<Insert something amusing here>

It's been a week since my last post and since I've been berating my brothers about their posting frequency (or infrequency, if that's a word) I thought I better get something in before another week goes past. De ja vue is setting in because here I am again at Silicon Valley Internet Café waiting for my washing to finish at Soapy Suds. Still we have no phone line and our washing machine was declared faulty by the plumber that came around yesterday. Really he just said it's got water and he doesn't know why it isn't washing, so we all have to assume it's faulty which really means to us that it's going to take even longer to get it fixed. We've found out that it'd be almost impossible to get out of our tenancy contract since our problems would be best described as trivial, so instead we just have to keep getting on to our landlord to get everything fixed. To add to our problems, a few days ago some "youths" (I guess they were young anyway) decided to "decorate" the front of our building. Odd that we're the only house on the street to be defaced, maybe someone's trying to tell us something, send us a message. They didn't write "Aussie's go home!" or anything to that effect, so if they were trying to tell us something they didn't do a very good job.

I finally finished a book that Peter gave me a long time ago, Teach Yourself: Philosophy. I think it was Christmas about 5 years ago and basically instructed me to read it (quipping that I was "pig ignorant", probably not too far off the mark). I knew little of philosophy then and thought that it'd be nice to learn a bit on the subject so I took up the book, planning to read it on the bus trips into Uni. Alas, I was poor at concentrating back then and only read (and re-read in times to come) the first chapter, thinking it was rather heaving reading despite being a thin book, and the book conveniently being misplaced for extended periods of time only to be rediscovered months later in my near annual clean up of my room for the whole process to begin again. When choosing books to bring with me to the UK I spotted this one again (after a final cleaning) and decided that I would indeed read the entire thing on the trip. Procrastination did occur thanks to a gift of two other good books (Book of Five Rings and Pattern Recognition) which I finished during the first month of being here. Eventually I began to read the Philosophy and now that I've finished I'm glad that I did. It was a very thought provoking book and has shed a lot of light onto other subject matters that I've talked about. Mum, I see a lot of similarity with what you're doing/teaching/studying in some of the topics covered by the book like phenomenology and epistemology. Sort of revelating at the time. Anyway, my interest in philosophy has been piqued and I may even read some more books on the subject, although someone at work is reading Einstien's book on relativity and I thought maybe I could give that one a go.

I will go now, as my washing is surely done and we still need to decide on what to have for dinner. I've some things to say on the food here (not all bad) but I'll leave that till next time.