So, totally buggered at the moment, but in fact surprisingly upbeat despite all the orientation panic, student angst and what have you. An anti-rant-list is apparently called for. Today, the following things are making me happy:

1. Holidays. Yesterday was a public holiday, for which I thank the saints fasting. I'm in that stage of mental shut-down which says that energy-wise I'm pretty much at the end of my tether - I did sweet bugger-all all day yesterday, it was luvverly. I have two weeks off from Friday, which is a half day owing to the staff party. I figure I'll just about survive, having carefully paced myself to this point.
   
2. Chocolate brownies. For my birthday this year sven&tanya gave me this incredible book called Chocolate Chocolate, full of recipes which require untold and unlikely quantities of the eponymous ingredient, and which are uniformly and unashamedly decadent and bad for you. (Eighteen different chocolate brownie recipes! good grief!) As a result of this I've actually learned to make decent brownies, which has mostly been a matter of subtracting 50^o from the temperature, fifteen minutes from the cooking time, and flinging into the recipe whatever the hell happens to occur to me in the way of extra chocolate, extra Lindt dark chocolate, extra cocoa, extra chocolate chips, extra vanilla, or extra random nuts or flavourings. The last batch was exceptionally edible, and I have three of them in a tin on my desk. The morning will be somewhat sugar-powered in addition to its usual Earl Grey fuel.
   
3. Recession. Yes, really. No-one has any money, everyone is doing the "ooh let's not do big presents this year!" thing, the shops are comparatively empty, and consequently Christmas is not bringing out my inner homicidal misanthrope quite as much as it usually does.
   
4. Supernatural. Season three is both darker and goofier (rabbit's-foot physical humour ftw), angsty!boys are angstier, but mostly I'm happy because last night's episode about fairy tale got the fairy tale bit absolutely right. Bonus accurate "Grimms' fairy tales were dark, twisty, violent and sexy" references from Sam, my current favourite geek in the whole wide world. Also, pleasingly perverse Christmas episode featuring caricatured 50s-style cheery suburban couples with a charnel house in the cellar.
   
5. My mother. She's in town. Life is better.
   
6. Cthulhoid wossnames. My Tor.com mailing list signup just gave me a totally unexpected early gift of the new Charlie Stross Laundry story, also with additional Cthulhoid Christmas perversion (the Filler of Stockings!). It'll go up on Tor.com next week, but if anyone really wants to read it earlier, mail me!
   
7. First trailer for Iron Man 2. 'Nuff said.

Now I go to herd academics, hand-hold devastated students and wrangle orientation photocopying. I wave a chocolate brownie mystically at them all.

I seem to have spent a lot of last night arguing with the head of department while trying to sign up for the correct Psychology courses to complete my major, with the intention of doing Honours and actually becoming a psychologist. The outstanding courses involve a lot of stats, so it's probably fortunate that at this point the unspecified saboteurs did their evil stuff and tinkered with the giant baroque fountain to connect it with the volcanic subterranean river so it spewed an enormous geyser of boiling water about a kilometre into the air, showering Cape Town with hot rain. I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something about my job. Also, I blame the comparative tameness of the imagery on the fact that I didn't actually get to see the Harry Potter film yesterday, since my mother was involved in baby-sitting duties and she wants to see it too. Maybe tonight.

I was for some reason in a very good mood for most of yesterday, as evinced by my tendency to wander around the faculty singing Belle and Sebastian to myself, while students and admin gave me funny looks. Today I'm wrestling with the labyrinthine improbabilities of Music degrees and am monumentally grumpy. On the upside, Sven&Tanya gave me an amazing giant book of chocolate recipes for my birthday, and I finally stopped vacillating between the 14 different versions of chocolate brownies sufficiently to actually try one out over the weekend. Music degree hair-tearing thus nicely leavened by copious application of Earl Grey and occasional interludes of chocolatey goodness (lovely recipe, but I have to learn the precise skill of undercooking brownies to leave them all moist in the middle. More practice clearly indicated.). Next up: the chocolate torte with swirled cream cheese topping, and the brownie recipe with bits of embedded nougat. Damn.

Oops. I just gave free reign to self-indulgence and bought myself the boxed set of the complete Twin Peaks TV series for Christmas. Possibly this is because my will-power is doing its usual thing, which is to curl up in a small, fluffy ball somewhere in my backbrain and decline to be stirred; alternatively, the fact that I've been fighting off Sid the Sinus Headache for two days may have caused me to feel entitled. New Year's Resolution: books, CDs and DVDs will be confined to a R200 per month budget for the duration of 2009. Unless, of course, they're necessary for academic wossnames, such as the complete works of Anne Radcliffe which arrived a few days ago (there's this Masters thesis I have to mark ...). Academia is a cloak under which I can conceal a multitude of crimes, in the manner of the Far Side cartoon with the gentleman smuggling a grand piano under his coat.

The rampagings of Sid have made the last couple of days a bit surreal, particularly since I'm still trying to finish the last few curriculum reports for work - a task made the more difficult not just because of the pounding head, but because the campus database has been having fainting fits all weekend. The last of the headache finally vanished this afternoon, something I'm inclined to attribute to the consumption of the French hot chocolate at the Kirstenbosch tearoom. It's a dark, thick, creamy sludge, bitter rather than sweet, not only perfectly suited to Cape Town's day of musing, retrospective rain but productive of a serious endorphin rush clearly sufficient to see off the persistently sadistic gnomes of sinus. I should see if my nice doctor will write me a prescription.

Actual time to post! Owing, mostly, to waking up ungodly early and wandering up to campus at 6.45am. The rest of the day is solid curriculum advice and wrangling academics, the new sport.

This made my morning. Teh Internets unleash random anarchic meme-activity on Scientology. In V-masks!

Also, because you're all very sweet and supportive of my narcissistic maunderings:

BUBBLING CHOCOLATE TAR-PIT DEATH!

Cake:
250ml flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
2 heaped tsp ground ginger
1 tsp chopped fresh ginger
180ml brown sugar
2 heaped tblsp cocoa
200ml milk
2 tblsp oil
100g chopped pecans or walnuts
100g chopped dark chocolate

Sauce:
250ml brown sugar
60 ml cocoa
350 ml boiling water
100 ml sherry or rum

Sift flour, baking powder, salt, ginger, cocoa; stir in sugar. Mix in milk, oil, fresh ginger, nuts, chocolate. Spread cake mix in oven-proof dish (I use a large, flat, squarish pyrex about 25cm across). Mix the brown sugar and cocoa for sauce, and sprinkle over the top of the cake mix. Pour sherry or rum over, and then boiling water. Bake at 350^o for about 45 mins, or until it resembles a chunk of cake floating in a pit of bubbling black chocolate tar. Eat, cautiously, in smallish servings, with cream or ice-cream.

You can also mess quite nicely with this recipe - for example, it works rather well to substitute grated orange peel for the ginger/ginger, and substitute orange juice and/or cointreau for some of the boiling water/booze.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was having a baby, by caesarian section, in a beautiful bedroom in a mansion somewhere, with the assistance of a nice doctor. No pain or anything, but halfway through I had the sudden thought that hell, I was going to have to share my bedroom with the baby, I really hadn't thought this through at all. Then I thought, no, wait, there's no way I'd randomly have a baby on my own given my circumstances, this is clearly a dream, upon which I woke up in considerable relief.

Eep! I shouldn't have raved so enthusiastically to jo about the motivating effect of the dinkly¹ little shaded boxes on a blog calendar, since now she's posting more frequently than I am. I have no idea why this engenders in me a vague sense of competitive wossname - possibly because I currently have nothing better to do. Also, weird dreams about jo last night - see below. I may feel a subliminal sense of ownership of her techno-jinx.

The Bowie-fixation has received a momentary check as I haven't acquired any new albums for a week or so, and am thus unable to indulge my impulse towards further contextualisation. Diamond Dogs should get here from Amazon this week, though. In the meantime I'm consoling myself with Duke Special, which makes me realise that quite possibly the Bowie-fixation is simply a manifestation of pervy piano-fancying.

V. tired today, not sure if this is the result of living it up with frog and mort last night (lots of excellent wine, made chocolate mousse, recipe here, mort; also forced the Evil Landlord to eat vegetarian food, heh) or random post-glandular wossnames again. It could also be the after-effects of being confronted this morning with the evidence that I hopelessly misadvised a student in a perfectly obvious way about six months ago. Depressing.

Last Night I Dreamed: I had to rescue the jo from the house next door (except it was just a garden, no house), and spirit her, several suitcases and all her children away in the dead of night before unspecified evil forces caught on. This entailed helping her pack the suitcases, which were all laid out on the bare earth and full of orange frilly costumes. I also had to evade and later attempt to run over the tall, thin, evil monkeys in the road outside, since they were the agents of the unspecified evil. I was driving a 4x4, somewhat inexpertly, and the monkeys were good at dodging. The loading-up process took forever, I'm not sure if we ever escaped.

---

¹ This was actually a typo for "dinky", but on mature reflection I think I like the portmanteau implications - "dinky" and "twinkly".

Today's discovery: Danish chocolate has long, skinny divisions instead of the more familiar A4-proportioned rectangles. I find this curiously disturbing. Only Toblerone has the right to funny shapes in a chocolate bar.

Courtesy of Neil Gaiman's inimitable nose for the weird, Iggy Pop's concert rider. I am enlightened to discover that a concert rider is the addendum to the legal contract with the venue which governs a band's performance: the rider tends to include details such as the number of bottles of Evian which shall be provided in the dressing room. The whole idea confirms my suspicion that rock stars need a dedicated aide whose job is to take the star's ego out back and shoot it when it gets too monstrous, but Iggy Pop's rider-writer is (a) extremely articulate, (b) extremely funny and (c) insane.

Spring in Cape Town is this sort of widely idiosyncratic vernal choir. Some of the oaks are shouting "GREEN!" quite loudly now, as opposed to their slower brethren, who state "Green!" quietly, but with conviction. A few die-hards are diffidently suggesting "green!" in a pale mist or scum, not unlike the top of the Evil Landlord's giant mutant jar of olives. Then there's always the small, mad, spindly tree by our front gate, which gives an excellent impression of being dead until about two months after everything else has broken into choral foliage, at which point it'll yawn, stretch and remark "Green..." in a sort of dark, lazy baritone.

I have not yet poisoned any pigeons or done in any squirrels, but given the frustrations of the week, it's been close.

I propose to draw a veil over the network of incompatibilities, misunderstandings, misleading documentation, trips to the computer shop and cuss words which have finally, a week later, resulted in me being able to type this on my very own computer, albeit one which still refuses to recognise a mouse of any sort. Cultural highlight: after an involved series of discussions about DDR RAM speed* with the computer shop, I innocently let fall the name of my Evil Landlord, who has been prodding various non-functional computer bits on my behalf, and who bought a new system at the same shop a couple of months ago. The nice oriental gentleman behind the counter immediately perked up and demanded whether the computer under discussion, which they'd just eventually upgraded and for which I had paid, belonged to the EL. Subtext: women can't own computers, really. They just hold them for their natural overlords.

In other news, this weekend I learned the arcane construction techniques of tiramisu. I was, of course, unable to contemplate the actual consumption of more than a bread roll and a small piece of chicken, but I'm told the concoction passed muster. I am still in that tragic and suicidal state where the contemplation of actual chocolate, or anything else actually fun to eat, makes me feel queasy. Next on my list of system upgrades: my body. (Except the arms, which are getting nicely muscular from lugging computers. It would be a pity to waste all that exercise).

* does RAM have speed? 200 vs 333? or is that power, or work, or energy, or something?

'Tis the season for random recipes. Ye gods, 'tis July. I cannot condone this helter-skelter promiscuity of the months, just lately, even if my Star Wars calender has just flipped over from June's images of Anakin Skywalker being petulant (new trilogy, ptooey) into the far more acceptable July collage of Luke and Han. But, since Scroob asked, and because I bear her no malice for her unaccountable alien marzipan fondness, there shall be culinary distraction from the wanton passing of time. ( Chocolate Pear Tart recipe lurks decadently within. )

Jo&stv came round last night and wantonly cooked a large Thai meal in our kitchen, a process auxilliary to the main point of the evening, which was getting our Friendly Psychologist drunk. (She's stressed about the immanent arrival from overseas of the other half of an internet relationship). Much fun was had, except that I seem to be labouring under some kind of weird virus which means I became heavily nauseous, with extreme room-spinnage, on two G&Ts. (This is absurd. I can hold my gin, usually in a large bottle cradled protectively to my chest.) I'm still feeling faintly ick, tired and achey today, which is annoying since this evening sees Part 2 of the FP Distraction Program, which is more gin, and Indian take-out, at her place. I may be a small, pale, quiet presence in a corner.

Despite quasi-viroid ickness, I did this day finally and utterly kill not only the 2500 words on Disney (with a stake through its heart, at a crossroad, with a rude inscription about consumerist manipulation on its headstone) but an additional 250+ on John Crowley (this one buried beneath a gallows in an alternate universe, with a small, enigmatic hieroglyph). How the hell my Nice Editor Man expects me to be definitive on Crowley in 250 words is utterly beyond me. Crowley's writing is dense, weird, literary, intellectual and rife with reference to folklore, mythology, fable and gods know what else. I'm still reeling from Aegypt and that was months ago, not to mention the complete quasi-Victorian folkloric rehash that is Little, Big. 250 words, tchah, I say! He got 317, and cheap at the price.

(Actually, the Nice Editor has just mailed me back to thank me for the entries, with a sweet little punning riff on the fact that they're "outstanding" - indeed, he says, outstanding in quality, not lateness. I preen.)

Today an unexpected number of things made me happy:

• Mike & Nikki came to dinner, bringing with them Mike's massive, 10cm-thick collection of Uncanny X-Men on extended loan. Too tired to crack it tonight, but am experiencing hopelessly fangirly eager anticipation. Dinner was fun, too, and entailed Thelma Chardonnay.
• I made a new, extremely decadent chocolate pear custard dessert thingy with chocolate pastry. And chocolate. It looked exactly like the picture in the recipe book. Am gratified.
• The nice gardener man washed my car. Go colonialism.
• The Shire political meltdown is showing signs of firming up and rediscovering the realm of sense-inspired adult interactions.
• Jo's game tomorrow, after more delays and put-offs than one would have believed possible.
• My headache stopped.

Simple pleasures are the best, after all.