A throw pillow bursting into flames

One minute you’re pottering around idly, the next minute you’re pimping your dad to your blogpals. And then, deciding definitively last night, in the hope of banishing insomnia, that I would get back to editing my novel manuscript, I dreamed that story written by Sarah in her Leto days (according to my dream), called “In Lieu”, had won a Northland literary prize for which I wanted to compete. A search under “in lieu” reveals these posts, one of which contains the phrase “I may just have dreamt that”.

I hope making so many citations doesn’t qualify as blog-pimping!

It was a blogless weekend in harvestbirdland, not due to the failure of technology, but rather to the immanence of housekeeping. But now my carpets are vaccumed, my floors wet-mopped, the dogs’ bedding Softly-fresh, and my shoes shined, getting rid of the cooking stains on at least one pair of boots. And I de-pooed the lawn, a disagreeable but necessary task (and one much more unpleasant in winter, when the melting frost makes things extra mushy and stinky).

Whether in response to this modest ordering of my surroundings, today was the first Monday since term began that I didn’t feel as if my brain was being squeezed out of my skull under pressure of new routine. Maybe this was as a result of not sleeping much last night; today I drank two trim flat outs (that’s a cheap man’s flat white–mostly hot water) and nothing happened, whereas normally even one is enough to increase rapidly my giggle-to-serious-utterance ratio.

There was also the small matter of the bomb scare today, in which a pipe-in-explosive-disguise saw much of the campus roped off. Security guards helpfully telling students to go home and not come back rather diminished my class numbers, while outside more than one staff member was heard to say, “at least they left it in the right place” when told just where the fake bomb was idly lying.

When told by a student that some librarians in the library’s upper levels had freaked out, I wondered whether they were part-time staff who hadn’t been briefed: it’s emergency evacuation season at the moment and we thought it might all be a drill. Dozens of police roaming the campus put paid to that idea, although, as I said to Bill, where you’ve got a hundred police, your chances of finding at least one who’s really a stripper are surely a little higher than normal. (Maybe the coffee did have an effect, since there’s not even specious logic in that statement).

I keep coming back to the even more bizarre fact of actual destruction that recently took place nearby, which is to evoke the tornado that cleared at least one Greymouth street of its pesky burden of houses and householders last week. I can’t imagine it, the combination of a ten-second tornado and the limpid torpor of the West Coast. It’s the weatherly equivalent of a tree fern suddenly emitting radioactive beams, or one’s grandma’s throw pillow bursting into flames. Other regions might scream and bewail their fate; the homeless coasters simply looked slightly puzzled.

I will have no more weekends for housework for a while and feel a little overwhelmed at the thought of all the recreation coming my way: next weekend on the farm with Mariella, then Dunedin & Middlemarch over Easter with Gladdie, then, for two weekends after that, Melbourne with harvestbro. Come May my teaching load will more than double for six weeks, and there’ll be no non-teaching time till September. I hate only having the schedule to take my break before the year’s really begun, especially with a five week first term. As one who sees no shame in eating dessert before one’s main course, that’s saying something.