Alien Spouse

Admin. Pro. Lunch.

Yesterday was Administrative Professionals Day (Note to British People : I know *rolls eyes*), so today my college had a lunch for all of the admin staff. This was a lovely gesture, and I really do appreciate the thought and the effort that went into planning it.

But... When we walked into the conference room the tables were already set with individual plates of salad, with a big piece of chicken right on top of each salad. And I'm a vegetarian.

So the only thing I could do, and not be the ungrateful pain in the backside, was to ask if anyone wanted my chicken and then just eat the iceberg lettuce that had been underneath it whilst trying not to think about it too much.  That won't kill me right?

Plus the thing started at 11:30 - So I feel like I had a salad as my mid-morning snack (there was also a sponge cake with a strawberry sauce and a blob of fake cream) instead of lunch, and didn't get my usual afternoon nap on Doc's sofa.

Other than that, it was very nice.

The Proverbial Till.

I promise that I was only inside the Franklin Fountain long enough to order a ice cream sundae, have it made for me and then pay, before heading to the tables outside to eat it - So what's that? Probably less than ten minutes? Not long anyway, but it was thoroughly enjoyable to be in a place where there was so much to look at and admire for it's charming attention to detail.

Even the cash register was appealling - and inspired a short photo essay!

As you can see it's a gorgeous vintage till, with pressed tin sides and a big glass display for the prices - except the prices on the tabs have been removed, so instead when your total is rung up you get a proverb! The family standing a couple of people ahead of me in the queue got "Search Others for Virtue, Thyself for Vices".

The men in front of me (covered in tattoos and clearly both tough as nuts, but still in the mood for some ice cream with hot fudge sauce) got "A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned"

Mine was "Talk is Cheap Because Supply Exceeds Demand", which I quite like.

I also very much like the soda jerk uniform for the Fountain, although I feel bad about referring to them as "Soda Jerks" because everyone there was lovely despite a line of customers going out of the door meaning they really didn't have a second to even turn round between customers! Still, aren't the uniforms great? I particularly love the classic combination of the little hat and the bow tie.

An Ice Cream Sundae.

So on Friday, not four days ago, I was in Philadelphia sitting outside in the sunshine eating ice cream.

It was snowing here yesterday, and it's really not that much warmer today.

I also ate a lot of salad, fresh vegetables and fruit whilst we were away - It wasn't just ice cream! I only have photo evidence of some of the fruit though.

 

Extremely Comfortable Cats.

When we are away for a few nights I make a nest on our bed for the cats, it's just made out of pillows underneath the covers so that they've got a little nook to curl up in that smells like us. Not that I think the cats themselves are sentimental, but they do like a certain reliable routineness to their surroundings.

Anyway...

We got back from Philladelphia last night and it was obvious that the cats had been sleeping in the nest I made them. And yes, ok FINE, I did think that was very sweet so when I got up this morning I did put it back together and Nancy immediately curled up in it. Edith meanwhile spent her morning following me around the house (I booked an extra day off because I wasn't sure how late we'd be getting home, or how Eva was going to like flying this time).

Then I noticed I no longer had a floofy grey shadow, and went upstairs to discover both cats curled up on the bed. You can tell by the look on Nancy's face that she is only doing this because it's cold here today.

Of course the minute she heard the camera Edith started posing and flirting with the lens, and she looks gorgeous - But Nancy looks super gormless in those particular shots, so I stuck with the ones where she merely looks annoyed to have been caught in this position.

Phriday.

Friday and I'm in Philadelphia! Yay!

I started off my day with a forty minute walk uptown to get to the book fair, with a couple of detours to Lush (Fresh Farmacy soap & Imperialis moisturiser) and H&M (nothing in my current size). The books were ok, but nothing amazing. I bought an anthology of Campion murder mysteries & a trashy murder mystery set in Philly, with some nice over art.

By this point it was lunch time, so I re-traced my steps to a falafel place I spotted earlier. I had forgotten how much I like falafel. I finished my lunch,and bought three falafel balls to tide me over for the rest of the walk back to the hotel. And I stopped at a different falafel place a bit further on, because they had juices as well and I thought a nice vegetable juice would be a good counterpart to my plans to get ice cream later.

Obviously by the time I got back to the hotel there was just time to say hi to Doc C, have my after lunch nap and then go out for ice-cream. What? The baby needs calcium! Ok, she perhaps didn't need that calcium to be covered in hot fudge sauce, but that was just how it came! In an appealing rum-raisin / pistachio flavored format!

Doc still had some conferencing to do, so I came back to the hotel to wait for him, and then took him to a martini bar nearby that had good reviews for food. Those reviews were well earned.

So yes, I ate my way around town today and I'll probably do it again tomorrow!

Sunny Philadelphia.

We are in Philadelphia! Yay!

We were in town for no more than three hours before we found ourselves a cup of coffee, a park bench and then a really good second-hand bookshop (I cleaned them out of Nero Wolf mysteries and Doc bought a couple of philosophy texts). Doc C doesn't start conferencing until tomorrow morning, so we spent the afternoon strolling around some beautiful sunny parks, full of flowers and leafy trees. For dinner we had curry, which was delicious.

Tomorrow I intend to go to a huge book sale which the nice lady in the bookshop gave me a flyer for, as well as the obligatory visit to Lush and maybe H&M. I have also just discovered there is an old fashioned soda fountain just around the corner from the hotel, so I suspect there is a banana split in my future.

As for as my plans for Saturday, I got really excited when I saw that both "The Artist" and "We Need To Talk About Kevin" were playing, but the first ended it's run this afternoon and the second is only screening across town. The cinema around the corner is a really good art house cinema with five screens, but I just don't fancy any of the films they'll be playing this weekend.

So far the only disappointment has been that the fantastic deli diner I found last time we were here has closed, and I was planning to take Doc there on Sunday! Oh well! Still, it's just so lovely to be in a beautiful and historically rich city. An urban setting is simply my true mise en scene.

Atheist Students.

Doc C reported back on the "Ask and Atheist" event, and apparently it went very well.

I was, I'll admit now, slightly concerned that there would be some unpleasantness, but actually it was more a case of students stopping dead in their tracks and saying "Oh! Oh! I'm an atheist too, I had no idea there was a club on campus! There are people I can talk to! Where do I sign up?"

One thing that I'm really impressed by is that the students in the atheist group are very keen on doing service work, so they are doing things like the Walk for Life to raise the group's profile and, of course, raise some money for charity.

Tiny and In Charge.

I stayed at home today at the behest of the Fetus Overlord (Overlady?), who hit me with indigestion last night and a nauseous headache this morning. For a creature who could fit in the palm of my hand, Eva's damn bossy - Clearly she wanted to show off her back-flips because she was really wiggling about today.

In other news there was another cat on our porch this afternoon, Nancy was furious and her tail puffed up to three times it's normal size. Edith was asleep and missed the whole incident.

Ask An Atheist!

Doc C spent most of this afternoon making this large sign for the (self-explanatory) "Ask an Atheist" event at the university tomorrow. I like the sign a lot, and hope they get asked some good questions!

Nancy's question is when she's likely to be fed, with a follow up question about getting rid of Edith.

Recent Adventures in Reading.

I am reading tons of books (both paper and kindle) at the moment, and yesterday I finished reading "The Bat".  

It's a fairly standard issue country house mystery, but it doesn't particularly distinguish itself except for having been one of the inspirations for Batman.  The Bat in this case is a infamous villian, and he leaves drawings of bats or dead bats at the scenes of his crime; he actually projects a bat's shadow onto a window at one point in the story, which is clearly a pre-cursor to the bat-signal.  So that's fun for Batman fans, but otherwise I wouldn't bother.  I'll probably still watch the film, because it stars Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price so it's bound to be a feast of over-acting!

After that potboiler I decided I wanted something a smidge more literary, so I moved onto "Geek Love". I am quite sure I must have read a description of it at some point, but I didn't bother to re-read it before I picked it up this time.  It's good, really it is, but it centers around a family of circus freaks who were deliberately created by their parents using various cocktails of dangerous substances during pregnancy. That part is fine, a little disturbing but the parents do adore their carefully manufactured freaks so I didn't find it horrifying at all; except that I stupidly didn't think about what might have happened to the mutated babies that weren't viable... and, yeah, I've decided to read that book some other time now.  Probably after I've given birth myself and everything is fine, you know? (Actually I'm also not reading pregnancy manuals either, for pretty much the same reason - They just love to scare you and I don't need that, thanks!)

So now I'm reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and I know there is bound to be a lot of substance abuse in this too, because the drug-addled misbehaviour and hallucinations are pretty notorious, but I think I can also be fairly confident that Hunter S. Thompson didn't have a pregnancy to worry about at the time. Right?  You'd tell me, wouldn't you?

I Loaf Scones!

Doc C is baking scones!

And he remembered to put on his apron! Which he gave me permission to post a (lightly disguised) photo of!

It's a good day!

Warm scones with jam and a nice mug of tea!

Pinteresting, Very Pinteresting.

Oh! A weird hodge podge of my photos are turning up on Pinterest!  

I'm not sure why people are linking to me for the "TARDamask" image, because that's a Threadless t-shirt and the actual link is but a click away on that post.

The most popular of my own photos are the perennial favourite pictures of my pink net underskirt, with the origami cherry blossoms following closely behind - So I'm strongly associated with pink as far as Pinterest is concerned.

Paper Cherry Wreath.

Occasionally I get an attack of the Marthas and feel the need to decorate the house in some crafty seasonal way (this is one of the reasons I am only permitted a special dispensation to buy Martha Stewart Living Magazine at Halloween - Otherwise the inspiration would be too much for me and we would be knee deep in nick-nacks and bunting for the entire year). So long as I don't start spending a lot of money on any of these projects, Doc C has discovered it's best to just get the hell out of the way and let the crafting fever run it's course, because it's usually not a prolonged bout and the results are usually not so bad.

An excellent example of this would be my brilliant idea to make tons of strands of origami cherry blossoms to decorate the living room with, remember that? Fortunately this was pretty cheap, it only required three or four sheets of paper and some fishing line, I even gave myself plenty of time to actually implement the idea properly instead of rushing to get things together and it was going to be so epic!  Actually I think the very epicness is what killed it, because I ended up making only half a dozen strands, which frankly looked a bit sad all by themselves on the vase of twigs.

Still, six strands of paper flowers are better than none at all, and I had a spare vine wreath left over from Halloween, so I combined those together, threw in a glitter hummingbird and I am quite pleased with the end product. If only because of the angle of the hummingbirds wings, the whole thing perhaps looks a little like an overly cheerful reference to the "Hunger Games", but not too much, right?

How Now Brown Cow.

Over the weekend I was persuaded to actually leave the house and meet new people, which was fairly pleasant and I will probably repeat the experiment again.

The only thing I found uncomfortable was being told by a person who I'd never met or spoken to before, that my british accent was "mellowing" (how the hell would you know buddy? Oh, and I'm pretty sure it isn't because my Mum would have told me when I spoke to her on Saturday) and that I'd probably end up losing it all together in a few years time.  It's just an odd thing to declare to someone you've just met, isn't it?

Here's the thing, I love regional accents, but I myself have simply never had a regional accent of any sort, so I speak what is best described as nicely-brought-up-middle-class-ese.  I am reasonably certain that if I was going to have picked up an accent, then logically it should have been whilst I was a child or a teenager, when I was presumably more easily influenced and wanting to fit in; why would I suddenly change my accent in my mid-thirties?  I'm really quite happy with how I speak, and there isn't any pressure for me to change; in fact I get the distinct impression that having a British accent is one of my main selling points to an American market, if you want to be cynical about the thing.  I'm sure I've picked up some new words and phrases, but that's just sensible if you want to communicate with people.

Yeah, so that annoyed me quite a bit now that I think about it. In fact I'm tempted to find a course of internet elocution lessons, or listen to a lot of BBC radio broadcasts from the fifties to really nail that received pronunciation thing down.

A Good Friday.

Long Weekend!!! I've already had a three hour nap!!!

A Field of Buttercups.

When we were in Winston-Salem for the ultrasound we couldn't park right next to the clinic we were going to, so Doc C dropped me off and went to park the car somewhere else. It turned out to be next to a field full of buttercups!  So pretty!

For some reason Doc laughed when I suggested Buttercup as a middle name - Which is weird, because I know he loves "The Princess Bride" as much as the next card-carrying geek.

Such a Girl!

On Monday we drove to Winston Salem for Genetics Counseling ("Are you related?" "No, that seems highly unlikely - Did you clock the accents?" * ) and an ultrasound. At this point they can say, with 95% degree of accuracy, what gender your baby is and our tech was pretty certain that the alien spawn is a girl!

This is especially good because we were finding it difficult to choose a name for a boy, but we both really like the name Evalyn for a girl. I had a Great-Aunt Eveline who I was very fond of, and, whilst Doc C never met her, he just really loves the name. Just like my Aunty our daughter will be Eva for short, but we are going with a different spelling to make the pronunciation clearer - If we spell it Eveline she will almost certainly be referred to as "Eve Line" or possibly "Ever Line", and we want her name to be pronounced "Eva Lin". 

We were just brain-storming names when I first threw Evalyn out as a suggestion and I didn't think much more about it, until the Doc brought it up again when we were having the same discussion on another occasion. He really liked the name and was already very keen that we call our child that if she were a girl (I don't think I was even pregnant at this point!). I do think it's a pretty name, but it's also good that Aunty Eva was actually quite amazing in her own way. Eva was a Major in the army, which was one of those details of her earlier life that blew my mind as a child; because to me she was the woman who knitted me hooded cardigans, made me elaborate soft toys, gave me books like the "Chronicle of the 20th Century" and could be relied upon for incredibly rich tea-time confections. I also think it was damn cool that she didn't marry and never seemed to regret that particularly; she was proudly independent and self-reliant, so, whilst I'm sure we would disagree on things like politics if she were still alive today, her strength of character is definitely something that I hope my daughter will be inspired by.

 

* When we lived in London and were taking the night-bus home one evening, the drunk guy sitting in front of us turned around and, having clearly been eavesdropping on our bus-ride banter, abruptly asked "Are you brother and sister?" and then said "No, because you are British and he's American, so are you a couple?". Drunk guy's girlfriend was mortified, but it was really funny!