We had to put down Mozart. He has been lingering for weeks. Today he couldn't walk, and we knew it was time. He's been my friend for 18 years, since he was a kitten. He was the perfect cat.

Recently in the gentlemans retiring room at work I have been observing novel behaviour. Is it new, or has it just escaped my notice before? Guys are pulling handfuls of paper towels out of the dispensers and using them to avoid touching the urinal flush buttons, the taps on the sinks, and the door handles on the way out. It seems a bit excessive to me. I can understand at a scummy pub, not wanting to touch the rusty, rough-feeling door handle on the way out, but at work?

Come to think of it, why don't they hang toilet doors the other way? If they swung outwards, you could pull the handle to enter, and barge the door open with your shoulder on the way out to avoid picking up germs from someone elses cheesy dick-touching bum-wiping unwashed hand. The only drawback to this plan would be the danger of copping an enthusiastic door in the face when you were going for a slash.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

Very cogent, and funny. Bit of a sequal to the Closing the Collapse Gap article at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259.

"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln

Mozart is eating again! I am happy! he is eating whole saucers of the finest minces and sachetes of senior cat food we could find him. Also, his blood test shows no liver cancer and only a possible thyroid problem. Yes!

I was thinking the other day, Mozart is very different to most cats. In fact, his temperament is particularly like a horse. He is quiet, determined, still, serious, deep and calm like a horse. A tiny black horse. he looks bizarre because the vet shaved his throat to get a blood sample. The skin underneath is wrinkled like a buzzard neck.

Meanwhile those terrible fires in Victoria burn on. Whole towns have been wiped out, and the death toll is climbing.

Mozart still wasn't eating, so we took him to a different vet today. It wasn't something I wanted to do, but Pam has mostly taken over, as she is wont to do, and it isn't worth while trying to oppose her. I comforted myself that, even if we are just adding to the sum of his suffering, it won't last forever no matter what happens.

They took a blood sample and tried to take another, but even his jugular vein is too collapsed from dehydration to do so. They took a urine sample by jabbing a needle directly into his bladder! I had no idea such a thing was possible. Then he decided to piss on me, because he was so stressed from all the examining and having his fur shaved. He was panting and throwing up bile when we took him home.

The vet neatly cracked the tartar off his tooth with her thumbnail and declared it wasn't obviously loose or damaged under there. This means the root cause of his sickness is most likely something else, possibly his liver or a cancer somewhere.

He ate a small amount of sloppy food and drank some water. I think removing that tartar might have done him a world of good. They gave us some new antibiotic, and advised we get some hydration salts into him somehow.

Now we're sheltering inside the house again. The streets are deserted. Hopefully the cold change will sweep through soon.

My old black cat Mozart is very sick. He is barely eating, and very skinny. Right now he's lying on the cool tiles in the bathroom.

We noticed a couple of weeks ago that he had lost his shine, and was spending a lot of time lying listlessly around the back yard, and the stiffness in his hips, which all old cats get, was getting worse. Then we realised that he had an infected nose, with green snot in one nostril and boogers as well. It was always the same nostril, which I thought meant he had snuffed up a blade of grass or something which was causing the infection.

The vet said it was most likely cat flu, and she proposed antibiotics to fight the bacterial infection while he recovered from the viral one. I asked for Clavulux, knowing how much he hates pills. Clavulux is a liquid, which I thought could be squirted on his food or right in his mouth.

Of course, he hated the clavulux, and it seemed to destroy his remaining appetite. Yesterday we took him to the vet again, because although he was feeling better after a day without Clavulux he had hardly eaten anything all day. A different vet saw him, and she thought the infection was actually an abscess in his tooth, which had caused a sinus infection and blood poisoning. She changed him to a different antibiotic, a pill this time, but she didn't have much hope for him.

Neither do I. I'm pretty sure this is the end of the road for the old boy. He is 18, same age as Flash was. Michelle bought him some lamb baby food, which he licked up a teaspoon or two. Other than that, he drinks water and lies on his side staring into space.

The heat is here. The giant blob of hot dry air which has been cooking over central Australia for weeks, held there by high pressure off the East coast and prevailing easterly winds from the West coast, has finally arrived. It's been making life miserable for everyone in Adelaide and Melbourne for some time now. Sydney got off easy.

We don't have aircon, and don't want it. We live near the harbour, and it's a waste of money and power most of the year. In the morning, about 9, when the temperature outside climbed hotter than the temperature in, we prepared. We closed all the windows, and draped sheets over the big verandah windows facing east. We closed the back door and kept it closed, despite the constant attempts of Pam to open it or persuade Michelle to leave it open. Pam believes that opening a window or door cools a room despite the fact that there is a blast furnace outside. She's cooking upstairs while the burning wind blows through her part of the house, efficiently conveying the suns heat to every nook and cranny.

Inside it's about 26 now, outside at least 34. As soon as the temperature outside falls below the temperature in, we'll open up again. Tomorrow they predict a day in the mid 40s, until a cool change in the arvo. Groovy.

I think our neighbours killed themselves last night. Or were murdered. Or something bad.

About midnight Michelle woke up and realised all the lights were on in the house on the opposite corner. It belongs to Rod and Dot, an extremely old couple. She went out and discovered dozens of police cars, police tape around the entire house, and a couple of ambulances standing around idle. Most of the people were inside.

I slept through all that. About 2 I woke up because the cats were running up and down the bed. They had treed a huntsman spider on the wall just above my head. I got up to capture it and put it outside and Michelle pointed out the action across the road.

Rod was a carpet installer, had his own company, which he sold to his son. He was friendly when we moved in, leant us some tools, I gave him some homebrew beer. Then his wife started to lose her faculties. She had an inner ear balance problem, and then she started to go senile. Rod rented the ground floor of his house out to a series of dodgy people who came and went in quick succession. The last batch of those moved out about 3 weeks ago.

The last time I spoke to him was when a pair of young women crashed into the traffic barrier at the intersection between our houses. The driver was learning, she had been speeding along Henley Marine and tried to take the turn without slowing down. I saw the whole thing from the front garden, and when they jumped right out and started complaining about how unfair it was that a traffic barrier was right in the middle of that intersection, I went inside and got my camera. Rod came over and got involved, he was much more sympathetic to the girls. He chewed me out when I started taking pictures of them and their crashed car.

Recently Rod himself was becoming more decrepit, although he still drove, barely. It was odds on he would lose his licence the next time he had to get himself tested. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a murder suicide case.

Edit: Yep, murder suicide. They're the ones on Augusta street, which also joins Henley Marine at our intersection.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25015547-5001021,00.html

It sounded like there was water in my ear. When I shifted my jaw, there was a soft rushing sound, similar to the sound when your ears are full of water after a swim, especially when you tilt your head and hop on one foot and the water suddenly drains out surprisingly warm down the side of your face,

I haven't been swimming, though, and when I poked my finger a short distance into my ear, there was a sharp pain. I was afraid it might be an ear infection, and pus or blood was pooling in there. Yuck!

But then, rocking my jaw from side to side, I realised the sound was different to having an ear full of liquid. It actually sounded a bit like rubbing a balloon. Or perhaps rubbing a drumstick across the skin of a drum. The way it started and stopped so suddenly with the movement of my jaw.

I had the horrible thought that the old-man whiskers growing from my ears might be growing inside too. Perhaps one had gone the wrong way and got caught, like a vine growing down a well with no room to turn around, and the tip was dragging back and forth on my eardrum when I moved my jaw. I started pinching delicately inside my lughole, moving the stubbly trimmed whiskers around, looking for the long one. Remembering that those ear hairs are the product of one of the very few genes which are carried on the Y chromosome.

Instead of a whisker I drew out a cat hair! I can even tell which cat it's from - Tilly, the big fat banded one who likes to sleep pressed up against the side of my head, so no surprises there.

I bought a load of 80 silk ties on eBay, for quilting. They arrived last Friday. They were so well packaged. Each bundle of ties was bound up with a vintage women’s linen handkerchief.

The colour selection was good too, lots of warm reds and yellows. Silk ties tend toward silvers and greys and subdued colours that emphasise the material. In fact, some of the ties were too good to use. I picked out a couple to keep, swearing to swap them with ties from my wearing collection. I'm wearing one now, a deep red one with a pattern of crosshatched red and black lines.

Later, I showed Michelle the package. She got right in and started pulling out ties, lining them up and sorting them. Then I had a terrible realisation.

"You're not keeping those ties are you?"

Oh yes. She picked out about a dozen ties for Michael her step father to pick from. I got her to promise that he would replace them with unwanted discards from his own collection, or else she would have to make up the loss with silk scarves. That's always the issue when working with high quality material of any kind, you don't want to start cutting. It's the same when making furniture out of luxury wood, you don't want to start the sawing.

The googly eyes are the best part. Compelling.

Yesterday afternoon Michelle and I drove up to Newport beach to watch the moonrise. Apparently the full moon happened to sync up with the perigee of the moons orbit, so it was 15% bigger than the regular small size moon. Anyway it was a good day for a drive.

We got sidetracked by the fact that it was council pickup time in Narrabeen. We've been totally wrong all these years about council pickups. We always thought that old established suburbs full of free-standing houses would be best for junk trolling, because they had the junk to start with. How wrong we were! The junk in Narrabeen, from all the flats and units, was much better. Why? It could be that they are more likely to throw away good items, without trying to pass them on, because they don't have room to store anything in their tiny sixmat flats. It could be they don't know how to eBay yet. At any rate, Michelle found a suitcase full of lustre-ware ceramic figurines she will give to someone we know who collects that stuff, and I found a photographic enlarger, which I will use to make a digitisation rig for the Freemason archives.

Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? Could it be they are attracted by the abundent lice and fleas which swarm within your fetid clothing? Do your twisted limbs remind them of dead trees? Perhaps it is merely pity. One thing is certain. Just like me, they want to be close to a reliable source of food and shelter.

I spoke to the builders working on the concrete house this morning. It has cost 10 million dollars to build, they say. Not bad, thats only 1 million for each century it will last.

This house is just across from my morning bus stop. It's been under construction for about a year. In that time another house, on the opposite corner, has been demolished and completely rebuilt. Of course, that other house is brick, and the foundations were actually large slabs of styrofoam! Yes, they laid big blocks of styrofoam, cut out into a waffle shapes, and poured concrete over them for the foundation.

But not this house. This house has been cast by repeated pours of concrete into carefully built formwork. It's one huge continuous block of concrete. When every other house in the region has been replaced and fallen down, this house will remain standing. It might last as long as the Roman villas it appears to have been based on, which were also cast from concrete (although the Romans did not use steel reinforcing rods, which may cause problems with concrete cancer here).

However, the fact that this house is about 1 metre above sea level may prove problematic some day.

• 17:07 Yay! Keanu Reeves will ruin more classic cinema on Boxing Day! #

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In the last council cleanup around Five Dock, we found a sewing machine. Someone put a perfectly good Elna machine in a metal case out for the council to collect. Of course, we collected it instead!

It turned out the cord was missing, so I bought a replacement on Ebay. However, the pedal circuit of the replacement cord came without a plug. It eneded in bare wires.

Yesterday I cracked the pedal to wire the cord in, and found this mechanism. It surprised me a lot. I had expected there would be a potentiometer of some kind, a variable resister, and maybe a line of gears to turn it when the pedal was pushed.

Instead, this bizarre hack. The springs are loops of resistor wire. There is a kind of comb of copper, and the teeth engage with contacts connected to the wire loops. Obviously, when the pedal is up, the current doesn't flow at all. When the first contact is connected, current flows through every loop of reistance wire. As each tooth of the comb hits its contact, another loop is shorted out of the circuit, lowering the resistance and sending more current to the motor. Weird, but it works.

Then I spent hours debugging the machine. It sewed paper, but not material! I tried everything - winding the bobbin the other way, putting it in upside down (it has a horizontal bobbin), changing the bobbin tension. Nothing worked. It would sew paper fine, but try some material and it would leave stretches of a centimetre or so unsewn. This means that the mechanism wasn't grabbing the thread from the needle and carrying it around the bobbin like it was supposed to. What could cause this?

In the end, entirely on a hunch, I changed the needle. Instant success! Somehow the blunt needle was causing this bizarre behaviour. Sewing machines are weird. This one is a little beauty though. All metal construction, heavy as lead, and very quiet, especially at high speeds.

Flash was one of two kittens found by Michelles' nannas' dog Molly, around 1990. Molly sniffed them out in a pile of cardboard in the local park, where they had been abandoned. Nan raised them.

Flash was always nan's favourite over her sister Meggsie, because of her personality. Meggsie still hisses at us, but Flash was always a lady.

Flash was named so because she would dart around the back garden, her furry banner tail whisking behind her. Especially when Michelle let her ferrets out for a run, Flash would play tag with them.

She had a special place in our hearts, and also our dining table, which was her personal kingdom. In fact, when we had guests for dinner we had to get out the vacuum cleaner and leave it in the hallway to scare her off, otherwise she would nimbly jump up and walk all around the entrees. She would eat a surprising variety of foods, especially anything Mediterranean, including olives and garlic aeoli. We said it was because of her ancestry, Five Dock being an enclave of Italian and Greek immigrants.

Over the last few months she grew very thin and feeble, and developed a lump in her neck which was quite likely thyroid cancer. When she started bleeding last night we knew it was the end. I took her to the Happy Tails vet, a new one in Five Dock, and they were very good. It never gets easier. She was always there, literally at my right hand on her particular corner of the table, watching whatever I was doing, casually draping her flash tail over my dinner or whatever I was working on.

You know why I hate FaceBook? I like LJ because it's an empty box and I put whatever I want in it. It's like writing in a journal, and pasting in photos and clippings and reminders. You can even text to Twitter and have a third party robot copy your texts across. It's all words on a screen, sentences, pictures.

FaceBook, on the other hand, is much tighter organised. It's all forms with check boxes and radio buttons and other elements, and you select what you want to do from a menu. This is preferred by people who are daunted by a big empty page to write on, because they don't have anything to say, but they want to interact with other people. Fair enough, they should be able to do that, BUT all those check boxes and radio buttons and menu options remind me of something else. A database. Databases are good for storing information. LJ stores all your entries in a database. That's okay. The thing about FaceBook and the database which is behind that is, the data it stores must be much more granular and machine readable.

It's like this: if I write a post, it's full of words in a particular order, and you have to be human to really understand them. A robot could scan through them and look at word frequency and vocabulary and work out that I am male and a certain age and perhaps profession and also political leaning, but that's all. And, it's estimate of my politics would be expressed as a percentage eg. "90% probability of liberal sentiment". On FaceBook, if you put a tick in the "Democrat" box, or friend John McCain, or join the group "NRA for Armed Overthrow Of the Government", the robot knows exactly what your politics are. And I don't like that. I don't mind humans knowing, but robots can fuck off. FaceBook really is like a giant exercise in population profiling. Millions of people are entering their inmost secrets in machine-readable database which can be quickly scanned. That is not going to turn out well. In a world where police sniffer dogs hang around Newtown station constantly waiting for hippies with a few grams of pot in their pocket, it's only a matter of time before the police start data-mining Facebook looking for anyone who joined the group "Hemp For Victory" so they can go and knock on your door.

Oh, and I know that someday those robots will be able to read my blog and refine those percentages down to near certainty, but I'm not gonna make it easy for them!