This is what is happening here tonight

If you were wondering

Attentive readers might have noticed that I've taken to only blogging every other day. This is because I keep finding myself without anything interesting to say, and then the following day thinking "Well, I can't go two whole days without blogging, I'd better say something!" I'm going to get out of this habit, one way or another. Anyway, tomorrow my brother's coming to stay, so I'll either have something to blog about or be too busy to blog, we'll just have to see.

Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

He could only eat Swedes.

I think that's a completely groovy joke, because it's exclusively English - as far as I know, there's no equivalent in other languages, and you can't even tell it to Americans, because they think swedes are called 'rutabagas' and Swedes are called 'foreigners'. It's actually easy to tell swedes from Swedes, even if you're English, because swedes are nasty-tasting vegetables that nobody likes, while Swedes are awesome people who everyone likes, and who organise memory competitions!

So, please everybody come to the Swedish Memory Open on September 25th and 26th - see the bilingual website here for more details. I will... probably be there. I hope so, anyway, because I've not been able to go to Sweden for one reason or another the two times I've been invited there in the past, and I'd hate to miss this one too. And I'm sure it's going to be a whole lot of fun for everyone! Twenty non-Swedish competitors is the limit, apparently, first-come-first-served, so sign up fast! (Well, I'm not sure that there will be too many more than twenty non-Swedish people who want to join in, but you never know. It couldn't hurt to sign up fast anyway...)

I would wear my lucky Swedish socks, but they've got holes in. I wear through socks fast, because of my extremely long toes and funny-shaped ankles.

It's a real dilemma

Do I move my desk from the spare room into my bedroom? See, my brother's coming to stay for a while on Friday and I have a hare-brained scheme that I can employ him as a live-in slave-driver and make him force me to spend an hour or so every evening doing memory training. But if I have to go into his bedroom to do that, it probably wouldn't work, and it'd certainly smell funny. So I think the only alternative is to move the desk and turn my bedroom into a bedroom-cum-study like a poor student would live in. But moving the desk is tricky, because I put it together myself and skimped on nails and screws, so it's basically just a few pieces of wood balanced on top of each other, and I would almost certainly drop one of the pieces on my foot and fracture one or more of my toes. My toes are extraordinarily long, you see, and so they're basically everywhere, so if anything falls on the floor, anywhere in the world, it lands on my toes.

Of course, my brother, who's an artist, would probably also like to have a desk in his bedroom while he's staying here, but hey, he'll just have to put up with it. I mean, I'm giving him free room and board just because he lives in China and has to come back home to sort his visa and things out, how dare he demand desks from me too? The big ingrate. He can just use the kitchen table. Or, since I've only got one chair and I'm taking that into the bedroom too, on second thoughts he can just sit on the floor and draw. That'll teach him. Just as long as he doesn't drop his felt tip pens on my toes while I'm busy memorising in the next room.

Dreams

I woke up early this morning because I needed to inscribe two magic words on the floor of my living room before the sunlight reached them. Then I realised that that was a dream, so I went back to sleep. Or rather, I tried to go back to sleep, but I was too preoccupied with trying to remember exactly what these magic words were meant to achieve and what was going to happen if I didn't inscribe them. Sadly, I still have no idea.