I haven't had a spare moment for ages to post things that have been happening IRL, and now it's all building up, madly, until I have two lives - no, three, no four: bloggable, unbloggable, secret, and anecdotal. Time to do a mass catch up.
To recap, the strange, inexplicable occurrence of A Life caused a warp in the blog-time continuum, rectified only slightly by the acrostic worm hole of a post on my first evening off for ages.
Sleeping too much again has had a lot to do with it; I can't count the number of nights I've had to pass out utterly cream crackered at about six or seven o clock lately. Thank christ I have next week off and not a single thing to do, not even for fun. Heaven.

Movies have been fun, but somehow I've been stuck on the letter M. I noticed that I tended to veer towards the end of the alphabet, mostly out of panic when wandering round alphabetically stacked video shop shelves. But lately it's been Mona Lisa Smile, Mystic River, Master and Commander. I've tried repeatedly to see 21 Grams, as my best film for the past two years was Amores Perros, by the same director, but it's not even alpha, that, it's numeric, so the dice is against me so far.
Yeah, Mystic River was okay, but 'M' movies are pretty ropey - two bags of crap aren't really balanced out by one mediocre. And who does Sean Penn think he is, with that embarrassing Al Pacino pisstake he's been dining out on of late?


Farting is my new secret hobby. Farting horribly. Full of beans and fruit. Mind you, I'm awful regular. Mr Kellogg would be proud.
Upset stomachs aren't the source of the - ahem - 'high fibre provision' my water system is having to cope with, though. For some reason every month I have a stronger period than previously. There's a respite every three or four months, when it's just heavy, but jesus crikey frig, man, when it's not, then twenty minutes is all it takes for my womb lining to rip through any type of non-drip barrier. Think of the creature's acid blood in 'Alien'. Mmm-hmm. That's about right.
City of Culture? Birmingham? City of weirdo acid flashbacks, more like. Have you seen that new attempt to make the old bullring's admittedly supremely shitty 800 year old market site into a Gaudiesque work of art? They've created a miniature city where once stood a shitty bus station - you think you're in a shopping centre, and you see the street outside, but there are still four floors beneath you, two of which lead to streets outside. The whole thing is a little spiral city, winding over on top of itself to fool you into thinking any directions are simple. Once you've looked straight on at the silver monstrosity, your eyes stay crossed for a good ten minutes, slowly uncrossing, which doesn't help. It's not just my bad sense of direction, either. Believe me, we asked several locals how to get to the mainline rail station two minutes away and got about fifteen different directions from all of them. None of which were right. And if they're going to build winding streets in mid air, why build them all on a constant incline, so that, still bug eyed from looking at the eyesore, you permanently wonder if you're falling upwards off the pavement at a forty five degree angle?
Keeping my wits about me is hard enough in Birmingham as it is, already, after an unfortunate incident about nine years ago, when, while staying there with fmc, I raided her fridge for what I thought were tasty cookies and spent the next eight hours fingering street signs in the Bullring, asking people in lifts if the lift was real, going into bookshops to count how many books they sold, etc. I remembered my own name sat in the front seat of a car somewhere on the M4 several hours later. Brrrr.
I've fallen off the wagon three times in the last fortnight. I drank in the pub with Yidaho, with the result that: we forgot to go see 21 Grams, I started to find short fat middle aged Iranians fascinating conversationalists, and we ended up in the same old same old local bar at three am, eating chips and flinging wine about. The hangover was like a bloody hurricane, lasted for two days solid. And what did I learn from this?
Nothing - the Friday after, I drank three glasses at a work do, then spent the rest of the weekend getting trashed in Birmingham, being chatted up by overly short fat middle aged Britishers*.
God I'm so off booze now. The hangovers were rank. Staying off it by choice, not coercion, this time.

Been blogging elsewhere in secret. Which has been fun. Not so I can bitch - heck I'd have to actually bother speaking to people I dislike to do that, but just because I wanted to try a 'topic blog'. I have a total of 8 visitors over there now, compared to the 150 a day here. Four of them were me, two were wrong numbers, and one was a referral from 2001, bizarrely. Hah. I offer two free cats, slightly naughty, to the first person to find where. (As if.)
Lousy daughter, that's what I was on mother's day. I had the great idea of going to visit my parents, hanging out, relaxing and stuff, and taking some yumlicious stuff as a present. As it turned out, I rolled in six hours late, passed out asleep as soon as I'd eaten, didn't wake for another fourteen hours, ate all the food in the house (which my mum had to then cook for me), then slumped in a sad hungover stupor on the sofa till it was too late to do anything but go home again. If there ever was an inheritance, it's yours, Sue, after that. The shame!
Only my lazy-lousy-daughter plans were thwarted (jebus, that's nearly a poem - well, okay, a limerick) by yet more bloody terror alerts on the railways, trying to get home. Stuck for two hours in a siding somewhere just west of Paddington station, we listened quietly to the driver's scarily descriptive 'information bulletins' about the two abandoned packages on platforms 2 and 9, and texted people. It was the same train that smashed into another in a fireball several years back. Although fourteen years of living in London makes you pretty immured to bomb threats, this was the first time I can remember since 1992 (when a car backfired, and everyone in Russell Square threw themselves flat to the ground - don't know many European countries where such a response would have been as instinctual before 9/11) that I noticed genuine fear in the saucer shaped eyes around me. Everyone was pretending to be irritated and disgruntled at the delay, but their eyes told a different story - told the driver to take as long as he liked, just get us home in one piece. Freaky.
Greek food frenzies, though - mustn't forget the Greek food frenzies. A chance comment on the blog led to Krystal frighteningly generously offering to come get me from work in her under used chariot, collect my dirty smalls, and go wash them at her house while she cooked me a smorgasbord of Greek delicacies to satisfy the idle fantasies that reading 200 pages of 'Middlesex' (a greek diaspora epic type thingy - you know, long, full of greek things) had infected me with. Bloody hell, I could hardly walk after that.

(*with apologies to Lux!)