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Perth is a bit warm at the moment.

For weeks the daily temperature has been above 35 and the house heated up. Now everything inside the house has started to heat up.

Red wine is ideally served at room temperature but that means 19th century French room temperature, which is about 18 degrees, not 28. I've taken to keeping it in the fridge because when you pour wine at 5 degrees into a glass that's 28 degrees it comes out about right.

Warm Nutrigrain floating in cold milk is odd.

And donning hot socks in the morning is not to be recommended.

NAB Connect is the name of the online banking system for the company accounts. It isn't a great web application and I had to fight with as usual today. After logging out today I was asked if I wanted to complete an online satisfaction survey. Seeing the opportunity to vent I carefully filled in all of the sections and provided constructive comments.

On clicking the Submit button I got a stack of errors - the survey doesn't work on a Macintosh.

Not satisfied.

Oh, a whole year without posting. That sucks.

As days-of-the-week-on-which-to-turn-40 go Wednesday is perhaps the least desirable. Insufficiently close to the beginning or end of of the week to turn it into a long weekend, and I'm not quite narcissistic enough to take the whole week off. Instead I thought a pleasant mid-week day off would suffice and, happily, it did.

I had some plans, some of which changed slightly on the day. The extended cycle ride along the river front was replaced by an stroll along the river front abbreviated by Eggs Benedict and coffee at Deep Water Point. Pretentiously reading Breakfast At Tiffany's in Kings Park ran into problems when I forgot to bring the book, but a hastily purchased copy of The Great Gatsby was a suitable alternative. The trip to Ikea was unavoidable but the fates smiled on me and I manged to get in and out without feeling the slightest bit homicidal. Chocolate from Subiaco, wine from Applecross, pre-prepared dinner from Mount Pleasant all went according to plan and I was back in time to get Ben from school.

I mentioned to mum that the day had been very relaxing. She replied that it was in stark contrast to the day she had 40 years ago.

Normally at Christmas time this is what happens. We write all of the Christmas cards, promising that we will write a letter to go in each one. Time runs out and we end up sticking the cards in the post at the last possible moment, without the letters.

This year we did it differently. We wrote the letter, then time ran out before we had written the Christmas cards and we ended up not sending anything at all. Disaster.

So to all of you of were kind enough to send us cards this year we're sorry for the un-festive silence. Next Christmas we'll be back to our usual routine.

Jumping the gun somewhat I went to the music shop and bought the sheet music for a couple of well known pop tunes.

I can't play them yet, despite their slow tempo and relative simplicity, but one thing struck me straight away - when you've got the music you've got the magic right there in front of you, and you can work the spell all on your own.

With other music your chance of replicating a sound is next to zero since you can't pull together the mixing and production, the same collection of instruments, or even get the same sound from a single instrument - I've got both an ebonite and a metal mouthpiece for my tenor sax and the sounds they produce could be from two different instruments.

But where a song is just a singer and a piano you can press the keys just like they do, and the sound comes out just the same. I spent a good few seconds lining up eight of my fingers to produce the last chord of a song and it was just as spine tingling as the sound coming out of iTunes. Fantastic.