Thar she blows…

I am proud to announce that I survived the Big Wind Storm of August 2009. It was a dicey couple of hours there with no power, but in the fine tradition of this house Krystle and I said “screw you mother nature!” and went and ate cake in Ivanhoe.

Before that though, I was home alone with no electricity. And when  I went lookng for candles, torches and pants (as previous pair were soaked in the deluge), I made the startling discovery that THIS HOUSE IS TOTALLY UNPREPARED FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.

Seriously.  My search for illumination and pants yielded the following items that could be useful should the undead walk the Earth:

*One torch, almost flat.
*An assortment of candles including one I got for my 21st, two I bought in Thailand last year and one I got in an oil burner from a friend in 1998.
* Hayley’s hurl
*One oversized cat, who insisted on following me around the house
* Two Ferrero Rochers (clearly the most useful)

As you can see, if this were a zombie movie we’d all be dead by now so I am going to spend tonight on my Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Plan, whilst ignoring the two editing assignments that I have due on Thursday and  Monday respectively.

PS – My second shift at  the Melbourne Writers Festival was awesome, I got to listen to Margo Lanagan and Anthony Eaton talk about young adult fiction and now I am inspired to get  back to my story.

PPS – My first shift at the MWF involved 2 crazy men, a flock of lesbians,  a bearded lady, the federal police and this sign:

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Can’t sleep…the soprano will eat me…

Today we had a knock on  the door from someone claiming that he was there to change our lightbulbs for free. We were somewhat sceptical at first (this has happened before, it turned out that it was only free if we changed electricity providers) but it turned out to be genuine. Which is great, and huzzah for free light bulbs, but now I have three working lightbulbs in my room, instead of just one.

You would think that this would also merit a huzzah. But here’s the thing. The light fittings in my room are yellow glass, and with all three light bulbs working, my bedroom is now SAVAGE YELLOW. To a normal person this would be fine, but when I was little I used to have a recurring nightmare where I was stuck in a big yellow room on my own, and the only sound I could hear was an opera singer singing the one high note, without pause. (I swear, I was about seven when this was happening. It stemmed from reading The Enchanted Wood in a way, because the Scary Opera Room was at the top of a tree, Faraway Tree style.)

While I have mostly grown up enough to recognise that just because my room is now SAVAGE YELLOW that the world will not end, I am putting an embargo on opera music, for the sake of the tenuous grasp that I have on my sanity.

I swear I’m not mad.

Many other things have happened since last I wrote an actual post, instead of pointing at impressive things on youtube, but they mainly involve me being really sick and coughing up my lungs. The good news is that despite my best efforts, they are still firmly in place. Even more exciting is that I have gotten my mojo back just in time for the Melbourne Writers Festival, which starts on Friday. Big huzzah! There are many reasons why I’m excited about MWF this year, but the biggest of all is that I get to be a volunteer on the ‘Eclectic Bookshops Walk’, which goes all over Melbourne to bookshops that you might not ordinarily know about.

How excited am I? Let’s face it, I don’t really need to know the location of MORE books, since I’m doing such a good job spending stupid amounts of money in the ones that I DO know about. But screw that, I’m excited!

(PS – have finally update the books and movies list. Also updated the about page, just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Not much I can say about this…