Azawakh

Jan. 29th, 2022 06:08 pm
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Today I filled in my post-booster survey (no, I did not have any reaction other not sleeping well that night and a bruise-like feeling on my arm for a day).

My mother and I went out for lunch with her best friend, Colleen, and her daughter, Ali. Ali is a nurse like my mother. Today she was telling us about a troublesome visitor to the hospital she works at, and finished by saying, "Anyway, you just can't fix stupid."

"But you CAN sedate it," said my mother, and the two of them laughed uproariously. Obviously a bit of nursing humour.

Four more zucchini today, and a dinner of savoury zucchini crumble followed by warm zucchini brownie and yoghurt.


January

29. If you are an only child, do you wish you had siblings? If you have siblings, do you wish you were an only child?

I'm an only child and I do not wish it otherwise. Someone said to me once I didn't seem like an only child, meaning, I think, that I didn't fit her mental image of an only child as being loud and all about me. I'm quiet and all about me instead.
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Finally, I am boosted! I was a little worried because, unlike last week, they hadn't sent me any reminders, but they had me on the list and happily jabbed me, so all's well.

Six more zucchini today.


January

24. If you could switch two movie/book/TV characters, what switch would lead to the most inappropriate movie/book/TV show?
Well, this is just asking for two wildly disparate characters, isn't it? How about Winnie the Pooh and Pennywise the Clown? Sauron and the man covered in saucepans from the Faraway Tree books? Dracula and Anne of Green Gables?
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Yesterday's storm turned into last night's storm and I woke this morning to a freshly washed world and a flock of rainbow lorikeets.

My mother had her Covid booster today. Mine is next week. And that leads me to today's story from... [imagine that wavy thing TV shows do for a flashback]... way, way back in December last year. Three weeks ago.

Day one
The government sent me a text to say it was time for my third vax. So I went to the local hospital's vaccine registration site, which is how I set up my first two doses. There, I clicked the big blue button to set up an appointment, exactly as I did for the first two doses. But instead of giving me appointment times, that link has now changed to a state-wide registration site, which I had to set up a user name for. So I did that. The site said they would email me a temporary registration number to enter in order to create a password. The email did not arrive. I clicked the link that said it would re-send the number. That email didn't arrive. I decided I'd try again the following day.

How did that go? )

So that was a bit of fun.

January

14. What movie would be greatly improved if made into a musical?
Black Hawk Down.
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Late-breaking news on Friday, as all of Victoria went into a snap Stage 4 lockdown for five days, Saturday to Wednesday. I had to go to the supermarket on Friday afternoon and there were already signs up about limited purchases of certain items: toilet paper, pasta, hand sanitiser. The usual suspects. But there wasn't panic buying. Everyone probably has enough toilet paper in storage from last time.

Before that it was an odd sort of week, as I'd had to go into the office a few times. I'd been thinking that everyone was getting slightly blasé about it all - there used to be bottles of hand sanitiser on every desk and spare surface, for example, which have all disappeared now. Perhaps this snap lockdown will kick everything back into action. I'm supposed to be back there on Tuesday for a two hour meeting about fringe benefits tax, but I don't think that will come under the definition of "essential work" to meet in person. I hope not, at any rate.

At home, there was (extremely) minor excitement on two fronts. First, I bought a label maker and made tiny labels for the top of all my spice jars, so now when I open the spice drawer I can read the top of the lid without having to lift them up. What a time saver. While at the stationery shop, I found mailing labels, just regular sheets of Avery labels, but on clear frosted paper instead of white. So I bought some of that too, and made slightly fancy labels for all the plain jars in the pantry.

Second excitement: the first of my Christmas subscription cheese boxes arrived. Camembert, chèvre rolled in ash, a semi-hard cow's milk cheese with wildflowers pressed into it, and manchego-style cheese aged in wine. I've tried the first two so far, and they've both been good.

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Last year, for a New Year's resolution, I did two of the challenges from The Conqueror (it was a New Year two-for-the-price-of-one special), where you log your exercise as a distance and get virtual postcards of your trip and an actual medal at the end. Last year I did the New Zealand Alps to Ocean and the US Grand Canyon distances. I signed up again this year, same deal. I'm currently halfway up Mount Fuji. Not sure what the second one will be yet. Maybe the set your own distance one and make it long enough for the rest of the year. I suspect that will be the only way I travel anywhere for the foreseeable future.

No new bright flowers this week. Instead, a photo of the dangers that lurk when picking vegetables: someone playing Tiger in the Grass among the bean plants.

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No daily entry today - well, apart from this. Dry eye. I'm going to lie down with cucumber slices on my eyes or I will have to gouge them out.
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Hello, f-list. New job is going well. I think. Seems to be. I haven't accidentally set fire to the building or anything, so let's call it positive. It involves a lot more looking at a computer screen than my previous jobs, so I'm doing less of that at home to give the old eyes a rest. Which means I have a month's worth of words jotted down that should have been entries. Let's do this.

Chester
One night a few weeks ago there was a knock on the door just before midnight. That's never good, is it? I opened it to Brian Next Door, who said, "You haven't seen Chester, have you? Someone opened the gate and he got out." Chester is Next Door's little terrier, very old now, mostly blind and arthritic. He's run over here other times he's escaped, so I helped Brian search the garden, but we didn't find anything. I felt terrible thinking about him lost and lonely in the night; Next Doors would feel worse.

The next morning as I was heading off to work, Next Door's car pulled into their driveway. Brian got out of the passenger side and waved to me, holding up Chester so I could see his wagging tail. Kim got out of the driver's seat and came over to the fence. "He found his way home then?" I said.

"No, we had a call from the vet on the highway at half-past seven. Someone picked him up on the highway last night and dropped him to the vet this morning and they got our number off his chip."

So that ended a lot better than it could have.

Extra day
It's a leap year, and there was a lot of fuss about 29 February, the extra day. What did I do with my extra day? I had two naps. I had a cold, you see. An actual cold, which has been going around the City by the Sea, and not the novel coronavirus. (Although it could be *A* coronavirus, said my mother helpfully, there's lots of them.) It was all over quickly, but I do feel robbed of my extra day.

The unwanted guest
Mister Alistair Cat was sitting outside in the potted bay tree when I shut up the house last night. I turned off all the lights and went to bed. Five minutes later I heard PADPADPADPADPAD as he trotted up the passage. So far, so normal... but something wasn't right. He normally meows, I thought, and turned the light on to find out why he was being uncharacteristically quiet, just in time to see him come through the doorway with a mouthful of mouse. I said, "No!" and he dropped the mouse, which turned out to be still alive. It ran into one of my slippers; he jumped on it; it ran behind the open door; he sat at the end of the door and settled down to watch. The mouse ran under the door, down the passage and into my mother's room. Alistair stayed where he was, convinced the mouse was still behind the door.

I woke my mother and we searched her room unsuccessfully for the mouse. No help at all from Alistair, who was still staring behind the door when I finally went to bed.

That will do for today. Tomorrow (or whenever): updates on flowers, soaps and knitting.

February books read

* Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor (1971) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Provence - Katrina Nannestad (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* The Girl, the Dog and the Writer in Lucerne - Katrina Nannestad (2019) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* With a Bare Bodkin - Cyril Hare (1946) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Death Walks the Woods - Cyril Hare (1954) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* The Wind Blows Death - Cyril Hare (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Tenant for Death - Cyril Hare (1937) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )
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You can get pants like fried chicken legs. We'll all be wearing them next year.

(I also see on that page the suggestion that I might like to purchase knee-high socks like chicken feet. Wear them together!)

I kicked my big toe this morning and tore half the nail off. The toe is now bandaged like in a cartoon. It looks silly, but at least it's not rubbing against my shoe.

Yes, today was a quiet day.
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LiveJournal sent out that ten year challenge notice last week, reminding me that ten years ago I was (wait for it) complaining about the heat. So... not much has changed. Today's paper reminded me I had good cause to be complaining about the heat ten years ago, this being the tenth anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires, the most fatal fires in Australian history. Ten years. Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister then, so that's five Prime Ministers ago. And now I'm second on the list at the library for a book about them.

The fires were much further north and east than the City by the Sea, but a local couple — actually a woman my mother used to work with — had family in that area and lost their son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. Kevin Rudd made a secret visit to the City by the Sea to meet them in private afterwards. My mother's friend described him as really lovely, which is not something you often hear about Kevin, so good for him.

Late last year, I read an interview with an executive from Amazon, wondering why Australians hadn't taken up their Black Friday sales in the sort of numbers they expected. Well, one, we don't celebrate American Thanksgiving, so Black Friday sales have no historical meaning for us; and two, days labelled as Black tend to signify to us that something terrible happened occurred on it. Disaster, not bargains. I mean, learn your local market, dude.

This week I watched an episode of Grand Designs New Zealand while I was making dinner. The couple was attempting to recreate some historic 1800s homestead the wife had admired as a child. Well, that's what the wife was doing. Her husband was just going along with it. Anyway, they recreated this house and filled it with period furniture and did it all well under budget. And it was nice. Not to my taste, but it looked exactly like the house they were copying and it was what they wanted, so good on them, right? No. Not at all. The host asked them if they were happy with it, and the husband was, but the wife... not so much. What's the problem?, asked the host. She was unhappy with the local building restrictions that meant her ceilings weren't as high as the ones in the original house, and the left wing of the house had to be several metres shorter, and she wasn't allowed to use the heritage-listed wood that the original was built out of. So they had bought another block of land and were going to build the same design all over again. That's when I added her to my mental list of "irritating people on Grand Designs whose houses I hope fall down". And they live in New Zealand, so that actually might happen next time there's an earthquake.

This weekend I have been struck with some sort of minor bug. A sniffly nose and heavy eyes that just won't stay open. Not sick exactly but aware that's something's not quite right, and I can't remember what it's like not to feel like this. I feel like I'm going to be mildly peaky forever.
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This week: I had my eye appointment. The woman I saw (ha) last time is on maternity leave, so I had to see (ha) a different chap. He was all right. Very chatty. He was excited to discover that we are almost prescription twins. Right from the off, he was talking about multi-focals. He said my age is about the time women start needing reading glasses. I said I don't need reading glasses yet. He said we'll see (ha). He seemed a bit disappointed to discover I was right.

Anyway, new prescription. I've gone backwards this time, back to where I was a few years ago. I picked new frames too. Turquoise, slightly cat's eye-shaped. I'll get them in a couple of weeks.

This weekend is the Australia Day long weekend, which is when I usually go to a big second-hand book fair in Port Fairy. This year, I work for the organisation that runs the book fair. Thursday, the hottest day of the year (and when I say hottest, I mean HOTTEST), saw me driving supplies to Port Fairy and spending a couple of hours unpacking boxes of books. It was hot. So very hot. I really can't overstate how hot it was. It was heat like a blunt force object. Or 43.2C (109.8F). Manual labour in stifling heat is not something that often troubles accountants. I was assigned the popular fiction boxes. Sophie Kinsella and Marion Keyes pretty much had a table to themselves. My presence was not actually required to run the book fair on Saturday, but I went anyway, to show support. Also to go to the book fair.

My mother came back from her nursing trainees' reunion with the news that her friend Colleen had found a "three-metre tiger snake" in her letterbox. I mean, Wikipedia says they usually only grow to 1.2 metres, so three might be an exaggeration (and really, who can blame Colleen for not stopping to measure it?), but whatever the length, it's not something I'd want to find when I went to collect the mail.
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Some sort of coating is coming off my glasses, making both lenses scratched. In the middle of the lens, right where I see out of, as if I'm wearing something specifically designed to show me what macular degeneration is like. So I need new glasses. My eye appointment is on Friday, but I've been entertaining myself by looking at new frames. There are so many things I'm not allowed to have — no little nose pads, not rimless, not too big — so I hope I find something nice. I am leaning towards a cat's eye shape, away from the rectangular ones I have chosen the last few times. I like this sort of thing a lot, although they might be a bit too red for my pink, pink skin, and the black version might make me look like a fly. I like these too, as a more low-key, sensible version of the shape, which is more me.

Also: Ooh! Or could I pull off pale tortoiseshell?

Oh, decisions.
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This week: I have struggled, nay, soldiered on with a cold. Monday and Tuesday I was the sickest person in the world. If that was a real competition, I'd have been given a trophy. A bronzed box of tissues, say, or a giant perspex lozenge. Thursday and Friday, meanwhile, were wretched filthy hot: aggressive dry furnace heat that knocked you down when you opened the door. I am glad the cold didn't coincide with the hot, else I'd have just had to lay down and die.

Pertinent to both having a sore throat and needing to cool down: I am not a huge fan of frozen ice-creamy things, but these are a treat, f-list. I recommend them for both illness and hot weather.

My mother is a subscriber to the local theatre, and on Thursday night she had two free tickets to the launch of the 2019 season. There will be some interesting shows next year: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Bell Shakespeare, a few small independent plays. She was late booking her tickets for the launch, so we had to sit in row S. Row S, f-list. The ignominy! She was determined not to suffer that fate for 2019, so Friday, my day off, we braved the heat and went back to the theatre to book our tickets for next year's shows. I thought this was very eager of us, but we weren't the only ones. We had to queue.

That done, we headed back outside. In front of the council office was parked a car with fishing rods poking out at various angles, all dangerous. A man in a ranger's uniform was taking photos of it, and he had to step back to let us pass. "Oh, say," he said to my mother, "have you caught that little cat yet?" He, it turned out, was the ranger who had failed to catch Tojo a few weeks ago. My mother filled him in on the Tojo news. "Aw," he said, "that's too bad. He looked like a sweet little fella."

Things I regret doing this week: I saw a knothole in the magnolia tree, a little nub of wood that looked loose, so I poked it. It fell out, followed by a torrent of big shiny ants.

Things I learnt this week #1: Lemon, lime and bitters is an Australian thing. I am genuinely surprised. What does everyone else do when they need "a mildly sophisticated drink that could be served to people of all ages"?

Things I learnt this week #2: A man coughed up a blood clot the shape of his bronchial tree. (He later died. I mean, obviously.)

Targeted advertising update: Thanks to searching for garden products, I've seen less of the hairy chest hoodie this week and more retractable hoses. Also, mysteriously, ads about a man called Josh, who paid too much for his business insurance. Poor Josh.
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It is officially the first day of summer and I have a scratchy throat, precursor to my second cold in two months. Grrr.

Tojo )

November books read

I made it to fifty books for the year. And what a bland lot they were this month.

* Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy - Lindsay Tanner (2011) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Wakestone Hall - Judith Rossell (2018) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* The Café by the Sea - Jenny Colgan (2016) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )

* Snap - Belinda Bauer (2018) ★ ★ ★
Read more... )
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Honey is magic. When I had that sore finger a couple of years ago, it improved markedly once I started smothering it with manuka honey. (Of course, that was also after it was cut open, scraped and cauterised, so that might have had something to do with it.)

Early this morning, we picked up the seafood for tomorrow: prawns, calamari, and some smoked salmon instead of scallops ("The boats haven't brought in any scallops for the last couple of weeks," said the fish lady. "I think the season has ended early.") Then home to play with hoses: setting up the hidden hose along the back fence for summer watering, then moving a hose that has just been hanging, unused, along the side fence. I've been meaning to do that for ages. It looks so much better. Then in to look at washing machine specifications. All go, then.

Weekly knitting update: I joined the front and back in the round, and knitted two rows. Not really worth taking a photo.

Open Wings

Jul. 9th, 2017 10:31 pm
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This week:
1. I worked my last day on Monday, so I am unemployed again. Having two months back in the office has really given me food for thought about what went wrong last year, so that's been useful. The last thing I had to do was a handover meeting with Passive-Aggressive Lady. It was all very polite, but she clearly wasn't going to like a lot of the improvements that New Me and I had set in place. Ah well. That's for them to argue about now.

2. So I was a little unsettled and down about that. I was surprised how much it affected me, actually. And then I slept through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so I suspect the real problem was some sort of mild bug.

This week on Masterchef:
1. Too much habanero, too much vinegar and your pumpkin was... undercooked.
2. Sadly, your kingfish... let you down.
3. You promised us the flavour of roasted rice in that ice-cream, but it just... wasn't strong enough.
4. The puddle of runny liver is... distinctly unattractive.

Also, one of them made something he called "lettuce water".

This week in knitting: No photo today as all I've done this week is pick up the stitches for the second band. Still not finished, but surely it won't be long now.

In lieu of a knitting photo, here's a meme:

Either/or meme
Cacti or succulents
Butterflies or honeybees
Typewritten or handwritten letters
Flower crowns or oversized sun hats
Polaroids or film
And more in the same vein )
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Weekly knitting update: None. But these last couple of days it has been cold enough to make me put on socks in the evenings, so it should soon be cold enough to knit.

Weekly everything else update:

I received a reminder about getting my eyes tested in December and have been putting it off. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that some sort of coating was coming off my lenses, so that made me get my act together. My usual optometrist is on maternity leave, so I went to her replacement. She looked about twelve. I've been wearing glasses for longer than she's been alive.

She asked if I thought my eyes had changed and I said no, it's a bit blurry but I think that's because of the scratched coating. Then she did the test and said, well, yes, the scratched coating wouldn't help, but both eyes have deteriorated. So new lenses... and new frames. I picked them up on Monday, and am now seeing the world through these:

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The striped bits in the arms are feathers. Mine have more light blue patches at the front too.

Anyway, the world is clear! I can see! And I've had a headache for most of the week while I got used to it, but it seems to be clearing up.

Finally, with this entry title, I come to the end of the Dame's posthumous Pink Collection of historical romances. Look forward to next update when I move on to the contemporary romances.
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What I like about the Olympics are those moments when they have a wall of screens showing people paddling and running and fencing and playing volleyball. Or when they finish a race, then go straight to the action in the table tennis or the judo. Just the idea of all those people doing things in a relatively small area, and none of them me.

No knitting photo again this week. My cast on row from last week remains on the needle, untouched.

What have I done this week instead of knitting? First, I had a cold. Not a bad cold, but a lengthy one. I didn't have a sandpaper throat, for example, but I had a slightly dry throat for about four days. My nose hasn't been particularly blocked, but it's been sniffly for days on end. It's an irritating sort of illness.

Second, this week my decision to resign was made public. That's been quite draining. I feel a bit like the proverbial frog that can jump out of hot water water but doesn't notice cold water coming to a slow boil; I am good at identifying sudden onsets of the glooms, but this time they have been descending so gradually I didn't realise. It's only now I look around and find I'm shrouded in clouds. Anyway, my boss asked me to give it a week to really think about it, which I did and came to the same conclusion. So he sent the email out. It began with "I am deeply saddened" and ended with "she will be much missed". I was tempted to Reply All with "I'm not actually dead!"

After that, I received many kind emails. My favourite was from Doctor E, our very posh English doctor, aged 72. He is a leading light in his town's amateur dramatic society and he is lovely. He sent me the first verse of Byron's "She Walks In Beauty" with the subject line "I am distraught !" I will miss Doctor E.

Since there is no knitting photo this week, here is a selection from the garden. Colour! )
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I have a cold. Obviously this means I am the sickest person in the world.

On Thursday, I noticed that I had received a text message earlier in the week allegedly from my bank, giving a code to approve an online transaction of 12 million Indonesian rupiahs. Spam, obviously, so I deleted it. On Friday evening I checked my online banking and noticed that my credit card balance was unexpectedly high. There was a payment to Garuda Airlines for $1,200. That's about 12 million rupiah. Hmmm. So I rang the bank and complained, and the man said, "Oh, no, we would never do a transfer like that without you entering the code. That must have been a different attempt." Right. So he's cancelled my card and issued a new one.

Knitting! Did I cast on last night just to avoid the shame of completely missing another week? )
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Despite having a large area fenced in for his own use, Alistair insists, at volume, on being taken out to the front garden once a day. He has discovered that the cat from across the road sometimes sleeps under the rosemary bush, and he has to make sure that it's not there. I put on his little red harness and off we go.

Anyway, there we were yesterday afternoon, investigating the skinks under the paving stones, when a wallaby casually hopped by on the footpath. And Alistair was so shocked he had to sit down and watch it go all the way up the hill. You could almost hear his brain cogs whirring. Poor lamb. It must be surprising to find out there are more animals than Cats and Dogs and Things I Could Eat.

In other news: My finger is not puffy!
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I've just seen an advertisement for a florist offering "on-demand flower delivery". As opposed to all those other florists who deliver bouquets randomly without waiting for an order.

Last year my mother's best friend and her two daughters were visiting the City by the Sea and they went to high tea at one of our fancier tea rooms. They asked my mother and me if we wanted to go, but my mother couldn't/wouldn't leave John for that long. She said I should go by myself, but I didn't. I felt a bit weird about going out and having fun while she was stuck at home so I said I'd stay with John so she could go, but she didn't want to do that either. I think we were having a martyr competition. Anyway, neither of us went, and I regretted that. I regretted it straight away, but even more so once I met them for lunch another day and they showed me photos of it. Éclairs in the shape of swans! One of the daughters is an aficionado of high teas and she compared it favourably (regarding presentation, taste and cost) to high tea at the famously fancy Windsor in Melbourne. So I was kicking myself.

My mother's friend rang a couple of weeks ago and said they were coming back for their annual visit in March and were doing high tea again and did we want to come this time? So we're going. This is what we're going to have (éclair swan not pictured, sadly - I hope that doesn't mean they don't do them any more).

How is my finger? )
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I have just received an email with a link to 75 Apps That Will Save You Time As A Busy Person. Seventy-five! I would suggest that if you stopped messing around with 75 apps, that would save you even more time.

This weekend I went to the pet supply shop. I was there to stock up on Alistair's favourite flavours of cat food. The same brand is also available more conveniently at the supermarket, but he prefers the flavours exclusive to the pet shop. Irritating creature. I'm sure each successive generation of cat is getting more demanding.

The pet supply shop had animals visiting from the RSPCA shelter for a special adoption day. There were dogs. There were rabbits. There was a white Staffy pup with a green kerchief round its neck. What would Alistair make of that, I wondered. Dinner, probably.

Unrelated to the RSPCA, there was a woman and her son with their new dachshund pup. He was tiny. He still had milky eyes and was draped over the boy's shoulder. They had come to buy a bone-shaped tag for his collar, engraved with his name. The boy spelled it out to the pet shop lady working the engraving device. M-I-S-T-E-R space Z-E-U-S. I have never seen a more unlikely Mister Zeus in my life.

Alistair is a declutterer. He is particularly fond of decluttering the kitchen windowsill. There is to be nothing on that windowsill. Nothing at all. Whatever I put on it, I find knocked off the next morning. I knew this once, because I stopped putting things on that windowsill for a while. Last week, I forgot, and put my box of antibiotics there; I found it in the sink when I got up.

That night, I put the little plastic jug that fills the iron there; I found it in the sink the next day.

That night, I put a couple of tomatoes that my mother had picked there; I found them in the sink the next day.

That night, I put a rogue zucchini the size of a cat there; it was still there the next day. Obviously too big for him. It's good to know he has his limits.

How is my finger? )

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