The slightly improvisational scanner set-up continues -- meaning that there's a sneak preview of The Weekly Strip (this week: Wake up! Wake up!) going up here on cleanskies before it gets onto my alleged website.

This is my first year in the new house, and I'm still getting used to how the sun moves around it; the discovery that around Halloween it rises through the multistorey carpark, flashing through the concrete layers floor by floor was a particularly nice moment. The dream about the evolution of sound was the fault of Tim Science, who'd been showing me (images of) sound waves the night before; the snarling spaniel of wakefulness is humourous shape for one of my regular liminal hallucinations -- that something bulky, dark and growling is at the foot of my bed ...

Speaking of which (dogs and mysterious specks of light) mr_snips, I finally got around to reading The House on the Borderland (it's online! here) one of the days I was home sick. It's good fever reading (although I must confess I began to drift a little during the orrery/astronomy trips) but the lack of actual home improvements going on (although I suppose you could argue that nailing the doors shut *is* beefing up home security) means it isn't quite the DIY/haunted house book I was craving. It also seemed quite unnecessarily convinced of the innate evil of luminous and lurid colours, while I actually found the descriptions of the lurid green house under the turbid red sky weirdly soothing. And I'm more concerned with attics than cellars. But other than that ...

I found an amber octopus for sale at the market yesterday, but I didn't buy it.