Freckles & Doubt

My Evil Landlord ¹ is severely in the dogbox at the moment - not because I'm fulminating domestically against him (although I am led to believe that our exchanges about loading the dishwasher are worthy of an Old Married Couple) - but because he underwent a rare moment of unGermanic inefficiency over the weekend and missed his mother's birthday party. He was convinced it was on Saturday night when it was actually on Friday; various frantic relatives phoned all conceivable friends-of-Evil-Landlord² with increasing desperation as Friday night wore on, but no-one's cellphone ring was loud enough to overcome the ambient noise at the steak restaurant where we were doing our usual end-of-month payday restaurant celebration with jo&stv. His mother is apparently severely narked.

The problem I have - and I'm surveying this anthropologically, from the point of view of someone with deeply civilised parents who I think would resort to ridicule rather than guilt-trip if I screwed up thusly - is that her level of infuriation seems to indicate that he is in the particular dogbox reserved for Offspring Who Forget Parental Birthdays, with a side-order of Offspring Who Forget Important Family Gatherings. This seems unfair, since he clearly remembered it and planned to attend - in fact, he's guilty of no more than momentary mental aberration, disorganisation and planning snafu, which happens to all of us, be we never so German. I suspect the guilt-trip response is partly because they were seriously worried he'd had an accident or something, and swung to the relieved/annoyed pole when they finally made contact. Which is understandable, but still a tad unfair.

Then again, the victim is my Evil Landlord, who has Shrug And Ignore It down to a fine art.

I have to say: Nelson's Eye? Seriously good steak. They proudly trumpet their basic disinterest in such frou-frou as starters and side-dishes, which they provide in more or less token form, and which are in consequence seriously behind those of the Hussar, my usual steak-house benchmark. This is problematical while you're actually eating the starter, because Nelson's Eye's prices are ... pricey. One and a half times Hussar, on average. You feel gypped for the duration of the starter. Then you wade into the steak, and All Becomes Clear. Those prices? Totally valid.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was trying to knit socks. This was a sad, frantic experience during which I became bogged down in morasses of multiple double-pointed needles in hundreds of sizes, circular needles like coiled springs and art deco representations of Shub Niggurath, and rope-like, writhing yarn in nauseating pastels. I think my subconscious is seriously threatened by my current vague leaning towards trying to knit a woolly hat for my niece. It seems a valid use for a skein of purple wool, but if normal needles warp space-time, imagine what I could do with circulars.

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¹ Who finally gets his own tag. Words cannot describe how little this would mean to him, given his professed and vindictive ignorance of all things bloggity.

² If the EL had a blog, or thought about these things, he would presumably be apologising e'en now to all the people who had their Friday nights disturbed by frantic EL relatives, but he doesn't and doesn't, so this is about as good as it's going to get. I'm personally rather interested to see how far they threw the net.

Internets! Did you miss me? I missed you! The Evil Landlord awoke on Saturday morning, decided that this random rebooting thing was interfering unacceptably with his lawful computer gaming, and wandered off with his computer under his arm to get it Seen To. We have consequently spent three quarters of the Easter weekend without even sulky intermittent teen tantrum access to teh internets. I survived this surprisingly well, all things considered.

Worst things about Easter:

1. It seems to inspire Sid the Sinus Headache to new and ever more vicious heights of pain. I woke up on Sunday with him sitting over my left eye, kicking things. Mostly me.
2. Consequently forgetting completely that I was supposed to spend the whole weekend updating my hapless Masters student's thesis on Tolkien. While I plead in extenuation that I didn't have internet access and thus couldn't read her increasingly plaintive reminder emails, basically I am a Bad Supervisor and probably deserved the headache. Someone suggested last night that it was proactive karma, on the same principles as reannual wine. They were right.

Best things about Easter:

1. 4-day weekend. I think I've actually caught up on sleep, for the first time in about three months.
2. Easter chocolates thereafter go on sale. Somewhere in my future is me biting the head off a giant dark chocolate bunny. A cheap giant dark chocolate bunny. (How cool is it that tacky kitch chocolate easter shapes are now in grown-up dark chocolate?) Pre-emptively, I'm going for a dental checkup this afternoon.

Which brings me to the weird topic of Easter symbolism. Bunnies and chicklets and eggses, o my! They make, basically, no sense. They're mad carryovers from the original pagan spring festival, which celebrates life and rebirth and baby creatures and, probably, when you get down to it, screwing. To slap the whole Christian crucified-Christ thing on top of it is extremely incongruous, even given the risen-from-death motif. I remember the Baptist preacher, way back in the days when I was a boring born-again¹ schoolgirl, trying desperately to claim that chocolate eggs represent the stone rolled away from Christ's tomb, and even back then I had an embryonic version of the response I now slap into the margins of undergrad essays in bright green ink, viz. "You're stretching the metaphor, read in CONTEXT!"

I actually rather like the way religions nick motifs from each other on an ongoing basis, suggesting that most human spiritual experience runs in well-worn grooves and Jung might have had a point, after all. All religion is postmodern. It's cobbled together from fragments of other religions which appealed to the cobblers as meaningful, powerful and likely to get people to do what the cobblers want. Of course, having engaged in pastiche with the enthusiasm of rutting bunnies, they then attempt to refigure the whole shaky collage (aka load of cobblers) as Absolute Meaning and Totalitarian Discourse, which by all the rules of postmodernism you're not allowed to have, which possibly explains absolutely everything I always hated about religion. It's conceptually inconsistent on the meta level as well as internally. *is pleased with own random insight*

Oh, yes, forgot to add. Best things about Easter:
3. Finished the book.

Last Night I Dreamed: I occupied a rather beautiful modern larney house, all glass and split levels, in a city somewhere, possibly New York, and was hosting a gathering in the giant studio to show off my husband's latest artworks to a select bunch of critics and fellow artists. Said husband was all angsty and paranoid about the arrangements. He may, for at least some moments of the dream, also have been David Bowie, so I guess that fixation isn't dying down as fast as I thought. Sigh.

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¹ Not, I have to admit, with any real degree of conviction.

Bother. My Matrix poster has just taken yet another graceful nosedive off my office wall, as it's been doing at intervals since I moved into this office. Either the prestik is not adequate to the gentle air currents from my ceiling fan, or the cosmic wossnames are telling me to stop perving Keanu's coat¹ and actually do some work. Except, wait! I can't do any work, as all the relevant information-holding people only get back from holiday tomorrow. The faculty has paid me for a week's worth of surfing the 'net, interspersed with moments of concentrated perplexity as I try to interpret Discovery health options and the retirement plan. Is it just me, or is Discovery a sea of financial confusion populated with ninja sharks? Also, Vitality doesn't appear to reward me for gym three times a week at Sports Science. Rotten swiz.

On the subject of walls, my Evil Landlord has just put up a set of rather dishy new CD shelves in my study, thus giving my floating David Bowie collection a home other than a tottering pile on my desk, and incidentally revealing a few Disks Of Shame I'd forgotten I owned². He also added another shelf to my bookshelves. This means that the approximately 5 metre-high piles of homeless books currently bedecking the study may, once I get my act together and actually shelve them, find homes. Any day now.

Department of Random Linkery: Making Light has a rather enjoyable clutch of Bruce Sterling quotes. The man talks horse sense, always supposing it's a particularly technophile and politically sussed mechanical horse with a well-developed tendency to bite the undeserving unexpectedly on the butt.

Last Night I Dreamed: another of those mad space-opera dreams, in which I was part of some kind of space expedition trying to make sense of a giant ship full of bizarre and incomprehensible alien artefacts in various tasteful shades of crimson. Later, I was wearing a somewhat home-made Supergirl outfit while flying over the city to gatecrash a slumber party up in a skyscraper flat.

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¹ Keanu is completely upstaged by his coat in Matrix Revolutions - it's beautifully cut and far sexier than he is.

² Bangles. But I'm not a newt any more, I got better.

My favourite Xmas moment for 2007: my Evil Landlord gave me a set of kitchen knives, lovely ones in a bamboo stand. The gift tag was two plasters, with "TEH DOC" scrawled across their back in marker pen. I think stv's getting to him. But I went "awwwww".

Also, my niece in a bucket on the patio, circa Xmas day. She's insanely cute, and also at certain angles disturbingly identical to me at that age.



Thanks to all the Boxing Day braai attendees, it was an extremely pleasantly relaxed occasion despite slightly mad quantities of people. You should have stuck around for the aftermath, which was entertaining: me attempting to stop my mother from doing the washing up. This is basically futile, and we ended up in Twin Sink Mayhem, ripping through the debris in short order in a side-by-side mutual attempt to reduce the amount done by the other. Duelling banjos have nothing on us.

Last Night I Dreamed: vividly enough that I woke myself up at 2am replying to the loud statement I damned well heard from the mad old bat next door, although I think it was a particularly vivid dream. She said something like "Aren't you done yet?", implying that I should have been doing something rather than sleeping peacefully. I think I mendaciously shouted something like "Almost finished!" before realising I was dreaming. Then I couldn't get back to sleep for hours. Consequently a bit frayed today. Also sore from Gym, The Return.

Conspiracy is afoot! Not only has wolverine_nun successfully rallied the hordes into a Save the Piano Fund (the contemplation of which is making me extremely happy, so gratitude all round), but the bunny has finally, fittingly, bought it at the hands of an Infernal Device of considerable cunning and complexity, not to mention conspiracy.

Yesterday was a bit surreal. I spent it drifting around the house making desultory gestures of party-preparation, but at around lunchtime the Evil Landlord and the dreaded jo arrived, and proceeded to closet themselves in the garage with loud protestations about "cleaning" it, an occult process I was not permitted to witness. Thereafter a succession of gin and tonics moved steadily into the garage, and a succession of bangs, thuds, giggles, shrieks, yells and wild gales of laughter emerged from it. At some stage in the proceedings stv arrived and was sucked into the maelstrom. At intervals some member of the triumvirate would emerge, quarter the house restlessly, and depart with an unlikely selection of objects - the watering can, the potholders, a pile of German books. At all times loud comments about cleaning the garage, or rather "cleaning" "the" "garage", were made.

A couple of hours into the party, the assembled guests were herded into the garage to behold a veritable shrine to Heath Robinson: a Contraption constructed of bits of wood, string and random household objects, culminating in the bunny (a tragic figure blindfolded with black tape) sitting beneath a suspended anvil. I was handed a pair of scissors and instructed to ceremonially cut the ribbon. Speechless, I did so.

The resulting events are a bit of a traumatised blur, but as far as I remember, a swinging owl-shaped potholder knocked over the first in a line of domino-style books, which fell in sequence to hit a lever which pulled out a plug in a tube, releasing a whole line of marbles which rolled down a series of inclines to fill up the suspended watering can, which tipped, releasing a lever which lowered a lit blowtorch to melt a block of ice on one end of a balance, which tipped, bringing a candle down to burn through a piece of string, releasing an anvil, which fell on the bunny, crushing it utterly to smithereens.

The scary thing is that none of the engineers had actually seen the comment in which I specified a bunny-destruction mechanism including several of the above. Also, the Evil Landlord wants to make another one next weekend. Fear.

I feel that this was a fitting end to the bunny, whose motivational force has been suitably recognised with a grand gesture, and moreover one which didn't actually give me a chance to drop an anvil on my foot. I am free! Also, have scored lovely birthday loot in addition to piano-funds, including booze, clothes and piles of books I propose to spend the rest of the weekend reading.

Being slightly emotionally traumatised by the proceedings, I took only completely crap photographs of the contraption, and stv took a video I have no idea how to edit or embed. However, I feel the birthday present from jo&stv should be immortalised:


The back reads "Stockholm 2007".

I couldn't work out why Todal, feline of the 10-second attention span, should choose Wednesday evening to blitz me with an extended, 20-minute affection session, complete with staring, purring, climbing all over me, putting her whiskers in my ear, and that cute bit where she pats my nose with her paw. That sort of love is usually reserved for the Evil Landlord. It transpires, however, that this was post-traumatic shock of a sort: on Tuesday evening, following the mad piratical DVD-watching, she did her usual odd-kitty thing, which is to jump up into the narrow space between the TV and the cabinet and disappear behind the TV, presumably in search of all the interesting little moving people. On Tuesday I apparently closed the cabinet doors and went to bed without realising she was in there. She spent the night there, mewing and thumping, which caused the Evil Landlord to turn over in bed a couple of times and assume that a Multicoloured Gerbil of Paradise was once more buying it on the living-room carpet. He let her out when he woke up in the morning.

I feel a bit bad, but also mostly amused. Also, someone has dismembered a pigeon all over the Evil Landlord's study this morning, suggesting that some kind of generalised feline revenge has been exacted. Sigh.

Random linkery for jo, because she liked the bit that MTN rip off in their ad: the OK Go treadmill music video. Bizarrely lateral and appealing. I hope this eats less of your time than the Spikefic. *evil grin*

Random linkery because I can: various Hugo-nominated novelettes and short stories available on the web. I really enjoyed Ian Macdonald's "The Djinn's Wife", which uses Indian mythology to talk about AI. Michael F. Flynn's "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" is one of those mild, understated, slow-build stories packed with significance. Robert Reed's "Eight Episodes" is simultaneously fun and thoughtful. Haven't found time to read the novellas yet, watch this space.

The dread day looms! tomorrow an army of builders descends on my bedroom and reconstructs it from the ground up! In the process they will dig up the floor, damp-course it properly, re-lay it and surface it in wood, sort out the cracks in the walls, damp-proof the walls, raise the roof a foot or so, raise the roof and ceiling of the bathroom a foot or so, deconstruct and reconstruct the shower in order to make it flow uphill into the grey water system, and otherwise make merry in a generally positive builderly¹ fashion. This means I've had to move out of my room and bathroom into the guestroom, which has been entertaining as the guest room is a third of the size and already contains its own furniture and the entirety of the Evil Landlord's fantasy collection. Also, I have a fair amount of Stuff, TM, even given the amazingly cathartic throw-out sessions I've been having all week. I love throwing out stuff. It makes me feel lighter.

Being squeezed into a small, cluttered space for the next month is going to give me the pip², but I console myself with the thought that it'll also give the Evil Landlord the pip, given as how he'll have to endure not only my whinging, but the temporary transformation of his bathroom into a deeply girly space. Callously, I consider that it'll do him good to get in touch with his feminine side. I may go forth and specially acquire some heavily floral bath products.

I know only too well that the latest incarnation of the Army of Reconstruction, even if utterly dissimilar to the last lot in all other ways, will follow their brethren in their absolute disregard for the green things that grow. Consequently, herewith some pics of my courtyard, just for posterity, before it's trampled by a herd of plaster-dropping, cement-mixing, brick-fondling reconstructive elephants.





Also your last chance to experience the Horror That Is My Bedroom, current alias the House of Usher (cracks, dank, strange fungi, although mercifully as yet no incestuous corpses).

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¹ Almost but not entirely unlike bildungsroman.
² Good lord! Who knew that "the pip" (colloquially "a fit of disgust, depression or bad temper") is more literally a disease of poultry or hawks, characterised by throat mucus and white scale on the tongue? Eeuw. But linguistically interesting.

When I trotted into the Evil Landlord's study this morning to break out a new, fresh pack of the day's Iburst, there was a suspicious rustling from the corner of the desk.

Regretfully discarding the theory that the impressive collection of pack-rat junk in the EL's study had achieved sentience and was flexing its paper tentacles preparatory to lurching down the passage and demanding some nice pulp fantasy for breakfast, I informed the Evil Landlord that he had mice. He admitted that, in fact, during the small hours one of the cats had brought something alive into the study and released it, in that inquisitive, controlled-experiment sort of way cats have.
"I heard it rustling around in there last night," he said. "I think it might be a giant cockroach."
Discarding this as some kind of futile attempt to keep me away from the Iburst, I poked cautiously around in the corner of the study, to find that there was, in fact, an active, 20cm mole running along a shelf, with that adorable fluffy clockwork train motion they have presumably developed as a defense mechanism against soft-hearted humans.

"Mole!" I meeped. "It's alive! It's cute! bring a box!"
The EL made some sort of murbling noise to indicate that all the boxes were stashed in the roof, and then, applying the usual meticulous and pinpoint German efficiency to the problem, went ambling off to work, apparently unmoved by the problem of a small creature trapped indefinitely in an unfamiliar and foodless environment. Seizing the chance offered by his indifference, the mole scuttled off somewhere and disappeared, like a small clockwork train going into a tunnel, although without the ear-splitting whistle.

A 10-minute study search reveals nothing, which suggests that the bothersome beast has gone to ground in one of the desk drawers. I have shut the study door in an effort to (a) keep the cats out, and (b) persuade the mole to venture forth so that I can swoop on it and incarcerate it temporarily in a friendly and welcoming box-like structure before releasing it into the wilds on the Common with a hearty handshake and my goodwill. Having fortified myself with a refreshing bout of blogging, I shall now go forth and do battle. If, after thuds, screams and epic grappling I am not heard of henceforth, it means my early-morning shortsightedness was more extreme than usual and, in classic Goon Show fashion, the label around its neck that I thought read "M-O-L-E" actually read "L-I-O-N".

But I seriously wonder what my Evil Landlord would do without me to resolve these little domestic crises. He's still riding on the wave of having rescued the last mole-like intruder from under the piano, which became necessary because I, my mother and starmadeshadow were helpless with giggling. I don't think it's a sufficient argument.

'Tis that time of year again! the annual, horrible, always unanticipated stupid big run thing which comes pounding past my bedroom window, two metres away from my head, at 6am on a Sunday. It comes with thumping feet, panting, talking, laughing and other expressions of masochistic dysfunction and the cheerfully sadistic impulse to spread it around to the less energetic. I spend the first ten minutes lying in bed wistfully wishing I was on the roof with a catapult*, and then I give up and get up. Of all the stupid side effects of my stupid body, the one where I can't get back to sleep again once I've woken up is possibly the most annoying.

Sleep was particularly necessary because of yesterday's trip out to the Strandloper, the beach-style fish restaurant up the West Coast, another in the line of Tinnimentum-entertainments with jo&stv. It's a pleasant drive, and a lovely, laid back, make-do sort of atmosphere. Seven courses of seafood and one of lamb, off paper plates, with mussel shells for utensils, sitting on concrete tables on the sand under shelters made from weathered bits of boats. The "shipwreck" ambiance is possibly taken a tad too far, I kept bumping my head on random floats hanging from the ceiling. Which is, incidentally, shadecloth, upon which the shadows of the gulls make lovely patterns. Very relaxed sort of day, with the cumulative effects of sea air, wind, sand, food, wine and sun sending us shambling back to town in a sort of pleasantly zombified state, to fall into bed at about 9pm, zonked.

Am v. proud of my self. I ate mussels! In garlic. By dint of closing my eyes and refusing to look at all the wriggly intestinal bits.

I also stood on a rock and recited Ted Hughes, for additional pretentious academic cred. "Wind", possibly my favourite poem of all time ever. ... The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope ... At any second to bang and vanish with a flap... a black-/ Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. I love watching gulls in a strong wind, they make beautiful patterns in the air. Strandloper has a large population of enormous, glossy birds who live on the pickings from the restaurant, and presumably conduct an ongoing brutal turf war to keep lesser birds out.

* the Evil Landlord's contribution: "Caltrops."

Since the damp, Cthulhoid, rotting-wall status of my bedroom is inducing lung-rot, I have been sleeping in the guest room for the last couple of months. This circumstance may, in retrospect, have something to do with the sharp rise in my bizarre sleep-walking behaviour - probably not unrelated to the fact that two out of the four guest-room walls are lined with books, and my vulnerable, sleeping brain is being warped by a combination of the seepage from all that pulp, and basic L-space.

Be that as it may, one of the many drawbacks of this relocation is that the Evil Landlord now sleeps on the other side of the wall, instead of at the other end of the house, and is thus peculiarly placed to ask me searching questions the next morning about my sleep-walking habits, since apparently he can hear me thundering around the room. This, however, works both ways. The other night was rendered particularly surreal by awakening sharply at about 2am to hear the not particularly dulcet tones of the Evil Landlord, raised sharply from the other side of the wall, in agitated litany, thus: "Fish! Fish! No, Fish! Fuck!"

I rolled over in bed, muzzily wondering if this was:
(a) Fish licking his ear;
(b) Fish landing heavily and unexpectedly on a tender portion of his anatomy; or
(c) Fish throwing up on his bed,
and, judging by the levels of anguish, plumping for (c). Then I went back to sleep.

(It was (c). O my prophetic soul, etc.)

I am immeasurably comforted and gratified by the outbreak of commiseration, consolation and constructive advice in the comments on my last post. Thank you, witterers all, I feel a lot better. The Usual Sunday Evening with the Usual Suspects (jo, stv, Friendly Psychologist) also helped a lot, especially since putting the three of them together on the sofa and liberally applying Long Island Iced Tea is productive of something perilously close to street theatre. I'm going to bed now. Maybe the room will stop spinning if I lie down.