I bought a canister of Posh Sand from a shop called Living and Giving, which also has a good range of cheap coloured candles. I doubt they're targeting the witchy-poo demographic, but I'll go where I can find the stuff I want.

The altar setup is not ideal, but nothing in my room is ideal except my bed, the Mighty Queen-Size Four-Poster Mosquito-Netted Bed of Serenity. I don't have enough shelves or storage space and the room itself is too small for the bed; it fits, just, but you have to sidle round it and there's hardly room for the bureau drawers to open. But I love it. I need a compass; you're supposed to orient your altar so that your element items are at the compass points, but I just had to go with my dad's best guess ('Tony, come into my room and point North'). Anyway! 'Do what you can with what you have where you are,' said Teddy Roosevelt, who wasn't a witch but invented the teeshirt and inspired the invention of the teddybear, so we should honour his memory. As far as I can tell, being a relative craft newbie, it makes a pretty good working principle for witches too.

Today I slept in, because the Bed of Serenity makes you want to do that. It also makes you want to wear a long white cotton nightie with hand-made lace trimming, and be brought breakfast in bed on a tray with legs. When I got up, I made laksa for brunch for me and Tony (it's a Malaysian soup flavoured with coconut milk and curry, with rice vermicelli noodles and oodles of stir-fried seafood), and then, laksa-fuelled (it always makes me perky somehow), went to the gym of which I recently became a member. I always used to scorn gyms and I still hope not to develop a Gym Person's Mentality (I conscientiously think 'repetitions' instead of 'reps'), but I do enjoy doing something that makes me feel healthy. The rest of the day was spent doing Saturday things like reading the papers and lazing about.

Website-Related Plans

1. I'm getting rid of Dilandau. There's no flame there any more *^.^* So I'm going to offer up 'prettyboy from hell' for adoption. I've come to the conclusion that it's biseinen for me, not bishounen. (Okay, so Allen Schezar is borderline, but who can resist him?)

2. Someday I really will resurrect 'Focus: Yuuichirou & Rei,' especially because Lizz has never seen it, and I'd like to show her my first foray into the webworld.

3. Future plans: create Haunted Junction and NightWalker sites in collaboration with Lizz, which we've had planned for some time, and get up shrines for Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop. I am in love. Forget Spike (Spiegel) forthwith.

My friend Lizz drew my attention to this news item. I really hope this guy didn't have a family. Imagine going through life explaining, 'My husband/father was killed by a duck.'

I think you'd pretty quickly amend it to 'My husband/father was killed testing a water vehicle for Yamaha.'

Or maybe not - maybe you'd just brazen it out. I wonder how many people who know him were unable to restrain a guilty burst of laughter when they heard how he died?

Perhaps that's just the British Sense of Humour in me talking. This is remarkably similar to an old 'Punch' story about the trials in life of the son of a man killed by a falling pig.

It's not that I want anyone to be killed by head-on collision with a duck. It's just that I rejoice in living in a world so full of absurdity and random chance that this type of thing can happen.

But I want to know how come Fabio walked away from a head-on collision with an airborne goose (a much larger and pointier bird) while this guy perished. There's no justice!

Okay, okay... Fabio has a mother too, I'm sure it would be very sad for her if he perished in a waterfowl-related incident... I don't wish Bird Death on anyone. But it makes you wonder about Fate's priorities.

That's my best female friend's website. (My best male friend can have a turn tomorrow.) She has the Web's finest sites about the SuperS season of Sailor Moon and the Escaflowne movie - and I'm not saying that just because I love her, 'Tsubasa no Kami' is widely acknowledged as the most reliable and authoritative fan-created source of Escamovie information and coolness.

Oh, and I love her.

So! Today I did something I'd never done before - drove in my pyjamas. A proud day for all. I had to run my mother in to work because her car's at the panelbeaters' and I wasn't exactly up when she wanted to go... I also got my eyelashes tinted and my eyebrows shaped - twenty minutes of discomfort in the name of low-maintenance prettiness. I'm telling you, it's so much more comfortable than wearing mascara. Otherwise things have been pretty quiet, just pottering about the house and watching some videos my BFF sent me - I am being initiated into the wonderful world of Cowboy Bebop. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for men called Spike (especially if they are punk vampires or Milligans) so this is right up my alley. Der Spiegel has the lanky Lupin thing going on at the same time as the lazy-eyed, genial slacker Tylor thing, and I find the combination quite irresistible, leading me even to overlook his shocking white man's afro.

That's me homepage. I invite you to visit. Here is my new blog, started on a whim. Um... I think I'm s'posed to write about my day. Well, this should be fascinating. I went thirty minutes on the cross-trainer at the gym this morning instead of my usual twenty. I was so proud when the machine actually told me to stop. 'Pant... gasp... you're wearing me out, here, Sarah! Your vim and vigour are entirely too much for my puny constitution! I shall have to have a lie-down after you're gone.'

Well, actually it just said 'Begin Cool-Down,' but for a gym newbie it was still quite a proud moment. I also discovered that I can lift at least twenty kilos with the Power Of My Arse. Well, when the machine tells you this exercise uses the gluteus maximus muscles, that's what it means, isn't it?

I'm waiting to hear back on job applications to TVNZ and the New Zealand Woman's Weekly - TVNZ have acknowledged my application, at least. Let's hope they like people with MAs.

And a Powerful Arse.