SWAN VIEW: Payton L. Inkletter proposes to move desperate polar bears to Antarctica, and showed how to catch one by putting salt on its tail – dinkum!

In other news…

19^th January 2009:

Monday: I cleaned up the kitchen for Janny, and Baby Inkletter called in and had lunch with her, so it was nice to catch up – I planned not to eat (other than a nibble) until this evening after taking Bob out. I eventually was functional enough to go to Guildford to get him and take him by train to Perth city for his one in four outing.

The city was reasonably busy. The skyline is dominated by cranes these days, from the wealth of the pre-financial crash days last year, and every time I visit there are several more storeys added to fractures on the skyline. We did a different thing today: we got all the usual freebies and costies that Bob likes, except in different places, other than his Express paper, and even caught a different CAT service to finish the day, the yellow one, and my how East Perth has developed in the four or five or so years since I last was up that way! We spoke to my diminutive neighbour Prem in King Street, who thought he knew Bob, but he’d confused him with Peter of Kenwick; I walked past the infamous Julian Grill in Hay Street, who eyeballed me looking every bit a nervous and greatly harassed man. While in the city we ducked into 78 Records where I ordered Emmylou Harris’ ‘Cowgirl’s Prayer’ album, which means I now am looking forward to two CDs coming hopefully soon, for I ordered Alison Krauss’ ‘Lonely Runs Both Ways’ album online from JB Hifi back about the eleventh of this month. I cannot remember the last full price CD I bought for myself, and now I have two coming – yippee! And such quality both albums contain!

I mailed a birthday card to our dear niece Alice from town, at the Wellington Street Bus Station in fact, so I hope it arrives tomorrow; she will be a mere 31. She was a babe in arms less than two weeks old when she and her mum, my dear sister Mary, saw me off on the Indian Pacific in ’79 to Sydney then Queensland for 19 months.

On the way home, about half seven p.m., I called at the local Dewson’s and got four more slabs of the UHT milk sposhull, and a jar of the newfangled green blend Nescafe coffee antioxidant palaver malarkey stuff – ‘Greenblend’ –to try, also on sposhull. Janny did make a cup of it for me after tuck tuck, and it was very nice; you’d be hard pressed to know it wasn’t one of the normal nice instant big bad coffees. So what with that and my almost daily unsweetened – gggrrr… – 4 heaped teaspoonsful cocoas which I now imbibe, I’ll never die… what’s that noise? Aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh…splat!!

So yes, Janny gave me a pile of lovely nosh, then delivered nosh to Pa pree and spent nearly an hour with him, bless her fishnets. I was so whacked I stayed in front of the box till about nine, then had a nap till a bit after ten, when I watched most of ‘Made in Chicago…’ on Aunty about Barack Obama, before another short nap, before Letterman, with Janny, on which he featured his last ‘Great Moments in Presidential Speeches’, as well as his tribute to the same. (I am in two minds about the enormously great degree of ridiculing of George W. Bush: he portrays himself often as a bumbling idiot, while doing a lot of harm, and so is fair game to lampoon; he is the highest office holder of an important nation, and his standing and the USA’s standing is certainly suffering due the intense comedic focus. But then even I have ridiculed him on my main site, now in my Visitors’ Book Celebrity Archive.) It was good to see Arj Barker do a tad of stand up. By the end of all this I was onto my third white comforter to ease my headache pain.

Today has been much cooler, thankfully. I went for a late walk, after half two a.m., I don’t know how, but my need for exercise outweighed my exhaustion. Some folk are a bit slow to get it it seems: a young adult son of a neighbour a few houses down the street happened to be walking up the street across the road with some other folk, and saw me putting on my walking shoes under my front patio in preparation for my walk, Sekim, or some such spelling, who would have to be about 20 or more, and called out “Hi Payton!”. Now there wasn’t a breath of breeze, you could hear a pin drop, and he’s calling out at half two in the morning. I quietly called back, wincing, but it’s a wonder I didn’t wake Missus Inkletter up, with the bedroom window open and curtains up for ventilation and cooling. He probably disturbed half a dozen homes’ sleeping occupants, given that it’s summer, warm, and windows are open. Discretion would stay one’s normal desire to call out a greeting at that hour of the day, one would think. This fellow happens to be the extremely forward youth of some years ago, whose forward manner I grew instantly to find very repellent, yet after all these years I’m still popular enough with him to be greeted for some reason.

I spent quite some time after my return uploading ‘In other news…’ entries on the new page of that name, and researching with Google more blogger improvements and workarounds, but they all look as time consuming and fraught as they always have.

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