My middle daughter is a veterinarian. We’ve known she would be a veterinarian since she was about eight, an event I accepted as pretty much a done deal the first time she sat down at the dinner table and announced autopsies were fun and the internal organs of small animals were “cute”.

Rather than fight the inevitable, while she was still at school I allowed Secondborn to take a job at a local vet clinic as a kennel hand, on the strict understanding she would not bring home any of the merchandise.

She swore an oath to this effect which lasted for a whole 10 days before she arrived from work with a ginger and white kitten who’d been marked for execution, and which Secondborn announced she just had to save, or clearly, the world would stop turning. Me, being the cruel and unsympathetic beast I am, stuck to my guns for all of about oh… 30 seconds… before caving in and saying: OK, you can keep it.

I was then required to mind (as in feed and pay for)  the aforementioned cat for the next 12 years, waiting for Secondborn to finish high school, take a year off and then spend another 6 years at university, until finally she could graduate and take custody of her furry little friend.

Anyway, Jojo is now happily residing with her rightful owner, but some things are just inevitable… like me buying useless shiny things, the sun coming up tomorrow, and Secondborn falling for cute condemned animals…

Her latest acquisition is Bruce, a pit-bull/mastiff cross who, at 6 weeks old, is already 4kgs (that’s over 10lbs). He will probably grow to be roughly the size of a Shetland pony.

She takes him to work with her, has enrolled him in puppy school — where she was planning to keep her occupation a secret from all the other mums and dads, except they all turned out to be owners of her patients LOL — sends me long emails and photographs documenting his every move and then rings me to tell me the bits she forgot to put in the emails.

Apparently, she was going to call him Kevin, but decided he looked like a Bruce.

I shouldn't be surprised by his name, I suppose. After all, she's the one who named the cat, Steve.

Today is Thursday, or as it's known in my world - Movie Review Day  - which means I make the trek down to the ABC Studios in town, at 5:30 pm, step over all the cables on the floor on my way through the building to the bus out the back where they’re transmitting (the station is undergoing major renovations) and pontificate for ten minutes about whatever film happened to take my fancy.

Earlier in the day, I ran into a friend who reminded me that it was MRD and we got talking about our favourite lines from movies, specifically, the most memorable lines. I don’t mean the tagline quotes movie publicists are fond of, but the lines from films, TV or even ads that actually become part of your everyday language — either in their entirety or paraphrased — among family and friends.

This set me to thinking about how often we do this, (and so as proof I can waste time doing anything to avoid housework), here is a list of my favourites and when they tend to appear:

Not happy, Jan

Who can forget that memorable Yellow Pages ad?

That’ll be the phone, Reg…

Another Yellow Pages classic. I think the ad ran fifteen years ago, and someone still says it every single time the phone rings…

Remember the force, Luke.

A must when you spy someone trying to lift something heavy and so much more useful that actually offering to help...

That’s one for the pool room.

From The Castle, a silly 1997 Australian comedy I don’t even like. Happens at Christmas and birthdays when someone gets a gift they particularly like.

You should open a shop.

Also from The Castle. High praise, indeed.

She wants to root him, she wants to root him (in a singsong voice)

Someone in my family always says this during a love scene on TV. Or even a hint of a love scene. At the first whiff of sexual tension, even. From one of my all time favourites, Hercules Returns, a 1993 film I would trade one of my children for, if I could find it on DVD.
(Note to US readers who don’t get this. Rooting something in Australia has a very, very different meaning to rooting for someone in the US, which here, we call barracking, as many an unsuspecting tourist has discovered to their intense embarrassment… LOL)

What seems like every second line from the film Clueless.

And every third line from Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion.

My all time favourite, however, comes from an atrociously bad 1988 post-apocalyptic movie called World Gone Wild. It’s a line Bruce Dern says to Michael Paré after he lets the bad guys get away and is the ultimate condemnation for someone doing something really, really stupid.

The magic works better when there be bullets in the gun, asshole…

Today I achieved a great milestone. I finished the Advanced Information Retrieval Systems unit I am required to do for my Masters.

Did I mention that in the middle of all this chaos I’m supposed to be doing a Masters Degree…?

Oh well, completion of this unit was clearly a cause for celebration. So, how should I celebrate, I wonder?

I know, let’s go shopping…

Now, in my defence, I only bought stuff that was on special (I have a motto, you know: never pay retail), and The Dressing Room, which is the most salubrious dress shop in town was having a sale because they’re moving into a bigger shop, so of course, I had to go there…

And that's where I found this really nice blue and gold top, that was 50% off, but I needed something to wear it with, so then I found an even nicer suede jacket (also 50% off) and then I saw this great skirt (70% off) that would just finish it off beautifully (and I am celebrating after all)…

Well, you get the idea.

Half an hour, and one smoking credit card later, I'm heading back to the car, wondering if I might have overdone it a tad, considering I'd already treated myself to the most ridiculous piece of useless bling bling (also with the excuse of celebrating) which was a silver, amber and crystal-encrusted scorpion phone chain (yes, seriously, a phone chain) …

So, there I am, walking through the Alice Plaza, loaded up with shopping bags, shiny phone chain around my neck, sated and complete, while trying to calculate how much more I can justify spending when I actually get the wretched Masters thingy…

And there it they were in the window of a shoe shop… under a big red shiny SALE sign… and OMG, in my size to boot! (pun shamelessly intended)...

Cowboy boots... but not just any cowboy boots... shiny gold cowboy boots…

I’ll let you guess the rest…

For some inexplicable reason, a burst of energy and enthusiasm has exploded at the happy little cave that is Speculate (well, not so inexplicable, really… I think it’s because I paid my bill)  and the minions have been hard at work on my website.

They’ve been tweaking, and coding and muttering incomprehensible things in binary (can you do that, I wonder?), all to make my website a happy little place for me to waste time in, when I should be writing.

The big news is, of course, that now we’re now syndicated on Livejournal so if you’re that way inclined, you can add my blog to your friends page by simply clicking here.

We’ve also got heaps of new avatars/Livejournal icons for you to play with, a new quiz to test your knowledge on the Lion of Senet, and they’ve enabled the comments in the blog as a trial, so provided everyone remembers not to post spoilers, it should remain active, but we’ll wait and see.

The merry minions have also updated the two new covers that are out for the German release of Warrior (Ritter des Throns) and the new US cover for the upcoming release of Warrior. A very cute and handsome Damin Wolfblade features on the cover, although I don’t remember any scene in the book where he stands there waving his sword around in the hallway…

The whole thing about covers is a bit of a joke anyway. HarperCollins in Australia always goes through the motions of asking me what I think and then does whatever they feel like (I’ll tell you about my missing palm trees, some day). Nobody else even bothers to ask my opinion, generally, and more often than not, Amazon gets the covers before I do.

The upshot of this is that sometimes you get good ones and sometimes you get things like the Russian covers of the Demon Child Trilogy, which feature a fortune-teller on the cover of Medalon, a chick in a leather bikini with a unicorn on the cover of Treason Keep, and Harshini (my all time favourite) features a half-naked pole dancer swathed in nothing but some strategically placed chiffon.

Sex sells, baby…

I decided last night, that instead of bringing Oscar and Fluffy (the dogs) and Stevie the Cat to bed with me on really cold nights, I should probably invest in an electric blanket. Of course, this meant going into an appliance store, which is a little bit like an alcoholic waking up to find himself in bar.

I resisted temptation admirably however, focussed on the counter, ignored all those gleaming displays of juicers (don’t drink juice), coffee machines (got one), grills (got one), vacuum sealers (got one), deep fryers (got one), electric carving knives (got one), electric massagers (got two).. and so on, walked straight up to the assistant and said: I want to buy an electric blanket.

Which sort? she asks.

There’s more than one?

Well, says my helpful shop assistant, there’s the regular 3 heat setting model, and then there’s the dual control, electronic readout, machine washable, sheepskin underlay, 10 temperature setting, auto-timer, super heat boost model, that’s just come in…

Before she's finished describing it, I'm in the throes of an adrenalin rush. Without even looking at it or asking the price, I'm saying: I’ll take it!

I am now the proud owner of an electric blanket (which cost roughly the GDP of East Timor) and have spent much of the afternoon playing with the controls and setting it up to do everything short of bring me hot chocolate and slippers before I go to bed.

Of course, I will never want to get out of bed, but that’s OK, because I can bring the tablet PC into bed, hook up the USB coffee warmer I bought the other day and read through the Treason Keep and Harshini proofs, while sipping the aforementioned hot chocolate and I’ll actually be working…

Which means my new dual control, electronic readout, machine washable, sheepskin underlay, 10 temperature setting, auto-timer, super heat boost electric blanket and my USB coffee warmer are tax deductible!

Now, if only I can find a way to write-off that USB missile launcher I saw in Tandy the other day…