How much do I want a mondrianium? It reminds me of the mondrimat, which was one of the very first sites I ever visited on the Internet. Ah, memories. Who'd have thought that adding lines and colouring boxes could fill in so much time?

*****
I've been feeling slightly disgruntled since my second-last radio shift on Tuesday. First, I was with Bernie, who alone is quite enough to disgruntle anyone. Then the new assistant station co-ordinator brought a new reader into the studio only half an hour before air time and said, "This is Peter, he's going to read today." Oh, is he? With no training and after we've finished putting the show together and against all established guidelines for new readers? Right. Anyway, Peter seemed like quite a nice chap, and was, of course, completely unaware that his arrival had caused a hurried reshuffle; we got him to air for twenty minutes and he did quite well.

In times gone by, I would have gone to the new assistant co-ordinator after the show and explained that that isn't the best way to introduce a new reader; it's stressful for everyone, and if he tried it on Thursday, for instance, Jan, who is much more forthright than I, would send them both packing. I came over all Pontius Pilate though, and washed my hands of the matter. I was more concerned that the roster preparation sheet hadn't appeared yet, preventing my announcement of my imminent retirement. I had to tell the new assistant co-ordinator - the skeevy guy I don't like terribly much - instead. He shrugged and said, "Okay then, I'll cross your name off."

Now, I wasn't expecting wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Or a party, come to that. But after nearly four years, haven't I even earnt a "Sorry to lose you" or "Thanks for your time"? Hmph.

*****
The radio station we have on at work was broadcasting a tennis match from the Australian Open yesterday, and every single game was one of those that got to deuce then advantage, deuce, advantage, deuce, advantage, deuce, etc, ad nauseam. I used to play tennis, back in the day. Oh yes, I once hit the en tout cas as part of the Purnim Ladies' Club (Girls) team in the Warrnambool & Districts Lawn Tennis Competition. I even have a commemorative spoon to prove it. I had a cunning little forehand slice that I could put right on the centre line, baffling the two players on the other side of the net... and that was about it, really. It was my complete lack of ability, athleticism and ambition that stopped me from becoming world No. 1.

So while I'm au fait with the rules of tennis, I had a personal rule of my own, one that I deemed prudent not to mention to my team mates. Namely, when stuck in one of those interminable deuce, advantage, deuce games, once we got to deuce for the fifth time, I would let the other team win the game.

Years later, in an annual performance review, an employer told me I wasn't a team player. Well... guilty as charged, Your Honour.

There are some delightfully insane people in the world, aren't there? Flipping through a magazine in the supermarket queue this morning, I came across a feature about "Christmas on a budget". Its tip? If you're too poor to buy tinsel, swathe your tree in a calculator roll. Personally, I think a calculator roll would cost more than a strand of tinsel (unless you already had one to hand, I suppose, or stole it from work), and, in the resulting photo, the tree did rather look as though it had been wrapped in toilet paper. Now there's an idea...

I've just been searching for a large-numbered digital clock, but was distracted early on by the discovery of a site that sells titanium sporks - "the coolest and most powerful spork ever created". Quite a boast indeed. And yet, somehow less mad than the calculator roll suggestion.

There's a new Yellow Wiggle! It's like the end of the world.

How strange the little calendar showing which days I've written entries this month looks compared to previous months. If I ever look at it in the future, it will seem like my life suddenly became filled with so many more interesting things to write about this November, which is plainly not true at all.

So I've proved to myself that I actually can write something every day if I really want to - I even felt slightly guilty on a couple of days when I wrote a short entry, knowing I had time to write something longer. Ah, laziness. Still, I've found enough to write about every day this month without raiding my list of potential topics more than once. That means you've all missed hearing my thoughts on this (although those thoughts could rather be summed up by "Oh. My. God.", so you really didn't miss much).

I have begun a Procrastination Project, meaning that whenever I'm in the mood to put off doing something, I'll always have something to do instead; namely, putting tags on all my old LJ entries. So far I'm up to July 2004, so I think this promises to be a long-term project. I don't normally go back and look at my old entries; I remember a few of them, but certainly not all. One thing that surprised, reading April, May and June 2004, was that I rarely mention books unless it's to say I didn't like them. Lest I be mistaken for some sort of book curmudgeon, today I'm going to write about the book I've just finished reading and that I enjoyed tremendously, and that book is The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

This is a non-fiction, popular science book (about clouds, oddly enough). Before reading it, I knew enough about clouds to tell a cumulus from a cumulonimbus, but now! Well, now I know my cumulus humilis from my cumulus mediocris radiatus, and what a sundog is, and why children should be punished if they draw teardrop-shaped rain, and that's just for starters. So, it's a fascinating book, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and just a little bit disturbing, both in the chapters about global warming and weather manipulation and also for just how enthusiastic Pretor-Pinney is about clouds (he has even gone so far as to start a Cloud Appreciation Society).

Anyway, I highly recommend it.

I'm as fond of carnivorous plants as the next person. I love the rosy blush of pink inside the Venus fly trap flower (if that's what it is), and the ticklish feeling as the fringes of the trap close around my pinkie finger (although I do feel a little guilty for tricking it). However, I think I would struggle to love Nepenthes x ventricosa, aka the condom plant. I nearly choked on my chai when I saw it in my Tesselaar (scroll to the bottom of the page) catalogue today. I don't think I'll be getting one, even if it is a rare collectible.

Amusing: Lady Voldemort.
Crows: don't like out-of-date yoghurt.
Essay: at a standstill.
Idea: stolen.
Hair: trimmed.
Mouse: eaten (not by me).
Newspapers: read.
Oven: baking soda cleaned the door a treat.
Shoes: made my Achilles tendon hurt.
Weather: fine, mild and mostly sunny turning chilly in the late afternoon.

In a couple of weeks, Melbourne will play host to the Commonwealth Games (for those who don't live in the British Commonwealth, imagine a summer Olympics in which Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the individual countries of the UK celebrate beating Tonga at lawn bowls). I'm, well, a touch underwhelmed by it all, I must admit.

These Games don't have a torch but a baton, and we have been getting regular news updates on where it is and what it's doing each day. Torch or baton, this always strikes me as odd, as if the thing has free will and the ability to move itself about. "Today the baton went to Gippsland, and tomorrow it will be heading out to sea." Not like there's any people carrying it at all, just a baton jaunting about on holiday.

The baton will be sight-seeing in the City by the Sea later this week, and because it's predictable that there's always someone unhappy about something, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about it. The baton's big photo opportunity here was that it was going to be carried down the beach by an ex-jockey on a locally famous, 28-year-old ex-racehorse. The jockey has hurt his foot and can't ride, so the organisers have given him another leg to run alone, and given the horse-back beach leg to another ex-jockey on another locally famous ex-racehorse. So the first jockey has gone to the paper, complaining that while he's happy with the new thing he's got, he's disappointed for his horse.

So the horse is upset it can't carry the sentient baton. Right.

*****

( And I mean: always someone unhappy about something )

I discovered two days ago that Sydney's Powerhouse Museum had a William Morris exhibition late last year. I could have gone over my long Christmas break. Was it too much to hope that it would still be running? Yes, of course... because it has been packed up and moved to the Melbourne Museum. That's in Melbourne, of course. Three-hour-day-trip-away Melbourne! But only until February 12.

All of which is just to explain why I was up at a most ungodly hour to catch this morning's train to Melbourne. The train used to be run by a private company and ran express from Geelong to Melbourne. Since being taken back by V/Line, it now stops at four stations in between, adding a considerable amount of time to an already lengthy journey. I answered a phone survey on this very topic a few months ago, but they obviously didn't rush to V/Line with the news that I was displeased with this change.

They have also renamed Spencer Street station as Southern Cross station, which (a) I already knew and thought was pointless and (b) really is pointless, especially when the official platform signs say "Southern Cross (formerly Spencer Street) Platform 5". I'm sick of things being renamed and rebadged for no good reason. Spence - sorry, Southern Cross - is being revamped with a wavy roof and when the train pulls in it's like being swallowed into the belly of a beast and looking up at its ribs.

At the museum, the ticket lady kindly pointed out where I needed to go to see William Morris, then said, "But first you really must go to the Forest Gallery and follow the path round to the second signpost and look up. It'll make you go 'aaah'." She shrugged her shoulders and wrinkled her nose with glee. Ordinarily I would think that sort of thing is the museum equivalent of "Do you want fries with that?" but those instructions were so precise and she was so excited I gave her the benefit of the doubt and went to the Forest Gallery's second signpost and looked up... and went "aaah." In the forest, there is a mating pair of tawny frogmouths with two chicks, and being nocturnal they had decided to sleep the day away on top of the pillar. All four of them: two adult birds and two little balls of grey fluff. So cute.

I spent the rest of the morning wandering around the Morris exhibition, said hello to Phar Lap (Morris is just next door to him) on the way out and caught the lunch train home. Blistered right foot aside, a good day.



* A piece of graffiti on one of new non-express station's walls. I was wondering how the artist came up with that tag when I realised it was actually "Aero Freek". When will vandals learn to spell?

I'm not much of a napper, myself. I have enough trouble getting to sleep at night without confusing my body clock completely.

Midnight Mass last night ended my run of bishops; just the boring old parish priest and his assistant, Father Jazz Hands (who turns out to be only Deacon Jazz Hands). Two rows and directly in front of me sat a woman with the most awesome femullet I've ever seen. It was a Christmas miracle! I didn't know they still existed in the wild and I couldn't keep my eyes off it.

In the row immediately in front of me was a young-ish couple in matching leather jackets. He was fine, although clearly (and disturbingly accurately) modelling his look on Vin Diesel; she was irritating, draping herself all over him and whispering and giggling all through the service. And then she had the effrontery to look outraged when Deacon Jazz Hands gave the sermon and said, "I'm sure we're all going to eat a hell of a lot later today!" Honestly. You can either talk in church or you can be sanctimonious, but you can't do both.

Deacon Jazz Hands finished the mass by putting on a Santa hat and saying in a Tiny Tim voice, "God bless us, every one!" The priest said, "He's mad - I just never know what he'll do next!" Christmas dinner at the presbytery was probably a riot.

And now I'm going to have some pudding, admire the photos in the Earth from the Air book I gave my mother and do a sudoku from my new giant sudoku book.

Isn't it terrible when you have so many things you really ought to be doing, only to be struck with an idea that solves something that you've been trying to do for ages that's not urgent but would be so much more fun?

Yes. Yes, it is indeed.

In other news, "easy peel" in the context of plastic boxes containing either fresh pasta or fresh cat mince (er, mince for cats, not of cats) is a cruel and heartless lie.

In still other news, two Australian scientists have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology. I particularly liked how one of them drank bacteria to give himself an ulcer to prove a point. That's what I call dedication. Australia would be a much better place if we gave these two chaps a ticker-tape parade, rather than all the football teams that seem to be cluttering the streets at the moment.