To do list: ring optometrist, make appointment

One entire new blog and two whole years after the traffic sign that said

TURN LEFT
WITH CAKE,

I still haven't had my eyes checked. It's just not the kind of errand that seems urgent, not when your house is full of cat-hair tumbleweeds, your winter doona is still at the dry cleaners' after being left there more than a month ago, and the feral bougainvillea is about to pull the fence down.

So, like the master of avoidance behaviour I have been for so long, I was tending this morning to my FaceBook Farm, which shows you what a plant, animal or building is called whenever you happen to hover the cursor over it. My understanding was that that golden tree is called a Flourishing Birch.

But instead, in a moment worthy of a horror novel involving computers, the text popped up on the screen saying FLOURISHING BITCH.

On weather, fear and reading

The Weatherpixie in the sidebar there, at this moment anyway, is telling me that at Adelaide Airport, 20 minutes south of here, there is currently a totally clear blue sky and the sun is shining brightly with his whole face. Yet chez moi all is dark and gloomy both inside and out. Thunder rumbles roll past in waves. Whistling and pattering, not unlike the whistling and pattering in the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, is coming from outside, and I do so hope it's just the irritating wind and the small rain. It's the sort of day that makes you think you should go straight back to bed and stay there, but if I did that I'd have to finish reading my current bedside book, the new Val McDermid, and that's much much scarier than any scary weather.

My other fear is that the next book in that pile, the new Kathy Reichs (bedtime reading is strictly non-work-related), is going to continue the downward slide that began two or three books in from her debut when her publishers (or so I surmise; maybe her agent too) first told her to dumb down the science, bland out the prose and ramp up the lerve story, which is getting INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS. It's probably too much to think she might have defied them, at this level of success, and write however she damn pleases, the way she did when she first started. But we live in hope.