Daniel has been putting things into the toilet again. It would seem that this is a new game: if it looks gross enough he doesn�t flush it down � he just leaves it there for me to find because apparently it�s funnier that way.

Last night he randomly called out, �it wasn�t me!� and I assumed he meant that there was some sort of icky smell wafting in from outside, and he didn�t want me to think that it had squeezed its way out of his precious buttonhole.

Fine; I forgot all about it. I can�t believe I made that mistake twice.

It wasn�t until an hour or two later, just as I was getting ready to go to bed, that I stumbled upon the traumatising sight that awaited me in the bathroom. It wasn�t just that the awful muck was exactly the wrong shade of brown, or that its consistency was the most perfect example of unpleasantness imaginable; no, there was also a weird blob of something black floating in the middle of it like an alien eyeball.

I only caught a very brief glimpse and quickly looked away. I didn�t shout or scream; I just whimpered �yuuuuuuuuuuk�� and crept away with my tail between my legs. I crept all the way to our bedroom, lifted the blanket and stuck my head under it. �Daniel, make it go away��

Yeah, he thought it was hilarious. I just kept whimpering softly until he went off to do something about it.

Apparently the muck was the guacamole dip he made several weeks ago, and the black alien eyeball was some exotic form of mould. I locked him in the bathroom with it until he flushed it and scrubbed its remains off the porcelain.

Is this normal behaviour for an adult male?

Daniel�s boss has a 21-year-old daughter (he also has two sons but they�re not relevant). You can tell by looking at her that she is naturally gorgeous: decent figure, nice eyes, perfect teeth, dimples in her cheeks, bubbly personality. But man, somebody has got to teach that girl a few things about makeup.

First of all, when I saw her at the Christmas party, she had painted herself orange. I mean that. It didn�t even look close to a real tan. The silly thing is that her whole family has the kind of skin that tans easily, and there is no way that hers isn�t the same. But no, she still has this inexplicable urge to paint herself up like an Oompa Loompa. When she closes her hands into a fist you can see white lines where the tan didn�t make it into the folds of her finger-skin.

To make it worse, she has matching orange foundation, which she cakes on liberally so that it gives her serious crow�s feet around her eyes when she smiles. That is a lot of makeup for a 21-year-old. It�s as though her motto on applying foundation is �apply with a spatula, remove with a chisel�. I know I sound horrible but everyone has commented, males included, and nobody has the heart to say anything to her. None of us know her well enough, for a start. That�s really the kind of thing that only a close friend could tell you. �Hey, you might want to wipe some of that scary orange foundation off � you look kind of like Jack the Pumpkin Head from Return to Oz.�

And it still gets worse. On top of the orange foundation she was wearing pale green eyeshadow, pale pink lipgloss, and carefully-applied mascara that turned a full set of eyelashes into about four spikes on each eye. Yes, we are getting into creepy gets-up-and-kills-you-while-you�re-sleeping, bride-of-Chucky-style baby doll territory here.

To top all that off, she had this (slightly bleached) hairdo that sat a good three inches above her head.

Lovely girl, but� who�s going to tell her?

Last night I was trying to work out, if I had to teach different animals different styles of self-defence, what I would teach to which animals. I�d teach cats some sort of ninja-style martial art, the kind of fighting style where you get in there, silently inflict maximum damage and then disappear into the shadows. Cats kind of tend toward this behaviour anyway so I think it�d work.

I�d teach bears judo because it just seems right. I wasn�t sure who to give kickboxing to but I ended up deciding on either camels or donkeys. I wanted to give polar bears Greco-Roman wrestling but bears already had judo, so I think I�d teach Greco-Roman wrestling to puppies. I think they have a bit of a gift for it anyway.

I�m still not sure about sumo, because while there is technically a lot of foot-stamping in sumo wrestling, I really think that whales would have a natural disposition for it. And I guess I�d have to get really obvious with boxing and give it to red kangaroos. (For non-Australians, red kangaroos are the really big ones.)

This entry has been so shallow. I guess nothing has really happened to me since yesterday, other than my boss insisting on having the company pay for new speakers for my car because my old ones no longer work. I really don�t think I deserve to be treated so well at work. The company now pays for my petrol and for my E-way tag, and I feel guilty about it.

I did learn that I�m really not very good at taking criticism. I�m not going to go into it but I am doing a correspondence diploma course in Book Publishing, Proofreading and Editing, and I got back my first assignment yesterday. The tutor said I did really well, but I still thought that some of the corrections she made to my work were� stupid.

I remember once in high school, I was in an accellerated English class and we had the same teacher for three years. She used to make her own clothes, but then she got over that and her outfits got marginally better. The stand-out was a pair of white jeans, an ADIDAS t-shirt tucked in, a pair of gold high-heeled shoes and a beaded necklace. And foofy hair. Anyway, she had this really nasal voice, and one time when we were all quietly working, she was sitting at her desk marking our essays from the previous lesson. In the midst of the silence she said in a semi-mortified, semi-disappointed voice, �oh, Marteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!� whilst shaking her head and tut-tutting. I looked up in alarm, only to have her finish off with: �there were no streets in Shakespeare�s day!�

As it happened, I had written about King Lear being cast into the streets. I thought that this comment was a really stupid thing for my teacher to say, firstly because it was a mere figure of speech � you don�t often hear tragic tales of someone being cast out into a field � but also because streets and roads have been around since Roman times, and hey, guess who colonised Britain?

So yes, believe me when I say that a couple of the things that my tutor has �corrected� me on seem a little� yeah.

Wow, this entry seems to have turned into Marzipandemonium. Sorry, I'll try to keep it a bit more relevant next time.