Whilst we often use the expression "I'm saving that task for a rainy day," it's not all that often that I've actually used a rainy day to finally get around to removing such a task from my ever-growing stack.

It's Grand Prix weekend, so the inner city's full of people, and hence St Kilda held no appeal for me today, even though I really could've done with a comfort visit to City Cafe. Malvern would have to do. I picked up a few more books (even though I'd nominally banned myself from purchasing anything more until I'd actually gotten back into reading) :

• The Raymond Chandler Papers : Selected Letters and Non-Fiction 1909-1959 : perhaps it's such a random selection of stuff that's what I need to be reading right now, instead of a full-on novel.

• The Republic of Wine, by Mo Yan : I'd very nearly bought this in Singapore last year, but didn't, because I didn't get around to buying any books in the end.

• The Inspector-General of Misconception (the general compendium of sorting things out), by Frank Moorhouse : I shamefully had no idea there was a new book out by Frank Moorhouse, even though he's probably my favourite Australian author - I'd concur with the critics who suggest he's our country's best author, but since my reading of his peers is spotty at best, it's hard for me to feel qualified in doing so. But I will point out that I've not yet bought Grand Days or Dark Palace because I want to save them for a rainy weekend, so I can fully savour them all in one go. Or something like that. I greedily devoured all his other work in a short period of time, so I'm keeping something "out there" for later, so I don't have to despair at having read his entire works already. So anyway, I only discovered this by noticing an ad in the Readings newsletter, which I idly flipped through whilst paying for the first two books...

So having watched the weather turn a little sour, coming home seemed the next best option, with an added benefit that I also wouldn't be able to do any more shopping (well....). In the middle of answering a long email from a faraway friend, she'd asked me something about my grandmother and inspiration came to me like...well...like a bolt of inspiration. Dad had e-mailed me a couple of Word Documents of family history stuff that I'd promised I'd HTMLify in my Spare Time^TM, and it seemed like it was way past time I kept my word. And look, I have.