No salted caramel macarons for me, then

Well. Today I went to Hutt Street on a follow-up visit to the nice surgeon who removed my gall bladder and, while he was in there, (gulp) biopsied (is that a verb?) my liver.

The good news is that there is no new bad news about the liver, and that everything that was eating at my innards has now been surgically removed and is healing up nicely. The bad news is assorted: (a) that gallstones can in fact form in the bile duct, so there's no guarantee that I won't grow more, and (b) the confirmation that the condition of my liver is not at all what it should be (NB this has nothing to do with drinking, so there) and if ignored and neglected could easily lead to something called non-alcoholic cirrhosis, which is exactly like alcoholic cirrhosis except that you didn't have any fun. And cirrhosis -- well, you know.

Now Hutt Street, as Adelaideans know, is an excellent place to have coffee and cake. I had coffee. No cake, no biscuits, no gorgeous French patisserie and absolutely, positively no salted caramel macarons. Not today, not next week, and only very occasionally as a special treat ever again. Sugar, fat and alcohol, formerly three of my main food groups, are off the menu for the foreseeable.

The bright side is that if I take this seriously, as who would not, then my days as a traditionally built lady might be numbered. Goddess knows I'm already ten kilos less traditionally built than I was when this all hit the fan two months ago. It could be the start of a whole new look.

How not to have a party

Another teenager has brought down the wrath of a virally spread party invitation on her long-suffering parents' house.

On the Facebook invitation, the girl said she didn't have enough time to invite everyone. ... She also said that the event was going to be an "open house" party as long as it didn't "get out of hand". She told Fairfax that she did this because only two people showed up to the last party she held.

Got that? She 'didn't have enough time' to invite everyone, and hadn't figured out even after her previous experience that perhaps people might rock up if you gave them some slight indication that you cared whether they did or not. Like, being organised enough to invite them individually and personally.

Perhaps even -- I know this is a radical idea -- in writing of some kind.

Possibly even in joined-up writing. Of the kind you do with a pen. A pen is a ... Oh, never mind.

Also, you kids get off my lawn.

In which the older and wiser are not surprised

After a couple of more than usually frenetic weeks I was catching up with some favourite blogs last night and found this at Johnny's in the Basement, the music blog that celebrated Australian blogger Tim Dunlop writes for crikey.com.au.

I'd just like to say that, like my almost-exact contemporary Mark Holden, I thought that this child (as she then was) was the outstanding pick of the bunch even at sixteen, far too classy and original for Australian Idol. Go over to Tim's and watch it.

And speaking of generational tastes in music, there was a sad moment the other night when James Taylor and Carole King left the stage for their half-time orange quarters (and I'm not going to rave about them here for fear of being mocked by persons younger than myself; Leonard Cohen seems curiously immune from said mockery, but I fear Taylor and King may not be, despite their well-deserved legendary status) and my entire demographic got up and painfully stretched -- a great deal of Adelaide's cavernous Entertainment Centre is made of cement, including, it would seem, the seats -- thereby releasing an unmistakable eau de Boomer into the atmosphere. 'Ah,' said my friend D, 'the aroma of our generation. Half patchouli oil, half Denco-Rub.'

Neither rocket science nor brain surgery

I've known since I was about fifteen that a week on a diet will not suffice to lose the weight that you've spent years dedicatedly gaining. But I don't know how much older I'm going to have to get before the message sinks in that if you've got a sleep debt that has built up over several nights (or, of course, longer), one normal eight-hour sleep will not be enough to get you back out of the red. In my own case this has not been true since about 1978. And yet we live in hope.