Another of those misty Cape Town mornings in which the peninsula has clearly woken up, rolled over in bed, thought "bugger all these seasonal expectations, anyway", and huddled itself down into a comforting shroud of gentle rain, soft skies and a drifting sea fog forming a separate layer below the clouds, like a sheet under a duvet. Come to sunny Cape Town! Bring umbrella.

My image clusters this morning suggest that actually I'd also rather be back in bed. Fair comment. I'm a bit fragile because Sid the Sinus Headache is trying to make a comeback, which I'm ruthlessly undermining from within via a cynical media campaign, using my tabloid agents Lots of Vitamins and Stv's High-Chilli-Quotient Thai curry. The gin/chardonnay combination which accompanied the Thai food last night may also be contributing its mite to the rather-be-in-bed stakes, admittedly. Other than that, of course, the weather is making me predictably happy, and the Monday billboards were particularly entertaining:

TIGER NOW 6 OVER PAR
Poor Tiger's indiscretions are inevitably doomed to give rise to more, and more horrible, bad golfing puns than one would have believed humanly possible. There's a sort of unctuous schadenfreude in it, too - his media image is so much Nice Young Man that the tabloids seem to be deriving a compensatory pleasure in shredding him.

RONALDO REMOVES SHIRT!
I love the complete inconsequentiality of this. Undoubtedly there's an actual incident behind it, but it simply begs to be ramified into a whole string of similar incidents: OBAMA HAS CUP OF COFFEE! BRAD PITT CLEANS TEETH! PARIS HILTON WEARS PANTS!

And, finally, memorably,
GUBAI DUBAI!
Alas Dubai, someone popped your bubble, which was frankly always an absurdly overblown and self-indulgent bubble, anyway. Gubai indeed.

Gawsh. In the Department of the Inexorable Advance of Time, it's November. Hate it when that happens. It's a particularly blustery one, too. I thought that was supposed to be a Northern Hemisphere thing. Not that I mind, because strong winds make me almost as happy as rain, but damned global warming.

In other news, I have sand everywhere. We went out to the Strandloper yesterday for lunch - up the west coast in Langebaan, the mad outdoor "fish boma" where you eat ten courses of fish, no trimmings except bread and lemon, off paper plates using mussel shells as cutlery. It's all sandy and open-air under shade-cloth decorated with suitably piratical bits of fishing float, net and the largest, fattest, glossiest, best-fed gulls on the continent.





Mussels and mackerel and angelfish and stumpnose and snoek and paella and lamb stew and crayfish, oh my. And, of course, a cooler box filled with white wine and gin (and sand). Also, a rather jolly proprietor who gave us taunt-ammunition for EVAH! by warning us not to let "peaches-and-cream there" (pointing at stv) go out in the sun too much. I confidently predict that getting stv's goat by calling him "Peaches" will get old approximately never. It's righteous retribution for all the punning.

However, on the downside it was very windy and thus very sandy, leaving me with small deposits of sand in my shoes, handbag, hair, camera case, ears, teeth, and stuck to the UV blocker on my arms. I was consequently more than somewhat wind-blown, sun-crazed and totally dead last night, I stuck it out as long as I possibly could and then crawled off to bed, only realising as I switched the light off that it was actually 8pm rather than 9. Basically I'm feeble and not used to the Great Outdoors. Also, the West Coast is aggressively beautiful given that it's mostly composed of vast tracts of more-or-less flat and scrubby nothingness.

The weather is mad again. There was a thunderstorm in the small hours of the morning, complete with thunder and lightning and raindrops so huge and fat they landed separately and distinctly, like a small pachyderm parachute brigade. The noise on my tin bedroom roof was indescribable, I actually got out of bed and bumbled over to the window (falling, as is obligatory, over the cat) to check that it wasn't hail. (This entailed standing there starkers except for my glasses and peering outside until my vision had cleared enough to see that there were no actual drifts of hailstones on the flags. I will not invite you to picture this proceeding in the interests of mental health). The first few splats of rain left wet circles about four centimetres across. Some weirdly giant precipitation up there.

Thunderstorms make me deeply happy, enough that I didn't actually resent being woken up - I have a theory that I subliminally wake myself up deliberately so I can enjoy the sound of rain, anyway. What I did resent was the idiot who thereafter phoned my cellphone at 5.40am, waking me from a sound rediscovered sleep for a wrong number. Who the hell phones anyone at 5.40am anyway? It's not a time, it's a hideous limbo space filled with meaninglessness and the deranged, dawn-inspired tweeting of manic birds. (Manic, damp birds in this case, and serve them right). I am consequently a little fragile this morning, and am only succeeding in bribing myself through the day by copious application of chocolate biscuits. On the upside, for some weird reason sleep-deprivation makes me ungodly productive for the first half of the day. Between processing great tottering piles of credit transfers I have also managed to order more Scary Go Round T-shirts, pay my bills and read a deliriously wonderful paper by someone using Harry Potter to teach basic political science ("ethnic conflict, power political studies and dysfunctional bureaucracies").

I recommend, as a wake-up shock, today's XKCD, which is being all nostalgic about Geocities. It actually made me recoil from the screen with a shout of "Aaargh! My eyes!" Thank the gods the internet Got Better and is no longer a newt in the design stakes. Mostly.

Finally, today's happy-making discovery from Worthless Word For The Day: my subject line employed in the cause of being beautifully rude about religious bigotry. John Ruskin: "So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is." Hee. The proceeding, for a given value of "scripture", also applies, in fact, to politics, education and popular music, and probably also to parrot-breeding and French cuisine.

Summer is here! Lhud sing cuckoo; also, bah, humbug and the usual grumbling. It's early days yet, however, and in fact the sunny days with not too much actual heat are mostly tolerable, what with the recent rain, green growth everywhere and the little birdies going twit. Or, in the case of the mad pair of peregrines who nest on the hospital opposite our house, screaming their avian pea-brain heads off, presumably in some sort of mating frenzy. There's no accounting for taste; I, for one, am profoundly turned off by yelling. (Punk, so not an aphrodisiac). The warmer days also seem to bring the milk of human kindness bubbling to the surface, and there's been a positive orgy of courtesy and goodwill as we all let each other into the rush-hour traffic, beaming like loons. (This is necessary, the traffic has been unusually dire in the last few days). In keeping with this lightened mood (albeit temporarily, watch me growl once the heat-waves start), summer makes me break out the P.G. Wodehouse. Strange but true.

Summer also means I'm into the cotton skirts, along with their associated doom: t-shirts bare to the onlooker's gaze without intervening warmer covering, and, therefore, the dire necessity for a bra, the which I joyously do not wear all the way through autumn, winter and spring. This is one of the things I actually hate about summer, mostly because there's a sort of Seekrit Girl Club to which I do not belong, viz. the one which shares the arcane knowledge about how to stop your bra straps from perpetually slipping off your shoulders. I lack this skill. I am clearly, for the purposes of bra strap wrangling, not a girl at all. I spend most of summer mournfully raising and lowering the length of the straps, in a sad, futile sort of way, like a short-sighted peeping tom at a parlour blind. What's the secret here? string? superglue? complicated contraptions with magnets? nine-inch nails through the shoulders? I swear, I'm seriously considering the latter. I cannot but feel that it redounds negatively to my professionalism to have my eyes glaze over at intervals, usually in the middle of impassioned curriculum advice, while I grope down my sleeve via the neck.

Happy Summer Sights of the last few days, though: turning in for home past the Common, an elderly man trying to persuade his bull terrier that walkies were, in fact, Over. Man's body angled at 45^o away from dog. Dog's legs all at equal and opposite angle as he digs his feet into the ground, mule-like, and refuses to move. Upshot: by considerable straining on man's part, dog dragged along ground, leaving ruts. I laughed all the way home.

Finally, more graphical info-porn for smoczek: Best Science Visualisations. My disaster-movie-loving soul is obscurely soothed by California falling into the sea as the San Andreas cocks up its toes.

Bother. My Capacious Handbag o'Doom defaults to a sort of Shub-Niggurath configuration when my MP3 player headphones snarl up with my cellphone charger cable, my camera cable, my tape measure and the random bit of broken-off AV lead that's there because I accidentally snapped it while lugging my dad's TV around. This necessitates the drawing of Elder Signs before I can even start disentangling the tentacles sufficiently to realise that in fact the camera cable, which is the point of the whole exercise, isn't even part of the snarl, because I've packed it neatly into its case. Never be tidy, it's only ever counter-productive. (Also, on a not unrelated note and because various people keep recommending it, The Unspeakable Vault. Both creepy and cute).

I have, however, finally triumphed sufficiently to connect the camera bone to the USB bone, now hear de word of de lord, and thus upload not only some of this weekend's photos, but some of last weekend's as well. We had a Salty Cracker expedition out in the approximate Franschoek direction for lunch yesterday, Bread and Wine at the Môreson wine estate. Lovely place, slightly informal, spacious, and assiduous in moving the whole party out into the shady courtyard the instant it was warm enough to do so. Excellent wine, very good food - not up in the delirious taste experience category of Ginja or Overture, but pretty darned good. The cook makes his own somewhat marvellous charcuterie, which we had for a starter. The dessert menu includes coffee with chocolate truffles, which is simply civilised when one has already overeaten. Also, it's beautiful, and was presenting seriously lovely cloud action, thusly:



Then we came home and watched The Middleman. The Ectoplasmic Panhellenic Investigation is gratifyingly rude about sorority sisters, frequently in wicked imitation, and in the Goofy Middlemisms department gives us "Ghosts of the living!", "by the eyeglasses of T. J. Eckleburg", "Great Caesar's ghost!" and "Holy Wachowski brothers!" Bonus points for ongoing Ghostbusters references, the Second Werewolf Administration, and the obligatory Star Wars quote: "Omega Theta Nu. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." Deliriously happy acronym-fu in the Bio-harmonic Universal Multi-Modular Emotional Rerouter. Love this show.

Good grief, it's October. Hate it when that happens. All sneaky-uppy on you. And, of course, spring, which means my eyes are perpetually scratchy and my nose itches. Wait, that's why I punched the last three students in the eye. Oops. On the upside, the city smells of new-mown grass, my garden is going "sproing!" in all directions, and I have the crazy impulse to read a lot of e e cummings, stat.

This week has been completely insane, made more so by the fact that I've been completely spaced for most of it. I'm suspecting that the culprit is some kind of low-grade virus, or possibly the rams. I seem to have been in a daze of either socialising, or cooking for same, since about Friday. You know it's a bit of a problem when you go to work to relax and catch up on the internet. (Don't tell the Dean).

I have, however, completely addicted the EL to The Middleman, he initiates watching sessions and sits there snerkling like a loon. (If loons snerkle. Actually, they so do - possibly more of a chortle, but completely demented). Episode 7 is "The Cursed Tuba Contingency", featuring the Bad Guy who is "basically Highlander, with a tuba". Goofy Middlemisms include "Great Barrier Reef!" and "Tropic of Cancer!", suggesting a sort of geographical theme, as well as "Sweet Molly Brown!". Bonus points for the Carpassian Hog Roach, random geeky acronym-fu on the American Shrimp and Crab Amalgamated Processors, and the chorused repetition of the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Yup, still love this show.

This city nearly washed away on Sunday. The new parking garage behind the Pick'n'Pay has clearly been designed by incompetent desert-dwellers who don't grok this weird Cape Town "rain" business, because it was about a foot under water when I tried to park there on Sunday afternoon. Either that, or aliens stole all their drains. I believe that Camps Bay and river-adjacent denizens had a really bad time of it, but even Main Road was interestingly ankle deep:



I loved it. I know floods are hell on the Cape Flats shanty towns, and I'm sorry for them, but excessive, exuberant rain makes me deeply happy.

Next up in Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic month is Sharon Shinn. I found her Twelve Houses series in the Evil Landlord's bookshelves, source of all that is self-indulgently pulpy, although these aren't, strictly. They're not stunningly original but are immensely readable: their fairly standard political fantasy setting has enough quirks to be arresting, and in fact serves as the giant disguise for a whole series of romances. The recent success of the paranormal romance category suggests that I am in fact not alone in having no objection at all to fantasy with a hefty dose of emotional and romantic angst leading to eventual happy endings, so it's all good. I also rather like the way she's handled the magic: I don't usually enjoy the Spanish-Inquisition-style persecution of magical practitioners, but the interweaving of that with feudal politics is nicely done and the magic itself is interesting.

In a nutshell: politics, romance, highly specific magical powers only partially understood, resulting in a lovely sense of exploration. Kick-butt riders, kick-butt mystics, spies, assassins, nasty bigoted moon-worshippers, giant evil-minded feline killing machines. Romance in the categories Giddy, Soppy, Forbidden, Cute, Sexy and Doomed. Rather endearing close-knit friendships and warrior bonds between practically everyone. Back rubs. Lots of aristocratic parties. More good names. Marlords and serramaras. Emotionally damaged underdogs. Neat, unrealistic and reasonably satisfying Happy Endings. Mostly.

Rain! It's been pouring down gently, in a harmonious, soaking sort of fashion, since yesterday. This is of course my fault: yesterday at around lunchtime I realised I hadn't watered my herb garden for days, causing the sage and vietnamese coriander to flop around like dying fish; as soon as I finished watering, the clouds blew over and the heavens opened. I am a small, localised, rather perverse rain goddess. Clearly.

Apart from the rain, other happy-making things that have recently arrived include (a) my mother, and (b) a completely unexpected and unsolicited copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, with no indication as to donor. I'm not sure if this is a slightly lateral birthday present, or if the person who borrowed my original copy has accidentally dropped it overboard or into the heart of a volcano or something, and uses this anonymous route to sort of not quite own up. Either way, thank you. I'll really get around to reading that now, promise.

Speaking of which, Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month! I shall now proceed to cheat. (This is somewhat traditional with these things, I fear). Lois McMaster Bujold should be known to most of you - if you don't read her Barrayar series of more or less postmodern space operas, you're missing out on a hell of a lot of fun. Her Chalion fantasy novels are not strictly a series, although the books are loosely connected - The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt have some characters in common but mostly what they do is explore the operation of a world under a particular religious system. The gods of Chalion are real, believable and fascinating in construction, permeating their world with a beautiful, rational logic. They're based around mother/father/son/daughter archetypes, each with their corresponding seasonal attribute and areas of patronage, and the fifth god, the Bastard, takes up anything that doesn't fit, an escape valve for all this over-determination. I'm madly atheist mostly because I've never found a religion that even faintly works for me on logical grounds; this one fascinates me because it does work, and the gods are meaningful, rational constructions who actually seem worthy of worship. Bujold's characters are as usual vividly drawn and generally likeable, or at the very least understandable; the adventures are tightly-plotted and provide interesting twists, and the politics is woven fascinatingly into the religious backdrop.

In a nutshell: gods, believers, disbelievers. Temples, demons, saints, ghosts, revenants, soldiers, diplomats, queens. Possessions, dispossessions, curses, battles, love stories, slavery, pilgrimages, madness. Giant ice bears. Soul transference. Random Chaucerian homages. Holy zoos. Personal growth. A religion that works. Did I mention the religion that works? Also, she's only written three of them, but admits that logically there should be five, one for each god. She's done the Daughter of Spring, the Son of Autumn and the Bastard. I await the other two with ill-concealed impatience.

Edited to add: Did I say it was raining gently? I lied. It's raining extremely, extravagantly, absurdly, like nine billion maids with buckets are pouring them out at once. I've just driven back from Hout Bay at a snail-like crawl, with red mud and water sheeting across the roads and giant, deceptively innocuous puddles in the corners. There were three cars stopped on the verge in Rondebosch, just after one particularly epic puddle through which all three of them had presumably dashed in a sheet of spray, thus watering their distributor caps nicely and causing the car to choke. Me, I remembered this possibility, and toddled decorously through the puddles, sternly repressing the three-year-old bit of me that wanted to make a splash. It's raining indecently. It's beyond excessive. It's making me incredibly happy.

I do love extended birthdays. Celebrations for mine this year started yesterday, owing to smoczek having the brilliant idea of using my birthday as an excuse to go back to Overture, which the Salty Cracker Club loved. So I was hauled out there for a birthday lunch with smoczek and maxbarners and the Evil Landlord and the friendly_shrink and her Internet Romance, now Internet Husband, and fed royally. Also wined a lot. You can do the Overture meal with wine by the course, and they give you a large glass of wine with each dish, impeccably tuned to the food, and fill it up if you ask. (Jo asked. Naturally). They are also remarkably understanding if you turn down the aforementioned impeccably chosen pairing, as I did, on the grounds that you can't stand muscadel and would rather have port, which they cheerfully supply.

The food was wonderful. The food is always wonderful. The waiter's mastery of the lifted eyebrow when Jo ordered pork belly for dessert was commendable. The company was perfect. Probably the best part of it all, though, was the view.



and:



and Jo, hauntingly backlit:



Memo to self: take mother there while she's visiting. It's the perfect excuse.

... on account of how the four-day weekend seems to have shut down every last facsimile of brain in my skull, leaving me just enough to read, play computer games, drink and cook huge meals (roast chikkin and a multitude of veg. for the jo&stv, also muchly booze and hilarity), but precious little in the way of coherent sentence formation. Instead, this is a sort of postcard. More dusky mountain shots.



The dawn/dusk setting on this camera is purple. Extremely purple. Be the evening never so red and gold, it'll record it as purple. I think it's a frustrated poet of the more torrid and indigo sort. Anyway, this shot courtesy of pulling up a red traffic light on the way to a supper date and saying to the Evil Landlord, who was driving, "aarghquickwindowquickgivemefullwindow!" while scrabbling in my handbag for my camera. (His automatic window controls are broken and can only be operated by the driver, usually to the accompaniment of manic, Evil Overlordian laughter. Never give full control to a German). The evening was sort of blue/grey, but the camera, despite the overly purple wash, has the soft, teased solidity of the cloud formations absolutely correct.