Exactly two weeks I woke up feeling sick. Annoyingly, I'm still sick, but at least I can celebrate my two week anniversary. Hopefully I'll be able to do that by making a full recovery later this afternoon.

One of the things I've been doing over the last few days is reading over everything here on SoFo. I meant to do that earlier, but somehow never did. I've discovered that I never properly finished writing up the Dog Biscuit to Dum Dum travel piece, which debuted here back in May. I did some more work on the Indian section last night, and I'll try to get that up next.

Being ill has also meant that I've spent a lot of time at home lately. I figured it was a good opportunity to do something about tidying up my room. I bought a new bookshelf and moved several large, swaying piles of books into it. To my surprise this made the floor visible, for the first time in a long time. "Wow," I thought, "there's carpet down there."

In other news, I've resigned from chess teaching. Too much schlepping and not enough teaching. One of the things I'm doing to fill the gap is move from Blogger to Movable Type. It's not going all that well. Movable Type's installation manual is longer than The Lord of the Rings. And, to be perfectly frank, not as interesting.

Last month, when Guan-Ji moved out, he left us with the compost bin he'd bought a few months earlier. Seeking a way to commemorate his time in this house I stuck a label on the bin which identifies it as "The Official Guan-Ji Memorial Compost Facility." I invited a few local dignatories for the opening ceremony, but they didn't come. I invited some friends, but they also didn't come. No one came. Not even Guan-Ji came, and it was his compost bin. As a result, it was a fairly quiet opening ceremony. I threw some vegetable scraps into the bin and stomped back into the house.

But I've just discovered that a mouse has moved into The Official Guan-Ji Memorial Compost Facility. It's possible that a few weeks ago I would've been bothered by this, but not any more. After my recent confrontation with an enormous rat inside the house, I'm delighted to have one small mouse living outside in the compost bin. In fact, I think I'll go out and see if it's okay. Perhaps I'll offer it some cheese, as a reward for not being inside the house, and for not being a rat.

Oh, and Jenny Sinclair wrote a nice piece in The Age about the Melbourne blogging scene. Jenny interviewed me for the piece, and I gave her a lot of great material about dragons, mice and compost bins. She didn't use any of it, though.