Today has been mildly productive for me. I spent
fifteen minutes filling out a survey with false answers in order to obtain some Treasure Madness Museum Dollars. Finally I finished it, which prompted the following message: 'Thank you for taking the time to answer our survey. Would you like to offer any additional feedback?' Yes. I would like that very much, so I typed in 'you are gay' and now I am not allowed to take any more surveys from that website. But I still got my Museum Dollars!
I went to see my supervisor today about my book. I am still struggling with my research question - in the Creative Writing Ph.D you can't just write a book, you've got to include a 40000 word exegesis too, which is basically a theoretical/analytical essay that accompanies the creative work. I had to do one in my Honours year as well, albeit only 5000 words, and I had such trouble with it that my son Angus thought it was a kind of monster I was trying to conquer. He would march around the house shouting 'Exo-Jesus smash!' Anyway, by the loosest of definitions my research topic is Australian humour - now I've just got to work out a specific question within that field, and I've got to do it by March of next year, which is when I will be doing my research proposal. I was actually supposed to do it last year but pregnancy and childbirth and illness have all played a part in delaying it.
From where I'm sitting I can hear the magpies warbling in the gum tree outside. We just moved here about a month ago and already I have come to a startling conclusion: all the animals in Woodcroft are f**ked up. Seriously! These bloody magpies can't tell the difference between day and night, then we've got the mad cows who live across the road - they don't moo like normal cows, they moo like me mooing like a cow. And when I moo like a cow, people tend to give me a wide berth and look at me sideways as if to wonder why I haven't been locked up yet. (Because Mr Rann decided to build a tramline extension instead of putting more funds into mental health. Boom tish.

) Lastly, there is a bizarre chicken that lives next door to us; it spends most of its time climbing up a pole on to the shed roof, then flying back down to the ground. In all other respects it is a normal chicken; it clucks and has all its feathers and struts around jerkily like Pinocchio on crack. But it climbs. And it flies. And I really don't know what to make of that but I think it's pretty awesome and I hope my cat doesn't eat it.
