(diaryland) December 19, 2001 - 3:48 p.m.

My dream house.

My dream house is grey. My dream house is in the mountains, in the middle of the city. There�s heaps of finches in a big forest of birch trees in the front yard. The kid next door mows the lawn around the trees for me. The kid next door keeps kicking footballs into my yard. The finches keep shitting on the windows. There are weird, pointy wrought iron sculptures on the lawn next to the porch. The kid next door mows around them too. My children steal the footballs that get kicked into the yard and kick them into the birch trees and scare off the finches. One of my kids built a harpsichord in the rumpus room downstairs. One of my other kids makes topiary animals in the back yard. One of my other kids brushes the cat every day. The cat is grey and fluffy and I like to blow on its tummy. My dream house doesn�t have any fences around it. There are bats that live in the birch trees too. For some reason, there is a huge clock on an ugly turret over some spooky disused stables around the side of the house. My kids play in the turret and once, a show about ghosts was filmed in the disused stables. I got two thousand bucks for letting them film there. My dream house has a freezer room coming off the kitchen. My dream house has a secret corridor leading from the rumpus room to the clock turret with long windows right down the bottom of the walls. If you lie down on the floor of the corridor, you can see the topiaries in the backyard staring up at you. The kid next door mows around the topiaries. The kid next door cuts my toenails. My dream house has timber floors. One of my kids built a recording studio next to the freezer room. My dream house has an enormous tapestry of naked people killing each other hanging above an immense oak staircase that leads to a tiny dark room with nothing in it. Once, when one of my kids was two, it ran up the stairs and did a yellow poo right in the middle of that room. We call that room the Imaginary Toilet. My backyard also has snapdragons in it. My dream TV has cable. My kids watch infomercials.