Dear Diary

Party time!

I've done my math on the matter and I reckon we should take off for our party at the park long about 9. That gives us enough time to get there, fetch MeMum, and do any other setting up before everyone else gets there.

It's just immediate family. We had no time to invite friends. And it's probably for the best because Chaos gets overstimulated just thinking about parties. Having a host of folks, food, and presents there might make her vibrate into another dimension.

And I'm pretty certain Beloved is going to insist upon barbecuing something, because that's what you do at parks. It's busy season where he works and we might have to get the requisite meat byproducts at a local shop.

And I have to hurry, because it takes a while to do Chaos' hair.

It's raining findings!

There's a definite difference between buying in person and buying online. And it could be solved with ONE solution.

An adult human hand.

Not everyone understands centimetres. Not everyone expects centimetres to pop up on a findings site where your average measurement is in millimetres.

So I've wound up with nonse like this:

[Shown here, a "feather" finding that overflows my palm]

[Shown here, a "leaf" finding as long as my pinkie finger]

The human hand is a universal indicator of scale.

Busy Times

The weather is changing and I can literally feel it. The usual low pressure system warning has clung to my head in a band formation. Meaning that I ache across both eye sockets, my teeth, and the nape of my neck.

The chill turn of the weather doesn't help, either.

Something else has come by my mailbox, but I have to go and collect it locally. Which implies that it was too big to jam into the mailbox. Which, in turn, has

My calendar is full

Driving to and from Tullagawupwup. 3AM wake-up against my will. A dire need for coffee and a dire need for air.

And one of my nineteen parcels arrived, but it wasn't any of the ones that I can confirm as being in Sydney.

Evidently, Aus!Customs has no qualms about a quarter cup's worth of ~~glass shrapnel~~ seed beads. I kid, of course. I'm not going through all this shit just so some forensics mook can dig it out of the scenery.

Secondary skills

In the words of Odo when Quark questioned his interest in funerary rituals, "Everybody needs a hobby." It didn't come in to the Hevun's Child trilogy, because almost everyone I was writing about literally did not have the time to kick back, relax, and faff around.

I glimpsed at it in The Amity Incident but by and large, the entire human colony were a bunch of nerd whose primary focus was their better future. The luxury of messing about with things to

A Winner is...

The 7-loop connector bars (250 of them!) from Milky Way 888. They were one of the last to get going, and I had to extend the allowance time lest my order get cancelled. And yet, they are the first ones to arrive in my hot little hands.

A moment of silence for the ziplock baggie that tried valiantly, but could not contain the mighty force of two hundred and fifty brass findings during the rigorous journey between there an here. It did

Signs of progress?

Yes, I'd love some. I looked up the status of my nineteen parcels for EGDB, and nothing has yet shifted. I've also discovered that Auspost is absolute shit at tracking things from China.

I can't wait for the day that I'm big enough that I won't have to worry about this shit.

Chaos keeps complaining about being forced into a Dutch Braid rather than a French Braid. All her arguments are currently illogical so I guess I'd better actually show her why

Gifts! Plus getting there ever so slowly

My darlings have delivered unto me enough combined sugar and chocolate to conceivably choke a horse. And I now own a coffee mug so huge that I must be wary of the undertow. It looks like it can hold at least twice the usual amount of caffeine/beverage of choice. Maybe 2.5 times the usual. It's going to be fun finding out what I'm capable of on that much coffee.

I have four out of nineteen of my parcels for Every

Birthday Embuggerance

Miss Chaos is turning eleven in a little over a week. Her fondest wish is to see Steam Powered Giraffe. That's more than a little beyond our means, right now.

The best I can do for her is to fill her iPad with as much Steam Powered Media as I can.

Her second prize, "purple sparkles", is going to manifest in some hand-crafted jewellery. As soon as I find something suitably purple and sparkly. Fellow relatives are welcome to find as many

"Drink it Freddy": the non-alcoholic drinking game

Mayhem and I came up with a stroke of genius, this morning, and it all came out of a bottle of beverage that had been hanging around inside the fridge for a month.

This shit is not due to go off for a year, so we came up with a non-alcoholic drinking game.

To play, you need:

1 shot glass per player
1 stack of trivia questions [Optional, colour spinner if you're using Trivial Pursuit cards]
1 beverage that was clearly a

The race is on!

Five of my nineteen parcels for EGDB have cleared China's customs. One's in Sydney, which means it could be here any day now. And, interestingly, it's the one I was stressing the most over.

I have discovered that "left the warehouse" is code for "we're not actually tracking it yet" - which is annoying me a little. With luck and fortune,I should have most, if not all, of my gear here by June at the latest. Then I can work out

Beloved is turning into a Fogey!

I actually heard these words issue, unironically, from the lips of my lifemate. "Back in my day..." whilst complaining about how technology was too easy to obtain for either Mayhem or Chaos.

Love, you purchased every single one of those things for our kids. You did it with a song in your heart. You did it with an eager spirit. And now you're complaining that the kids are too casual with them and don't know the first thing about basic tower maintenance.

Good things and bad things

I woke up to the news that someone I dearly admire was recently sexually assaulted by the TSA in order for the common public good. Apparently flying whilst transgender is equivalent to hijacking an aeroplane and flying it into a building 9_9

I wish I could make it better, but I'm genuinely powerless.

The TSA does absolutely nothing to protect America from Terrorists. What it does do is make travel inconvenient for everyone.

And worse - it happened in Texas. The

Continuing hunting

The place where I had once found the big bargain grab bags of assorted beads is called Bargain Place. Thanks to Google, there's only two of them that I know of.

One's in Garden City. The other one's in Strathpine.

I have one more chance, as I know of it, to get these grab bags. If they still exist. And considering the epic amounts of running around I did yesterday... I don't really know if it's worth going there [1 hour round

I've learned some things

In my forays towards having my own business, I've learned a few things. And in my forays towards actually losing some weight again, I've learned a few other things.

First: The exercise part of the activity app on the Apple iWatch is a piece of ableist shit.

Why? Well because it only counts exercise as something above a brisk walk. This automatically excludes the elderly and the chronically ill. Thanks a bunch, guys. I'm now resigned to having that green circle in

Menu

A 3618-post collection

Party time!

It's raining findings!

Busy Times

My calendar is full

Secondary skills

A Winner is...

Signs of progress?

Gifts! Plus getting there ever so slowly

Birthday Embuggerance

"Drink it Freddy": the non-alcoholic drinking game

The race is on!

Beloved is turning into a Fogey!

Good things and bad things

Continuing hunting

I've learned some things