There goes my peaceful Monday

I was looking forward to a relatively peaceful week and then Japan blew up, so work is going to be fucked. Poor Japan. For the rest of the world, it's mercy it happened in a country like Japan, where the infrastructure is decent so rescue efforts, efforts to not let nuclear plants totally fucking explode, etc., will be pretty close to the top of the game. But for Japan - shit. Our stringer there is sending us all this news and even though he's a pretty crusty older man who I'm sort of scared of I just wanna hug him.

I am taking a break from running today, not because of running, but because I went on quite a decently long kayak with the local club on Saturday, and it's left my legs stiff as a morning boner. My arms held up nicely though. Also, I don't have anything that doesn't reek to high heaven to run in. I've been juggling one inappropriate pair of cotton shorts and one running skirt, and running five times a week, and the laundry system broke down. Luckily another running skirt appeared in the mail this morning so hopefully I can construct a new and better system for staying reasonably hygienic.

Anyways, having to write endlessly about the fucking devastation in Japan and not being able to go for a run is sort of compounding my stress today, as everything seems to be ticking along nicely in terms of our acquisition of The House, which is good but also meant I had a bad half-hour just now when I thought I was going to have a forge a few signatures when I couldn't find a signed copy of my work contract for the bank. But I found one. And the pest inspection is done already, and there aren't any, as far as they can see. And I checked with the council, and we will, if we choose, be able to keep not only chickens (max. 10), but also one sheep. They're a herd animal so that seems sort of cruel, but the F-word, who half-grew up on a farm, claims that they're out-with-the-fairies enough to feel perfectly contented if you just put up a picture of a second sheep.

So things are ticking along so nicely, in fact, that I think I'll give The House a name - a blog name, anyways - I suppose considering both our names'll be on the mortgage I'd better give the F-word a say in its IRL name. I think Batalonia, in double-honour of the flying fox colony and my plans to recreate Guell Park in the fucking ridiculously huge back garden.

The waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flavour

I don't know if I mentioned but a few months ago I dreamt there was a blight on garlic; that almost overnight, all of the fucking garlic in the world shrivelled up and rotted away, and the fucking day dawned bleakly on shops emptied of their fucking garlic. It was the closest I've ever come to encompassing an idea of Armageddon in my head, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Amageddon, and I actually woke up screaming. It was one of those nightmares where you wake up believing it's real, and you have to sort of come to realize how unlikely it is, how somehow the world is still turning around you, etc., so it must have been a dream . . . and then gradually calming down. Previous to that, I think I'd only had those sorts of nightmares about having murdered someone.

Anyways, the F-word and I had a good laugh about what fucked up priorities I have if I'm having a fucking brutal nightmare about something so unlikely. And then we moved to Australia, and the fucker started flooding, and the other day we went to a huge grocery store and THERE WAS NO FUCKING GARLIC. Nor was there any at the grocery store on the other side of the shopping centre*. It's because of the fucking floods. The farmers can't get the garlic dry enough to ship. And for the first time in my life I had a vision of what it's like when your nightmares come true, it was like a fucking slasher movie.

There's still no garlic if you're unlucky, because Australians are awfully rah-rah-rah in a hideously cringeworthy way about things being made in Australia (although all the garish nationalistic labelling on the products has those sorts of vague, Body-Shop-"Against Animal Testing" type compositions that mean nothing, like "Proudly Operated in Australia!", which could just mean that an Australian truck driver takes the product from the port to the supermarket), so the stores haven't just buckled and ordered it from China like everyone fuckin' should.

It is bloody horrible. Bloody horrible.

*Australians have two principal supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, basically indistinguishable in terms of prices and product range, which each occupy opposite sides of almost all the shopping centres, and are both fucking overpriced suck factories, and then they call this thing that walks, quacks and fucks like fuckin' cartel "choice".