Anxiety...

Today is the day of the Mau-mau's official sixth birthday party. She actually turned six some days ago, and received a plethora of presents from all over the place, as I mentioned. But for a six-year-old girl, the birthday thing isn't complete unless there's been a party. A particularly girly party.

And therefore, we are having a Mermaid Fairy Princess party this afternoon.

Oddly, a number of boys have been invited to this party, and at least one has accepted. His mum sounded relieved when I pointed out that according to Natalie, it would be all right if the lad dressed as a pirate. Personally, I think he should be a Mermaid Fairy Princess too, but I'm not sure six-year-old boys have enough of a sense of irony to appreciate the humour.

I'm sitting down right now in the post-breakfast zone, clearing my mind, thinking things through. It's been rainy as hell down here - some flooding across the north and east. (Not affecting us, mind you.) Today it's dim and grey and foggy. My hopes of throwing all the small ones outside for a sunny afternoon play on the stupidly oversized playground structure are looking slender. Ergo, I have to come up with a way to keep about eight very small, sugar-driven, birthday-frenzied kids from annihilating the interior of my house for about two hours this afternoon.

I'm thinking balloons. Fuckloads of balloons. Kids like balloons, and if I inflate a couple hundred, they'll be happy to run around shrieking and kicking clouds of balloons into the air, right? The cats will never forgive me, but who cares?

Meanwhile, I've also got to prepare a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and a cherry on top. Maybe a layer of whipped cream in the middle. Apparently, jelly is also desirable. And marshmallow cones.

There's also party favours and lollies and decor to think of. Yes. All that stuff.

Then there's my sanity. Have you seen it? I'm not sure where I put it down. I think I had it just a few days ago, briefly, but then the phone rang. And then the University told me my enrolment was up in the air 'cos they didn't have proof of my citizenship. Citizenship? Fuck! I've been a permanent resident of Oz since 1973, and a full citizen since 1991. I don't even know exactly where my stupid Citizenship Certificate is anymore. Luckily, I keep my passport in a handy location. Wish I could do the same with my sanity.

Fortunately, there's a carton of Boag's St George in the kitchen. I will undertake the Quest for Sanity through Booze after the Mermaid Fairy Princesses are all in bed. (Did I mention that at least two of them are sleeping over? I didn't, did I?)

Okay. Gotta go. Genghis is now coughing up a lung, and quite seriously, he's amplifying his already horrifying cough by putting a very long cardboard tube up to his mouth. So I can hear this weird, echoing, rattling, tearing, gurgling bark of a cough richocheting around the house. Natalie doesn't seem to like it either, by the way she's snarling at Genghis. I can understand that, though... the cardboard-tube Death Cough is probably the ugliest thing I've heard since I last mashed up Justin Bieber and Yakity Sax.

Sanity? Hellloooo?

Alarums And Excursions

Natalie and Jake returned from Ireland on Sunday morning, as planned. I was well enough to drive in a collect them from the airport, which was damned handy. (The antibiotics appear to be doing some good. Not fixing everything, but at least I can breathe again.)

Of course, they fell asleep in the afternoon, and lay like logs. Still, they brought presents, which was good. I have a fine bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey which my antibiotics and I are observing wistfully, from time to time.

Everybody took Monday off school, sensibly enough. And by a useful coincidence, it was also the Mau-mau's birthday. Her sixth. I've had a daughter for six years, apparently. Fuck, eh? Who knew?

Six year old girls and birthdays are... challenging. They expect rainbows, unicorns, and random falls of sugary pink candy from the sky. The Mau-mau did okay. Her mum brought her a pink satin dress complete with puffy skirt and bows and ribbons and underskirt layers. There was also a LEGO dollhouse that took half the day to build. (Kept mother and daughter nicely occupied.) There was a fine tiara of some kind of robust but graceful metal, replete with diamantes and pearl-ish things: high grade costume jewelry which she immediately adopted and adored. There was a necklace of silver. There was an embroidered purse and some bead necklaces from an aunty.

From yours truly, she got the first fifteen issues of the Marvel Godzilla comic, bound in a single edition. (She loves her some Godzilla.) She got a simple digital camera meant for kids, with which she is now photographing the crap out of the entire world. And she got (with help from Ginny in the USA) a very clever paintbrush. You use it with watercolours. It has batteries, and a metal strip down the side. You paint with it, and then with a finger of your off-hand, you touch the wet paint and become part of an electrical circuit that makes the brush 'sing'. Essentially, you form a variable resistor, and by moving your finger to different places on the painted line (with the brush touching, of course) you can change the tone the brush makes. It's very cool.

Nevertheless, the Mau-mau wanted more. More! What's Aunty Becca going to send me? Ooh!

It's not so much the having. It's the opening, and the getting. I'm quite sure that if we were to wrap a bunch of rocks and get her to open them with sufficient fanfare, she'd be almost as delighted.

She wanted tacos for dinner; I complied, as one does. And I made a fine chocolate cake with whipped cream and strawberries. (Yes. That explains the photos.) And she got to sleep on the floor of her bedroom, in her little fold-out kiddy indoor playtent. What more could you ask for?

But Dark Forces were aswirl. For starters, Natalie appears to have brought back an exciting gastro-enteritis from her Irish sojourn. Jake, as usual, is completely unmoved. The kid gets unwell so rarely that when he does, he's a fucking pain, because he has no experience with things like sore throats, or vomiting, and he gets really cranky about it.

Genghis, on the other hand, Catches Stuff. And last night at a quarter to midnight, I heard an awful, stertorous bark from downstairs. Now, as it happens, I'd only just gone to bed because I'd been watching the Mau-mau (still sleeping on the floor in her tent. Why? You'd have to ask her). She's caught the chest infection that settled on me. By day she's fine, but by night, she coughs like a ninety-year-old three-pack-a-day smoker, and her nose blocks up too. So I was kind of expecting trouble, yeah?

Except that when I got downstairs, I had to put the brakes on fast. It wasn't the Mau-mau. It was Genghis, and he'd just dumped at least a kilo of polenta-crusted salmon, green salad, hash browns and leftover birthday cake all over his pillow.

Not good at all. The bedding got changed, and everything got cleaned up, and Genghis got a bowl - but that mess was horrible, and showed absolutely no sign of being digested, five and a half hours after the meal had been eaten. This is not a good sign.

And sure enough, at 0630 this morning, another thunderous bark yanked us out of bed. The boy is not well. He's currently on the couch watching "Life of Brian", his faithful barf-bowl close at hand... unlike his brother, he's used to this sort of thing so he just takes it in his stride.

The Mau-mau? Oh, she was fine. I checked on her at the first Vomit Volcano event, and she was sleeping peacefully in her little tent.

So, here we are. My family is all home again. Lucky me!

God, I Love Science!!!

Sheep Drugged and Shocked to Prove Taser Safety

Seriously. Go read it for yourself.

Now, while I admit that I have no particular desire to teach sheep to freebase and then go all Tasermatic on their sheepy asses, there's a certain wild-eyed enthusiasm to this whole project that I find fundamentally admirable. Who came up with this idea? More importantly, who did they find to implement it? It goes to show: we may live in a modern world, but there's still a job for Igor whenver he needs it. Because who else could you possibly call upon to make sheep snort meth, then apply the lightning rod to their woolly butts if not that most tried and tested of all B-movie stereotypes: the Mad Scientist's Equally Mad Assistant.

Look, I know this whole thing is awfully hard on the sheep, but as a longtime fan of B-movies, I can't help but approve. In my youth, I often envisioned myself as a Victor Frankenstein for a new age. I liked Science. I liked weird stuff. I liked mixing chemicals until they changed colour and smelled funny (and made the cat fall over). I liked explosions and lightning. At no point have I ever been concerned with the idea that there are Some Things Man Wasn't Meant To Know. I have wild hair. I can cackle maniacally.

There really ought to be a useful place for me in the world of science. And now, thanks to this... clearly VERY scientific project, it is apparent that somewhere, somehow, Mad Science is still happening. Could it be that at last, at long last, my project to crossbreed magpies and tiger sharks has a future?

Could Have Been Worse, Apparently

Not pneumonia. That's good.

Bronchitis. That's... not so good.

The good is that I'll probably not have to be hospitalised. The not so good is two weeks worth of doxycycline... and the lingering question of why the f__k I can't cough up all this crap the way normal people do.

Referral to a respiratory physician coming up.

There May Be A Hiatus

Yeah.

So - this cough isn't going anywhere. Except downhill. Bad night last night. Not a good morning so far. I'll be taking this one to the doctors today, and I gotta say I won't be surprised if they want to keep me for a while.

I'll be back when I can.

Diseases

First, mine: this whole lung thing is starting to worry me. There's a strain of pneumonia doing the rounds hereabouts. I'm feeling like utter shit. I'm still afebrile, but I'm given to understand there's been a case or two similar to that recently. There's only two things keeping me from heading down to the surgery. First, I'm still goddam sole parent until Sunday. And second: I can still walk up and down the hills here without falling over.

That suggests the pain and coughing are all about inflamed bronchial pathways, not fluid in the lungs and other pneumonia-type problems. So I'll drop another handful of paracetamol and ibuprofen tonight, have a hot shower, and grab a few hours of broken sleep with my head propped up on two or three pillows in the hopes of breathing just a little better.

Fuck this shit.

Second disease? Oh, that would be Fred Nile -- the NSW parliamentary equivalent of a big, fat herpes sore. Here's his latest:

Wong Baby Not Right

The man is an absolute dick. Penny Wong and her partner are having a kid - and he goes on and on about the wrongness of children in a gay relationship. What a set of standards, eh? Can't have a kid in a gay relationship, even if one of the parents is a Federal minister. But it's okay for a world-spanning organisation of paedophiles and their enablers to go on running schools, right?

I think I've come up with a good plan for dealing with Fred. What we need to do is put our pennies together, and raise a large sum of money. This money is to be paid in the form of a bounty. It goes to the first brave, heroic Sydney drag queen who manages to get footage of himself giving our Reverend Fred the blowjob (or other sexual thrill) of his life.

That ought to just about shut him down, no? So - how do we go about starting up a charity, then?

Urgh

Genghis' pet chest infection is leaving him. I didn't have to drug him at all last night. He coughed for a while after he lay down, but then he went off to sleep nicely and stayed that way.

Wish I could say the same. It would appear I'm still on the downslope of this particular bit of nastiness. I'm not enjoying the situation at all.

We took a trip to Launceston yesterday to see 'Captain America'. I'd rate it one of the best superhero flicks so far. The look was perfect, the acting was fine, and Hugo Weaving made a most excellent Red Skull. And who can argue with a story about Nazi super-science and lost Asgardian technology threatening to destroy the world?

There really was a lot to like in the film. If you're an old Marvel fan, watching Captain America hook up with the likes of Dum-Dum Dugan and a young Nick Fury (from a very old comic called 'Nick Fury and his Howling Commandoes') was pretty cool. I admit to a warm, fuzzy moment when Dugan took over the zap-ray tank during the escape-from-Hydra sequence, purely because of the cry of "Waaahoooo!!!". I don't think I've seen one of those old comics since I was about seven or eight years old...

They did well with 'Bucky' Barnes, too. A sneaky, fun moment when Captain America features in the scope of a sniper rifle... then the scope climbs, finds another sniper about to shoot our hero; the trigger of our POV scope is pulled and the sniper onscreen dies, then the camera pulls back to reveal 'Bucky' behind the scope of 'our' rifle, and a quick thank-you wave from Captain America. Shades of the Winter Soldier and the 'Death of Captain America' plotline from a few years back.

And a bit of respect for film history: Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, unearthing his Asgardian toy. He says something like "...while the Fuehrer plays in Northern Africa, digging for trinkets, I have found this..." Heh. Anybody remember a movie where Nazis in Northern Africa were trying to dig up an item of Great Magic Power? Nice touch.

Genghis and I did not travel alone to the cinemas, however. We took with us the redoubtable Baggins sisters (Not their actual name. It's an in-joke that they'll understand if they read this. Hi April! Hi Amy!) and the eldest of the Viking Neighbour clan to round out the expedition. A trip to my favourite secondhand book store made things even better. I found a compendium of the first fifteen Marvel 'Godzilla' comics in a single cover, still in its shrinkwrap. That may not seem like much a find to you - but then you don't have a daughter who thinks Godzilla is the greatest thing ever to reach cinema. Said daughter has a birthday coming in about a week - so a mint, unopened Godzilla compendium is a Huge Goddam Score. I'm really rockin' the dad thing here.

We had another Skype attack from Natalie and Jake last night. It went... marginally better than the last one. (The Mau-mau did not stand up, lift up her dress, and scream "Booooooobies" at the camera this time. I count that as progress.) Our farflung family members are apparently in a backpacking hostel in Galway. They affirm that the place is nice, and everybody's friendly, and they're having a good time. The bastards.

Anyway, today the rain is closing in cold and grey, and I have three extra kids in the house. Genghis and one of the Viking Neighbour kids are taking apart the clothesdryer that died. The Mau-mau and the Double-trouble daughter have got out "The Craft Box" (a big cardboard box full of pipecleaners, tassles, string, paddlepop sticks, glue, crayons, paper, cardboard and all kinds of similar epic shit) and are making a fucknormous -- but very creative -- mess on the dining table. The eldest Double-Trouble child is slouching about aimlessly.

Soon I shall have to feed them all. Best I conclude this now.