sitting on my roof in the land of the forgotten

So here I sit, sifting through the mass of emails that have accumulated in the two days since I bothered to check my accounts. In total 96 message, 22 of those junk, 5 of those eBay-related, 18 pertaining to university.

Some of the rest--about twenty or so--have come from a rather creepy person who, in the same two days, has also left twelve messages on my answering machine. I'd consider a restraining order, but knowing this rather creepy person, I believe it would do more harm than good--and besides, it's very easy for me to add him to my spam filter and delete his messages.

Which still leaves about thirty emails just from friends and family, of course... but as you probably know if you're reading this, I am a writer, and I come from a family of very prolific writers--not novels, but rather letters and emails. Most of my writerly friends are much the same. So whenever I actually remember to check my inbox, I spend a good hour or two catching up on everything I've missed.

In this case I am particularly relieved, because my aunt, uncle, and cousins in New Orleans have just checked in to say they're safe and staying with frends in Seattle. As most of you will know, a couple of very large hurricanes have been hitting America recently. The news in Australia hasn't covered it much, and even if it had I don't watch a huge amount of TV, but my family has had to evacuate from first Gustav, then from Ike when it hit... was it Texas? Either way, they've ended up in Washington, preparing to rebuild their house for the second time in a handful of years--Katrina hit them pretty hard, too.

I don't mean to imply anything--oh hell, what am I saying, of course I mean to imply things, but other people have already done it better. Go listen to "The Gov Did Nothing" by John Butler Trio. That's the song this blog's title comes from. I'm not hugely into politics; as long as I can afford to fill up my car with petrol and buy me some Cadbury Hazelnut now and then--and presumeably World War Three isn't being started--I can't say I give much of a damn about the political scene at all. But sometimes things get to be quite frankly ridiculous, as I feel they are in this case.

On a side note--the new airport security sucks, by the way. The last time I went to the airport it was the domestic one, where it isn't so bad, but I went with two of my friends to pick someone up from the international airport, and even though we weren't actually getting on a plane, it was still ridiculous. Between us, we got a lighter and a nail file through the security gates--they simply weren't picked up by the checks. Supposedly we could each hijack a plane with those. My friend's sister (who, not-so-coincidentally, happens to be the image of blonde-haired blue-eyed big-breasted beauty,) got pulled for a random stripsearch by a male guard. I will probably rant about this again some other time, because it really annoyed me, but right now I'm going to go bake a birthday cake.