this morning driving home from the market, I saw a man in the park with a dog. the dog was lying down. he was stroking its head. sensing something wrong, I hung a U-ey and called out "are you OK?" he said yes. I said "do you need help?". he said no. but when I had turned back again to continue on my way he was crossing the road with the large white dog tangled up in his arms, tongue lolling out. it looked like a dying dog to me.

was he accepting its death? was other help on the way? he appeared to care for it. extra pats for my dog this afternoon.

there's a particular ancestor my family talks about for some reason, maybe his grand name: Andrew Topping Thompson.

not so much is known of him except that he was a figure in early Ballarat. I went to see my grandmother's brother, ATT's grandson, in hospital last week and he told me two things: ATT is buried in the Ballarat cemetery under a headstone showing a fireman (he helped set up the fire brigade there. and when the man was in a family argument, he'd blow off steam by playing the bagpipes. in the house. as in "I think I'll just have a wee play on me bagpipes".

snort. I can almost feel a genealogy blog coming on.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this: why isn't there a Dyke Eye for the Straight Wife? in which you can learn to leave your armpits hairy, not iron the sheets and go drinking beer with your buds every afternoon instead of stuffing olives and similar wastes of perfectly good life?

want sleep. must organise move to Hong Kong (or more to the point, leaving Melbourne). have actual work to do (interviews, writing).

all else is a blur...

Funny, I thought Google would care that spammers are trying to get gmail addresses by trawling Blogger blogs and emailing requests for invitations to the owners of those blogs, whether or not they actually have gmail. but they don't. they simply advised me to hide all my addresses from view, like one piece of spam either way matters to me.

otoh, gmail is performing quite well so far. still not sure how useful "conversations" are but I'm enjoying not having to clean it out. which I could have achieved by simply changing my overstuffed six-year-old Hotmail address too...