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Curse! I just sliced my right thumb while I was cleaning the kitchen. Tried to push the recycling bin's contents down so as to fit more in. That'll teach me to do housework! It's the couch for me from now on.

Hmmm... on second thoughts, maybe not. Divorce lawyers are $ersiou$ly co$tly. I shall grin and bear it. It's a clean cut, and doesn't hurt as bad as it looks.

Today was Canberra's "Piss Off The Catering Lobby By Making All The Public Servants Stay Home On Cup Day" holiday, invented by our by-now totally senile legislative assembly who really need to be sacked and voted into oblivion, if only there were some kind of opposition party available. Our plan was to spend the day preparing for our trip, but the heat and humidity have been feral so we didn't get much done. Still, I got the airbeds and tent packed, and bought some stuff from Bunnings, and this evening I did some serious decluttering of the kitchen/lunchroom area so we won't come home to a pit of chaos. Ah! And we booked places to stay for the time we're in Tassie. So really, not a bad day.

I finished Unseen Academicals last night. It was a mixed bag. On the one hand, we had tedious rehash characters like Andy (the psychopath, like Teatime or Carcer), Juliet (the ditz, like Christine) and Nutt (the naive newcomer with a dark secret who turns out to be amazingly clever, like Carrot or Otto). But on the other hand, we had Vetinari doing a couple of things one would not expect him to do, and although [SPOILER! SPOILER!] he remains superhumanly in-control as ever [WASN'T REALLY A SPOILER! WASN'T REALLY A SPOILER!] he still seemed to have a lot more character than in previous books, even ones that focused on him. My Beloved pointed out that Pratchett hasn't written many really excellent female characters; I countered that one Granny Weatherwax and one Nanny Ogg count for about a dozen of any other author's female characters; she counter-countered with a reminder of all the kick-arse male characters he's written, though I really think only Vimes, Death and perhaps now Vetinari count as true stand-outs. But yes, he's reading like he's tired and running low on ideas, which is a shame.

I really wish he'd written the book I imagined for him in the mid-1990s, when I posted a fake annotation thread on a Pratchett forum in the hopes that people would take the idea and run with it. It was called Strange Visitors, and was a mash-up of superhero stories (comics, movies, TV shows) in the manner of Soul Music or Moving Pictures. It could have fit his style back then, though he moved on from that sort of thing shortly after. A pity: the idea of the Librarian swinging through the night sky of Ankh-Morpork dressed as some kind of flying rodent would have been worth reading about... Ah well.