So tired

My cats are gorgeous, granted, and they are great studio companions,



but sometimes I could brain them with a bookbinding hammer.

Mr Pooter (named for the main character of Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith) is living up to the POO part of his name: he has a bad habit of not wanting to poo in his litterbox at night if Mr Padge (named after a minor character in the same novel) has been there first. So he will walk around the house yowling, and if we're too dead asleep to do anything about it, he will either poo in the bath or keep yowling until we do something about it, like cleaning out the box in a zombie-like fashion (a zombie with Tourette's Syndrome) or we kick him outside and he can bloody well take his chances in the dark with Alpha cats and cars.

Last night was one of those nights.

Add that to Padge stomping all over the bed constantly because he'd decided that the snap cold weather means that he needs more food to cope with it, even though he's so fat that he can't fit on our overly-generous window ledges



and you end up with one tired Duckie.

Add to that the fact that it's been a week of homework emergencies (why do teacher make all their assignments due the same week?!!) and flat batteries in cars (OH! IS SHE PREGNANT? lisped the charmingly Hispanic NRMA battery man when he saw Padge) and that teaching and marking has finished, and I guess you can surmise that I've crashed at the end of a big year.

My evergreen and never-ending TO DO list (it's now a book) has been set aside while I have just slumped in a corner and pretended to move piles around while I play Facebook games. It helps that Best Beloved is off in North America running through as many museums as he can fit between meetings, it means that I only have to operate on a teenage level -- and the kitchen reflects that.

In fact, I'm only really writing this post to procrastinate from the mammoth task of cleaning and preparing for tonight's Thanksgiving Dinner, being held for my lovely homesick yankie neighbour Julia. There's a lot of people coming, but there's twice that many dustbunnies dancing across the carpet in front of my bleary eyes, and a big sack of potatoes waiting to be peeled in the kitchen (mashed potato is apparently very important for a successful TG).

And I'm so CRANKY after watching the end of Spicks and Specks last night. I absolutely adore Adam Hills, before last night he could do no wrong, but did he really think he could wind up an iconic Australian music show with a half-arsed band fronted by a talentless loser like the Uncanny X-men and engender any form of nostalgia from the audience? I hated Brian Mannix in the 80s, I hated his every appearance on the show (and I'm sure I'm not alone in that), and to give the UXM a plum tv opportunity like that smacks of something bad smelling: maybe their promoter offered the ABC a lot of money, or maybe Mannix knows something about Hills that he shouldn't... or maybe they just got it horribly, horribly wrong, and it truly is time for them to stop. Whatever it is, I went to bed very grumpy last night, and that five minutes of ending will be the only bit of S&S I will never watch again.

Sorry, peoples. I just needed to vent. I guess it's dustbunny attack time. Tally ho!

GAH!

The old lady across the road must think I'm mad.

Nine times out of ten when I drive the car out of the driveway, I do one of the following things:

[a] stop halfway down the drive, jump out of the car and run, cursing under my breath, back in to the house, grab whatever I've forgotten, and run back out to the car and resume my journey.

[b] get a few metres down the road, stop, turn the car around, go back into the driveway, jump out of the car and run, cursing under my breath, back in to the house, grab whatever I've forgotten, and run back out to the car and resume my journey.

[c] drive away, get to the nearest traffic junction, stop, do some convoluted traffic movement to get back to my street, go back into the driveway, jump out of the car and run, cursing under my breath, back in to the house, grab whatever I've forgotten, and run back out to the car and resume my journey.

I'm getting there. The lists are getting shorter, but the sleeping is getting more restless as my brain goes over the lists and the options through the night.

T minus 4 days! Adrenalin starting to pump.

All tomorrow's waiting line

I'm sitting here at home, listening to Iva Davies' splendid version of 'All Tomorrow's Parties' from his cover album The Berlin Tapes. I decided to have a home day, since Bumblebee has spent most of his holidays away from home, and he's needing a good lie around in his pyjamas doing very little.

I also need to get myself organised; I have piles of neglected bills and receipts and taxy things that need sorting, and I hate sorting piles of stuff like that. New Zealand is T minus 17 days, and there is a lot to do before I go, not least sorting out my studio so that my friend Nicci can sublet it from me.

I finally defeated the Passport Monster who preyed upon my inability to pay attention to the quite obviously displayed directions and kept rejecting my attempts to get a child's passport. Getting B's father to sign the form once was amazingly seamless; having to get him to do it a second time was frustrating... we very rarely see each other when there is anyone else around not related to us (we do hostage swaps at roadside rest stops along the highway, etc), so when his car broke down I took the opportunity to drive up & get the boy and we got the tow-truck driver to be our witness. Sheesh. Anyhoo, now Bumblebee is the proud possessor of a passport, and he can travel to meet up with me later in September.

Yesterday I printed the first layer of some miniature posters for the upcoming Call of the Small exhibition at Craft ACT, curated by The Shopping Sherpa. Here's a pic:



I'm using Warm Red, which always looks absolutely stunning on the metal rollers of the press. The posters will be about the size of a large postage stamp each, and they will all be black and white and red, one of my favorite combinations. They will each feature an animal (I have some lovely little image blocks bought from teh interweb a number of years ago) and have the first letter of the animal prints in large friendly red letters. Rat, Owl, Frog, Dragonfly, and one that is just an ampersand, because we all love ampersands.

Since it's cold and currently very damp, they'll take a couple of days to dry before I can keep working, so having a day at home is quite convenient. Best Beloved has gone to Adelaide for work for a couple of days, so it's just the two of us. Apart from cooking a nice overdue meal for The Shopping Sherpa tonight, we're going to kick back a bit and flollop (as much as my whizzing T-17days brain will let me).

My music has moved on to Zero 7, 'The Waiting Line'... mmmm. OK, I need to tackle a pile. Any pile.