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We had plans to go away at Easter but a combination of disorganisation and weather meant that in the end we mostly just hid under a rock. On the plus side it's now much tidier under the rock: making this metaphor work for its money, the woodlice have been evicted, the lichen have been watered, and you can see the glinty streaks of quartz shining through. In real terms this means ( we got some stuff sorted out )![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) addedentry and I didn't buy each other loads of chocolate for Easter, partly because we still have so much chocolate from Christmas (!); but he surprised & delighted me by having baked me some Easter biscuits, which were so tasty I decided not to take them into work today so I didn't have to even consider sharing them with anybody except Owen, OMNOMNOM. :-) And I did roast pork with all the whatnots on Sunday, which was very tasty if I do say so myself, and then made the leftovers of it into some kind of casserole-kind-of-thing yesterday (fry sadly-not-crackling-but-very-garlicky pork fat and a red onion, add rest of leftover pork, add carrots and parsnips and mushrooms and a pint of stock and a couple of glasses of red wine, leave simmering for ages while fettling Ubuntu, stick the leftover yorkies on top for a few minutes at the end) which was also pretty tasty. ALSO also, Warburton's hot cross bun loaf for the win! Exactly like hot cross buns but easier to stick in the toaster, and very tasty with home-made marmalade. And despite all the vegging out and eating and drinking over the weekend I still managed to run 5 miles today. My new sports socks are the business (and the shorts from the same place are also so comfy I bought a second pair). I am also grateful for the ongoing support of Shock Absorber [warning! site features JIGGLY BREASTS, eventually!]. Tags: diaryism
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Hello! I'm not dead. But I do seem to have lost my LiveJournal mojo a bit. I have plans for Strategies for sorting this out. But for now, as an example of the way my exciting life is pottering along, this weekend (starting from Friday night) I have: - been to a gig (Daedelus, at the Luminaire in Kilburn; review to follow...) - been to a play (of sorts: "Potted Potter", all the Harry Potter books in 60 minutes; review to follow for that, too, hopefully...) - nearly scored a goal in Quidditch as part of the above :-) - met up with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) smallbeds and rgl for a coffee - played Boggle in the Far From The Madding Crowd - written some perl (for work) - finished reading two books - sorted out a stack of documentation, mostly car-related - tried to register for an OU course in digital photography (need to phone them tomorrow, their online registration is rubbish) - got all my personal email inboxes down to under 100 (but not my work one) - emailed one friend and phoned another, both of whom been meaning to phone/email for about 2 months - fixed my mac laptop (which had decided it didn't want to have a Bluetooth thingy any more) - got my mac to sync with my phone at last - phoned my parents - catalogued some more of our books on LibraryThing I rather feel as though I'm always busy and never actually getting very much done. I also feel as though I'm losing touch with people a lot, though I'm delighted that so many more people are on Facebook now -- I do find it a good way of keeping people on my radar. So this is a sort of LJ keeping-in-touch amnesty: if you feel neglected or not-kept-in-touch-with or you just want a reply to something, please comment here, and I promise I will reply to your comment. Tags: diaryism
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Yes, hello, I have been hiding under a rock for a while. In lieu of tedious diaryism, here are some things I have done for the first time in the last couple of weeks: Installed Ubuntu. What feels like several hundred times, though I've actually only done two installs, and the rest has been booting live CDs/DVDs, and CD images in virtual machines, testing boot times. ... I have now been in the new job for two and a half weeks, and I've got so little done, and my colleagues are all cool and interesting and frighteningly clever, and I sometimes feel like they must have hired me out of pity. Walked to the top of Boar's Hill to see the dreaming spires. Okay, we only walked from Wootton, but still. And you can't see the spires unless you're nine feet tall and have a telephoto lens the length of a telegraph pole. I am five foot one and a bit and have a point-and-click Canon Ixus, and got a photo of my feet, though that was deliberate. There is a thing you can stand on, which you're not meant to stand on. I will post photos. ("The photos are in the next post" is the LJ equivalent of "The cheque's in the post".) We saw llamas mating on the way back down the hill. I won't post photos of that, don't worry. Tried to fix my grandad's hair... in Second Life. He's inspired by the whole idea, and currently determined to build a virtual Switzerland, and to recreate the voyage of the Titanic. We had trouble getting the "dignified" look he wanted for his hair. He turned 80 last year. Bought a computer on eBay. It doesn't have a hard drive. I may have to buy another one. Or a hard drive. Or both. I'm hedging my bets. Executive summary in pictures: [ Ubuntu | Standing on maps | Scary llama ] Tags: diaryism, photos, second life, work
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Today got off to a good start with the discovery that addedentry and I were one of the runners-up in the LibraryThing Book Pile Bonanza photo contest, and that the photo has been favourited on Flickr by the most famous librarian on the interwub. Squee! I have added "being a library groupie" to my LJ interests list to celebrate these little successes. In sillier photo news, I've recently been quite disproportionately amused by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) cat_macros, to the extent of persuading brrm and saffie1981 to let me stick text on their cat. I don't have any of those five-foot-high freestanding letters in outlined Impact that the regular cat_macros posters seem to have, but I thought I captured the general effect... What? What? Is there an easier way to do it?? brrm and saffie1981 and their cats are lovely hosts, very generous with pasta puttanesca, port, paws and purrs (you can work out which were provided by whom!); and dinner with them was a lovely conclusion to a busy Saturday: lunch with emperor, followed by volunteering at Oxfam books with cleanskies, sea_bright, mr_snips and other people who may or may not have LJs. After all that hectic socialising we felt entirely justified in spending Sunday being lazy and decadent, eating caviar on toast and drinking TEA. The caviar was left over from last Wednesday, which reminds me that I have been very remiss in not thanking my anonymous valentinr-senders! I have my suspicions about their identity, and may be commenting in an anonymous-comments-fest some time soon. I have been equally bad at thanking the senders of real actual paper cards: one anonymous card-sender whose writing I recognise ;-) and one signed card-sender: you know who you are, you are both very dear to me, and if I don't name you here it's not because I'm embarrassed but because I don't want to risk embarrassing you. Strange moods at the moment; angry and hopeful and detached and passionate all at the same time. Staying afloat, positively buoyant a lot of the time but not very sure where I'm headed. Sometimes I wish I was out there saving the world, but I reckon a lot of the time I'm not doing it much harm, and maybe that sort of lack-of-evil is a kind of good (maybe all that is required for good to triumph is for people to do no harm). Other times, I wonder if we're all just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. Me, I'm going to be tap-dancing on the deck of the Titanic: if we're all going down anyway, I'm damn well going to make somebody smile as we go. Tags: diaryism, melancholy
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So we spent Thursday and Friday getting acronym safely installed in his really quite excellent flat on the cool side of town, which gave me another chance to play White Van Jan. This one wasn't quite as much fun as last time, as the gears on the van seemed to be somewhat suboptimally arranged (for "suboptimally arranged" read "cocking awkward"), in a way that all too often left me unsure about whether I was moving into first or third, or second or fourth. I'd like to be able to say that "hilarious consequences ensued", but in fact the main consequences were stalling at a couple of junctions, mild panic at Mitcham's Corner when several seconds of stick-waggling failed to locate first gear at all, and a hell of a lot of swearing. The van shenanigans also involved some frankly hilarious reversing manoeuvres, but thanks to helpful friends and neighbours I managed to avoid damaging Practical's property or anybody's houses/bins/cats/etc. A big thumbs-up for Practical, by the way, if anybody's after van-hire recommendations; they were reasonably-priced, and very friendly and helpful. They were also unsurprised but amused when I told them I'd been recommended to them by cam.misc. ("So where did you hear about us? No, wait, it's the internet. Everybody always gets our name off the internet.") I was certainly very glad of their laid-back attitude when we were over half an hour late returning the van. This was largely due to my own mis-estimation of times and distances: I cycled from Greenwich House to Cowley Road in 20 minutes on Thursday after work, and I can cycle from home to work in 20 minutes in the morning, so I couldn't quite believe that it could take an hour to drive from home to Cowley Road, but it did, more or less. Being this late meant that addedentry and I didn't have time to pick bikes up in the van, so we ended up walking from Cowley Road; it's always strange being a foot-traveller in a place which is built for four-wheeled access, but it was a beautiful day for a walk, so we strolled along in the sunshine and picked handfuls of blackberries from a hedge that was heavy with fruit. In retrospect we might have been better not trying to avoid the Milton Road roadworks with a "short cut" through the Science Park, though it was quite an entertaining detour. In the end, fearful of going round in a fruitless (no blackberries here) loop, I gave up and asked a friendly passing cyclist (not knowing that another friendly passing cyclist in the shape of beckyc would pass us a minute later!) who directed us through his company's car-park and through a hole in the hedge. We crossed the old overgrown railway track and emerged into an Arbury cul-de-sac just in time to catch the ice-cream van whose bells we'd heard from the car-park. Later we had to stop and ask another friendly cyclist (this time ewx for directions from Armitage Way to the other side of the Arbury. (I'd have probably packed a map if I'd realised it was going to turn into such an expedition, but we were never lost, just not really sure of the best route from A to B.) It was growing dark by the time we eventually made it home with our bikes; it gets dark so quickly at this time of year, from low-hanging sunshine to blue-black gloom in barely 20 minutes. On Sunday we had another chance to discover new roads as we cycled over to acronym's for afternoon tea. I've never had occasion to cut across the common from Coldham's Lane to Newmarket Road before, but it reminded me so strongly of Marston Rec that for a moment in my mind it was 1997 again and I was back in Oxford. There were heaps of brambles along the Rec, too, and we'd see people gathering the berries in tupperwares, and when I'd cycle home in the small hours of the morning the grass would be slightly frosted and the cows would be dark sleepy mountains looming out of the mist, coming out of nowhere like the nine years (nine years!) between now and then. I've talked about this before, I know; it's just one of the many well-worn roads through my mind, and sometimes when my feet are sleepy they fall back on the paths they know. Tags: diaryism, psychogeography
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Gosh, I feel like I've spent half the weekend fighting, but in a good way; a bit of a mental and physical workout, if you like. Saturday morning was all the usual battles at the Oxfam bookshop (why we throw usable books away, why we're not allowed to price things at 99p, why we're clearing out three whole sections of books to make room for some more vastly overpriced stationery, etc.), but in the midst of all that we also managed to sell a lot of books and get a lot of clearing up done. Less successful was a skirmish with HSBC on the way home, as the ongoing attempt to actually close my account with them ate up another hour of my time. Still, the time wasn't entirely wasted, as I spent it curled up in a plush armchair reading Terry Eagleton's After Theory (thoroughly recommended), savouring the irony (or possibly post-irony) of enjoying post-Marxist post-cultural post-theory from within the maw of the Big Four. fanf's party on Saturday evening featured battles of a different nature, in the shape of some friendly debates, including "Why Tagging Is Rubbish" (interesting, but I remained incompletely unconvinced by the arguments of chrislightfoot, who doesn't have a LiveJournal, and whom I may have accidentally scared off by knitting and/or threatening to cover people in chocolate) and "So, What's Christianity All About Then" (with SJK, who really doesn't have a LiveJournal). The latter debate turned into one of those conversations that really didn't want to end, and while it might be a bit silly to extend your journey home by an extra 2 miles at 2 a.m. just so you can keep on talking for a bit longer to somebody who's actually travelling in a different direction, I'd forgotten quite how much fun it could be. I then spent most of Sunday afternoon wrestling with thorny plant life, incurring myriad minor injuries to my hands, arms and legs, and (more distressingly) a noticeable tear in my Idlewild t-shirt. However, our garden is now about 6 feet longer than it was before, as what I thought was land forever lost to lawless leaves turned out to be a few sensible trees and shrubs (mostly prickly) cocooned in over-enthusiastic bramble runners, bindweed and ivy. "Are blackberries a weed, then?" asked addedentry (as he manfully chopped the prickly heap into sensible green-binnable lengths). Now, I don't want to descend into trite fridgemagnetry like "A weed is just a flower in the wrong place", but really, I'd like to think that there's no such thing as a "weed": there are merely subordinate plants and insubordinate plants. Brambles are lovely, but they're also wilful, unruly, untameable; trying to keep them in order is a full-time battle that few people can face when there are so many more docile alternatives. It seems somewhat ungrateful to enjoy great big finger-purpling handfuls of fresh blackberries and then mercilessly mutilate the plants that provided them; but while there may well be places in the world for ten-foot-tall bramble runners with inch-thick stems, small suburban gardens are not one of those places. Besides, they'll have grown back by the time I've finished writing this. Giving blood tonight (the brambles should have left me at least an armful), which is pretty simple by comparison with God or gardening, and gives me a bit more time for tea and Terry Eagleton. It's a lovely life, really, most of the time. Tags: diaryism, il faut cultiver notre jardin
Current Mood: achieving equilibrium
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Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I thought Peterhouse choir dinner would be a mostly-pleasant but slightly awkward affair in which I made polite conversation with Fellows and tried not to feel left out while the students talked of supervisions and exams. I did not expect to end up draping myself around a young don in an attempt to distract him from the fact that I was trying to steal his cigar. I blame the port. It's always the port that's to blame, really, though in this case the previous champagne, white wine, red wine, and dessert wine may have contributed... I staggered home at some unimaginable time in the morning, not really having realised quite how late it had gotten, and I am lucky that addedentry was more amused by my sorry state than cross with me for not giving him any good idea of when I'd be back. I am even luckier that he looked after me and helped me to (eventually) get to bed despite (apparently) much resistance on my part. Saturday morning was completely wiped out in feeling miserable, alternately sorry for myself and cross with myself, determined to get well enough to go out but unable to walk more than three steps without feeling queasy... but we finally made it to taimatsu's picnic at about 5pm, having (I now realised) missed several nice people but being in time to see lots of other nice people. There was enough food to feed an army, and lots of folky singing, and general lazing around in the sunshine. Sunday was the last Evensong of the year, and we went out on a high note (metaphorically at least), with a robust reprise of Stainer's I Saw The Lord (which we'd done last term) and a moving a capella rendition of the lovely "Christ be with me, Christ within me" bit in the middle of Patrick's Breastplate ("I bind unto myself today..."), which, incidentally, is the BEST HYMN EVER. I also took the opportunity on Sunday to apologise to everybody for anything I might have said or done on Friday, and got an awkward blushing grin from the senior organ scholar (I only hugged him, honest, but he probably thinks I'm a scary predatory older woman -- sometimes I forget that I'm seven years older than the oldest of these people) and a chuckle and a general-purpose drinks invitation from the nice young don (who's very Peterhouse, so I really don't think there's any danger of us confusing each other there). The moral of the story? When life gives you port, drink port. Tags: diaryism
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The weekend was pretty much pure Bank Holiday: unpredictable weather, car maintenance, shuffling furniture around, and gardening. ( How much stuff can you fit in one weekend? )Oh, and, I know I still haven't written about singing, but I do still intend to, honest. It's on the to-do list, along with the other 1,596,253 things that may or may not get finished in this lifetime. What do you mean we don't get another? I want my money back! Tags: diaryism
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