I went window shopping today.

I know, shoving one's nose up against a glass panel whilst mentally enumerating all the reasons why you can't buy what's on the other side is pointless, but it gets worse when the shops are still open and you can get close enough to fog up the object of your desire instead of the window as you drool a little puddle of icky stuff all over the floor in the general proximity of your feet.

Today I drooled. Hey, its a natural side-effect of licking ones lips in avarice, ok? Shut up, it is so.

I drooled over a painting in a gallery at The Mount. Well ya gotta do something when you see a painting like this painting I saw and as I'd already seen this painting several times before, Im pretty damned good at that puddle thing, even if I do say so myself.

I don't know the name of the artist and I don't think the painting has a name, but that's not important.

What's important is the way a painting makes you feel when you look at it; how it entwines itself into your brain and makes you start running complicated mathematical sums in your head looking for ways to creatively account for spending non-existant money on it.

And when I look at this painting of a house and a tree in blossom with a stucco wall, I do so much more than see it; I feel it. **Are you hearing the Twilight Zone theme, too??**

No, I didn't buy it, but I can't understand why it's been hanging in that gallery for the best part of 18 months and even though someone else will come along one day and buy it, in my head it's really mine.

End of story.

Each time I have drooled the drool over this vision of loveliness, I have been out roaming with Muzz on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon seeking a satisfactory cappucino in some over priced cafe, often surrounded by the ambient aroma of petrol fumes. Knowing it's an overpriced caffeine shot makes you appreciate it so much more, don't you think?

Anyway, today was no exception - we had a lovely cuppa in a little cafe tucked away down that boardwalk area in downtown Mount that I can never remember the name of, run by two very pleasant men just bursting with gay abandon and bonhomie. And they definitley appeared to be bon homies, if you know what I mean. Lovely blokes.

Muzz, who has an appetite the size of Africa, purchased himself a nice big piece of carrot cake which came with a little pottle of yoghurt as a side dish. He specifically chose the yoghurt and it soon became apparent why.

His inner drive to paint pictures, which has been stymied in its infancy by the need to spend every waking and non-working moment creating Masterpiece Linux servers on demand for Asswipe, is making itself felt in strange ways involving food; I watched him wield his knife with artistic precision as he painted the sides of his cake with the yoghurt. No wonder we made a bee-line to the gallery when we got out of the car, he had an "art attack" coming on.

All my worst fears have been confirmed. He is indeed a carro, er fruit cake but a very pleasant, interesting and potentially very productive conversation was had, anyway. And hey, at least he wasn't buying more garden sculpture... ;-p

I wonder if the lady in the gallery would let me take a picture of my painting... or let me pay off $400. Then I could buy it. I mean, the kids don't really need their trip to Oz in July, do they?

Geez, another Tui Billboard.

Muzz has a most amazing painting on his lounge wall, I suppose I could try to nick that instead. I wonder if he'd notice...?