"Hey," said the cute Coles check-out boy, "I've served you before, haven't I?"

"Yes," I admitted. "I'm the one who shrieked, 'You're oppressing me, you're oppressing me!' at you."

*

Like that enterprising and able-memoried lad, readers of this page may have this vague and faintly affronted sense of recognition at this point. "What's this?" they may think. "It looks like an update, but that can't be right, because Dee never sodding updates."

Guilty as charged.

To a certain extent it's that I'm just not doing interesting things. My weekly phone calls to my mother (HI MUM!) go along the lines of, "Well, same old; work, a bit of writing." Then again, considering that in the past few weeks I've had parties and houseguests and actual, you know, shenanigans, it's possible that I haven't a leg to stand on. Which makes it just as well I'm sitting down.

To recommence with every intention of retaining semi-decent habits this time: the major news at the moment is that I'm sick. It's the third cold in two months, and this one is a doozy. A few days in, when the hacking (and spitting) cough was starting to lose its novelty, the illness decided to mix things up by throwing in a pain in my lower left ribs. At first this was just when I was coughing - felt a bit like having a stitch - but then it decided to hang around all the time, so I took it to the doctor. He politely declined to take it off my hands (or ribs), but declared it was probably either a pulled muscle (go me) or an infection. He gave me Nurofen and antibiotics. So I'm on those, plus vitamin B and C, plus a cold-and-flu pill to help suppress the cough a little so I don't die of pain. When I walk, I rattle.

Actually, when I walk I have music, because my (new! shiny! third-gen!) phone has earphones and enough memory to hold about half an hour of music, so I have become one of those annoying people listening to music while walking down the street. I find the problem isn't so much singing along as dancing along. For instance, when the Eels' "Last Stop This Town" cuts into the funky drum section, it's very hard not to boogie on down on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth.

So I just do. People waiting for the lights to change need entertainment too.

*

In other news, the company that hosts viscerate is going to close down in two weeks, so I'll be schlepping my shit to a new host. This will probably cause the usual hysteria. Just letting you know.