all sorts of beasticles, birdlings and boys

Monday's marvellous White-Rabbit-clad student seems to have started something stirring in the realms of unlikely correspondences. Subsequent to that, my life has been enlivened by a goose, which sat on the windowsill of my fairy-tale tutorial for twenty minutes, going "Gronk!" at intervals to the accompaniment of delighted giggles from the class, and presenting all the appearance of an obliging illustration on the point of laying golden eggs. Then I wandered out of the class (a spirited discussion of eighteenth-century "Beauty and the Beast" variants) and promptly bumped into a young black gentleman who was proceeding down the avenue in full-on eighteenth-century costume, lacy cravat and all, in a pleasing shade of orange. Is my vivid imaginative life actually starting to warp space-time, or did someone crank up the "surrealism" setting on the universe without telling me?

I spent most of yesterday afternoon helping my dad unpack and repack boxes of his personal stuff from Zimbabwe for shipping to France. This was an exercise in nostalgia, random juxtaposition, dust, heavy lifting and surprising discovery, including my sister's PhD thesis, all of my high-school report cards and the mauve fluffy blanket my late grandmother crocheted for me when I was little. We have to find a proper commercial packer for the Wedgewood willow pattern service and the Stuart crystal, the family heirlooms most likely to cause rifts, ructions and horse-tradings when my sister and I inherit. starmadeshadow, which company did you use, and did they break anything?

Last Night I Dreamed: an epic quest for the island of a race of secretive and magical leonine creatures, cunningly concealed by magical misdirection just off the coast of South America. Armed with a map disguised as a picture, and directions and occasional misdirections from a small, animated, stone rhinosceroid statue resentfully in our possession, we trekked across vast tracts of desert. At one point a sheik and his entourage drove past in a procession of limousines through the sand; unfortunately, his second most important wife took a random fancy to us and our map, and we were more or less kidnapped. Escaping from this in some off-screen action, we actually arrived at the island, only to discover that the leonine creatures were exceptionally off-pissed that we'd discovered them and their network of secret railways. We were incarcerated, but managed to escape by flinging ourselves into the rapids of a nearby river and floating away downstream.