Invasive Species

A day late by Aussie time, but then you're the late Karloff The Uncanny, too.

I know what I'm watching tonight.

The sad hush over the campus is almost a physical object in itself. Today is the day of the funeral of Nick Waterlow, the much-loved art world figure and curator of the gallery here where I work. Everyone has left to head to the church where the funeral is to take place, and then to the wake at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

And I'm not attending either.

Not out of disrespect to Nick W, not at all. If anything, I'd feel sort of intrusive, since our interactions had been few. I would feel vaguely grief-groupie-ish - I don't want to step in on my friends & co-workers' sadness and that of the Waterlow family.

Plus the crowds expected to gather to see him off, as he was and remains a much-loved figure in the art world. I don't do well in crowds of strangers.

I also know I'd turn into a blubbering mess, despite not knowing him well - ever since I lost Todd, any funeral (in reality or even on film) just pulls out the stops on my own never-going-to-get-over-it grieving. Each man's death diminishes me and all that; I feel such stuff too strongly anymore. I'd feel even more intrusive making that personal associative leap at such an occasion.

Instead I'll just look out across the empty campus, wilting in the heat blast sweeping over Sydney, as trees and buildings bow in stunned respect for the man who walked amidst them all these years. Feel the loss and sadness filling the pathways of the community I still feel peripheral to, yet part of nonetheless.

Aussies tend not to say "rest in peace" in their memorials, but rather "vale", so ... vale, Nick Waterlow. If there's anything Afterlife-y, I hope you feel the love and respect soaring into the superheated skies from Sydney today.

So, some Bangladeshi Siamese twins (Siamese Bangladeshi twins?) conjoined at the top of the skull just had some wonderful heartwarming headseparating human-interest-news-headlining surgery here in Australia. Everyone is appropriately awwww'd by it.

Of course being twins, their parents have given them cutesy publicity-friendly matching names: Krishna and Trishna.

Me, I wonder why, if they were going for marketable cutesypoo-cloying, they didn't give them the more appropriate names of Forehead and Morehead.

Theme music, courtesy Sunn0))) who stand in the corner robed, guitars strapped on, shuddering cacaphonous waves of feedback shimmering from the wall of amps behind them pummeling the audience, plays as commercial break ends. Music stops.
Sound of audience applause.
Matt Damon and Jeff Corwin, clad only in small tight speedos, approach podium.

MD (staring at teleprompter, reading artificially): Well, Jeff, here we are. The Yuriverse Awards Night! The most glittering affair in all the ... uhhh.. squints ... Yuriverse.
JC: Yes, Matt. Always nice when Yuri lets me out of the handcuffs and Compound to attend a public event.
MD: Yes. Anyway, let's get to the Award presentation; the hot tub in the Yuricompound is getting cold without us. And Prince Harry is mixing the drinks for later.
JC: I can't wait! And this time, the lemurs I've carefully trained will be able to videotape the entire org- err, event.
MD: Where's the envelope with the winner, anyway? Is it in the mail pouch?
JC: That's not a mail pouch you're grabbing. That's m-
MD: cough Sorry. Oh, here's the envelope.
JC: Thank you. And The Yuriverse Person Of The Year Award goes to ...
sound of envelope opening
Whoever threw the plastic cup of water that bounced off snivelling pop twat Morrissey's head recently. You go, gir ... err ... guy ... errr ... person!



loud audience applause, whistling, etc.
Matt Damon and Jeff Corwin rush offstage into waiting limo, anticipating their return to the Yuricompound and their rendezvous with their master.

I am rapidly coming to think our front guest room is haunted, or is a psychic portal, or someone is pumping aerosolised LSD into it, or ... something. Every time I sleep down there I have the most absolutely bizarre dreams.

Last night, for example. A weather change blew through. High whooshey winds were hissing the trees and making a godsawful racket in our bedroom loft. I'd gone to bed very early (even for me), but was woken up around midnight and couldn't get back to sleep due to all the noise. I heard a loud thump from ... somewhere. My first thought was "damn, the wind blew one of our hanging plants off its hook on the front porch." I stumbled downstairs, out the door - very nearly pulling it shut behind me, forgetting it locks automatically; luckily I didn't or a whole new layer of entertainment would have been added to my adventures - and found all plants swinging happily in the dark gusty breeze. Still, I took them down just to be safe.

To break chronology, I insert the source of the thump so as to get on with the more surreal gist of my nub's point, or whatever the phrase is. In the dark I couldn't see anything amiss. I figured a big branch must have just whumped against a wall. It was only to be in the light of 6am - the time at which I wake every day, no matter what occurred or when I got to sleep the night before - that I would see the dining room table awash with water and the vase with the Aussie flowers I'd bought the other day lying on its side. Yes, Dax, Princess Of Absolutely Everything, had done some feline exploring. Whilst Nick's ex had named her after some character off Babylon Galactica: The X Generation or some it's-not-space-opera-it's-really-deep,-man sort of show, she'd decided to live up to what I'd originally assumed was the source of her name: Dax The Destroyer out of Marvel Comeeks. Luckily the floor seems to angle at just enough of a slope that the waters of Lake Waratah coasted toward the end of the table furthest from Nick's pile of origami books, along with origami projects and sheafs of folding paper. Disaster was narrowly averted.

Anyway, at 2am I did not know or see any of this. I went back to bed - and was serenaded by the howling winds. I started my tossyturny thing I do when I want to sleep but cannot and, figuring not to wake Nick, decided writhing in frustration downstairs in the guest room was the better option.

Down I went. And proceeded, in that quieter room, to finally drift off and dream.

I dreamt of The Afterlife. And no, it was not glamourous. Nor serene. Nor filled with lost loved ones. No! This Afterlife was seemingly contained wholly within a black-walled, dimly lit warehouse. The budget for The Afterlife is very cheap, as well. Whoever decorated it tried their best to make it look like the interior of a gigantic brain, but instead sand-dune-sized lumps of sponge lay around, with wobbly walls of plywood mazes funneling the inhabitants around meaninglessly. And apparently there are no foodstuffs or any creature comforts in The Afterlife, because everyone roves in desperate packs trying to loot and steal everyone else's belongings. The Afterlife it seems is very Lord Of The Dead Flies. Atop all this, strange beasts (or hunchbacks in cheap Lost in Space-budget-level alien-style costumes) that are sorts of carnivorous synapses roam around as an additional peril. Barbaric savage looters and hungry mindless synapses. The Afterlife will surely be a hoot.

The only decorative visuals, aside from spongy materials passing for bits of brain, allowed (or afforded) were massive banners in a very Big-Brother-Is-Watching-You style hung everywhere, bearing Socialist Realist-style portraits of Gene Krupa. I repeat: Gene Krupa. Hearteningly, The Afterlife isn't festooned with portraits of Phil Collins; that's something, at least.

And I wonder why I am bleary and drained and exhausted this morning. Little sleep and a journey to an Afterlife that does not entice me in the slightest.

I think I need to get a psychic to visit that room, if only to fine-tune the spectral viewing channels.

I get to work in a brilliant mood - a sunny sunny morning, warm and bright, just spent an evening full-steam-aheading on a fun new song, and now festooned in my Snoopy & Woodstock t-shirt ready for a day made easy by an intractable good mood ... to hear horrible news.

The Sydney Morning Herald headline I'd skimmed over when I woke to check the news online had, in fact, concerned a co-worker, who had been brutally murdered late yesterday along with his adult daughter. Everyone at work is pretty much in shock - he was a wonderful, irreverent, softspoken man in all my interactions with him, passionately devoted to running the campus gallery of which he was curator, and a relentless fighter for the expanded state-of-the-art(s) gallery that is in the designs for the remodeled campus-to-be. I always looked forward to his arrival in our office, listening to him and my immediate boss shoot the breeze and generally have a good intelligent witty time.

What a horrible way to go; such stuff just doesn't happen in Australia with the numbing frequency it does in the States. I was just relaxing and losing my Yank-styled high-strung fears and paranoias.

Anyway, poor guy. A long and rewarding/rewarded career (he'd received the OAM - Order of Australia Medal - the Aussie equivalent of an MBE I think, and about the highest you can get since they stopped handing out Aussie knighthoods), cut too short too soon. Still sinking in.

Ahhhh at last the weather warms more oft than not and the sun blears and the air thickens and gloms on to me and metaphoric ants squirm in one's metaphoric pants to frisk and frolic in the outside and flop and banter about in the greenery.

Yardwork and gardening beckon. As does some aggressive Indian-mynah-eradication plan. Must remember to track down this fellow in Sydney who's run a few eradication programs with local councils and sells his traps on the side. Kill kill kill, thrill thrill thrill; as the record sang which The Groovy Guru once played on Get Smart therewith foreby to subliminally disrupt Youth Society and collapse civilisation so KAOS could cash in.

But dead Mynahs? That would help Australian civilisation. Well, its ecosphere. Which Aussie civilisation hasn't been much help to for a lot.

As my sludgy hibernatory instincts fade I've been getting back to the gym a bit too - which simply has to stop. Maybe not utterly - but I need to finish my music project. One or two more songs & I think I'll have a batch enough to start spreading The Word and all that. Swallow my pride a& fear of failure & just treat it like a video game. Play play play. Toss it out and see what happens, jiggle the pieces like rounds in a simulation. Which really, it's all it is anyway.

Anyway, back to looking out my window at the pretty pretty world.

A quiz via dfordoom ... hey, at least I'm not a very envious sort. And I think of Lust as more a charming trait, not a deadly sin ...

Greed:	High
Gluttony:	High
Wrath:	Medium
Sloth:	Very High
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very High
Pride:	Very High

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Life has been rather uneventful of late, so not much to write about - but I feel guilty nattering on Facebook without being attentive to the better, more luxuriant, more communicative LiveJournal. So, I post for the sake of posting.

What's been up? Waiting for the seesaw of Spring weather to calm down and roll out steady warmth and niceness, mostly. So I've petulantly grown another beard in an act of meteorological protest, vowing not to shave it off until four days of good (by MY standards) weather have passed in a row. Allegedly, the weekend will be sunny and warm, so Sunday may see the last of Hirsute Yuri for a while. At least til next winter or laziness kick in.

Other than that, my creative energies & free time have been taken up with the John God & The Choir Invisible project ... mostly rushing home and getting 2 or 3 hours' time to noodle about until Nick gets home, then dinner and usually, since he gets home 7.30ish, by the time we've eaten, and that I have mutated into an early to bed early to rise sort (egad), there's only time left to perhaps watch a quick dvd and then snoozetime.

So I have a good handful of songs done. And have set up MySpace and ReverbNation sites for the project ... soon I guess it'll be time to do that which I hate and has always stunned me in other fields I've bothered with - publicity & self-promotion. I mean, I doubt I'll startle the world or anything - too old, too non-scene, too uninterested in competing with all the white noise of the internyets - but it would be nice to connect with and share stuff I'm proud of with likeminded souls. Just because I always wind up writing for the drawer doesn't mean that was my actual intent. I need a Svengali, is what I need.

Anyway - that's about all I've been up to of late. When growing a beard and finishing viewing the complete run of Upstairs, Downstairs are what feels like major accomplishments, one knows it's time to begin attempting to shake up one's hibernatory instincts a bit soon. I'm like a koala, in the eucalypt of a dacha, placid and fuzzy and snoozily munching on leaves.
-------------------------------
LJ Note: As I update, it's worrisome to see two posts appear one atop the other on my page by other-side-of-the-world friends mention losing jobs or work contracts not being renewed. Added to others I know (or e-know) already in dire economic straits ... not so sure about all the "recession ovah!" headlines making the rounds in news outlets. It's saddening. Oh for John Reed or Emma Goldman to be around these days ...

Our cat Dax, The Princess Of Absolutely Everything, has the odd habit of, after making use of her litter box, doing a mad triumphal dash around the dacha, pausing occasionally to utter a quick sharp mrowp! of self-congratulation. I never understood this until last night, when I did a similar thing.

Not, I mean, after using a litter box, or dashing around, or uttering a quick ... well, let us elaborate.

Progress continues apace on my John God & The Choir Invisible project - about all I've been doing lately is getting home from work & rushing into the dacha office to work on music til Nick gets home, and often even after. The poor galoot is probably feeling quite neglected. But there are a few songs I've been tantalisingly close to finishing, ones that I feel are really good, and have been driving myself crazy obsessing on completing them.

Anyway, last night I at long last got one magnum opus, "Simply Divine", done, after about a million "listen to, cringe at one small bit, work on that bit, have it all unravel and require hours more of work" events, followed by even more frustrating "finish mixing levels & stuff, transfer to mp3, email to self, put onto dacha iTunes, listen on real stereo system and cringe at the sound, rush back to tweak slightly before repeating the whole process five or six times" trials.

This song has bedeviled me for weeks now. At last! Done. Then I listened to an earlier effort, "Stupid Sunglasses", that I thought was listener-ready. I realised it was in horrible shape - it was the first I'd done, and I've learned a heckuva lot more on GarageBand about how to do stuff since, so I had to unravel the entire song and rebuild it, finally just giving up and re-recording the vocals as well. Luckily Nick was running later than usual so I was able to sonically yammer on a bit further. Handy, too, 'cause a few lyrics changes had come to me since the song was finished. And I tweaked some stuff - improved the guitar, turned down the far-too-up-front bass, etc etc yak yak blah. Then did the requisite "mix and send to self and upload onto stereo and cringe and repeat process" thing yet again.

So when I finally was able to play both songs without feeling like Phil Spector would have shot me, too, and actually hear pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear, I was relieved and overjoyed. And this is where me acting like Dax POAE comes in.

Nick arrived, calmly and as usual, to find a manic Yuri hopping around and waving the remote control in his face. I played him the songs as I started prepping dinner (a foyn roast beef, if I do say so myself), rambling and babbling cathartically about any and sundry things. More of the divill's rocke & rolle was played, selected by us both, we ate, I continued at the stereo blasting the most rambunctious and unrepentant sonic savagery for a while (and a whole bottle of red wine; erm, oops).

Eventually I ramped down and after finishing with "Hey Jude" crawled up to bed. But two frustrations and longer-than-expected-to-complete songs done! And well! It was like a weight lifting from my psyche, or clogged sinuses clearing suddenly - that instantly-lighter sensation, that sort of ... hm; it was then that Dax POAE's triumphant post-poo laps came to mind, and I got a sense of perspective on her feline world and my own self-absorbed little universe. Clearing one's system (whatever that system may be) is indeed uplifting.

Anyway! "I Want To Travel Back In Time And Throttle Madonna In Her Crib" is coming along nicely; hopefully its completion won't be so arduous and finish much more easily, for the sake of my mood swings, my liver, and my poor husband's post-work evenings.

I may soon have a presentable body of work with which to ... um, do something with. Gawd knows what. Huzzah!

( Weekend Report. )

I tracked down that long-lost nickname for Sydney dust storms I was unable to recall during my tale of the Big One Of 2009! At least according to The Boy Travellers in Australasia by Thomas W. Knox, first printed in 1888, it was called a "brickfielder".

Which would make a fanTAStic name for a ... something. Poem. Song. Band. Sextoy. Something.

But I digress. Knox relates:

"Mention has been made already of the tendency of an Australian to speak exultingly of the climate of his own city or section, and to disparage other localities. All parts of the country suffer from the hot winds of the interior, but the inhabitants of each place declare that it is worse anywhere else than with them. Be that as it may, our first experience of the hot wind here in Sydney is quite bad enough, and if Melbourne or Adelaide can surpass it we pity them.

They call this wind a 'brickfielder', probably because it brings a vast quantity of dust such as might be blown from a field where bricks are made or brick-dust has been thickly strewn; and this was what we saw and felt:

There was a period of calm and ominous silence, and we observed that the sky was changing from blue to a sort of fiery tinge. Puffs of heated air came now and then, like blasts from some furnace; they grew in force and frequency, and in an hour or so became a steady wind with increasing force. It was hot and dry and scorching, and we seemed to be withering under its effects. 'It' a brickfielder, sure enough,' said a friend, and he cautioned us to get back to our hotel as soon as we could. We took his advice, and went there.

In a little while there was a driving volume of dark clouds like a London fog; the wind increased almost to a gale, and then came the dust. It was not a fine, impalpable sand, like that brought to Cairo by the khamseen in April, but a perceptible and gritty dust that sifted into every crevice and cranny, blinded our eyes, filled our ears, and made its way inside out clothing, til we could feel that it was all over our skins.

Nothing is sacred to it, and it invades the most stately mansions as well as the humblest cottages. The air was filled with dust gathered up from the streets, in addition to what the wind brought from the interior; the dustiest and most disagreeable March day of New York was the perfection of mildness compared to it."

... OK, not exactly what we got the other day. The air wasn't superheated, sadly; I could've used that; and the dust wasn't completely overwhelming (though we're still dusting off plenty of indoor spaces that are suspiciously orange-tinted), but then in the 1880s Sydney had a lot more dust (dirt roads, more nature nearby, general squalor) to get kicked up. I like to think this '09er had enough similarities that this might have been a relative. Besides, I want to call it a brickfielder, just to be retro-Australasian, and so I shall.

Besides, if they're saying, what with climate change and wotnot, we're going to get a lot more of these in the future - in fact, as I type, the sky is yellowy-grey and the winds are rather gusty yet again - best to dust off (so to speak) a perfectly good Aussie term and put it back in use, yeah?

[Note: If you're following this from my Facebook page, you've probably already seen the pics, they're the ones I posted there earlier].

Woke up to a sinister reddish-orange glow everywhere, rather than the usual grey pre-dawn glimmer. What odd fog, I thought. Walked out to take some pictures. A neighbour was out there, doing the same, marveling that she'd never seen skies like this before.

Checked online - no weather warnings, nothing on the Sydney Ferries site about any delays. "Don't use the ferry today," Nick said, "In fog like this, they're going to shut down no matter what."

I showered, dressed, headed off for the morning work commute - via the bus lines. It was only as I walked up to the bus stop that I saw all the car in the 'hood covered in orange-red dust, and the streets themselves smeared with reddish grit. And I noticed my teeth were crunching something tiny and sandy between them.

This isn't fog, I slowly realised.

A year or two ago I found a cool old book, something like "The Young Adventurers" or something, sort of fictionalised-for-adolescent-boys travel memoirs written by a US writer. The volume I found was their trip through Hawaii, the South Pacific, and 'Australasia', writ in the late 1800s. Neat to read about Hawaii before the US/corporate coup that brought down its monarchy, and of course interesting for their swing through Sydney. The reason this book sprang to mind this morning was, for all the marveling of Sydneysiders in the press and online that they'd never seen anything like this, there was a scene in the book in which a huge red dust storm swept through Sydney, and the locals said it happened fairly regularly. I wish I could remember the cool nickname folks had for it back then; this is my one chance to apply it! Ah well.

Anyway, Balmain was eerie and orange, the Anzac Bridge spanned a reddish cloud and its other end disappeared into dusty mist. Once I got downtown the few people who were outside were awed, walking slowly, staring at the red-orange blur that was once Sydney's skyline. Old sandstone cathedrals took on spectral form and everything was somewhere between a desperately-moody post-apocalytic doomsday movie and a Bela Lugosi film (if it were in black-and-orange rather than black-and-white).

Of course once I arrived at work, the weather services and press and websites came to life with DUST STORM! DON'T GO OUT! COR BLIMEY! &c. Thanks, warning services. Oh well.

What a morning, though! And what a wonderful reminder that Australia is its own mad wild continent, with its own resolute weirdnesses and animals and ecosystems, and that the Euro-Yank-style civilisation slathered atop it is a mere surface detail - this ain't Europe, this ain't America. It's a whole lost world all its own, and no city soaked with shopping chains is going to change that. Thank you, Red Centre unchanged for millions of years! Ancient old thang! Slap these upstart urbans into waking respect for your golden-red grizzled eternal majesty!

( Pics from a mad morning. )

Oh, and for ludickid, drownedinink, and any other comeeks fans out there - this is a café across from Sydney's Hyde Park. It scares me.

You know what's neat? Breathing is neat! I like to breathe! It is so neat to breathe. I can breathe today. No weird treebark throat, no bowling ball where my lungs should be. I breathe in .... ihhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ... real live air goes into my real live lungs like it's actually going in as opposed to the sensation that gosh it went in there it ought to be there somewhere why aren't I getting that I-just-breathed sort of sensation but now instead I can feel it HIT and all, and then I breathe out ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. AND THEN HA HA I DO IT AGAIN.

Choost fur so, as the peeA Dutch would say.

It's keen; you really ought to try it. It is delicious. Voluptuous, even.

( The other great struggle of the weekend was avian in origin. )

So I shaved my head.
No, wait, that's the end of the story.

To start at the beginning (a very good place &c &c): becoming more and more short of breath again over the course of last week, I returned to Holdsworth House, the medic-infested clinic that's been batting me about with asthma-or-not games thanks to the swerving diagnoses of Doctor Handsome, who (as you may recall from the last health installment) had suddenly decided, due to one poorly-administered test, to toss out all the other results and declare that no, I really didn't have asthma and it must have all just been a cold ... despite my not having had one this year.

Cue me calling H-House and setting up an appointment with Dr Betterdoctor, the one I used to regularly see before Dr Handsome intercepted me when Dr B was busy. Turns out, by good luck, Dr Betterdoctor is also asthmatic and has a far better handle on such things. After chatting and comparing notes & experiences, he clucked his doctorly tongue at Dr H's escapades and offered the preliminary theory that what's probably going on is a sort of mild or pre-asthma - as in, I'm probably going to develop it full-blown, given family history, and it's been brought forward by stress back in July. "Between people with full-blown asthma," he said, stretching out one hand, "and people without it," he stretched the other hand in the other direction, "you're about here," and he gestured to the middle ground.

So, we're back on preventative inhalers - Dr Handsome had declared that, since it was obviously not asthma, I should stop using them, which probably led to my chest going back to base 1 (i.e. mid-July), my breathing getting worse until finally last week I was getting winded even going up and down a set of stairs. But now we're back in the substantially improved and measured care of Dr Betterdoctor, and we'll check in this Friday to see what progress is being made. Three days of the new regime (Dr B put me on a different inhaler as well, wrinkling his nose when he read the e-files and saw what other one Dr H had put me on) and I'm doing much better already - stairs are no longer my mortal enemy, and I feel like I might actually draw a nice deep ooh-the-air-ahh-delicious breath wicked soon.

Also, Dr Betterdoctor had me get a chest x-ray, "just to check off any Really Bad Things", none of which he suspects, but just to be sure, &c &c. So if I hear from him before Friday, then we worry. Meanwhile, I huff on my puffers to blow my lungs wide.

Thus, as the weekend brightened into beautiful weather, and I wheezed at the computer homestudio-ing some John God & The Choir Invisible masterpieces, and my breathing slowly slouched toward normalcy to be airborne - enough to actually stroll around beautiful Balmain, Centre Of The Universe yesterday and dip my toes in the Harbour waters amid the brilliant bluesky heat - I decided to celebrate.

So I shaved my head.
Teh end.

Finally, I'm clamping down and steaming ahead with some music. Woke up with another decent song in my head yesterday - luckily (in a bad "I can't move more than ten yards without feeling like my lungs are giving out so I'm staying home" way) I had taken the day off, so with Nick at work and no other distractions I was able to sit down and pound out pretty much the entire basic track in a few hours before my doctor's appointment (another entry will be all about the is-it-asthma-or-isn't-it thing; today's been too good a day - long story short, it is, diagnostically, again, thanks other ninny doctor). Anyway, have a song waiting for vocals once I polish the nearly-done lyrics and get some practice/voice-recording time to myself. Everything else I can do on headphones; voice has to be live (duh) and mic'd, and I am self-conscious enough without knowing Nick's in the house hearing my every "la la l-damn, try that one again ..." moment.

But also spent time re-doing and polishing one of my first efforts, which I haven't yet uploaded to the John God & The Choir Invisible spot on MySpace nor played for anyone except my husband. More GarageBand experience let me dig back into it, uproot some lame bits, reconfigure &c &c the thing ... as well as give it the slowbuild/crashcrashZEEEEEEEEEE feedbacky finish I wanted all along. So, I've got to listen to it on a real stereo (i.e. not my headphones) and tweak it if necessary, and then maybe post it up.

Also, full throttle at last on "Rip Me Apart (You're My Cuisinart)", a fun kickass take-no-prisoners song that's lived in my head since ... gawd, 1982 or so? Ever since one of my favourite people on earth, July, came up with the title. Science has advanced to the point where at last, even without schmoozing skills or the ability to convince I'm-too-cool-for-you musicians that I am worthy of working with, I can bring the song forth in all its glory, sounding like an honest-to-god/dess/es/Elvis band is doing it. Soon. Again, it will have to wait for its vocal day. But aside from an intro that'll take some figuring, it's 80% complete, I'd guess.

So, soon, who knows? I may have a presentable amount of various-sounding songs to feel comfortable showing to the world. Beware, world. Beware.

Once my musical production skills improve? My new ideal is to do a medley of "#9 Dream", "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", and "Snoopy vs The Red Baron". Trust me, what I heard in my head was beautiful.

Ahhh, the weekend - when I tally up the list of everything I'd put off doing all week, look it over, and then put everything off again.

What was accomplished? Well, Saturday I managed to catch up on a lot of sleep. There are, I confess, few things more delicious to little Yuri than a nap during a sunny afternoon, bright sun warming me bones whilst a not-irksomely-cool breeze washes through the open windows and across my face. I freely confess, all the best things in life I've learned come from studying cats (well, aside from fellatio; that was more Danny Sommers).

Then in the evening we stayed in and made a mellow little chicken and noodles thing 'cause nverzeanu's tummy's been bothering him, poor galoot, so we went for quiet and nothing culinarily pyrotechnic for the evening. Then another three-hour marathon of Upstairs, Downstairs (handsome aviators! wartime deprivations! poow poow Wose - err, I mean poor poor Rose!). Honestly, I need to write a whole rant on why this old show is far better than any of the historical-drama crap being churned out by HBO or other teevee conglomerates these days. The positive side of curmudgeonry - we do give credit where it is due, albeit with accompanying grumbles.

Sunday, I was all prepared to loaf and do very little again, when what was inflicted on me? Just because I mentioned it'd be fun to go to Centennial Park and wander around in search of cool Aussie birdlife and maybe feed it crackers, I am forced to go to Centennial Park and wander around in search of cool Aussie birdlife and maybe feed it crackers. We drove over, parked, trudged about a bit, saw too many people and not enough birds (all chased into higher branches due to said stupid hairless apes). I did manage to toss some crumbs to a cool native Aussie crested pigeon, all the while swatting at a mangy regular old rock pigeon tailgating its crested cousin and trying to bully its way in to the feast. Aside from that, and ogling a veritable fleet of black swans gliding about the various artificial lakes & ponds of the park, the long-beaked corellas we were hoping to find and pamper were nowhere to be seen, and one lone yawwkyawwkyawwking cockatoo soared overhead briefly.

After an aborted try to hit Watson's Bay for a picturesque harbourside fish-and-chips lunch (no parking! awful people in swarms everywhere!), we headed back to Balmain, Centre Of The Universe for a nice burger at a favourite local hotel where I watched Collingwood crumble whilst St Kilda assaulted them in a televised footy game. Haw haw. I was amused. Even got to watch Dale Thomas, a particularly annoying C'wood player, get knocked nearly unconscious and be dragged off the field. Ahhh, beautiful Sunday.

Then home to laze around til dinnertime, when we cooked up some roo, read a bit, and went to bed quite early. Sometimes one needs a weekend just like this (laziness included).

I guess it wasn't a total abdication of responsibilities - I gardenputtered a bit, finished reading a bio of my new superhero Bela Bartok, tinkered a little on music (still need to sit down and crunch it out a bit more methodically). But all done quite leisurely.

Today, I've made the vow to return to the gym. My weight's fine, but I'm flabbing too much and need some discipline ... and heck, some good cardio is good for my short-of-breath maybe-it's-not-asthma or whatever it is (or isn't). Now that my feets is healed, I really have no excuse not to re-engage with that wretched regimen men call "exercise". Besides, warmer days approach (allegedly) - I may need to de-shirt in public soon, should beachside attendance beckon. I'd hate to cause horrified panic.