Alien Spouse

Creamy Carby Deliciousness.

This week I've made myself a basic rice pudding.  This doesn't sound like a huge challenge, but when you start researching recipes you quickly find that every food write out there has a very definite opinion and a slight variation on the recipe.  Just the cookbooks we have in the house disagreed wildly, with Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall flat out contradicting Nigella and Jamie Oliver going off on a totally different tangent.  After a great deal of thought, I went with Jamie, if only because his version called for the fewest ingredients (rice, milk, sugar) and I wanted to start off as simply as possible, so then I could tweak it by trying out the different variations.

I also wanted to make this batch on the stove, because that would take 30 minutes as opposed to 3 hours in the oven.  The only downside to the stove version as opposed to oven version is that it doesn't produce the skin on top, which I love.

The most difficult part was working out which rice to use, because in the UK I'd simply grab the bag marked "Pudding Rice", here the only pudding rice I could find was a pre-packaged Uncle Ben's box mix.  So I trusted in Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall's emphatic assertion that "Short-grain rice is essential. You cannot make a respectable rice pudding with the long-grain variety" (Neither of Nigella's recipes are for respectable rice puddings then, she must make the floozy version), and went with... Sushi rice.  Of course.

It was a gamble, but that was the only short-grain rice I could find and it actually worked really quite well.  I didn't rinse the rice first so there was enough starch to thicken up the milk nicely, and the rice maintained it's integrity and didn't turn to mush.  I made enough to have some for mid-afternoon snack at work every day this week.  Yummy!

Coraline (2009) - Freaking Finally!

Since Friday I have watched my "Coraline" DVD (Thanks again for that Mum!  Love you!) three times, twice in 2D and once in exciting 3D.  I'm not being sarcastic there, the 3D really rocked.

I actually really want to watch it for a fourth time, with the director's commentary playing, but I don't think Doc would want to do that.  Particularly as I'd want to double check if the commentary is different on the 2D and the 3D versions, and if they are?  I want to watch both.

This may be one of the best film adaptations of a book ever.  And as "Coraline" is one of my favourite books, this makes me very happy.  Also I want all of the merchandising even more than I did before - which was already a lot.  At the very least, when I replace my wellies (which sprung a leak today just as I was splashing in a huge puddle of melted snow - Fabulous timing there wellies) I shall be looking for a bright yellow pair.  Just like Coraline.  OMG! Coraline could be my Halloween '10 costume!  Oooh!

More Food In NYC And A Shirt.

I know that I am scarcely the first to say this, but it remains the truth: I love New York.  This is mostly to do with the fact that I love to eat good food, and I like to shop at good (not necessarily expensive, but good) shops.  I've been looking for a black-&-white check shirt for a while, and UNIQLO in NYC provided a range of different checks to choose from, all in the perfect texture of warm brushed cotton.  Happy sigh.

Last night Doc C had to go and do conference things (Oh, did I not mention we were here for an actual reason?  Yep, Philosophy Conference.) so we agreed to have a late dinner when he got back.  Which turned out to be around midnight.

Fortunately, I had happened to browse the cookery section of a bookshop yesterday and found Bubby's Brunch Cookbook, which had some delicious recipes in it.  Then I noticed that Bubby's Pie Company, the restaurant the book was based around, was in Tribeca.  Back at the hotel I just happened to wander onto their website, and immediately decided that was what I wanted for dinner.  Which was extra specially good, because it's open 24 hours (except Mondays) and was about 5 minutes walk from our hotel.

Where else, but New York, can you get a perfect Macaroni Cheese in the middle of the night?  Hmmm?  And follow it up with a slice of fresh coconut cream pie?  SO happy!

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. And Books!

This morning I had a bowl of porridge for breakfast, whilst I finished off the detective novel I've been reading on this trip.  Then I walked around the corner to The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street, and they had, not one, but two Mrs Bradley Mysteries by Gladys Mitchell; neither of which I had previously read.  Score!

Then Doc met me for lunch, and we went to Le Pain Quotidien, for a simple rustic lunch.  And a teeny tiny raspberry custard tart.  So adorable, and so delicious.

This evening we are going to get a curry.

New York.  I bloody love it!

 

Three Nights in Tribeca.

Can it be? Is it true? Yes! Doc C has found a hotel on Manhattan Island with free wi-fi in the rooms! It's incredible, but true.  Do you know that the hotel in Washington wanted $12 for a day's worth of internet?  Outrageous!  I think we need to stand firm on these sorts of charges, and work towards making hotels understand the importance of being able to browse the internet in the comfort of one's own room.  This is ofcourse the only reason that I broke my run of daily blog posts, I managed over a year but in the end that's what got me.  Ah well!

Fortunately, our hotel in Tribeca is much more progressive on the internet front; AND they have a cafe downstairs.  They thoughtfully provide a copy of the menu in the rooms, which I have perused carefully and tomorrow morning I intend to eat a breakfast of porridge with maple syrup & fresh fruit, most likely with a pot of tea. Lovely.

Oh, and there is a detective novel shop just round the corner.  This place is perfect.

p.s. I will be posting my Christmas Day report at some point soon, hopefully before the start of the New Year but we will see.  You can't rush comedy.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Pastry Stars.

I made mincepies for my office's Christmas party, ummm, Team Building on Friday and that used up the only jar of Crosse and Blackwell's mincemeat that I'd found here.  I think it was worth it, everyone made appreciative noises at least!

So, yesterday, I made my own mincemeat!  With like raisins, and currants, and apples, and zest, and stuff!  And a hefty shot of rum!

Then, tonight, I made my first set of totally home-made mincepies.

I followed the recipes from Nigella Lawson's "How to be a Domestic Goddess", and by way of an experiment on my part I zested the orange before I juiced it for the pie crusts; so that's what the curly stuff under the stars is.  It makes them smell amazing.

Cat & Book.

There really is a book for everything.

Edith already likes this one because it advocates weekly catnip parties, and she's sleeping off her nip buzz right now.

It's Thursday. It's Ten PM.

Can't update blog.  Watching nail-biting finale of "Project Runway".

Well ok, maybe nail-biting is over stating it; but no time spent with Tim Gunn is wasted.

Actually, Mum also sent me a copy of Nina Garcia's book "The One Hundred" for my birthday, which is a style guide which lists 100 items that Nina regards as the cornerstone of personal style.  And do you know what?  It turns out Nina and I have very similar taste, which makes me feel rather good about my wardrobe instincts.  Thanks Nina!

Three Good Things.

1. Very excitingly I will be buying this book from Rex Parker, replacing my current copy of this title; because I want as much of my Marsh collection to have vintage covers as possible.
2. I also bought some new clothes today, nothing particularly dramatic; a denim skirt, a pair of cords, and a black sweater, but the skirt is a US size ten so a UK size 12.  Um, squee!
3. And we found blackcurrant jam in one of the local supermarkets.

Yeah, I'm pretty easily pleased actually...

Current Book: Arthur Conan Doyle - A Life in Letters

I'm reading "Arthur Conan Doyle - A Life in Letters" which is just fascinating. I particularly loved the letters he wrote as a school boy; they are so hilariously Victorian in tone with their fascination with health and mortality, mixed with the abrupt changes of subject that you can expect from any 8 year old.  It's all, and I only paraphrase very slightly here, 'Sadly two boys died last week of the croup.  50 new books were bought for the library which is very jolly now'.  Brilliant!

At present I'm reading the letters he wrote as a struggling young doctor trying to earn some extra money by writing short stories for magazines whenever he had a spare moment.  He hasn't created Holmes yet, but he is en route.

I only bought the book because it was on the sale table last time I had the pleasure of being in a large book shop, and I wasn't sure what to expect from it.  So far my affection for Conan Doyle has remained untarnished; even though I'm completely sure we would disagree on any number of subjects my impression of him remains charmingly avuncular.  Of course I'm not even half-way through the book yet, I may still end up throwing it across the room in disgust.  (I'll try to remember to update this post when I've finished it.)

It Is Confirmed To Be Mono.

The doctor's office just called to confirm I do indeed have Mono, which makes sense given every single one of my symptoms was pointing to that diagnosis. The nurse firmly reminded me that this is a virus that will run it's course, but all I can do is rest until it does.  She also said this can take weeks, or has been known in some cases, to take months.

Tell you what, I'm going to have another cup of tea with a slice of Doc C's freshly baked banana bread and do some positive visualisations of me running around as fit as a flea within weeks.  Months is just plainly ludicrous, I can't be doing with lollygagging around the house for that long.

In the meantime, I've finished my "Frankenstein" essay in which I've managed to extrapolate a whole sado-masochistic marriage from a two sentence description of a painting.  Don't worry, I had Doc check it wasn't merely fevered ramblings before I e-mailed it in to Jill. 

I Dream of Sleeping.

Still no news about my blood tests, but I can report that I was at work for a grand total of two and a half hours yesterday.  This was just enough time for four colleagues and two students (one graduate, one undergrad) to tell me I looked terrible.  Mainly they thought I looked pale, which considering I am a blonde who avoids the sun isn't exactly news, but apparently I was even paler than I usually am. Imagine, I must have bee practically translucent.  Doc brought me home, and I napped for a couple of hours, before setting up my work computer laptop so I can access most of the software I need to do some work from home.

Not exactly a strenuous day, but I was so tired by the time I went to bed that night I actually dreamt about settling down to go to sleep.  It's quite something when even your sub-conscious is nagging you about accepting you need to get some more rest.

Apart from making sure I can keep my job, I'm also trying to keep up with my class work.  I have a 2-to-3 page paper to write, which is a close reading of a quote from "Frankenstein".  I've chosen the description of a painting in the Frankenstein library, which is only two sentences in the seventh chapter (page 76 for those of you with the Bedford/St. Martins 2nd edition), but I think it explores a lot of themes of the novel as well as indicating a much darker possible reading of the romantic relationships within the text.  It sounds quite good in theory, doesn't it?  The problem is that it seems to be coming out like that weird post I wrote the other day, I just can't seem to articulate my analysis clearly or, more to the point, provide solid textual evidence.  I am going to go through an look up each and every word in the OED and hope that gives me something to hang the whole essay on.  Keep your fingers crossed.

It's Alive! Alive!

Today was a very good day!  Doc made crumpets! And I read "Frankenstein" from beginning to end! 

Actually my personal best is still having read "Wuthering Heights" cover-to-cover in a single day, but that's not the point here.  Whilst reading Mary Shelley's best known work I was also underlining lots of passages in the novel and made a couple of pages of notes, which is guaranteed to make a girl feel like she's been doing some serious thinking.

One of the best things about buying second-hand text books is when the previous owners have already underlined bits, or made notes in the margins.  Whoever it was that owned this book before me started off annotating the text quite emphatically, for example there is a star in the margin that was drawn in ballpoint pen with such force that it's impression goes through the next three pages; but that kind of intensity is hard to maintain, and the notes stop a third of the way into the book.

Still, the last note is particularly pleasing:

"The Monster Lives!" Yeah, it does!  Wooh!

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Snacks.

Today started off very well indeed.  Doc cooked me buttermilk pancakes and episode-one-season-two of "Dollhouse" was available to watch on Hulu.  Yay!

For the rest of today I shall be mostly reading "Frankenstein" and critical analysis of "Frankenstein", which may well lead to my having unsettling dreams about expeditions to the North Pole for at least the next week.

To help keep up my energy levels through out the academic activity, I have snacks in the form of low-fat chocolate milk and a bag of multi-grain pretzels.

It's going to be a pretty good Saturday!

Of Intellectual Property Rights and Things.

Today I've been thinking a lot about intellectual property, copyright and plagiarism.  It's fascinating stuff, but not very funny and, just perhaps, a touch dry.

So instead let me tell you that I think I'll be basing Doc's Brain Slug Wig/Hat on a pattern posted here several years ago, which illustrated the construction process of costumes for twin boys who had decided to be Dr Seuss' Thing One and Thing Two for Halloween.

I only wish Doc would even consider the Wig/Hat in blue, but it still amuses me to think he will be Thing Three: The Growed Up Version.

A Dog-Earred (Former) Bookseller.

How do I know it's been years since I earnt my living by standing behind the counter of a bookshop all day?  Well, today I helped to man my department's stand at the University's Open House, which meant I was standing for four hours talking to prospective students, when I got home I had to nap for a good hour or two and now my legs feel like they want to fall off. 

Four hours is nothing to a seasoned bookseller at the peak of their selling capabilities, so clearly I'm seriously out of condition!  To think I used to flog books all day, then go clubbing and get up for the early shift and do it all over again is just exhausting.  Where did I get the energy from?

Evening Class Supplies.

This evening's class was on John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi", which has everything you could want in a Jacobean play, and throws in a nice case of lycanthropy when you're least expecting it.  Love it.

As you can see from the photo I bring all the necessary school supplies to the class with me.

• Text
• Last week's hand-outs
• Notepad
• Pens (It's important to have two or three different colour options, for the more detailed doodles)
• Cough sweet
• Folder
• Water
• Tea
• Chocolate, in this instance Reece's Peanut Butter Cups, but the exact type of chocolate is not important.

Work Study.

Week three of my college classes and I'm still not 100% on top of all the reading I need to do, I am getting through most of it somehow but I don't feel like  it's digested properly.  I feel like there is a chapter or two stuck in my throat.

I was talking to Doc C about this problem of working a 40 hour week and studying for two MA classes a semester, because that is a lot of work, and I mainly just wanted him to sympathise.  Naturally, and if you've read the blurb on the back of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" you'll know this, he responded by trying to come up with a solution.  He began recounting anecdotal instances of academic colleagues getting up at 6 so they can read for two hours, then go to the gym at 8, then reading for another 2 hours before teaching a class. The problem being, I already do get up at around 6 and I have to be at work by 8:30, so the idea of having 4 hours of reading time every morning is just so luxurious as to be laughable.  And not helpful.  I may have snapped a little tiny bit, before remembering who would be nipping out to buy me a burrito so I could have my dinner before going to the class.

Having considered the matter further, there is really only one logical solution.  The deal with the University is that they pay for three classes a year and I get time out of my working week to attend those  classes.  As it happens that both of mine are in the evenings, it's absolutely necessary for me to re-appropriate that time for research and reading.

So if you walk past my office and you see me reading a book, no I am not relaxing with chick-lit (as if!) and yes, I have finished that paper work you wanted.  I just also have a ton of homework to get through and I am loving it!

Reading Frenzy.

I tweeted earlier that I'd like a USB port into my brain, and when I typed that I was joking.

Now I'm really wondering if that can be done, because I have a shelf full of books that I need to cram into my brain this semester and radical science fiction brain surgery seems the most logical way to achieve that goal. I'm not sure it can be done with conventional methods.

Well, unless I find a whole extra day a week behind the fridge.

That Sunday Feeling.

Yesterday I intended to finish "The Duchess of Malfi" and start reading "Frankenstein", then make a start on the pile of additional reading I need to do. Totally achievable, right?

So naturally I stayed up until 2 last night, and I watched episodes of "Law and Order: SVU" and made a Brain Slug.  I'm sure I can hand that in instead of one of my research papers and it will be graded appropriately.

Still for me Sundays have always been about that mad scramble to get homework done anyway.  Why should that change, just because I'm 33 and should know by now how to efficiently plan my time?

The important thing is that the Brain Slug turned out quite well, except Doc thinks it needs to be larger.  So I anticipate that I'll be whipping up this one's bigger brother when I should be doing something else entirely.

Ah, crochet!  It's nice to see my wool gathering take a solidly literal form!

Home/Work.

This weekend I have a LOT of reading to do for my classes, so naturally I slept for most of this morning, went out for lunch, played with the cats and started a new crochet project.

My Commitment to Further Education.

At lunch time I spent a couple of hundred dollars on the text books I need for my MA course, and now I think perhaps I should also have looked for a decent time management book.  Taking today as an example I have been doing something or other since 6:15 this morning, and I need to streamline my day somewhere.  I mean obviously I need to keep the working, the reading, the sleeping, the exercising, the eating, and the scooping-litter-trays, so what does that leave that is inessential?  Well, I'm thinking breathing and, believe me this really hurts, but I think it might also be time to cut back on... the internet.

Don't worry I will ALWAYS make time to blog, but I really have to cut down on my random web surfing.  I've already got an extensive selection of blogs and websites that I peruse regularly, but I just cannot add any more to that, and some may have to fall by the wayside.  Much though I love it, I don't need to read "Overheard in New York" every day, I think I can cut that back to just once a week, and I've already stopped looking at "Stuff on My Cat", can you believe that?  "Stuff on My Cat" was what the internet was invented for, and I've gone cold turkey on it.  Weird.  Although it does help that it's not as good as it used to be, the cats are obviously still completely fabulous, but the quality of the stuff on them and the captions describing the picture have really gone down hill recently.

This is where Twitter, Netvibes and Instapaper are going to be invaluable.  Twitter gives me fun sized snippets of data through out the day, Netvibes keeps my internet nicely organised as well as telling me when there have been new posts on my favourite sites and finally InstaPaper means I can save interesting things to my iPod to read when I have more time.  It's a three-pronged internet attack plan, and I intend to use it ruthlessly.

Be warned internet, I will be taking no nonsense.

Nice Quiet Saturday.

Saturdays are particularly nice when you don't really have to be anywhere aren't they?

This morning we slept in late, and then Doc cooked me a lovely breakfast.  Then we took out the recycling, before we did some shopping.  I needed to exchange a skein of silk and buy some beads, whilst I was in the yarn shop I bought "Stitch 'N Bitch Nation" and spent this afternoon in a crochet frenzy, watching "Dead Like Me" on Hulu whilst the cats rolled around in a patch of sun.  Now we're watching the dramatisation of "Grey Gardens", and it's so fabulous.

I love Saturdays!

Back to School: Weirdly Yay!

I LOVED my first Eng. Lit. MA class last night.  It was really interesting and my brain was engaged by the discussion.  I know this because when I woke up this morning it wasn't my usual internal monologue of "Ugh! Work!  I really don't feel like it today.  **yawn** " (Nothing against my office it's just I'd prefer to be independently wealthy and spend my days wafting between Cinemas, bookshops & Pilates classes, when I'm not lunching with friends or sleeping), instead I found that I was thinking "Ooh! I wonder if that could also be tied in to perceptions of class structure in 17th Century England?  That would be interesting to do some more research into, hmmm..."

It's just really nice to be learning stuff again, although now I've seen David's syllabus and grading policy I am more nervous about disappointing him.  I really need to buy all of the books on the reading list and just highlight the hell out of them.

Evening Classes.

Guess where I am right now? Well, ok not right now because I'm setting up a timer delay on this post, but the time that this will be posted? Is this confusing?  Anyway...

This evening I'm taking my first MA class in English Literature, um, Squeeeee!

Wednesdays (6pm - 9pm) will be "Seventeenth Century British Literature" which is being taught by my friend David and Mondays (6pm - 9pm) will be "Bibliography and Research" which is being taught by my friend Jill.

If you're really lucky there might be a photo post after the class (I haven't seen any unusually sized insects today, so don't get too excited), but Edith woke me up at 4 o'clock this morning, damn her, and let us not forget that Wednesdays are also a gym day, so I am predicting I will get home and promptly fall asleep because this will be a v-e-r-y l---o---n---g day. 

Good thing I've had coffee.  Really strong coffee actually, and I might make some tea to take with me to the class.  And I should probably eat something as well, maybe a veggie burrito?

Point being, I am both really tired and over caffeinated, and that means I am barely coherent and I can't work put how to end this post without it just abruptly stopping. 

Sort of like a Neal Stephenson novel, much though I love Neal Stephenson's novels, the way the story just stop drives me crazy.  Have I mentioned that before?  "The Diamond Age", for example, is a rocking good sci-fi novel for the entire way through and then has an ending that annoyed me SO much the first time I read it I was proper cross.  When I re-read it, I was braced for the ending, so it didn't seem that terrible, but the first time I was totally deflated by it.

The End.

HUGE Insect Photo Segues into Children's Literary Allusion.

On the way to the car this evening we encountered a large caterpillar when Doc nearly trod on it.

I'm used to caterpillars in England being relatively small, but this thing was ENORMOUS.   To give you some idea, I took a photo with my hand in the shot for scale and it's only slightly smaller my index finger.  I'd have posted that shot, but this was a bug on a mission and he was moving so fast that I didn't have time to position my hand next to it and get a nice clear picture before the insect undulated out of focus.

This was definitely the best picture I got, but it doesn't convey the sense of urgency with which the caterpillar was moving.  It was as if the Caterpillar and the White Rabbit had swapped roles for the day, and that meant that our Caterpillar friend was late for an important function, whilst the White Rabbit got to chill out on top of a toadstool with a nice hookah pipe for once.  I know, I know, it's a bit lazy to immediately reach for the Lewis Carrol reference, but this thing was so over-sized I could easily have imagined Alice having quite a long chat with him.

Some Off Mountain Time.

There's a TV advert for a local pet shop which has become somewhat of standing joke between Doc and I, because of one key line of dialogue "Why leave the mountain when you can get everything you want right here?" Why indeed?  Doc and I are generally agreed that leaving the mountain is occasionally necessary in and of itself for the sake of our sanity, and besides you cannot get everything you need here.  I've tried.

Yesterday I decided that I needed to go to a bookshop, a halfway decent bookshop, as a matter of some urgency.  So we hopped in the car and drove to Winston Salem.

Our first stop was Borders.  Now in the UK Borders would not be my first choice of bookshop, mainly because I worked for Waterstones for three years and there was a friendly rivalry with the branch of Borders around the corner, but in the US it has several advantages.  They have books, DVDs, CDs and quite often a whole section of Paperchase products.  Heaven!

The books I bought today were:

• "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss
• "The Pilates Body" by Brooke Siler
• "Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters"
• "Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems"
• "The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book" by Bill Watterson
• "How to Have Style" by Isaac Mizrahi

The first two titles were precisely what I went to buy, so that was very satisfying; all of the others were from the sale section which was a great bonus.

The additional items I purchased were:

• A Gaiam Reformer Resistance Band, with DVD
• A set of badges with multi-coloured skulls
• A set of badges with embroidered roses and polka dots on different shades of pastel
• A roll of wrapping paper decorated with skulls and stars

And then, and then, we went across the road to Krispy Kreme to have doughnuts and coffee for lunch!

Our original plan was to go for a curry for dinner, but first we went for a walk around Old Salem and the campus of Salem College, which is gorgeous.  The doughnuts weren't going anywhere, so we decided to skip the curry and just come home instead. All in all it wasn't even a day trip, it was just six hours off the mountain, but it was psychologically invaluable and we scored a whole bunch of cool stuff. 

Actually, I hope that pet shop is open tomorrow because we do need to pick up a couple of things from there and it is pretty handy.

Agatha: Novel (1978), Film (1979).

When I was 9 I suddenly developed a taste for Agatha Christie novels.  I'm fairly certain the first one I owned was "At Bertram's Hotel", but I don't remember if I got that before or after seeing the BBC adaptations of the Miss Marple stories.  I could still hum you that theme tune, and for me Joan Hickson is the definitive Marple.

I must have been about 12 when the film "Agatha" (1979) was shown on TV, but I was thrilled to be allowed to stay up and watch it with my parents because I was fascinated by Agatha Christie's 11 day disappearance in 1926, which she never really gave a proper explanation for.  Dad teased me that there was bound to be a sex scene in the film because it starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, and, as I was a very pure minded 12 year old, the mere suggestion was completely outrageous to me!  I don't actually remember much about the film now, except for the main plot twist, and it being the main reason I developed a distaste for Timothy Dalton that I've never quite got over.  He's probably very nice in real life, but as Archie Christie he was a cad and a bounder so I could never buy into him being a romantic lead after this.

Last week I spotted the book that the film was based on.  It was published two years after Agatha's death, so she didn't have a chance to respond to the solution posed by Kathleen Tynan.  I'm only on chapter three, so she's only just vanished mysteriously and there isn't any indication of where she might have gone.

The art work on this is particularly 70's film tie-in, isn't it?  Hideous, yet intriguing.  Those are great portraits of Redgrave and Hoffman, but it's a weirdly composed image and I have no idea why they are peering off in different directions through wet glass.  I'm pretty sure that doesn't end up being a plot point, but I could be wrong there.

Further Education.

I went to meet with the Director of Admissions at the University's Graduate School today.  Just for a chat.

I need to complete an on-line application, get my undergraduate transcript, get a decent score on the G.R.E., ask three referees to write me references, re-tweak my C.V. and pay the accompanying fees for various parts of the process.

Assuming that all goes swimmingly, I'll be starting an MA in English Literature in the Autumn.

That is SO weird.

Smoggy Old London.

In the comments of my last fascinating post on the weather, Miss Joules (Hello!) mentioned that when she tried telling her family in America that "...England gets only a bit more rain than they do, only they get it over three weeks instead of three days, but their preconceived notions are stronger than my factual information."

OMG!  I know exactly what you mean!

Have you ever tried telling an American that London is not foggy?  They will look at you as though you are pathological liar.  They have seen Sherlock Holmes movies, thank you very much, which means they are well aware that London is foggy, so why would I say any different?  Well, because London really does not get "Pea Soupers" any more.  The thing is that actually what London used to get is smog, and  there is much less coal smoke in London, which means that you don't get the same impenetrable fogs in contemporary London. Sorry, I know that is slightly less romantic but it's also a lot better for your health, so there is that.

When I started writing this post I was intending to include a finale in the form of a hilarious anecdote about my lovely Mother-in-Law, but it has been vetoed by Doc C.  This leaves me without a big finish to this post, but trust me it was comedy gold.

"Ooh, and Here's A Treasure! You Want's That, Don't You, Dearie?"

We went to walk dogs and fuss cats today, it was very fun as always and once again we fell in love with a dog that we cannot have because we're renting a house. sigh.  Oh well, one day...

On the way back home we dropped off our recycling.  Boring.

Except!  They have a small table covered with stuff people have brought to swap, so it's essentially a free jumble sale.  It was pretty much as you would expect, and I could started quite a collection of steamy romance novels should I have been so inclined.  Just as I was about to walk away, I noticed a small binder that had a really ugly cover design, you know Beethoven wrote some quite beautiful music, but a pin-up he is not, nor did he ever claim to be as far as I'm aware.  Anyway, Beethoven was there to reinforce the small binders claim to be the A to Z of music and that is quite an assertion for something that's only slightly bigger than your hand, so I had a look at it.  Inside wasn't anything to do with music at all, in fact it was a transcript of the novelisation of the film "Labyrinth".

Squeee!  That is brilliant!  I particularly love the title done in that classic 80's style of large letters made out of typeface.

So naturally, I took the transcript out of the ugly binder (hey, someone else might want it.  I am just not that person.), and brought it home with me.  I shall treasure it, not least because an actual copy of the novelisation goes for $40 on Amazon.  I haven't started reading it yet, but rest assured I'll report back if there is anything really special in it.

Stinky, Stinky, Stinky.

Today's top tip, should you be about to drive route 81 through Pennsylvania, is to bring gas masks and some sort of air freshener because OHMIGOD there is a stretch of about fifteen miles that stinks to high heaven.  I am not even joking.  I found myself hoping for a skunk to become enraged at one point.  Funnily enough this stink was very close to the town of Hershey, I will say no more. *cough* chocolate-should-not-taste-like-that *cough*

Our trip was further enlivened by Doc C noting that his beef jerky purchase, far from adding to his manliness, in fact indicated that he was "...not a real man of the road...I went for the low sodium option."

To round up this post of dubious taste I'll just add that I have been reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" which combines the classic tale of romance with a plague of reanimated corpses.  It's very fun, and the conceit does explain why there is a garrison of soldiers permanently stationed by a sleepy English village.  Unfortunately Miss Austen's co-author rather stretched my credulity by adding a scene in which chipmunks scurry across the Bennet girls path, followed by several other animals, including a skunk.  That's just taking things too far!  Zombies? Yes. Misplaced wildlife?  No.  You have got to have limits and that would be mine, it's exactly the same issue I had with the live version of "101 Dalmations" frankly.

Inked.

So I tweeted yesterday that I was visiting a tattoo artist with Doc C, which was a subtle clue that I would be getting inked.

I've thought about getting a tattoo before, but never did for various reasons.  Yesterday?  I don't know, it was just different.

I wanted to get an old fashioned key on my wrist, and I knew I wanted it to look like a Victorian illustration.  Annoyingly I have a book of nature sketches at my Mum's place that I knew had the perfect type of illustrations, albeit of completely the wrong subject matter, so I was looking for something like that in all of the local bookshops.  Which of course meant I could not find a picture like that to save my life.  I found a couple of kind of, sort of, close to images on-line and off we went.

When we got there, we were introduced to Bill, our tattoo artist, who was lovely.  He had tattoos of his bikes, as well as lot of others, so he and Doc clicked immediately.  Doc wanted the suits of cards, and pulled out a deck with exactly what he wanted on.  Easy.  Then I explained what I wanted, so Bill thought for a minute and went into his studio for a reference book for me to look at.  It was the architectural equivalent of my nature book, by the same press and everything, and that's when I knew for certain I was going to be in good hands.

 It came out quite well I think.

Oh! Mighty Lamp, We Beseech You!

 One of the really fun things about staying in a house rather than a hotel is that you get to live with other people's taste for a while, and that can be fascinating. Our house in Province Town was very comfortable and had some lovely things in it.

 I was particularly fond of the lamp on my bedside table.  The base is a sculpture depicting a cat, a hare and a pig holding a platter which the lamp sits in the middle of.  The animals are all dressed in formal suits, and it's quite an odd piece of furniture but it really grew on me.  It's got a sort of Wicker Man oddness to it, but it's also quite sweet.

 

As it happens I spotted a makers name on one of the photos I took of this lamp, so I know it's a Frederick Cooper lamp.  However I can't find it on their website, so I have no clue if it's still available; and the site has no prices anyway, so I can't even work out if it's vaguely affordable.

(p.s. The book is "The Clue in the Jewel Box - A Nancy Drew mystery".  This edition was published in 1943 and this has to be one of the most breathlessly event packed books I have ever read.  So far our heroine has

• Has helped an old lady, who was taken ill
• Discovered the old lady is, in fact, deposed royalty.
• Searched for the lost Prince.
• Tried to foil a pick pocket gang.
• Saved her father from being shot.
• Been trapped on a runaway ferris wheel.
• Had to deal with that horrid paparazzi.
• Dived into a river from a speeding boat to rescue a small child.
• Been on a picnic.
• Rescued a postman from a savage dog.
• Had a valuable hair ornament stolen from her.
• Recovered hair ornament.
• Modelled in a fashion show.

And I'm only about two thirds of the way through!  Wow!)

Pre-Graduation Reception (With a Detour into Bookselling Cultural Indoctrination).

This evening was the medal ceremony for the graduating honours students.  I arranged a reception for what ended up being over 200 people, and I think it all went pretty well actually.

I went over to the reception hall to make sure everything was set up properly, and I took the medals across at the same time.  We'd asked for a small table to be put on the stage, so that the medals were to hand during the ceremony and I found that my ex-bookseller aesthetic requirements kicked in, so I instinctively pyramided the cases.  I just couldn't help it. 

Actually it was all I could do not to open all of the cases and straighten the medals so they were all in exactly the same position, because any multiples circular objects of that diameter triggers my stickering impulse.  Next time your in a chain bookstore look at a table with a display of 3-for-2 books, I think you'll find that all of the stickers are in the same position on the front covers.  Which believe you me, is really tedious to do in the first place, but it's even worse when you have to carefully unsticker a whole stack of them without ruining the covers entirely.  Ugh.

Anyway...

I think the event this evening went well, not least because the students seemed to really appreciate it and several of them thanked us in their speeches.  I was even asked to friend someone on Facebook, which I was very pleased to do.  So sweet!

Amost Rorschach.

I finished the hat this evening, and put the black ink blots on to the mask.  I still need to add buttons, a belt and a scarf. 

Of course then I'll probably want to re-do the mask, which will be tricky now that I've deployed hot glue to attach the hat.

Proto-Rorschach.

I made Rorschach's trench coat this evening (whilst Meryl Streep was suffering because of her beauty during the Holocaust.  Wow, "Sophie's Choice" is unrelenting isn't it?).  I'm really pleased with how the coat came out, although I forgot to put on the buttons before sewing it on.  Whoops!

The tricky bits are coming up next.  I'm still not sure how I'm going to do the hat, but I just winged the coat together, so I'm sure I'll work something out.  The face needs to be symmetrical, so I'll need to be very methodical and careful.  Not as much fun as just charging full steam ahead, but it is the most important detail if I want anyone to actually recognise Rorschach once he's finished.  I mean right now I could tell you it was supposed to be Claude Rains in "The Invisible Man" and that's wouldn't seem unlikely.

The sTori of Tori.

Ooh!  This morning I finished reading  "sTori Telling" by Tori Spelling and I now may, or may not, want to read her second book "Mommywood".  Don't judge me!  I know it seems really shallow to find celeb autobiographies fascinating, but her life has just been so bizarrely different to mine and it's always interesting to read which anecdotes a fellow human tells in an attempt to explain themselves.  I think because it was like reading the archives of her blog, and I realised that I would subscribe to that RSS feed in a heart beat. 

Wait, let me google "Tori Spelling, blog".............

I can't believe she doesn't have a proper blog! She's only got a myspace page, damn it.  I hate myspace. grumble...grumble...grumble...

Wait!  She Twitters!  I knew that Twitter would appeal to such a compulsive texter! I am all over it!  Those up to the second Tori and Dean updates are mine!

I SAID DON'T JUDGE ME, DAMN IT!

A Most Varied Saturday.

 This morning when I came down to feed the cats I immediately noticed that the cat tower had been knocked over, because I am perceptive like that.  What I don't understand is how the thing fell on it's side without waking me or The Doc up.  I mean it's pretty big, wouldn't it have made some noise?

Anyway, then Doc made me crumpets for breakfast.  This time I had jam on mine.  It was nice.

Then we went food shopping and on the way we stopped off at the pet shop.  We wanted a food container, but they had none in stock.  However they did have cat harnesses and leads.  More of that later...

On the way to the supermarket we were walking passed a small bookshop and I spotted Tori Spelling's autobiography "Stori Telling" on the sale table.  It is now mine.  It turned out that it was actually a bookshop, newsagents and cigar shop.  We browsed the magazines, and Doc asked me who the little old lady sitting outside was doing out there; on the way in I'd seen that she had a stack of books and a sign saying she was doing a signing.  Doc went back outside to chat with her, whilst I was asking about the empty cigar boxes they had on top of the shelves.  It turned out they were all for sale, and I have found a fantastic square box with a open front to it for $3.  I have no idea what I'll do with it, but it just looks really useful for something.  When I went back out, Doc had decided to buy two books from the author outside, she was a Russian emigre who had moved to the US when she was 8.  Her first book was about that experience, and the second book was a collection of the letters she and her husband wrote to each other before they married.  Doc asked her to sign the second book and bought it for me; she also gave him a copy of her husband's poetry, I think just because he was interested in it.

After doing the food shopping we came home, and put the harness on the cats one at a time.  They had no idea what the hell was going on, and as you can see Nancy looked particularly comfortable in it.  Poor Nance liked the going outside part, but hated the harness, so she kept walking backwards to try and get out of it.  Edith mainly just rolled around on the front path.

Then I came back in for my movie marathon.  "I Married A Monster from Outer Space" was fun, Doc went so far as to say it was "Rocking", mainly because of the surprisingly good special effects and some good solid performances.  As planned I then watched "Cheaper by the Dozen" which Doc wasn't interested in, so he cooked and just caught the odd scene.  Straight after that on TCM was "Funny Girl" OMG!  Doc lasted about 15 minutes before declaring he had enough.  I can't think why.  I mean I'm not a huge Barbra fan, but her early movie career was pretty good, so I watched the start and end around the "Ashes to Ashes" finale.  It was a very good evening for film and TV.

Oh, That picture in the bottom left hand corner?  That would be Edith killing her crinkly shiny ball toy, because I think it's hilarious when she does that.  She takes it so seriously!

Crocheted Rorschach Progressing Nicely.

I am progressing with Rorschach, so far I've made the head and half of the body; which are the easy parts!  I have a pattern for a crocheted top hat, so I think I'll use that and then squash in the middle.  That will work perfectly, I'm sure. 

Yep. 

I'm totally positive that will look like a fedora, not a squashed beige topper.

Very very confident about that.

The Picture of the Portrait of Dorian Gray.

I was intending to post a picture of Dorian Gray and his portrait last night, but by the time I was fairly happy with both of them it was half twelve.  So I thought I may as well wait until I had some actual sunlight to get the shot.

As you can see I decided to depict the very early part of the story, so the portrait is still in the preliminary sketch phase.  I'm no Basil Haywood with oil paints, so the finished portrait wasn't really an option.  Although Jonny did offer to stitch a portrait for me, which I think would have been amazing!  Next time we are on the same continent m'Dear, we really must collaborate on something fun!

I hope Jill likes him.  Happy Birthday!

(By the way, if you have never read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" it's a great story, and it's only thirteen chapters long.  It's on Project Guggenheim, so it's free to download if you are in the States; however if you are outside the US copyright laws may prohibit you from downloading it from P.G. for free.  These thing vary.

My favourite film version is the 1945 classic starring Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, and Angela Lansbury, but there have been several different interpretations some of which look ghastly.  I am very interested in the production being released later this year with Ben Barnes (you know, Prince Caspian), Colin Firth and Ben Chaplin.)

The Crochet of Dorian Gray.

I've nearly finished another amigurumi, and I have spent pretty much all day working on that.  All I have to do tomorrow is the face, which I'm not going to start this evening because I'm tired and I'll just mess it up if I try now.

This is a birthday present for my friend Jill, she asked me to make her something when she saw Yoda.  I asked what she would like, and her first suggestion was Jane Eyre, but we couldn't think of how to make her interesting because the whole point is that Jane is supposed to be mousy and unremarkable; which is, of course, why she was played by the famously plain Joan Fontaine in the forties adaptation.

Jill's next suggestion was Dorian Gray, which I thought was a fantastic idea.  I could see how I would make Dorian, but I had no idea how to do the portrait, but then we went to Philadelphia and the answer to that question dropped into my shopping basket.  I haven't started that bit yet, so I'll let you see it when it's finished.

The cats have been very helpful with this project.  Nancy pounced on the yarn, and gave the crochet needle a good chew to make sure it was thoroughly inanimate.  On the other hand, Edith padded all over my shoulders and even gave me a head massage, although personally I could have done with fewer claws and perhaps less biting (that sounds like she was attacking my head, but she was just being really over affectionate today; so I think this was her deranged attempt to act like a human and fuss me with her paws, then she gave up and started grooming me instead).

My plan is to make one more amigurumi for the Doc, and then I'll be running another contest!  This is going to be slightly different to the last one, and I think it will be really fun.

The Red House Mystery (1922)

This afternoon I finished reading the detective novel I bought when we were last in Asheville, "The Red House Mystery" (1922) and, for once, I had correctly guessed the main twist and the culprit in chapter three.  I'm usually terrible at that, despite the vast number of golden age of crime novels I have read. 

To be fair though this was the only detective novel that A.A. Milne ever wrote, and it's not bad for a first stab at the genre.  I mean it's obviously going to be Piglet if you think about it, he's clearly a sociopath hiding behind the mask of perky helplessness.  I'm joking.  It was Kanga.

It was written in 1922 and the plot revolves around the classic detective novel conceit of a country house party, with a mysterious reprobate brother returning from Australia and an eccentric amateur detective thrown in for good measure.  It many ways if I didn't know better I could easily have assumed this was a very subtle spoof of the 20's murder mystery, but it definitely has a charm to it, and the novelty factor is high.

Books!

My friend Michael posted this as a note on Facebook, and whilst I don't usually do meme type things (mainly because I am not really clear on what they are exactly, or why they are so popular), this is book related and therefore almost irresistible.

Michael's note-title was "Apparently the BBC reckons most people will only have read 6 of the 100 books here." which is a red rag to a former book seller!

There are fairly simple instructions:

• Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
• Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
• Star (*) those you plan on reading.
• Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible X (To be honest, not all of it, just the bits deemed necessary by my school which is more than enough)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X +
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X +
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons X +
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X +
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X +
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X +
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well having worked through that list I feel that I have been unfairly penalised for not liking Dickens.  There are six Dickens titles on this list, and I'm pretty sure that I have started every last one of them, but I just don't enjoy them enough to slog through.  Funnily enough I have the same reaction to Stephen King as well.

And why is Hamlet on there at number 98, when the complete works of Shakespeare is already listed at fourteen?

Still, by my count, I've read forty nine and a half of them (The half point is for the Bible),and that's respectable enough.

Anniversary Saturday.

Today we went into town to have some breakfast and wander around the shops.  I bought polka dot knee length socks, some great books (including a signed copy of "Torch Song Trilogy" for $6! OhMyGod!), several different colours of cotton yarn for crocheting amigurumi and a great vintage brooch, with blue diamante stones, in the shape of a "J".  We also had a late lunch of delicious noodle soup and I had a cupcake too.

Tonight we are going to go out for a curry, and then tomorrow I think we are planning to have a late brunch and see "Milk" before we leave.

Right now we are back in the hotel to recover from all the excitement of spending a whole day in a proper city. I am lying lengthwise across the bed, whilst Doc C is resting his eyes in the arm chair.

Narnia-esque.

So did I mention that to get to our house you have to climb through a wardrobe, which is in a bedroom in a house in Oxford?

And that there's this woman who keeps trying to give us Turkish Delight?

Not to mention all the talking animals.

Yes, North Carolina is pretty different to London.

Three Men on a Blog.

When writing a blog you also tend to be a regular reader of other blogs, and then you tend to find yourself experiencing post envy.  Sometimes the blog you are reading is about a lifestyle that you wish you had, but more usually the envious reaction is triggered by a nicely turned phrase, or a particularly good observation, an excellent joke or even just a well chosen subject.

The reading blogger then thinks to themselves "Damn it!  I noticed [...Fill in suitably fascinating observation here...] too, but did I write about it?  No!  I wrote a post about how my cat chatters at the birds when they land on the bird feeder, as if no other cat has ever exhibited this behavior!"

To add to my feelings of blog envy, I have recently been reading "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" by Jerome K. Jerome.  It is a damned shame that man died in 1927, because that necessarily means he couldn't have even considered the possibility of the existence of blogs, and yet, I firmly believe, he would have been a phenomenal blogger.

It's quite something to be envying the blogging capabilities of a man who has been dead for over 80 years, especially as you'd think observational comedy from 103 years ago would lose a little something, but it is still hilarious.  Not to mention free to download from the Guttenberg Project (if you are in the USA, if in other countries your copyright laws may vary), which is another distinct point in it's favour.

A January Monday.

It's my first day back at work after Christmas, and I actually got up at six to do some exercise, feed the cats and make a healthy packed lunch.  2009 is all about forming good habits.  Maybe.

The fur-balls were delighted to be getting food and attention so early in the morning, but Edith seriously disapproved of morning exercise routines.  It was a half hour stretching routine (The DVD I have is essentially this one, I think, but mine is called "A.M./P.M. Stretching", or something.  It's the same instructor), and Edith's contribution was to sit on the mat and attack my feet when I did the leg stretching, and after I'd shooed her away for that, she retreated to the top of the cat tower, where she could get a better view and watched me with a distinct air of "You are clearly doing that all wrong!  Stupid human, you can't stretch properly without a tail."

Just at the end, when I was working on creating a good posture for the day ahead, Edith jumped down from the tower and deliberately placed herself back on my exercise mat to throw up her breakfast.

Lovely.  Monday's are just hellish, aren't they?

Over Christmas I did decide that one thing I do need to do in the evenings after work is spend an hour by myself, so I can read books, and listen to cheesy pop music, or do yoga, or drink gin and tonic whilst flipping through a magazine, or paint my nails, or whatever!  By myself, with no-one else in the room.  It occurred to me that when I was commuting I had a solid hour every day to mentally decompress after work every day, and that's not something a ten minute drive home provides me.

So today I took a G&T, a small plate of salsa and tortilla chips and spent an hour reading "Enchanted April", whilst listening to a winning play-list of Roxette, Five, Ant & Dec and Voice of the Beehive.  It was most pleasant.

Enchanted April (Book 1922, Film 1992)

This morning I woke up wanting to read "Enchanted April" a 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim.  It's quite charming, and occaisionally I just feel like reading about terribly nice upper middle class ladies (and a minor member of the aristocracy, who is slumming it), in the 1920s, swanning off to Italian villa for a month and finding that it solves all of their problems.  Because wouldn't it just?  It's one of those stories that's very much of it's time and class, so I'm sure any hard-core socialists would hate it, but, if that doesn't bother you unduly, it's a nice light read.  Not a lot really happens; except everyone starts off sad and ends up happy.

I first became aware of it when I saw the film adaptation, which is perfectly cast and beautifully shot.  If you haven't seen it I have to say it's a very sweet film that you could safely watch with your grandparents (bearing in mind my socialist caveat) and feel a lot more relaxed by the end of it.  I didn't read it until a few years later when I found a second hand copy from the book stall by Brighton Pier (Oh, I miss Brighton!)

Maybe it's because Christmas is over and I have to be back at work tomorrow, and the weather forcast is grey for the next few weeks, but I really feel like reading descriptions of gorgeous Italian gardens, and a plot that revolves around the premise that being a little bit of selfish pampering of yourself can be a very good thing for everyone around you, because it makes you happier and therefore more pleasant.

So I glanced at my bookshelf and immediately I knew that that particular book wasn't here; because, as an ex-bookseller, I tend to memorise the spine of books for ease of location, and there were no tall dark green ones on my shelf.  I think it must be in the attic at Mum's house (Mum, find and read it!  You'll like it!)

Rats!

I mentioned my book sadness to Doc C and he asked if I'd tried to find it vfor the iPod.  Which I hadn't thought to do.  So I went to Project Guttenberg, via the iPod Bookz app, and there it was!  Yay!  Wisteria and sunshine will be mine after all!

Sandwich Joy!

For Christmas my lovely thoughtful Mum not only sent us stockings, but also, via Amazon, a couple of cookbooks from our favourite UK based eateries.  There are several good restaurants around town, but there are still many culinary options that are currently unavailable to me, and these books have helped with that quite considerably.

The first book to arrive was the Wagamama cookbook, and Doc C has already cooked us a couple of fantastic meals from that.  Noodles rock!

The other book was the Pret A Manger cookbook, this may seem odd because Pret specialise in upmarket sandwiches, soups and wraps (Oh, and great cakes, cookies and slices.  And really good coffee.  And root vegetable crisps.  And their smoothies are fabulous.  And the best salads), but really a Pret sandwich is a thing of such joy that it's worth having a book detailing how you put your favourite ones together.  Today I made my all time favourite ever sandwich, roast smoked salmon with horseradish.

It was a delicious sandwich.

Making myself that sandwich, eating it with a nice cup of tea, and knowing that I have enough ingredients to make another such sandwich tomorrow makes me very very happy.