*grumps*

I'm not supposed to be here.  I'm supposed to be on the train, heading out to Broadmeadows to exchange my Queensland learners permit for a Victorian one.  So that I can get my passport, because the Queensland proof of age card is not considered valid ID for passport purposes.

Only, at the very last minute I realised that (a) I needed my birth certificate, and (b) I can't find it. 

So I had to call up and cancel the appointment, and the next available one is in a MONTH, and that's more time I have to put off my passport application, and in the meantime I need to tear my room apart looking for my birth certificate.  Which should be around!  Because I only got it last year (on account of how extracts, which was all my parents were given at the time of my birth are no longer valid ID either), and then I had to make all these applications for security clearances at work.  So where is it?  (I checked my desk at work!  I know I did!) 

So NOW I feel like a big, cranky failure.  And so I want to go around the internet and tell people that their stupid ideas are stupid.  Like a well-known fat activist blog that was talking about how rheumatoid arthritis is seen more in slim people than overweight, and I was like, YES, BECAUSE ONE OF THE FIRST EFFECTS OF THE DISEASE IS WEIGHT LOSS AND MALNUTRITION, AND ALSO, FUCK YOU.  (I believe the pattern is for dramatic weight loss followed by gain due to lessening of activity, and also the preventative drugs.  Looking back, that may have happened with me, although it's hard to tell since I came out of remission right around the same time I had appendicitis and didn't eat for three weeks.)

I expect I shall be seeking procrastinatory activity while I turn my room upside down in search of my birth certificate (and, not coincidentally, assemble my new Ikea bedhead/bookshelf and reorganise all my stuff into neat boxes), so if anyone wants a CRANKY OPINION, now is the time to ask.  I shall endeavour not to bite heads off. 

ETA: BIRTH CERTIFICATE! NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN!

Books read in February

First Term at Trebizon - Anne Digby
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Le Carre
Second Term at Trebizon - Anne Digby
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Summer Term at Trebizon - Anne Digby
Sensational Melbourne: Reading, Sensation Fiction and Lady Audley's Secret in the Victorian Metropolis - Susan K. Martin & Kylie Mirmohamadi
Boy Trouble at Trebizon - Anne Digby
The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe
More Trouble at Trebizon - Anne Digby
The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York - Stephen Duncomb and Andrew Mattson
Babylon 5: In Valen's Name - J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David
More Trouble at Trebizon - Anne Digby

I unexpectedly managed the same number of books as January, although once again there was cheating -- those Trebizon books don't go more than a hundred pages, and the Babylon 5 comic took about half an hour to inhale. 

The highlight of the month was The Way We Fall by Megan Crewe, which I spent much of last week raving about at anyone who stood still long enough to listen.  It's a Canadian YA novel about an island off Nova Scotia that's struck down by a mysterious disease.  As more and more people die, the island is quarantined, and people begin to take matters into their own hands.  The premise alone had me sold, but the heroine is a socially awkward dork of colour, and there is not a melodramatic love triangle in sight.  And I really loved the different kinds of female friendship depicted.

The Trebizon series is another ... well, it's just addictive.  (I blame emilly for lending me the first one!  And BookDepository for having the entire series in ebook form for $2.06 a book!)  It's a boarding school series written in the late 1970s and early '80s, with all the cliches of Enid Blyton dragged kicking and screaming into the modern(ish) age.  Girls have Walkmans and boyfriends, and older students have cars!  And whereas Malory Towers' progressiveness went as far as having students from France and Spain, Trebizon has a third-tier character from Africa!

I'm kind of falling out of love with the series as I go -- the emphasis is increasingly on sport, and the plots are getting much sillier.  And there's a growing gap between the author's description of the characters and the reality.  The fair, justice-minded headmistress is the queen of jumping to conclusions and solving problems through mild psychological torture.  And the lead's love interest goes on a really scary rampage when he thinks she has (a) attended a rough party and (b) in company with another boy.  And there's a character whose defining aspect is that she's fat, and she loves food, and she can't stick to her diet, but she's always baking sweet treats.  (I remember fat shaming being a big part of Jean Ure's Peter High series, which was written around the same time, as well. IT'S A BIT UNPLEASANT.)

But I keep reading because I really like the modern application of classic cliches, and also they take about forty-five minutes to read, so why not?  Also, BOARDING SCHOOL STORIES.  I've discovered the passion I had for the genre as a kid.  It's pretty excellent.  Even with all the sport.  (One of the very earliest fics I ever wrote was a Malory Towers fic about Gwendoline redeeming herself, and the other girls learning that sport isn't actually all that exciting or interesting.  I think I was about seven at the time.)