My bum hurts. The chaps, not the crack. It's on account of mowing the unmowable lawn, spending too much time on the Hank Hill ride-'em! mower and then pushing around the pedestrian version until every last square metre of jungle was hacked out of the schoolhouse yard.

So now I walk like a cowboy.

The grass was really long because I haven't tended to it. Also, my hair. Littlestar buzzed most of it off with some kind of machine, and even though it's bit pathy it's preferable to the winged frohawk that had been gathered there for the past two months.

Like the Hank Hill ride-'em! mower, the cuttertron-thing whined and protested when it was asked to push through too thick a bramble. It would get caught and pull on my scalp. (I took it like a man, so when she was done Littlestar gave me a lolly.)

When I cut the grass I learned that Dog Boy has denuded the fire-pit of stones, reasoning no doubt that since he helped carry some of them they were all his to do with as he pleased. He repurposed them in an ugly landscaping hack in the front yard, probably to teach us all a lesson about how cruel and rockless a world it is without his benevolence.

When Littlestar cut my hair I learned that I now have considerably more grey hairs than I used to. The two findings may be related.

Littlestar bought a bushel of purple-flavoured terabriks and then I got in trouble because I drank them all. "There isn't enough juice in these stupid little boxes," I told her. "I have to double fist 'em."

"They're for toddlers!" she cried, rolling her eyes.

"Oh."

Our toddler is walking tall because she's become a peeing-in-the-potty ninja. She applauds herself. She thinks she's all that. But we're still hung up on pooing in the potty, which she finds disagreeable. At this point she gets points for just farting in the bowl.

She knows all about the fact that there is a new baby coming.

She presses her ear into Littlestar's belly critically and then asks, "Baby kickine yet? When baby comine out?"

Baby 2 is coming out at the end of next winter. We can't get the midwives to promise they can navigate the snow, so we've opted instead to hatch the critter at my mother's house, in the city. "Oh, thet's so exciting!" rejoiced the chief midwive, a veteran of Popsicle's in-pool homoe-birth; "what does your man think of thet?"

I think it's just fine. Welcome, welcome. Sit down whenever you can find a space.

After this one's proved its ability to breathe without assistance I'll be scheduling for myself the disconnection of my germ-line apparatus. I'm hoping we're baking a boy so we can have one of each (the human race: collect 'em all!), but I won't be disappointed to have a new little girl. Girls rock.

My current contract expires on Tuesday. I plan to bill to the hilt. (Let's hear it for flaming bridges!) Over the past five weeks I have helped to produce some of the crappiest commercial art of my entire undistinguished career. This wasn't really my fault. It was accomplished like this: when I was given retarded and/or contradictory directives, I raised no objections and suggested no alternative solutions. I just followed my instructions, and let the disasters sort of happen. I made no effort to streamline the production pipeline. I just let the whole fat jalopy work itself on screen, and then sat mostly quiet in the conference calls while they yabbered and flexed at one another in trying to grasp the origin of the error. Naturally, they settled on this one: "You mustn't have understood our directions clearly enough. Let us repeat them."

After enough iterations of this somebody finally changes the directions to something like, "Just make it work." Then I do my job, correct what needs to be corrected, and move on to the next task.

In this way my work on this project this summer has been relatively stress-free, in contrast to previous years. I have experienced no anxiety about producing work slick enough or fast enough to meet expectations, and have spared myself the pointless indignity of trying to defend myself against charges that result from being at the tail-end of a long and much-abused chain of shunted responsibility. Ah, politics! This time I have won by casting no ballots.

(The down-side of that I come away with nothing remotely good enough to put in my portfolio, but, as I think we established a while back, I no longer give a flying fuck about that. What I have now will do for the bait I require, I hope.)

Got some writing work for September. Bless the Badger!

Littlestar's car is going to evapourate around us in a puff of rust. Our strategy: whenever we see a contest in which you can win a car, we enter. Naturally, we'd have to sell whatever we won and use the money for some piece of shit we could actually afford to run. What a second -- Littlestar tells me gas is costing a million dollars a dram these days. Maybe what we need is big bicycle motorized by a pack of shiny-backed slaves. What are humans going for these days? I can pay them in potatoes.

"Mush!"

The county and the town are going through some kind of tussle over planned growth, and as a result the new train station has been put on hiatus. This was going to be my big big solution for getting to and from my rabbit in the city when I find one, barring the explosion of Union Station by evil brown people who hate freedom.

My mother says this is unlikely. She says Canada is too insignificant for evil brown people who hate freedom to target. She says if they did explode something Canadian that not enough people in the rest of the world would be sufficiently disgruntled to warrant the trouble.

Myself I figure she hasn't really grokked the full unbridled love of decentralized organisms. She doesn't understand that disenfranchised brown people who hate freedom living in Canada might not have anything better to do than to blow up. They don't necessarily need the say-so of some camcordered god.

This is, of course, pointless paranoia. I actually seldom think about explosions when I'm riding on trains or enjoying train-related infrastructure, except when I'm daydreaming about spaceships blowing up or something. I don't view the brown people around me with suspicion, even when they have those fluffy modern nogoodnik beards under their necks. I know so many brown people who don't explode that it's really hard to for me to really make a connection between them and the people who do explode, like that British monster yammering away on his video.

Clearly, the best thing to do with such videos is to play them over and over again on television. You have to make sure that the disenfranchised brown people who hate freedom who live everywhere get a chance to see it, and to think about what a similar gesture might mean in the context of their own psycho-religious experience.

Suppressing the growth of this insidious mimetic organism would, of course, be contrary to ideals upheld so dearly in the plots of blockbuster American movies and dreary French historical dramas. Information wants to be free. It's a fabulous new ecosystem. And not every virus fucks up your mobile. Some buck for Heaven.

But I digress. Like I said, for the time being all of the brown people I know are cool. Declaring Helter Skelter requires two consenting parties: one to helter, one to skelter. And I'm not playing.

Speaking of murderous racial profiling, I hear that New Orleans is sinking in several simultaneous ways. I've been reading the news and it makes me a little ill, even if you allow the positive spinners to do their spinning. I don't have a half-cocked Black Pantheresque conspiracy theory to nurse or anything, but the commentary by some authorities and news agencies on these matters is very...telling.

Question for the Americans: is it just me, or is the current King President always on vacation? Maybe it's just bad timing, but it seems like every time Father Bush has to respond to a crisis he's always being rushed to scene in a jet from his ranch retreat or horse camp or whatever. Maybe he thinks brown people who hate freedom are going to explode his office.

Who runs my country again? Boring McElection-Pants? Frank Somebody? He used to be the finance minister. Dapper dresser. Wears his hair like my Grampa Fred. Jowly chap. I don't watch C-SPAN.

I tell you what: physical media fellates!

I destroyed a painting commission earlier this week due to my inability to find a meatspace equivalent of either a) undo, or b) alpha channels. What the crap? I have come to really hate painting with my hands and fingers. I still have more spatial control, but the lack of temporal control drives me to want to kill.

My kingdom for a service that would translate my digital sources into large scale prints that don't suck and don't cost a golybillion Yuen + setup fee!

I'm hungry. I want lunch. I want a purple-flavoured tetrabrik. Gotta go.