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It is really windy outside – howling and whistling around the windows. I am thinking much more about the weather since I have been catching the train for the last month. Or is it more than a month? I’m pretty sure the mechanics who have my car are fobbing us off with stories and slowly stripping my car for parts. All I can say is, I wish they’d hurry up about it as it’s bound to rain on me one of these days.  I have been walking around four times a day, five days a week, for five weeks in the middle of winter, and I’ve been rained on twice. Plus one sort of drizzle which I didn’t count. If that doesn’t tell you we’re in a drought I don’t know what will. Over the same period in Auckland I would have been soaked to the skin at least three times, and dampened considerably for another dozen. But: Rain = 2. In other train counts, Crazy = 1 (a guy who was probably more drugged than crazy but was wearing a large Mad Hatter-style hat, rendering him quaint rather than scary), Inappropriate Conversations = 1 (one lady ringing up her daughter’s school to plead for her to stay on the netball team even though she hadn’t paid the school fees), Wrong Trains Caught = 1 (I leapt on a departing train, congratulating myself for my cleverness, before discovering far too late that it was running express to Laverton, which is a long way from where I live; and also is not the sort of place you want to stand around at night waiting for a train to go back the other way, necessitating a call to Mr T to pick me up, as fortunately he was working out that way and on his way home, and this is the longest sentence EVER that is totally official).

… and it is at this point that my laptop shut down without warning. AGAIN. It has been overheating regularly in the past few weeks, so this time I cracked the shits and made Mr. T open the back of it to see if there was any dust in the fan thing. Apparently this can contribute to the overheating. So he waited for it to cool down then unscrewed the back and… um. Turns out this laptop is quite an effective vaccuum cleaner. Packed into the fan vent bit was a tiny carpet of compressed dust and dog hair. He peeled it out of the little recess like he was picking up a thick piece of felt. Whoops. Hey guess what! The laptop is SO MUCH COOLER on my lap now. Who could guess? And here is my post, saved automatically into Drafts, thank you WordPress. I mean, it’s not the best post ever written, or even the best written TODAY, but I would have been annoyed to lose it.

OK here is a photo of my cat. I was taking it to show his new collar (I have never known cats to lose collars as often as this one and his brother, it’s an epidemic I tell you) but I don’t think I’ll send it to the Etsy seller as it looks like…

… I’m poking the cat in the eye. I’m not, for the record. And he’s sitting on my stomach as I’m lying flat on the bed so the photo was quite hard to take, OK? I’m not sure that justifies me not-poking him in the eye (I’m NOT), but I thought I’d point it out. Mitigating circumstances, and all that.