Yesterday was suicide hot. Ungodly hot. Possibly apocalypse hot. Hell may have opened, briefly. The English cricket team folded completely against South Africa, it was that bad (SA innings 312/2. Gawsh). Today is better, cloudy and slightly cooler. It's also the Evil Landlord's birthday, so anyone who knows him, please do the usual email thingy! it's his big 40 and he's trying to pretend it isn't happening. To which I say, bollocks.

Yesterday's heat also means I retreated cravenly into the arms of the air-conditioned cinema as soon as I finished work. It's a bit difficult for me to review 500 Days of Summer because I think the Pajiba review nailed it so cleverly, but hey, it's that or actually get on with reviewing excluded student transcripts, which is uniformly depressing. 500 Days, despite being a cute, quirky movie about falling in love, watched by me, single for the last 8 years, all on my own in the cinema¹, surprisingly wasn't.( I don't think you can actually spoil this film, but have a cut anyway. )

This has been a good decade for indie whimsicality. Shall add this one to Eternal Sunshine, Waitress and the rest on the Must Acquire list. The one Pajiba identifies as "whimsyquirkalicious", and about my fondness for the movies on which I am completely unashamed.

---

¹ This is a rhetorical whinge, I actually love watching movies on my own.

Coming home after a two-week absence requires, somehow, that one shrugs oneself back into the house like a favourite garment and wears it for a while before it feels right. It always seems somehow smaller, darker, slightly different to one's mental image for the first few hours, but I think I've almost re-inhabited my shell now. (For some reason re-arranging the 'fridge seems to have done the trick). I am incalculably happy to have back my cats, my own desktop, my kitchen and my bed, in which I passed out for twelve hours last night. My vegetables have not only survived, they've grown, so score one in the Evil Landlord remembering-to-water-them department. (I seem to have an evil phantom ninja slug, though - great holes in the bok choy, and no visible culprit. Damned ninjas).

The last two weeks have been hectic, stressful and emotionally draining, but I've managed to bumble through them on a slightly detached but reasonably even keel, bar a couple of days of gosh-darned glandular resurgance which made me feel somewhat pre-deaded. The actual degree of strain was revealed, however, when I walked into my bedroom yesterday morning to find that Nameless Culprits (from the evidence, jo&stv and the Evil Landlord) had liberally decorated it with welcome-home notices (colourful, with hand-drawn cartoons) and a variety of stress-relieving and occasionally rather lateral gifts, including chocolate, Earl Grey, multivitamins, bubble bath, schlocky literature ("Telepathic Vampires ... from the Future! vs. Accidental Superheroes ... from a College!"), silly DVDs (Moonraker and Step Up, which I think I'll have to watch back-to-back while drunk to achieve the full effect) and packs of microwave popcorn. I'm afraid I sat down on the bed and cried like a baby. In, however, a good way.

Now I have to frantically write up exam questions for my eroticism course, something I couldn't actually do overseas despite the looming deadline because when I was in France I had no time, and when I was in England I only had internet access via mother's computer, which is part of a school system and will not permit you to load any page past the first recurrence of the word "sex". Trying to consult past exam papers and sex-blogs under these conditions is a curiously Zen process which I eventually abandoned in despair. Possibly I should stick to teaching Dickens.

P.S. the trip back did indeed entail a SAA plane with no individual videos. I can now say with perfect truth "The flight was a horror. Rugby movie." (Forever Strong, forever cheesy. And, even worse, Rush Hour 2). I listened to SF podcasts and, in defiance of probability, dozed.