So, for about a week now my left ear has been blocked. Not all head stuffed up blocked, so I can’t travel on planes. And not, I think, all stuffed up with wax blocked. Just some kind of stupid infection blocked. It’s driving me insane. I can’t hear as well as I normally do. I have a tinnitus thing going on. And when there’s more than one noise source going on, I just can’t make much out at all. I’m off to the doctor’s as soon as I can make an appt., and then we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll be cleared up by the weekend. In other news, I’m not reading. Not at all. Nothing. Nada. I feel, intellectually, that I should want to be reading, but with the year’s best pretty much put to bed I can’t seem to summon up much enthusiasm for reading anything. Maybe a Harry Dresden mystery, or something mindless.  Apart from that, it’s all six-year-old princess parties, and getting ready to travel.

Oh. A weird thing. Way back when in that mythical summer of ’79 I spent a couple weeks at a caravan park. My family would go down to Mandurah (then a WA holiday spot; now a suburb), rent a caravan for two weeks, hang out and go swimming and stuff. Nice. Anyhow, that summer the caravan park we stayed at had an entertainment area with trampolines and such. There was a jukebox near the trampolines, and I would spend a chunk of my days exploring the jukebox and jump, jump, jumping for hours and hours. The record that played more than any other – possibly to the point where it threatened the mental stability of others – was a Status Quo cover of an old John Fogerty song, ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. Yesterday I found out that my six-year-old daughter is learning to sing the song in her pre-school music class. That bends my mind around unexpected corners, just a little.