Category: Journal

So it turns out I’m in the throes of a throat infection. The good news is that it’s unlikely to get worse – I had my tonsils out when I was way younger, and the doctor seemed to think this was a remarkable stroke of good fortune rather than, you know, one of those things that just happens somewhere along the way when you grow up. The bad news is that it’s viral in nature, so all I can really do is suck it up, sleep, and wait until my hacking cough goes away and I stop feeling like arse. In theory that was meant to be yesterday. In practice, I was relatively glad today was my regularly scheduled day off work and I got to spend eighteen of the past twenty-four hours asleep. And since I’ve now written far more about being sick than I originally intended, I distract you with some slight of hand and a youtube clip: See you

Twelve months ago I got a direct message on twitter that said, more or less, send me an email RE the job we discussed. I think it’s the only message I’ve ever received on twitter that made me cry with relief, ’cause it meant there was a chance of getting the hell out of my old job. It wasn’t just that my old day-job was bad – I’d worked bad jobs before. My old day-job actually went past bad and delved into the level of seriously toxic. There were only six people in the office and they were all at war with one another, and the manager had never really figured out why they’d hired me. When I signed my employment agreement there was a big empty space under my job description, and they never actually got around to filling all that empty space in. Occasionally I’d answer phones, or make deliveries to clients. Those were good days. On the

I’m home from a very pleasant night out at Avid Reader Bookshop in West End, which was followed by an equally pleasant dinner with some friends at a Mexican place nearby. Somewhere between all that I did a short reading from Horn, listened to readings from Angela Slatter and Rob Cook (who I hadn’t met before, but was a very nice bloke), and listened to a reading/Q&A with Margo Lanagan (which, really, was the entire point of the evening). It’s an evening made doubly-cool by the fact that I didn’t move boxes of books over to the new place, which is something we’ve been doing an awful lot of this week. It’s one of those inevitable facts of moving – I have a lot of books, the flatmate has a lot of books, and it generally makes much easier if you don’t try and move them all at once. Fortunately I’m almost done with books. Tomorrow, I figure, will be the

There are many things I like about my current day-job. Many, many things. I like the people I work with, I like earning money for doing things that are interesting and challenging, and I like the fact that there’s discounts at the cafe downstairs so I can stay relatively caffeinated throughout the day. This is just an illustrative handful of things I like, but you get the picture: my appreciation of this job covers a lot of terrain. That said, I really miss staying up late. I miss spending time in the world after 2:30 in the morning when everything is quiet and I start to get that tired-but-not-quite-tired-enough feeling which results in quiet pondering and pages of scribbled notes. I miss the freedom of mainlining a whole season of a TV show I’ve discovered on DVD in one fell swoop, confident that I’ll have the time to catch up on sleep. I miss reading in bed. I miss catching my US

It’s a quiet, slightly gloomy Easter Monday and I’ve spent the better of my afternoon lurking in my bedroom with a copy of William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavour and The Jane Austen Argument’s Somewhere Under the Radio on repeat. I’ve been meaning to write a catch-up kind of post ever since I went to Rockhampton a few weeks back, but I didn’t and somehow the fact that I kept accumulating things to blog about only meant that the gap kept winding on. Bullocks to that, though, so I figured I’d peel myself off the bed and give you the highlights. Firstly, I went to Rockhampton and it rained a great deal. This resulted in about ten hours of fun at the Rockhampton airport, watching them cancel and reschedule flights, until finally my 1:30 PM flight out finally happened at 2:00 AM instead. It made for a long day, although I did get to duck out of the airport and see the