Sydney may be trying to kill us, but there is an upside!

Did I mention our house was hit by lightning?

We've been having Exciting Weather here recently. So far this month there was the epic storm that didn't actually end up flooding the river, so I left work early for nothing, but did wipe out our phone and router and scared the bejeezus out of the cats when lightning hit either our house or as near as makes no difference. Rusketus ran around for ten minutes afterwards looking for the source of the big boom to see if he needed to fight it or run away from it, bless.

Then we had the tornado, happily not damaging us, though sadly taking out a lot of houses not far from here, and then this week has been heatwave, with last night so unbearably hot practically no-one could sleep, though I really shouldn't complain because in South Australia it has been 8-12 degrees hotter all week and people are literally dying. Also, half the country is on fire again and we are not.

Today, I had to unplug the spare router because we had electrical storms, and the house's safety switch, which I have learned WILL cut out power in time to save almost all the electrics, is no help if you're also plugged into the phone line.

As a result, my plan to spend my first proper holiday day reading erised fic was thwarted. I did go to the new hairdresser. I asked if she could lighten up my ends enough for us to make them pink as I was tired of having vertical stripes in my hair and wanted to go for horizontal ones instead. She assured me that would be fine. I now still have my old two light-blonde vertical stripes, with no dark-brown filling in of their tops as I had requested and a caramel balayage over the bottom ten inches of my hair because as it turned out the answer to 'can you get the lowest six inches of this hair this light?' was in fact 'no.' I had pictures and everything!

It's not bad, it kind of looks nice and grown-up if you don't pause to wonder why there are two light-blonde stripes amid the caramel. But I was after ridiculous and punkish, without having to listen to the death metal of my usual punk hairdressers.

I'm going to have a think about what to do next. Happily, there's enough hair that the answer could even be chop that lot off and start again.

And now there is no more lightning, the rain is making my garden very happy! If only I'd remembered to throw some fertiliser around this morning …

What the hell, people?

A ticker just rolled across the bottom of the morning news: 'JK Rowling joins actors in defending casting of black Hermione.'

HOW is this even a thing? We know three things about the way Hermione looks: she has bushy brown hair, she has large front teeth to begin with, and she probably has an epic side-eye given how clever she is and how much stupid she has to deal with when it comes to things like pure blood privilege. None of that says 'must be white' to me.

Can we not focus on the important things, such as get the chap playing Ron some red hair dye asap and HOW CAN IT BE that they have case YET ANOTHER actor as Harry Potter without looking for bloody green eyes??!!

As expected, my flist greeted the casting news with: 'Cool, awesome actor!' Because we have all actually read the books. One day, news producers will take their ticker notes from informed and engaged people, rather than the loudest knobends on Facebook. Alas, this is not that day,