It is now cold, by Western Australian standards, so I don't think I will break last year's swimming record, when I went in the ocean during May. By the coast it's a bit warmer than the official city record of 5^C minimum yesterday - we had about 8^C - but the air is definitely crisp and one needed one's jacket. To those who ever experienced a Russian winter [or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, really] you can stop laughing now, you'll hurt yourselves.

At the end of this month, I will get the chance to have proper conversations [at Swancon], and hopefully be more interesting as a result. I say this after nearly losing my mind again this evening, trying to figure out why M still couldn't hear me even after I had changed the hearing aid batteries. She'd wanted me to bring around fish and chips, which was supposed to be simple.

Conversations with M tend to be repetitive and basic, even more so when you're writing everything down and muttering insanely to yourself. Just lucky for me that the bit she did hear was when I'd managed to censor myself and say "flipping" instead of the other word. I've now looked up how long the aids are meant to last and it's a week to two weeks after they're activated. I hadn't known you're meant to let the battery sit for a minute or so before putting it in, that's not something that ever occurred to me and the hearing place didn't mention it. Before activation, they last several years, so M's idea that the aids fail because of "old" batteries is, like so much she says, nonsense. She doesn't change the f...ing batteries when they fail, it's just a complete mystery to her every time. And that's why I go mental over it. And no, I never considered a career in the aged care industry, why do you ask?! [EDIT. Finally got the aids to work by messing with them].

I'm in dire need of some intelligent and like minded conversation!  Last I had was when I visited Rdm and Leece of this journal. Or no, there was a week ago when the gamers did get four people together to play Cards Against Humanity, where I was victorious, being declared the most depraved person in the room for that evening!  

Swancon is Perth's annual sf convention, 50th of that name this year, and probably my only chance to be able to discuss important things. Like the books up for the Hugo Awards, zombies, what will happen when the zombies overrun Perth, our certain doom when Skynet AI becomes self aware, the latest empire to crash and burn [cough, USA!]  embarrassing things like what I've managed to write lately [not much], gaming, the Hail Mary movie and many other things.

I'll be looking about to see if there is a GURPS game somewhere I can join/get to. I haven't been able to play since two of our players dropped out and were, to be honest, getting extremely unreliable for a long time before that. Hopefully the gamesmaster will be successful in recruiting some more to ours, I'm pretty sure he's going to try.