Well, it's a quarter with five in the morning.

Or is it "a quarter of five"? Anyway, it's a quarter to five, and that's oh-dark-early, as they say in the military, in their precise fashion.

I've got a big day of writing ahead and I'm just tidying up/procrastinating before I get started.

I mean a BIG day of writing. Bigbigbig. Like twelve thousand or don't bother.

It's going to get a bit random, I think, but I'll keep writing until I stop.

Yesterday was a day out at the cork forest. Biggest cork forest in the Southern Hemisphere, did you know that? I took BailiCumber along.

Gotta say that my camera case is really fiddly. Pulling the camera in and out to take a photograph is a real pain.

But it was interesting to see the cork oaks up close, watch the demonstrations of harvesting, see the dancing, listen to the music, release a book.

Later on we went up to Dairy Farmers Hill, which has pretty much been closed since the bushfires. John Mackay (ACTEW head) was up at the top, explaining how the aboretum is going to look. Last time we were there - years ago - the place was wall to wall pine trees. Most of them gone now, you can see clear to Stromlo where once it was all pines. Poor old John was having to deal with what looked like a co-ordinated effort by ecoNazis to give him a hard time. The sort of people who think we should have nothing but Australian species in Australian cities. Yeah, like cities are a natural feature and homo sapiens a native species.

Geez, you gotta wonder about some people. We can't stuff all the damage and extinction back in the bottle and bring back the Tasmanian Tiger, the diprotodon, the fucken dinosaurs. But we can understand and manage, and with exotics like oaks and elms, it's not exactly difficult to control them in a planned environment. Willows drifting down rivers and taking over the banks, sure that's a pest. Cane toads and European carp, even blackberries. But plane trees on a city street? I hope these buggers choke on their birkenstocks.

Ah, some people shit me.

Anyway, gotta get on with it.

Panamaniac

It's been a while since I watched the Panama Canal webcam. A friend of mine has pointed me in the direction of a compilation of stills - a week of activity stitched into eleven minutes. Amongst the stream of Panamaxes shuttling through, there's a few liners and a couple of yachts. But mostly you get the idea that modern ships are ugly ugly ugly.

My son's final day of school today. It wasn't that long ago I used to walk him to and from, holding his chubby little hand. ***SIGH***

Next year he's off to college, maybe university afterwards.

More on the Mouse

Walked into the kitchen - I'm chain-drinking coffee/tea in this enormous Microsoft mug at the moment - and spotted some mouse action in a corner of the bench. It seemed to be hiding under the electric griller.

I didn't go anywhere near it until I'd covered up all of the hotplate coils with saucepan lids and constructed a barricade along the edge of the sink. And made a trap out of an empty cardboard box temptingly dark.

And then I startd disassembling the griller and putting the bits on the floor.

Took off the glass lid OK.

Lifted up the body of the thing and there was the mouse hiding in the base. Suddenly exposed, it made a dash for freedom while I had the heavy main body in my hands, avoided my cardboard box and got stuck in the barricade - an old glass beer jug.

I cleared away the griller and tried to capture the mouse, but it evaded me again, evaded my cardboard box and lost itself in the rubble at the far end of the bench.

Still, it was now a long way from freedom or at least refuge in the oven and my rows of defences were intact.

I gradually cleared away the stuff at that end of the bench - biscuit tin, old chocolate tin, mesh bag of mandarins and so on, and then I spotted a mouse tail sticking out from between the apples in the fruit bowl.

Opened the door, picked up the fruitbowl, walked out, closed the door, set the bowl down near Kerri's flower garden and began removing pieces of fruit.

Eventually, there was just this big ole bowl and a very plump and prosperous mouse, trying to climb the steep ceramic sides.

Heh.

And then with a final urge, it scrabbled up the slope, leapt into the flowers, and was gone, a brown little body against the earth and shadows under the leaves.

Perhaps I should have gone for my camera at some stage, but I was afraid that if I took my eye off it for a moment, it would have escaped.

My target for tonight

is 25 000 words. If I can do that, then I should be able to get the job done. If I can keep going at the same pace,

This will get me to the crisis point in my main thread, and a very difficult chapter in my secondary story. The flashback is probably fairly straightforward.

I'm toying with the idea of expanding the London story. Really, it began as just a few paragraphs, but it expanded into Al meeting Dee and i realised that I could supply a lot of the material without a lot of effort.

Maybe it's worth a fourth string of chapters, but probably not. I might write the material anyway, just for the numbers.

The story has changed quite a bit from the outline I gave to bookczuk six months ago. It's the same in general terms, but there have been some fundamental changes in direction. In fact I've only just worked out some fairly substantial passages.

I'll have to go back and rewrite to make it all hang together, but that's something for December.

And I'm going to turn off skype and IM for the next two days. No offence, but I can't afford the distractions.

Oh yeah. "As Time Goes By" came randomly up - sung by Jenna, so I put her into the story. There's also one or two things from Manly Books.

Raining outside. Funny, it started off clear and pleasant, and the forecast was "mostly dry". It mostly lasted until I could fetch in the washing, so that's a blessing, but I was planning a run this arvo and that hasn't happened. Won't now.