It's that point where you realise, staring at the never-meeting parallel lines on the notepaper, that everything you were about to write is just a long sequence of same-old cliches - the sound of the phone shattered the silence, he froze with the glass halfway to his lips - and any way you try to write it will just sound like you're trying to avoid the same-old cliches. There is no new way of saying anything that isn't in some way a cliche, and that's a cliche in itself.

Who'd be a writer, eh?

Anfy's school of lawyering:

Dear Client,

We refer to our letter of last week. We wish you had actually read it.

Up Yours Faithfully,

Me

Belatedly, the Big Day Out was full of rock, metal, fun and sunburn. No, really, I have the most hilarious sun lines on my face. I know this because people keep pointing and laughing.

Apart from that, only injury accrued was a smidgen of mosh-pit trauma. Trying to watch Muse from five metres away was like being neck-deep in a washing machine. After the first song I bailed out to beyond the breakers. That's the last time I swim between the flags.

...but why is the coffee gone?

Her: Well, you know, it's not really over until the far lady sings.
Me: That's totally bollocks, you know.
Her: What?
Me: Well, the primadonna soprano usually has her solo about a third of the way into the opera, at the latest. In my experience*, the show isn't actually over until all the surviving members of the cast come forward to gloat about how they're still alive and they never liked everyone who died anyway.

* Don Giovanni

Mares eat oats
and does eat oats
and little lambs eat ivy.
A kid'll eat ivy too,
wouldn't you?

(I think our new washing machine is trying to launch itself into orbit. First household appliance in space.)

There is no greater love than that of a girl for her egg-cooker.

My mother, benevolent scion of wisdom that she is, got me a Sunbeam egg-cooker for Christmas. I had raptures of joy, but due to holidays and moving and lack of eggs, haven't been able to use it until today.

It was a pivotal, controversial occasion. Anfy gave me shit for looking up the directions.
"You don't need instructions for a saucepan," he said.
"Fuck off," said I.

Anfy asked questions: "What's the difference between a hard- and soft-boiled egg?"
Me: "The idea is that a soft-boiled egg has the yolk still gooey."
Anfy: "So you cook a hard-boiled egg for longer?"
Me: "You're taking the piss, aren't you?"

Turns out, he knows not of the glories of a boiled egg. At all. Like, even slightly.
"What are you doing?" he asked, in the tones of one who's discovered someone licking soft furnishings.
"Cutting my bread into soldiers," said I.
"Into what?"
"You've never heard of soldiers? They're for dipping in the egg. Like this!"

He watched in horrified fascination for a moment, and then fled to work. So I enjoyed my boiled egg All By Myself.

And it was GREAT.

Me: "That's $39.95, please."
Girl: "Wait, it was ten dollars."
Me: I really don't think so.
Me: "Where did you get it from?"
Girl: "Just over there, but look on the tag, it's $9.95."
Me: "That's $89.95. Marked down to $49.95. With the twenty percent off, that's $39.95." What more do you want, blood?
Girl: "Oh. I won't get it, then."

Me: "That's $9.95."
Lady: "But what about the twenty percent off?"
Me: "Twenty percent off all books." These are cards. Blank cards too, it's not as if you could string them all together and get a totally post-modernist cutting-edge work of fiction.
Lady: "But they were on the shelf."
Me: Which automatically makes them books, of course. "Yeah, whatever, I just work here."

Guy: "This says it's the companion to the dictionary."
Me: "Yes."
Guy: "Where's the dictionary?"
Me: For the hundredth time: "If it's not on the shelf, then we don't have it."
Guy: "But how do you expect to sell this without the dictionary?"
Me: I never expect to sell anything, it comes as a constant surprise to me that people keep giving me money. Come to think of it, what are you doing here?
Me: "It doesn't have to be with the dictionary."
Guy: "But it says it's the companion."
Me: But that doesn't mean it can't make its own way in the world, what are you, misogynist?
Me: "But you don't have to have it to use the dictionary."
Guy: "But where's the dictionary?"
Me: READ MY LIPS! "We don't have it."
Guy: "Oh."

Hurrah for retail, huh?

On the way to Anfy's office and back, I mentally assigned the "skank" label no fewer than four times. And it's only eight blocks. Either it's a really high skank per metre day out there, or I'm feeling particularly bitchy.

We've moved into our new place. It's precisely three floors below the old one. A little of the old "beam me up, Scotty" action would have made the move a helluva lot easier, but it wasn't precisely an epic Himalayan trek as it was.

Anfy had been being increasingly plagued by doubts since he bought the place, in the inevitable and unavoidable recoil from having spent any sum of money involved six figures. But now that we're in it, it's easy to appreciate the good points - like study/spare bedroom with lots of light, the width of the corridor, and the absence of utterly wasted though pretty space. The bad points are still there (like the entrance-hall floor which instantly renders you seasick) but they're in proportion.

Also, we need a washing machine. We had one, but it's staying in the old apartment. Mainly because it's impossible to get it out of the old apartment without performing feats of superhuman strength, taking the wall out, or melting it down with acid.

The real estate agents are being very nice about it. We likes our real estate agents. We don't like the stupid fat hobbit landlords, who are being nasty to the real estate agents and, we suspect, going to take their business to the REALLY stupid, fat hobbits moronic, idiotic, vague, incompetent, dithering, blind, stupid and fat Dingle Partners.

We don't like Dingle Partners.

So remember, kids: Noel Jones good, Dingle bad. And don't talk to strangers.

We're sitting in the restaurant last night, right next to the door, all garlic pizza-ed and nasi goreng-ed up, talking cricket. It's serious business, yo. Dissecting the Sydney Test and musing about today's One-Dayer. Whinging about how Andy Bichel got dropped for no good reason. Dissing Brett Lee and his no-balling, and how in that over in Sydney when he had the catch off the no-ball and then the dropped one, he looked like he was going to burst into tears in the middle of the pitch.

Then the Male goes: "I said Bichel, you said Lee. Turn around."

And Andy Bichel and Brett Lee walk into the restaurant.

It's weird, y'know... I'd expected Lee at least to be taller.

PS: Happy New Year, eh?

I'd forgotten just how rank the smell of sweat-soaked leather was.

...this observation is not nearly as porny as it sounds.