My new telly cabinet from the Swedish Beast. For my telly, on which to sit. I have to keep looking at it because my eyes love, love, love its redness. And shinyness. It's just so.... red!

I got heckled by some old guys on a park bench today. They called me something in another language which sounded, to my ears, like a feminised version of 'prosciutto'. Could be entirely innocent, but I can't help but suspect that I have been likened to purchasable meat of some variety or another. Mmmm, dry and salty. 

String of brash expletives. Apparently I am plagued by gremlins at present. My wallet went walkies yesterday (my head aches at just the thought of all the running around and card replacing and money-borrowing) and today I've lost my work pass. Now I can't get into or around the building. The second one I've lost in a year. Idiot.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Knew I shouldn't have got out of bed today. Or yesterday, it seems.

I have a little theory about why folks often screw up their faces in disgust when they see a picture of themselves. The funny thing is that often their friends will love the picture, but the subject just hates it. "But I don't look like that!" they protest.

All of us have facial asymmetries of one kind of another. I have various spots and moles and so on, but I know that my left eyelid is lower than the right, especially when I'm tired, so it look a little droopy. According to Just-So-Story-telling evolutionary psychologists, asymmetry is ugly because it is an indirect marker of low fitness. (Evolutionary fitness, not jump-around-in-aerobics-fitness.) Personally I've always liked kinda wonky faces and I find them appealing and interesting... but I've never claimed to be anything but an evolutionary dead end.

Anyway. Asymmetry. So when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we become accustomed to our uneven features and they are no longer prominent or oft-noticed. However a photograph shows our faces as they appear to others, not a reversed mirror image, so we see our asymmetries not only swapped to the other side, but effectively exaggerated due to the cognitive adjustments we've already made that permit us to ignore them in the first place. This image we see resembles us closely but is just different enough to our mental image of ourselves, facilitated by the confounding mirror, to freak us out. Whereas this image is exactly what our friends see and to them it's a good reproduction of a face they know and like.

I reckon psychologists could, if they haven't already, play around with photoshop and adjust portraits a few different ways. When asked, the portrait subject would claim that their mirror reflection is their true selves and protest that something's wrong with the untouched portrait.

Amateur psychology over and out.

Oh yes, a rare and lovely jaunt out of the city on the weekend. Me an' three chums hopped on a train with our treadlies to Geelong, then rode to Queenscliff along the rather good rail trail there. It's great to get out of town on my own steam rather than latch onto someone else's road train. I must do this more often, if for no reason than to sample baked goods from faraway places. And I'm loving the distance cycling. Why have I never done it before?

Ma came to town on Friday, bringing her two dogs. I very much enjoyed having three hounds strewn about my house like the chickens of Gary Larson's "Boneless Chicken Farm" cartoon. We also went on a garden shopping spree and I got a mandarin tree and a replacement wisteria for the one I accidentally murdered. One day my ugly front fence will be cloaked in purple fabulousness. One day.

This morning, Squid disappeared into the bushes with her friend Harvey (who is, incidentally, the only slender golden retriever I have ever met). Several minutes of rustling and rootle-tootling later, she emerged. If a dog could say "TA-DAH!!!" and make an entrance accompanied by bugles and showers of glittery confetti, should would have... because she trotted up with three quarters of a full-size baguette in her mouth. It was longer than she was. She was so very pleased with herself. I congratulated her on her derring-do and swapped it for a standard-sized dog snack. As I was dumping it in the bin, we ran into two tiny white yappy things (ugh. Are these even considered dogs?) and as Squid prepared to rumble them, their owner tried to call them away. "Dallas, Dior, come here!" she tinkled. DALLAS. DIOR.

Harvey's owners and I thought up some similar pairs of names.

Calvin and Chanel. Gucci and Prada. Dolce and Gabbana. Louis and Vuitton.

Just the other day, the Curmudgeon and I were discussing a hypothetical second puppy (don't fret, it's not happening... truly) and what it would be called. Squid Too was ruled out. But would a second one have a similarly salty name? Barnacle? Cuttlefish? Lamprey? Groper?

Incidentally, I reached 7000 hits overnight. My wee little stats machine lists a whole bunch of visitors who are complete strangers to me. Who ARE you people? Really, this blog is quite dull and limited, given that I don't mention anything about my work, and I (generally) keep details that aren't mine to discuss under wraps... I just bang on about my dog, mostly. What's the appeal? C'arn, show yourselves.

"Why don't you ever say anything nice about me?" asked Ma after yesterday's post. She seems to have missed the point - that my memories of her cracking us kids up are happy ones that speak volumes about her fabulously silly sense of humour, one that seems directly inheirited from her father. But here are some nice things about my Ma.

• She's unquestionably the most supportive person in my life.
• She taught me lots of terrifically useful life skills - how to take cuttings of plants, how to make roux, how to ease a seam, and countless other things.
• She is one strong and feisty lady who knows how to work a crowbar and whose garden is magnificent.
• She makes a mean sponge cake.

Will that do, Ma? I have more but it might seem like fawning... which brings me to:

Squid's Techniques For Making Friends.

1. When you enter the park, briefly say hi to the dogs you know and like.

2. Then ignore them. Forsake them for others - preferably those whom you have met before, and know to be hostile and intolerant of your foolish antics.

3. Use your full repertoire of ingratiating, obseqious charms to try to win them over. Simpering, tail-wagging, puppy eyes, the works.

4. Persist, even when they have their teeth in your neck and make you yelp.

5. Go back for more.

6. Repeat daily. They will come around, eventually.

I don't know why she does this. When I identify someone who hates my guts, I generally steer clear and allow them to do so from a distance. My pup's optimism is endearing, though - she's so convinced that one day they will see the light and play with her. She's a Missionary for the Church of Squid. She doesn't bother preaching to the converted, only them heathens.

Fruits of Resilience include:

• Apples
• Oranges
• Mandarines

Fruits of Resilience do not include

• Mangoes
• Peaches
• Nectarines
• Plums
• Apricots

This community service announcement brought to you by she who brings in lovely ripe fruit for lunch and finds it pulverised by the journey. Especially pertinent in these heady days of summer stonefruit. Like the first of the white nectarines - today's innocent victims. So sad. So sticky.

When I was a kid, the funniest thing my Ma could say was "same to you with brass knobs on." It would dissolve my brother and I into hysterics on the floor. It sounded so uncharacteristically rude from a woman whose worst swear word for many years was a passionate "SUGAR!!" Another classic Ma funny that we made her repeat over and over was "Hootsmon! There's a moose loose aboot this hoose!" I had no idea what it meant but lordy, it made me laff.

Of course, once Ma ditched the good-girl act and her kids reached adolescence, she started swearing like a sailor. I suspect, just between you and me, that she had been doing it all along. Sneaky. Although we did teach her a thing or two... she once got some very wide eyes and dropped jaws in a meeting at work when she used the word 'fugly'. Heheh.

Can't remember why I started rambling about Ma's potty mouth. I was going to say "Bugger this blogging-every-day nonsense, I'm just not that interesting, or interested in being tied to a computer, especially on weekends when I'd rather be out noodling in a real three-dimensional world." Which is exactly what I did. The Curmudgeon and I dropped into The Village in the Edinburgh Gardens on Friday night - what a cool little place this was. It was a country-town carnival dropped into the inner city, and populated by Fitzroy hipsters. Lots of wacky performances. We did donuts in the Feetbus and enjoyed the Barina of Mystery - a dance piece performed in the front seat of a small cruddy hatchback. Cursed my long-broken camera because there was some visual fun to be had there, indeedy. Perhaps the most interesting was seeing all the gals (myself included) get prickly when a troupe of burlesque beauties paraded about in slow self-adoration, and all the boys started to drool. As my friend there said, "They're turning my boy on, and I don't like it." Imagine the photographs - women with narrowed eyes holding back their eager boys who had suddenly developed an intense interest in performance art...

Poor Squiddooo. Her best mate at the park, a neat and dainty black kelpie, is moving house and thus leaving the park. Squid always greets her, and only her, in exactly the same way - momentary pause from afar, then runrunrunrunWHAM, jumps on her. Very cute. The pack of pups (4) who meet every morning in the park and their associated humans (6) had dinner at my house last night to farewell said kelpie. It was somewhat mad with four dogs hurtling around but not much got broken.

So I ate too much and drank too much and slept too little and am feeling decidedly low-energy. Someone pass them there matches for propping open eyelidszzzzzz.

The trains were all buggered up on my line yesterday, with people spilling out onto platforms and looking all indignant. There was many an angry mobile phone call made. People cursing the train company and stomping off towards a tram (all full) or bus (likewise) and finally conceding defeat and walking to work. I kinda liked the walking bit, especially the agony of the uber-high-maintenance chicks in their spike heels. Tee hee.

It came out in the wash that the bumbling antics of the train company were not in fact to blame. THIEVES stole copper cabling from a station near the city because the price of copper has increased so much recently and they can sell it and roll about in the mountains of cash, laughing diabolically. I've heard tales of weatherboards being torn off houses and the copper pipes being pinched right out of the walls. Anyway, thieving = bad, wrong, etc, but I can't help but be just a little bit impressed by their creativity. And that they made hoards of people walk to work (who perhaps should be walking to work every day...)

I have stumbled across a site that produces voodoo dolls to your specifications... but only if your intended target is a small female person. See here. This utterly sums up why small boys are way more fun that little girls. Girls are wierd. Boys are revolting, but at least they don't haul around creepy little corpses like these.