The stream of my consciousness

I don't feel like I have anything burning to write about today, or much motivation to write. These days come to us all, of course, especially when you're tired and have spent a lot of hours writing or editing already in a work capacity. It's inconvenient, when it falls in the middle of NaBloPoMo, but there it is.

One friend on Twitter suggested I write about what's for dinner, and the sort of food we eat. Pork chipolata sausages, orange mash (potato, carrot and sweet potato) and peas and corn, the answer to the first part, is hardly awe-inspiring. Fairly boring Anglo stuff with a slight twist to Indian and Thai cuisine is the answer to the second. Hmmmm. Not much of a post in that.

Another friend suggested I write about the role of romance in fantasy and science fiction, which is indeed an interesting topic and one I'll tackle at some stage this month, but not today, not today. It requires thinking through, and I'm not energetic or motivated enough to do the thinking, let alone the writing, today.

Maybe I should just ramble a bit. (Oh wait, I think I already did ...) What are some random things that I could say?

Well, we have an Indian minah bird that lives in our backyard who has a huge growth under its chin. The growth is the size of a chicken's egg - half the size of the bird itself - and we all find it weirdly fascinating. I don't know if it's a tumour or a goitre or what it is (do birds get goitres? does anyone know?) but it's clearly not fatal because this bird has been bossing around all the other birds in our garden for at least 9 months now, and aside from the thumping great Thing under its chin, it's the picture of health. I'm watching it harass another bird right now, in fact. I keep wondering if the growth bothers it at all, but there's no evidence that it does - it doesn't even seem aware of it, although it has to keep its head on a funny angle just to accomodate the damn thing.

I'm reading a wonderful but difficult book at the moment - Alexis Wright's Carpentaria. I'm reading it as part of the 99 Black Books Challenge and will blog a review when I'm done, but it could be a while - I keep having to take little breathing spells to let it settle. Still, it's easy to see why it was so acclaimed and awarded when it came it, it really is an exceptionally good novel.

My 4 year old gets hyper demanding when I don't instantly stop whatever I am doing on the computer to attend to her, except when I am working. How she can sense when I have stopped working and am instead blogging, or tweeting, or reading the news online, I have no idea. It's not even screen recognition, she can tell before she even gets within sight of me. She just ... knows. It's slightly disturbing, actually.

Is it just me, or do Peppa Pig and her family look pretty wrong for a kid's cartoon about talking animals? They don't really look like pigs, but they do look like ... [something else that starts with p].

So did you know there are only 40 days til Christmas? I just scared myself a tiny bit there.

The episode of Little Kingdom that my 4 year old is now watching has an industrial relations / class warfare subplot. I adore this with the fire of a thousand suns. "What's money for?" says the overprivileged rich royal kid. "I'm not really sure, dear, but the elves seem to like it!" says the queen. Bwahahahahaha :-)

We're into season two of The West Wing, finally, and I confidently expect that we will finish this show by 2015 or so. (OK, we're slow on the old TV viewing...) It's really good, isn't it? [says the most tardy bandwaggoner ever]

I think  might dribble to a stop there. I know, this wasn't fascinating. But I wrote, and therefore I win!

This is post 14 in NaBloPoMo. 14 down, 16 to go!