Sunshine and sponges

It's almost warm in Melbourne today...almost mild might be a better description. The sun is out and doing its best to raise the temperature about 14 degrees. It might even have succeeded.

The ornamental pear in front of my house is blooming, the jonquils are showing just-about-ready-to-go bulges and star flowers are peaking through. Spring is heading our way. My favourite time of year. Anything seems possible in Spring. And I also get the insane urge to clean and organise. Gotta stop watching Nate on Oprah.

I took advantage of the sunshine to wash my car. You may remember my adventure to the Dandenongs a few weeks back. Well, that drive left my poor little Squeak looking like he'd been offroading for months. They got them some good sticking gravelly sandy dirt in the Dandenongs. Of course, because my car is dirty, we have had very little rain in the last few weeks (given the water restrictions I only wash my car a few times a year if possible, in between he survives on rain baths and rubbing off the dust with a nifty microfibre moppy thing) and the little kid who comes round every few weeks trying to gouge me $10 to wash my car is nowhere to be seen. He's got a good thing going on that kid, in my day I got probably something like $3 to do both cars. And ours were grubby being country cars). Of course, he doesn't get to have the fun we did having water fights because of aforementioned water restrictions.

Given that fate was not coming forth with clean up Squeak solutions, I decided to do it myself. Which lead me to two discoveries. One, my hose attachment is on its way to the great garden in the sky - it will only let me do dribble or wimpy spray, the trigger requires great amounts of jiggling and two of the four settings don't work at all. Something to rectify on my next trip to Bunnings. The other thing is not really a discovery, more a continuing mystery. My front hub caps. The rest of my car is coated in sandy coloured grime, the back hubcaps are mildly dirty with the same stuff but the front hub caps, particularly the little indented bits were absolutely coated with dark brown goop. This happens all the time. The rest of the car can be spotless and the front hub caps grow goop that looks like Squeak has been swamp trawling. Weird. Not sure how you design hubcaps that do that, but well done to Ford. I'm sure it has something to do with physics. And physics and my brain don't get along. Whatever. I shall chalk it up to "things mysterious" along with "who is it who makes my house get messy when I am working ridiculous hours and barely there" and "why do fancy mag wheels look like they're spinning backwards when the car is going forwards" (if there's some easy obvious answer to this I'm sure it's to do with physics/optical illusions again but you know...it's weird).

So there you go. Housework mostly done, a clean shiny car and the cheque to pay for the RWAustralia conference next week posted and really, I'm running out of excuses to not sit down and work out what's going on with the structure of my book. You'd think Virgo Brains would like that stuff. But apparently this one doesn't. It likes composing lists of things to take to conference and things to buy so they can be taken to conference and things to put on the lists-I-must-write list (at this point we shall pause while Keri shakes her head at me and the VT nods in agreement) but timelines and acts and arcs are making it go "do I hafta?". Go figure.

And by the way, the answer, dear brain, is YES. Or maybe I can clean my microwave and see if the stuff I bought based on the TV ad really does work.....