CANBERRA: Yip yip yippidees! Big day for we of the Antipodes; Payton L. Inkletter hopes we remain laid back, warm, generous, self-deprecating, direct.

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

In other news…

26^th January 2009:

Monday: Happy Australia Day to all my fellow Aussies, and pretenders!

Eye strained from all the CRT computer screen staring while I recorded, trimmed, and spliced the Arcanum story, deep vein thrombosis aided and abetted, I was glad to get outside and do a cowboy watering of the bamboos, and a tad of tying back, especially of the damaged (kinked) large oldhamii culm of my misadventure. I tied it in five places to a mature neighbour, kissed it better, apologised to it, and will hope for the best, but the wind will so bend the neighbour that I don’t know what to expect for the brittle young one.

A warm day, humid, but much better than yesterday, so this will help those hundreds of thousands of bravehearts or fools, take your pick, who sit around the foreshores of Perth city for hours in advance in the searing sunshine to secure the best vantage points for tonight’s skyshow. But then I did a tad of such for Baby Inkletter decades ago…

Pa pree Inkletter and Umple Daffyd arrived before noon to have a lunch with us, and we watched at the same time a tad of telly before I had to retire to the bedroom to get some badly needed sleep.

Which I did, and when Missus Inklealabasterdragon woke me at nine o’clock she disturbed some unusual dreams I was having, involving hills, ocean, waves of chalk and sea water, icy caverns, myself riding to these strange places on a bicycle, and much more I don’t recall. She and Pa pree were watching a free to air movie, and to the south the Skyshow thunder began for its half hour of glory, while I attended to my painfully slow ablutions and waking up procedure. No joking, the waking up can take three hours and be so tiring I feel like I need to go back to bed! The time needed for my ablutions are something of legend about these parts, but rugged beauty can’t be hurried, or can it?

I took a gamble and began the long slow upload – it took almost an hour – of the Arcanum story to my 4shared.com account, all 70+ Mb of it, having listened to less than half of the spliced version looking out for glitches which my iRiver machine regularly puts into it when recording – momentary dropouts of my voice – not to mention my own errors. If it’s got any bloopers too big, I’ll fix them up, and upload again, deleting my first upload. Janny and I hope to listen to the whole story through the TV later after I return Pa pree home, and she’ll hear it all for the first time, not even having read any of it, and I’ll get to listen for errors and glitches. Janny comes in for a bit of flack in the story, so I hope I get through it all with my manhood and marriage intact.

Most every week, sometimes every day, I find some new skin blemish appearing from my mad youth sizzling in the Australian sun all day every day without protection, not even a hat. That is one thing I would change in a flash about my physical living if I had my time over again – I’d take the sun very seriously indeed, and cover up assiduously, as I do nowadays, fifty years too late.

I took Pa pree home about half eleven, and had a meal watching a pre-recording of an episode of Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby with Janny, not being able to get our useless Panasonic DMR ES15 DVD Recorder to play the mp3 of the Arcanum story I spoke of earlier. I later converted it to a wav file, and will try again through the telly on the morrow, as an audio CD, for Janny’s sake.

I meanwhile put the combined file back onto my iRiver T10, and went for a nice long walk and listened to the whole thing, and was pleasantly surprised at how few machine caused glitches there were, and at how my own mess ups were bearable, some even adding to the effort. I found it funny, and I hope you do to.

I was surprised too by how little hoonery was going on on this late Skyshow evening of Australia Day, but the large amount of littered booze bottles, spirits and beers, did not escape my notice. There were a few more cars on the road, but not so many. And the overnight temperature was very reasonable for late January.

On my return I added links to the Arcanum audio file from the main site, and generally titivated and tweaked this and that to do with it. Just the full story text now remains to be uploaded to the Arcanum story posting. If I get this finished tomorrow night, I’ll then email Duncan Moon and let him know it’s all finished now, a mere three months or so after I asked him whether he would mind if I wrote a funny story about his beautiful Arcanum artwork.

Very very late I hit the sack, but it took me a very long time to fall asleep.

+paytontedwithlove+