I’ve dedicated my life to self-improvement.

Unfortunately this clashes head-on with the inexorable fact that I is a lazy ass who can’t be arsed doing anything but a half-arsed job. Unless it involves looking at a fine piece of arse.

I digress.

I like playing guitar. But I only ever learned enough in order to make some noise and not enough to actually play the guitar well.

I’ve written a little children’s book for my daughter, but I want to illustrate it as well. I’ve drawn two eyeballs for the story’s monster. That’s about it. That’s all the progress I’ve made in the past year and a half since I wrote the damn thing. Maybe she’ll get it for her 21st birthday …

I have a hunger for knowledge and I love to read. Non-fiction mostly. But I am a very slow reader these days and it takes me forever to get through one of those book thingies with pages and sentences and stuff.

I bought a book on speed reading to help me with this problem. I bought the book back in 2000. I’m still only about half way through it.

I also don’t possess a great mental thingee ... when you have to use it to ... think about stuff ... that prevents you from ... repeating stupid stuff. Mammary? Memory? Yeah, yeah, that's it.
So I got a book on memory techniques to help.

I can’t remember a single useful thing from the book (which I probably also didn’t finish), except for some remembering-people’s-names trick about matching up a person’s name with how they look.
But not too many people I meet are named Fuck Face, so it’s not really all that much help.

I also fear I’m a little dyspeptic. Or dyslexic. Which ever one of those isn’t related to indigestion.
At the last election I was meant to vote for the Left. But I got a little flustered when I went in to vote and got all mixed up and I think I voted for the Right instead.
They didn’t get in anyway, so phew.

I’m doing an early vote for the General Election today. All I have to remember is that I’m voting for hippies. Which ever party is the real smelly one. That shouldn’t be too hard …

New Fact:

Something I learned recently doing that whole reading thing was that Eskimos are actually make-believe creatures.

Basically, Abraham Lincoln had a hard job dealing with mass ghettoization of poor people in America in the 1860s, so his government came up with a clever way to deal with it.

He told the poor people about the existence of an Eskimoland up north somewhere, where the native Eskimos got to live tax free and eat all the whale blubber and baby seals they wanted.

People left America in droves.

Only when they got there, did they realise that Eskimoland was a frozen wasteland. Sure, there were whales and baby seals to club to death, but how easy is it to do that when your ass and hands are frozen solid?
Nor did they have the energy to return. So they simply made the best of a bad situation and made houses out of ice, which was pretty much the only building material available to them. It was also the only source of toilet paper available to them. Times sure were tough.

The people still living in Eskimoland today are the descendents of those poor pilgrims. They are also known as the Inuit, which translates from Old American as “Idiot”.

True story. I shit you not…

Following yesterday’s little office debacle where 30 or so of my company’s finest engineers could not work out how to change a light bulb, the chief player in the incident went away last night and obviously lost a lot of sleep over the ignominious outcome.

He stayed up all night putting complex calculations into a spreadsheet, and this morning he came in to have another go at changing that mother-flickering light bulb above his desk.

I’m amused to announce that this time he succeeded. But I helped rotate the ladder for him, so that probably had something to do with it.

I’ve just realised that all this worry I’m having about two-year-olds dropping birthday cake on my new $6K carpet is probably nothing in comparison to the sudden realisation that it is their clumsy parents that I really have to worry about.

We have friends famous for their “whoops there goes an expensive, irreplaceable plate/cup/glass/bowl and its contents all over your floor” escapades.

Then there’s my father who managed to smash a bottle of red wine on the floor of our first-ever house, just days after construction had finished and we had finally been able to move in.

Then there’s my own clumsy self who in recent times managed to spill a glass of red wine all over the old carpet. Thank god it was the old carpet, because my attempts at removing stains from carpet are very half-arsed indeed.

The weird thing? I was reading Sapphire's Drenched N Wine web-journal at the time…