Still can't get my head round it.

The Grauniad says the tsunami death toll is up to 124,000. Can't comprehend the size of the disaster, all those people, just gone. The worst is not over. Disease, hunger, exposure: it's going to get a lot worse.

I'm not going to get into the contras between the aid given by some western nations and our deadly profligacy elsewhere. You're all growed up, you can do the math.

Happy (belated) hijacked pagan shindig, y'all!

Hope you guys had fun doing whatever it is you do. I had a pretty nice Crimbo: I opened prezzies from home (higlights included a Lovecraft plushy and a box of acrylic paints, which I can't seem to get here--not good ones anyway), and then munched Panettone* and polverone** and watched Buffy Season 4 DVDs with Lurid. Chrismas dinner was salmon*** which I poached in white wine with onion and mushrooms, along with roasties, sprouts ect. Yum.

And Cava. Lots and lots of Cava.



*Panettone: Italian spongy fruitcake made with yeast.
**Polveron: Little powdery biscuits.
***I'm a grownup. I can have fish on Chrismas if I want. Nyahhh.

Just so we're clear...

Myself and Lurid Archive are not going to the UK this year. Our money's okay for festive fun in nice cheap Barna but would turn into pumpkins as soon as we got into Stanstead. 'Tonces, we're staying here and drinking Cava. Anyone in town and wanting to hang should try the usual channels (e-mail, PM, post to my Lj). I promise not to set the dollies on you.

Martin Amis is a fuckstick.

He is a Stick of Fuck.

What? That's always relevant.

Aznar a sleazebag liar, to no one's real surprise.

Aznar's PP party wiped records of crisis meetings after the 11th of May bombings, inquiry told.

Yep, you read that right. All the records are gone, all the backups erased. I mean, erased erased--they got a company in to do this for them so that the data is now completely unrecoverable. Oh, yeah--and they stuck Zapatero's lot with the bill.

Maybe all the war-fetishist numbskulls who still accuse Spain of "cowardice" for voting out the PP in the wake of their shameless attempt to profit from the bombings will shut the fuck up now, but I doubt it.

I have not been writing.

I admit it. Bad wannabe. No biscuit.

Don't really know why. 'Snot like I don't have plenty of time on my hands these days. I'm doing the odd bit: a paragraph here, a couple of lines there, a few revisions of existing stuff. But I'm not really doing it. I'm not doing it in a doing-it flavoured way. Plastic writing.

I'm just having a hard time wresting my mind back from present concerns, such that all my writing go as folow...

Ragnar Orcslayer laid aside his mighty blade, FrostFang, which had cost him many hundreds of gold pieces but which would totally be worth it in the long run, and wiped the sweat from his eyes. "The fight is won!" he boomed. "Now for the spoils!" Stepping over to the first Orc, he skillfully removed its armour which would fetch a bob or two down the second hand armour stall. "Ah, HA!" he barked triumphantly, snatching a gold medallion from the neck of a dead foe, "NOW I shall go forth and defeat the evil lord Ovah-Derrapht!"

I so painfully need a job.

Happy B-day, Lurid!

We're going to go an make Lasagne in a minute. Lurid's not much for cake. He said he didn't want a big fuss so I shan't make one, just Lasagne.

I turn 31 tomorrow and I want to do summink Fun. It's times like this I miss London; it would be nice to be within lurching/wobbling distance of the Devvie about now. As we're living in town I ought to find the Barna equivalent.

I'm happy.

I had a go of pebble-dashing today! It was great, first mixing up the special cement in a big rubber bucket with a king-sized cake-mixy thing, then smearing it all over the walls with various implements that I only know the Castillian names for (sorry) and then chucking gravel made from real marble at it. Ace! Everyone should do pebble-dashing at least once, it rocks. And they gave us all a cake.

Stuff like this, involving special fancy coloured cement and stucco and stuff, is taught over at another site, not the place I'm usually at. I find it noteworthy that on both sites, there is a profe called Ángel.

Same old, same old...

Not much to write about really. Ummm... it's gone a bit cold here. I'm doing okay with the course, it's all going pretty well. I like the site. It's mostly lots of pretend bits of houses, random kitchens and bathrooms standing by themselves as people tile and re-tile their interior and exterior surfaces. A spiral staircase winds up towards nowhere, a gatepost stands by the cement mixer like a sentinal. Faux Egyptian murals vie for space with stone cladding, painted saints gaze warily out from inside half a pretend church.

I had another go of the cement mixer yesterday.