Last week I finally got my mobile phone fiddled with sufficiently to be able to send SMS messages. Actually, that would be better written as SMSs, since "SMS message" would stand for "short message service message", which while syntactically correct, does sound rather cumbersome.

While it’s possible that any naff technology is exciting while it’s new to you, I think this holds some promise. While I’ve been receiving text messages from people for a couple of years, this is the first time I’ve had the energy to get the phone configured for me to send replies back.

And it’s actually kind of nifty. If you have a short, sharp message to send, you can tap it out on the phone (or on a web site). Okay, so you only get 160 characters, but so far I’ve managed to be reasonably eloquent, and haven’t even resorted to those dreaded annoying "U R GR8" shortcuts and slang that phone messaging seems to have picked up from all those teenagers on the Internet.

Once you’ve got your message written, you can fire it off to anywhere in the world for 22 cents. At least, I hope it’s 22 cents. That’s what the Telstra web page claims, and it doesn’t have any small print whatsoever qualifying that it costs two hundred times that amount to send it anywhere outside their own network. I’ve sent a few interstate, and a few to England, so I’m certainly hoping it’s just 22 cents a pop. I’ll certainly be complaining noisily if my next bill says otherwise.

There aren’t really many dangerous spiders in Melbourne. The most common dangerous one is called a whitetail, and if you get a nip from one, you end up getting welty sore type things. Contrast this to the stuff they get up in Sydney like redbacks and funnelwebs, and the whitetail seems pretty tame in comparison.

No, Melbourne’s spiders tend to go for the psychological angle. Take, for example, the huntsman. It may not be very dangerous, but it’s big enough to scare the shit out of me, I can tell you. It gets the adrenaline pumping mightily every time I evict one.

A week or two ago I encountered a huge one in my home office thingy. It was big enough that I’d swear I could see it licking its lips. I’m pretty sure I could see the hairs on its legs. Then when I summoned up the courage to trap it, it escaped from me - it must have seen me coming, about to put a plastic container over it, and it sprinted off along the wall behind a curtain.

Last night I saw it again in the hallway. At least I really hope it was the same one - the thought of two of these bastards roaming the house doesn’t bear thinking about, especially as they’re big enough that they should be paying a share of the rent!

Again, it saw me coming and made a run for it. The plastic container trapped one of its legs, which promptly fell to the ground, but the rest of the spider sped off. I panicked and almost dropped the container, and tried to figure out where the spider had gone. It didn’t seem to be anywhere on the chair I was standing on. It wasn’t on the floor or walls or ceiling, that I could see.

I put the leg, which was lying on the floor, in the bin. Then I spotted the rest of the spider hiding behind one of Isaac’s pictures on the wall. I bet it was pissed off. I know I would have been. I used the picture as cover and got it into the container, and send it on the usual exit route for arachnids from my house - flying out of the container, off the balcony, into the car park.

Problem is I was so nervous that I dropped the container too. It bounced into the car park and rolled away into the bushes on the side. I got a torch and carefully went down there. The spider was there, not moving, and thankfully well away from the container, which I retrieved and washed… ready for next time.

I had a bit of a clear out today. Admittedly I didn’t get very far towards my long-term goal of tidying up the house completely, but remember the longest journey begins with a single call to your travel agent. What is amazing is the little bits of memorabilia you can find when sorting through old papers. This is stuff like tickets and so on that logically is no use whatsoever after the event has occurred, but which I consistently tuck away in a pile of stuff somewhere, just waiting for days like these months and years later, when they can be moved from the pile to a bin.

This time though, some of the more interesting items have gone via my scanner.

It’s amazing the junk you can find in a clean-up. And this is just the small stuff.

So there you go. A handful of tickets and stuff, and you can create an online diary entry as boring as this one!

The completed shower

The shower got finished on Wednesday, which is good, because I was getting a bit tired of baths. Certainly they’re nice as a change, but not so good when you’re in a hurry. Speaking of baths, something half amusing, half embarrassing happened on Tuesday morning.

I was getting out of the bath and everything was at normal status, total Defcon 5. Just then Jeremy, who has just turned three, came in, looked at me and proclaimed "Dad, you’ve got a big penis!"

I stammered back "uhh yeah, all of me is big" and hid in a towel.

Now I’m dreading he’s going to be somewhere public and start announcing to the world "My dad’s got a big penis!" It wasn’t really true, anyway. It’s been bigger.

(My ex is probably reading this and suspecting I’m only putting it in to meet girls. Not so, I’m putting it in because it was funny. If I meet girls because of it, well, it’s just a happy side-effect.)

So anyway the shower is completed. Naturally the landlady is still whinging about the cost, but I’m suitably impressed - it’s beautiful, it’s a masterpiece of vertical water design. Water streams down the glass like the National Gallery of Victoria.

The two surviving goldfish

Bad news. Last night I noticed that one of the goldfish was… umm… sleeping with the fishes. I wasn’t sure if it was Tim, Bill or Graeme who had passed on to that great fishbowl in the sky, but in the morning Isaac let me know that it had been Tim.

I blame myself really. Okay, so I speculated that it might have been the heat earlier in the week that finished Tim off, but in reality I reckon it was that I hadn’t cleaned the fish tank in quite a while. It was getting dirty and… well, downright smelly in there. So I scooped out Tim’s lifeless body and gave him a burial in the garbage. I’d have buried him "at sea" in the toilet, but knowing our dodgy toilet flush, he might have kept coming back up - which would have been really really gross.

Then I cleaned the tank. Bill and Graeme seemed a bit pissed off by the whole thing, which was understandable really. But they were very glad when it was all over to get back into their nice clean tank.

I have now set myself a reminder in my automatic calendar thingy to clean the fish tank every four weeks. And I’ll be asking Isaac if he thinks we should get a replacement.

Ah, a nice relaxing bath. Can’t read the paper in the shower… Well, you kinda can, but it gets pretty wet.

I just had my second bath of the year. That might not sound like many baths, but it’s more baths than I had in the whole of last year. Oh, don’t worry, I do bathe regularly. I normally prefer showers, but the plumber came on Thursday and commenced fixing up the shower, which involved first of all pulling it apart and redoing all the concrete, so now it looks like a big dark grey blob in the middle of the bathroom.

So for the last few days I’ve been resorting to baths, which may not be as water-efficient or as quick as a shower, but is a somewhat more sedate way of washing. And it’s a very relaxing way to get through the gigantic Saturday newspaper.