A typical morning's conversation in the Dee House:
- I've never seen a cow up close and personal. I don't think they'd be as benign.
- Brian Molko would do a much better striptease than James Blunt.
- You can't sue the voices in your head for slander.
- Ylang Ylang is clearly Cthulu's perfume.

And it's only just gone ten.

In one of those proverbial Turnips for Books (good to know they're herbivores), my mother has discovered this website. Hello, Mother! I have given her due warning that these little instances of Dee's brain rendered unto pixels frequently contain Language Unbefitting a Parent's Gaze, but she seems sanguine about the concept. This would be the part where the punchline is me launching into a full sentence of graphic and inventive obscenity.

Can't be arsed.

I do hope everyone's Christmasses (Christmae?) were suitably summed up in adjectives such as "merry", "happy" and "full of good food and interesting shenanigans". It's been a hot one up here, which is all anyone expects of Brisbane, I suppose. So sweltery yesterday that it stormed in the afternoon, with much bluster and grumble and even a little rain.

So beautiful. I recall anew that my purpose in writing The Novel (Boralos, for those following along at home, being a novel set in an advanced civilisation in a fantastical sort of south-east Asia/Africa) was nostalgia for the Wet Season, and for mangroves, fruit bats, humidity. A timely reminder, I'm sure, since this year coming I need to finish the bloody thing.

I am so sick and tired of knowing that this thing would be publishable if it were only finished.

There you go, the first New Year's Resolution in the history of Dee: FINISH THE BLOODY BOOK, YOU LAYABOUT BINT!

Today I received this in my inbox:

From: dae [at] 0451 [dot] com
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 4:33 AM

> Good day, commander

It's still in my inbox, because I can't decide if it's spam or the coolest thing I've received all week. Possibly, of course, it's both. I obviously had to share this with the world. Also, this is a Subtle and Devious way of seeing if this is actually a piece of coolth delivered by someone I know who reads this thing.

Don't all speak at once.

*

In the spirit of random, coolth and the goodwill unto men that it generates, have a damn good Christmas, all y'all. I'm winging my way up to Brisbane, as I do every year, to partake of family shenanigans. This year, I am reminded anew of the passage of time and the fact that we're all growing old by the fact that my baby cousin (long since a foot and more taller than me) has just been accepted into graduate medicine. OLD! SO OLD!

*

In other important updates to the State Of Dee - we have a television.

I'll give you a moment to process that. We. Have. A. Television.

I haven't had a television in eight years now. It had become something of a point of pride that I hadn't seen anything after first-season Buffy. That I had only ever seen half an hour of reality TV in my life. And that I hadn't sat through an ad-break in many blissful years.

All undone in a moment. Well, a succession of minutes during which there was swearing about the bloody thing not fitting through the door. We've got a fairly large thing. It's not, I suppose, strictly speaking a television yet because we haven't got the right cable to plug in the aerial, so it's just a large, hulking, reflective thing clogging up the living room. But it's there.

*

But anyway. MERRY CHRISTMAS.

At some point between the Shopboy calling me and asking if I wanted more shifts, and me walking into the store (say, an hour and a half), he was held up at knifepoint.

Knifepoint. In Melbourne. On Swanston Street. At ten in the morning. Fucking hell. That could've been me. I work a morning shift. It doesn't so much make me scared as it makes me angry, and that worries me, because it suggests I might not react sensibly should it happen to me. Then again, there's a world of difference between a knife in someone else's face, and a knife in yours.

*

The actual point of updating again was that Nards called me the other day, and scolded me a little for not keeping up to date. I have to stay on her good side, or she'll sic her zombie kidlet on me.

I didn't get the scholarship I applied for. This means no Masters for me next year. Yes, I'm aware there are other funding options available, but actually the point of the exercise was to be paid to write. That point is removed if I'm the one what has to do the paying, ye ken? So I shall work, and I shall write, and I shall do my utmost to be self-motivated.

I've been trying that for years, of course, and it hasn't happened yet, but maybe she shock of no longer being a student will do it. It's been some twenty years. It was probably time to leave school.