Three questions for my readers:

1. Does my blog download properly now? Blogger seems to finally have heeded my pleas for salvation. I had no problems on the three computers I tested.

2. Where are you from? (I think I know from whence the regular commenters have sprung.)

3. How old are you? A healthy interest of mine dating from my sojourns in Asia. Knowing the demographics will help me decide whether I should write more about poodles wearing galoshes or rusty teapots dangling above the heads of donkeys.

Thank you very much and have an obscured day.

I am not deceased!

Here I am! Alive and well!

If you received my death certificate from that death notification service, you can cross out the died date and replace it with TBA.

Recently you may have noticed a dip in my blog output. I assure you that I am still around, breathing and in deep thought. So much thought is happening here that strings of thought spaghetti pours out of my ears. My pillow at night is soggy with the squished pasta. I wake up five or six times a night to scrape the thoughts into the toilet.

Sometimes all this thought is quite heavy. It’s sometimes hard to lift my head off the floor. I’ve taken to pushing around a wheelbarrow with my head on it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about this thoughtfulness. I rather like it when migrating birds stop by my wheelbarrow to feast on my thought. It’s good to give something back to nature after all this pollution and deforestation stuff. Maybe the birds won’t hate me so much anymore.

Plus, I can sing Mr. Bluebird’s on my shoulder without fibbing. I’ve even been experimenting with the words, changing Mr. Bluebird to Mr. Emu or Mr. Marabou Stork.

A byproduct of bird-attracting thought is my newfound status as a birdwatching celebrity. I am not sure if this is a good thing, though. Serious librarian types in alpine outfits sit outside my bedroom with binoculars and I’ve even been photographed in my own backyard by some nut who spotted a rhea perched on my ear.

Now what causes all this thought, you ask?

For the last three weeks, I attended the S.E.A.R.C.H. Program (Self-Employed Arts-Related Contractors for Hire), offered by Vancouver’s very lovely Alliance for Arts+Culture.

With one very short week left to go, you should get to know this new cast of characters in my life:

Audrius: Lithuanian who likes frozen oranges on Philippine beaches.

Barb: Her songs of rueful former maidens echo through the woods.

Beverly: Colourful Newfoundlander with a penchant for colour.

Carla: Writer and Amazonian butterfly expert.

Chris: Photographer who photographed the Olson twins & did not do them.

Christine: Having worked with bookstore crazies, she can now identify individuals out of their gourds.

Dome: Laotian painter whose best friend is a musical rock.

Ela: Polish lady whose paintings feature large smiling birds migrating over tropical islands.

Jeff: Video editor guy who lent me the yakuza & zombie movie.

John: Actor whom I’d seen days earlier in a play. Blushes often.

Jonna: Puppeteer who reminds me of Pippi Longstocking.

Karen G: What sort of wedding dresses does she make? She don’t seem like the wedding type. She’s in skirts over pants all the time.

Lily: French corset-maker whose daughter fancies herself a circus performer.

Melissa: Painter lass who sells household furniture for paints. She’s down to her bed.

Michelle: Future puppeteer and expert on childbirth.

Pauline: The huge earrings are nothing next to her ability to notice hickeys.

Rachel: The tattooed anchors on the backs of her shins tie her down.

Ryan: Subversive humour boy.

Sean: Tattoo guy, guitarist, conte painter, sculptor and beachside Pigmalion.

Tanya: Her Chickens in Squares pictures crack us up.

My apologies for not writing about the letter Q. I said I would procrastinate tonight and blog. But I have been very seriously working on work.

I have been thinking about the letter Q, though.

The letter Q takes centre stage in the Chinese national anthem, with a mindboggling eight occurences: four times as qilai (“arise!”) and four times as qianjin (“march on!”).

In Chinese pinyin romanization, the Q is one of the bad boy letters. Along with the letters J and X, it spits a viscous mass of saliva in the face of English Prononciation, then laughs while English Prononciation takes off its glasses and wipes them.

When the letter Q rides into town on its motorcycle, no letter is foolish enough to confront Q‘s gang.

Once, the letter I and his girlfriend, the letter H, drove off in a Trans Am during one of these sieges. They didn’t last long: Q‘s gang caught up with them and forced the car off the road. They dragged I out of the car, then beat him to a pulp. His ribs all collapsed. To this day I has not yet recovered.

I can’t even begin to describe what happened to poor H. She went mad soon afterwards, and developed needy relationships with the letters C and S. “She’s just so clingy,” complained S in a recent interview.

Despite the respect Q demands, behind his back the other letters hate him. Only his girlfriend, U, still hangs out with him. She is the perfect model of the self-sacrficing moll. Anything for her man. Q might ditch her sometimes (Qaddafi, Qatar, maktaaq), but his relationship with A is simply a fling. He always returns to U.

Q‘s only other friend, X, still occasionally shows up, as in quixotic. But X prefers solitude. X has his multiple personalities – xylophone and x-ray - to keep him company.

Warfare with K is exacerbated with such atrocities as Kwik. There have been some arrests, but body parts keep showing up. Rumour has it that i lost his .