Real estate has featured far too heavily in our lives over the past few months, so instead of telling the tale in all its hand-illuminated tomes of horrifying glory, I choose to gloss over our experience of house-hunting in the following way:

"Meh.
Meh.
Meh."
THE FOLLOWING WEEK...
"Meh.
Meh.
Meh."
THE FOLLOWING WEEK...
"Meh.
Meh.
Meh."
THE FOLLOWING WEEK...
"Meh.
Meh.
Meh.
OOH, we'll take that one!"

[Building report: I don't mean to alarm you and am hence writing this in a very impersonal and unbiased-sounding style with accompanying photographs for you to make your own mind up, but this house is heading for a structural implosion - which may or may not result in the formation of a black hole* and your subsequent death - unless you are willing to bend over and have someone extract approximately $50,000 from your person. Here, have some impartial-sounding danger phrases: 'not in a tradesmanlike manner', 'rot', 'foundations', 'serious', 'decay', 'leak'.]

"CRAP, now we hate real estate but need to keep looking, since we packed up our entire home in readiness for the house of cards we nearly purchased. So, what's on the market now?
...Meh.
Meh.
Meh.
Meh.
Meh."

So that's where we're presently up to: "meh".

* There was a digression in a meeting today - not the meeting I briefly snarked about earlier (for I attend many meetings!) - that featured some black holey goodness. We were sitting around trying to work out what kind of an icon might be used in a physics textbook to indicate that an experiment had some danger attached to it ("so how IS rocket fuel used?"). The publisher, clearly thinking very firmly inside the box, suggested an exclamation point inside a yellow triangle. The art director, who mentally resides in some sort of monkey-infested parallelogram, put forth the idea of a little guy stuck in a space-time continuum as the icon. My manager and I queried how exactly this would be depicted - should the guy's head be stuck on the event horizon of a black hole? Should his little stick-man body be stretched out towards the reader? This was never resolved before the art director pondered whether, if the space-time continuum were to be depicted with exact accuracy, a real black hole would open up. I responded by admitting that I didn't know the answer to that one, but perhaps we should create a little icon to warn people not to do it.

I went to the snow twice and snowboarded. I went off an unexpected drop (admittedly only a couple of feet high) in low-visibility conditions and landed perfectly, which was my big achievement for the day - "I'm still upright, yay!" I guess this is a sign that my snowboarding is still improving.

I also accidentally found a fun new run between two existing runs. There was much ducking and weaving between trees, and yea, the 'Pan (that's the streetwise abbreviation of Marzipan, yo) was veritably pleased and sought she out the same run agayne.

I have also taken up knitting. This is because I am Libran and hence feel an overpowering urge to balance out my doses of X-TREME with nice big helpings of MEGA-SAFE. Also because my sister is having a baby in about a fortnight and I decided I should knit a jacket for him, which incidentally was when I learnt that I was actually capable of knitting. I'm going to put the buttons (well, hooks and eyes) on tonight, which means this entry ends shortly.

My sister's biggest concern regarding her impending sprogling is not that he may have an intellectual disability or some sort of Chernobyl-esque genetic malfunction, but that he might come out with red hair and/or freckles. Autism she can take, but if that kid's a ginger there's a marriage potentially at stake.

PEE TALK

I managed to get a urinary tract infection a couple of months ago. As far as I'm aware, these are contracted by being slightly unlucky. Anyway, I went to see a doctor (isn't it a fun moment when the doctor says, "so, what can I do for you today?" and you have to respond with "I think I have an infection"?) and gave him a jar of my specimen. This was of course following a brief discussion and a trip to the bathroom on my part - I didn't just turn up with the little jar in my bag.

The doctor held it up to the light and said something that surprised me:

"Hm. It doesn't look happy."

It had never occurred to me to psychoanalyse my pee before. I guess that's why I'm not a doctor.

I received an email that got a rare out-loud laugh from me a few weeks ago, so in order to end my entry on a puerile high note, here it is: if Cadbury merged with Nestl�.

Bum jokes and references to private parts are always funny. Write that down.