Not much to say about Friday-Sunday: I did laundry and worked at the Snail.

Monday was a day of visiting Mum, which included tasty curry, yet more laundry, cleaning out my old tax papers, a trip to Ikea where they were out of catalogues (!!!) but we managed to find her the ‘Billy’ cabinet for her books anyhow, then a tasty dinner out on the town with our friends Mae and Shot at ‘Wolfgang Puck’. Oh! And watching ‘Chased By Dinosaurs’, which Justin presented me with just before he took off to Thailand. It was brilliant, especially ‘The Giant Claw’ segment, where I met what I think is my current favorite dinosaur, Therizinosaurus, an amazing herbivore (Mongolia, 75 million B.C.) with enormous 28-inch claws on 10-foot arms. The ‘Sea Monsters’ section got too scary for me, though, so I had to turn it off and make more tea.

I also read some great comics while I was home, including this marvelous little wordless number with stick-figure illustrations called Van Helsing’s Night Off. It looks a bit like Edward Gorey but features subtle beer-based humour. My favorite find of the week was a very exciting French comic set in Paris in 1911, featuring pterodactyls and Agatha Christie-esque plots called Adele and the Beast. I also read two of the Max Hamm hard-boiled fairy-tale mysteries, which follow in the (cloven) footsteps of Philip Marlowe The Big Sheep and The Long Ever After. I’ve also stocked up with Bendis’s Jinx, Sergio Aragone’s Groo, and of course, the rest of Bone. I hope to have all of these, and several more including the Leave it to Chance and Remembrance of Things Past graphic novels, read by the time Justin returns. Speaking of…

I got plenty of lovely email from Justin this morning. He I know it’s gauche to celebrate togetherness in 30-day chunks once you are out of high school, but y’all can bite me: today marks my “two monthiversary” with the delicious JVL. Huzzah! He’s currently on the exotic island of Koh Samet relaxing on the sand and enjoying the sea. Sadly, he appears to suffer from some form of digital camera curse. His Fuji had mysterious focus issues before he left, so I gave him my Sony, which is apparently refusing to even *take* photos – on day three of his vacation! Poor Justin. I really don’t give two figs about the camera: it’s fully replaceable, but the photos are not.

After the four-day weekend, I am back at work, and bloody miserable about it. It’s rainy and cold and grey outside. It’s boring and cold and grey inside. The plants at my desk have all developed some form of infestation in the past three days, which isn’t spider mites, but doesn’t look like aphids either. As a test, I washed my needlepoint ivy in soapy water but to no avail. The leaves are already getting withered and the main stem has gone brown. Boo-urns. 🙁