![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wah-washitsu, a 畳 crisis
Nov. 29th, 2022 02:59 pmI have a small bedroom that is 274.32 cm x 249 cm. A while ago, to deal with its tiny size, I bought 4 gently-used tatami mats and a Japanese futon. The mats can make a single or a double bed or stack against the wall as needed: so far, so good. I like them, and it's a much better solution than trying to fit any kind of Western bed in that room. I cannot use the mats as a primary floor surface at present, however, because they sit on top of the shitty fake hardwood we put in as an emergency stop-gap measure when we moved in. This means the door cannot properly swing open with them in the way.
With the baby coming (Katy is 14 weeks along), I'd like to actually lay the tatami mats. They will be softish, making the whole room a safe play area/crib, basically: a child can't fall if they're low to the ground. The mats are relatively easy to clean, and have a long life-cycle: the underlying block should be good for about twenty years. After about 5 years of solid use, one flips the woven grass layer on top over. After another five or so, one buys a new top and then, in time, flips it over as well. Only once this cycle is complete does one think about flipping or changing out the whole body of the mat.
On Monday, I'm collecting free, salvaged English Oak parquet blocks (enough to also do the hallway and maybe the main bedroom, which is another story). This will enable me to create a traditional wood border around the mats, and also to make up for any sizing issues (I can fit the blocks around the perimeter in a pleasing way to eat excess inches). Bringing them level with the depth of the mats should be fairly easy, I just need to add an under-layer wherever we set them.
The problem came yesterday, when I measured the mats. Tatami mats all have a standard size in Japan. They are:
Length 180cm, Width 90cm, Depth 5.5cm approximately.
This is so standardised that Japanese properties' sizes are often reckoned up in mats as a unit of measurement. A dining room is 6 mats or whatever.
Futon Company, a popular UK business importing Japanese-made mats, however, bucks this to match their mats to UK bed sizes. Their mats have a couple size option, but the one we have ended up with four of is:
L198 x W76 x D5cm.
So, if I can get some guys to set these mats to the right depth (and if I can't, I'll have to start thinking about a barn door/shoji apparatus, which would itself need a certain amount of clearance, or shaving a little off the bottom of the door--though I do want the floors to be level, from room to room), do I:
1. Set the mats I have:
- they're an unusual size and won't quite make the classic patterns because they're not 2:1 length:width.
- They are abundant in the UK now and can be relatively easily fully replaced if something serious happens to a mat, but I can't count on the company to still be trading in 30 years. If I set the parquet around a weird-sized item, this could be annoying later.
- Will I be able to find replacement top layer tatami in this weird size?
- Does this matter, given the difficulty of changing the top layer on my own (without training and a HUGE fuck-off needle to secure the ribbon) and/or the potential difficulty of finding a guy who can do this?
- The radiator's two pipes (currently extending 7cm from the wall) would probably necessitate two small accommodation holes being cut into one mat. This would be hidden by the radiator cover, but might stress the binding on the overall cover.
- I suppose the parquet could always be adjusted later, because it lays in snug interlocking blocks, but I don't LOVE leaving a problem for future me or the next owners.
- For now, the Futon Company's leavings are prevalent in the country, and their full replacement mats will be cheaper.
- see Plan 3 and Plan 4 (doesn't require any radiator adjustments).
2. Sell the mats I have and buy the classic sized mats?
- It's annoying to sell the ones I have and not deathly expensive, but kind of expensive, to buy properly-sized mats. (I'll recoup a fair amount of the cost in selling the ones I have, though).
- The classic sized mats are more universal, though not in the UK: I am more likely to find replacement tops pre-cut to this size. (Or at least I think I am: I haven't actually replaced a top before. I watched a guy do it in a video? Maybe there's a guide to this.)
- The classic installation patterns will match up, and not look dumb.
- The radiator's two pipes (currently extending 7cm from the wall) would have to be moved back to inside 4cm. If this is somehow impossible, see above the the issue.
- I will have to be VERY CAREFUL about buying any used replacement mats, because they may well be the Futon Company's bullshit, and Western auction houses will not know enough to know to mark them as non-standard.
- see Plan 1 and Plan 2.
With the baby coming (Katy is 14 weeks along), I'd like to actually lay the tatami mats. They will be softish, making the whole room a safe play area/crib, basically: a child can't fall if they're low to the ground. The mats are relatively easy to clean, and have a long life-cycle: the underlying block should be good for about twenty years. After about 5 years of solid use, one flips the woven grass layer on top over. After another five or so, one buys a new top and then, in time, flips it over as well. Only once this cycle is complete does one think about flipping or changing out the whole body of the mat.
On Monday, I'm collecting free, salvaged English Oak parquet blocks (enough to also do the hallway and maybe the main bedroom, which is another story). This will enable me to create a traditional wood border around the mats, and also to make up for any sizing issues (I can fit the blocks around the perimeter in a pleasing way to eat excess inches). Bringing them level with the depth of the mats should be fairly easy, I just need to add an under-layer wherever we set them.
The problem came yesterday, when I measured the mats. Tatami mats all have a standard size in Japan. They are:
Length 180cm, Width 90cm, Depth 5.5cm approximately.
This is so standardised that Japanese properties' sizes are often reckoned up in mats as a unit of measurement. A dining room is 6 mats or whatever.
Futon Company, a popular UK business importing Japanese-made mats, however, bucks this to match their mats to UK bed sizes. Their mats have a couple size option, but the one we have ended up with four of is:
L198 x W76 x D5cm.
So, if I can get some guys to set these mats to the right depth (and if I can't, I'll have to start thinking about a barn door/shoji apparatus, which would itself need a certain amount of clearance, or shaving a little off the bottom of the door--though I do want the floors to be level, from room to room), do I:
1. Set the mats I have:
- they're an unusual size and won't quite make the classic patterns because they're not 2:1 length:width.
- They are abundant in the UK now and can be relatively easily fully replaced if something serious happens to a mat, but I can't count on the company to still be trading in 30 years. If I set the parquet around a weird-sized item, this could be annoying later.
- Will I be able to find replacement top layer tatami in this weird size?
- Does this matter, given the difficulty of changing the top layer on my own (without training and a HUGE fuck-off needle to secure the ribbon) and/or the potential difficulty of finding a guy who can do this?
- The radiator's two pipes (currently extending 7cm from the wall) would probably necessitate two small accommodation holes being cut into one mat. This would be hidden by the radiator cover, but might stress the binding on the overall cover.
- I suppose the parquet could always be adjusted later, because it lays in snug interlocking blocks, but I don't LOVE leaving a problem for future me or the next owners.
- For now, the Futon Company's leavings are prevalent in the country, and their full replacement mats will be cheaper.
- see Plan 3 and Plan 4 (doesn't require any radiator adjustments).
2. Sell the mats I have and buy the classic sized mats?
- It's annoying to sell the ones I have and not deathly expensive, but kind of expensive, to buy properly-sized mats. (I'll recoup a fair amount of the cost in selling the ones I have, though).
- The classic sized mats are more universal, though not in the UK: I am more likely to find replacement tops pre-cut to this size. (Or at least I think I am: I haven't actually replaced a top before. I watched a guy do it in a video? Maybe there's a guide to this.)
- The classic installation patterns will match up, and not look dumb.
- The radiator's two pipes (currently extending 7cm from the wall) would have to be moved back to inside 4cm. If this is somehow impossible, see above the the issue.
- I will have to be VERY CAREFUL about buying any used replacement mats, because they may well be the Futon Company's bullshit, and Western auction houses will not know enough to know to mark them as non-standard.
- see Plan 1 and Plan 2.
Bitchy About Ceramics
Nov. 25th, 2022 03:30 pmWestern art terms for Asian porcelain are so frustrating. We say 'famille rose' or 'famille verte' like that really means something, like it's a whole aesthetic genre, but that just means red glaze, green glaze, it's like saying 'clay pot', it does nothing. I fucking hate some famille rose, you know the really busy white-ground work, but the yellow-ground shit is great. That's just too many highly-variable and disparate traditions and colourways crammed under one brand-name. It's serving nothing, hate it.
Also yesterday I didn't bid on a full tester bed because it was one of those more modern reproductions (maybe 19th c earliest but it looked 20th with that schmaltzy back-paneling---lumpy figures and over-shiny, loose line-work) with the unreasonably fat, monumental fore-columns. Who needs that? It's so, idk, English Heritage Tudor? Yes, I want to sleep in the 14th century, but not in a fucking Medieval Times. Also it was estimated at £400 to £600, but doubled that almost before we came to the lot in question. When is Millers or whatever they're using to estimate prices going to catch up to the run on tester beds the last few years? (I mean never, given that I've helped compile a Millers and know exactly what goes into that sausage. (It's fresh-faced female recent graduates who don't yet know about unions.) (And they are using Millers, because there is: nothing else to use.))
Thinking about that job because after 10 years of wanting it and many of actively looking for such a thing at the right price (ie, almost nothing), I finally got a pumpkin-shaped Yixing tea pot today. £30, and a couple others I got for £10 each. Used is usually cheaper, people forget this about antiques. A new Yixing? £150, easy, PER pot (and if you find a bargain, I start to worry about whether it's really handmade, really zisha clay, etc., etc.). I wouldn't have paid £30 for one, if I didn't know it was THE one I'd been looking for, in a style that's rarely made now (it's easier to manufacture and ship the simpler, more minimalist designs, and that, more than any 'modernist aesthetic', is why people limit the range they produce and market). Anyway, it'll be good to have a few, because technically you're not supposed to brew different types of tea in the same pot as the clay is porous and this fucks the flavour. (This is why, and I must remember this, I am not to use soap on the pot or place it in the dishwasher.) According to folklore, if you use the pot thus for long enough it'll assume so much of the character of the chosen tea that just putting hot water in will be enough to brew up. I do wonder if I'll be able to smell what the pot was dedicated to before? Probably not, but it'd theoretically be nice to keep a pot dedicated to oolong all its life chaste in its union.
It's weird to think about antiques and money. Clearly the effort and expertise required, the time it takes, to make a Yixing tea pot is worth £150, and with any luck it's a purchase that will last forever, through generations of a family. Spending that kind of money of anything fragile would terrify me, because I'd worry about breaking it. I can always find another old, cheap tea pot like this, though, and try my best--there's two more up for auction this month, and if the price is right I'd go for it just to have a back-up to soothe my paranoia. So what you're still paying for after this has had several owners, is like, residual labour value. Ghost labour. Equity-mandated re-screening payouts.
For the home, I don't like buying things that are virgin, that have had no life before me and that I expect to die with me or in my lifetime, like that weird 20 year period where Egyptians tried to bury living human servants in their graves with them (mostly, this did not work: the practice of using people who'd been involved in the tomb's construction led to a lot of scampering back through a hole you'd made earlier for the purpose, with an arm-full of grave goods as a bonus). Ideally I want not to have that many things---and that's relative, but for scale, my house is the size of my mom's garage. But the things I have, I want to maintain and improve. I would like them to hold or accrue value, and for the possession or sale of them to be valuable for whoever has to do the admin related to my death. Actually, Victorian furniture just isn't worth a lot in the UK, right now. It's cheap to buy, relative even to an Ikea piece. But Ikea is a car, depreciating even as you drive it off the lot. You can hardly move that shit, it retains relatively little resale value. Whatever you paid for a Victorian piece, you can probably realise back, provided you weren't stupid in how you bought it (like, a public-facing dealer? Bad idea. Don't do that. What you save time-wise in admin, you'll pay over and again.).
I suppose I like understanding almost everything I own. Having made decisions about it. Knowing that if it breaks, it can be repaired and is worth repairing. Doing up the house has been immensely effortful, but when I'm very depressed I can see myself in it. Trim I went to some bloke's shed for, paying £1 a piece and riding back with it in a bus or a van with a taciturn man, which I then painted myself. I had to talk to three handymen before I found one who knew, or who would understand me, when I said picture rail had to be screwed on as well as glued to the wall in order to support the weight of frames (aka, the entire point of 'picture rail'--it's not just fucking decorative, it's load-bearing). I can see all the work I did---the reading, the historic houses I visited, the notes, the sifting I do every day when I look for bargains on my standing auction alerts. The Saleroom system covers every sale in the UK, and some abroad. The stair rails I had to go to Exeter for, when an architectural salvage yard closed down and I spent days alone down there, going through the warehouse with a tape measure. Some poor other building was destroyed, but someone thought to save this fragment of its bones. I bargained away the rest of the lot to some mean Cornish Tories in exchange for some of the newel posts they had and I needed. (Actually, I had no use for the other rails and didn't want to haul them back, but the Tories didn't need to know that.) What a lot of trouble it was, to finally find the elderly Romanian man who could put the stair rails in. But how quick and good at it he was, when I finally found someone competent---as if it really had been simple, all along, as I'd imagined it must be.
And when I think I've done nothing lasting, nothing that matters---which is easy to think, when I'm very ill and lying on the floor of the bath---I can manage to turn my head and look up at the window, and see the 1890s tile I put in around the frame. Beautiful tile should be used, not collected: it should be a part of a house, a living thing. I didn't make them, but I cleaned over two thousand four-hundred encaustic, geometric floor tiles, rescued from demolished buildings. I inventoried them and consulted with the Tile and Architectural Ceramics Society and the Ironbridge Museum to get the Victorian design catalogues I'm going to use to lay them out. I made something better by being alive, and I can look at it and touch it---the raised texture of Minton chrysanthemums, beautiful and everyday, a thing you can forget and remember. We moved so often when I was young. I want to move once more in my life, perhaps, or never. And I suppose it won't matter if, when I go, the new owners completely fuck up my Glasgow-school inspired bathroom design, but fuck I never want to know about it if they do.
Also yesterday I didn't bid on a full tester bed because it was one of those more modern reproductions (maybe 19th c earliest but it looked 20th with that schmaltzy back-paneling---lumpy figures and over-shiny, loose line-work) with the unreasonably fat, monumental fore-columns. Who needs that? It's so, idk, English Heritage Tudor? Yes, I want to sleep in the 14th century, but not in a fucking Medieval Times. Also it was estimated at £400 to £600, but doubled that almost before we came to the lot in question. When is Millers or whatever they're using to estimate prices going to catch up to the run on tester beds the last few years? (I mean never, given that I've helped compile a Millers and know exactly what goes into that sausage. (It's fresh-faced female recent graduates who don't yet know about unions.) (And they are using Millers, because there is: nothing else to use.))
Thinking about that job because after 10 years of wanting it and many of actively looking for such a thing at the right price (ie, almost nothing), I finally got a pumpkin-shaped Yixing tea pot today. £30, and a couple others I got for £10 each. Used is usually cheaper, people forget this about antiques. A new Yixing? £150, easy, PER pot (and if you find a bargain, I start to worry about whether it's really handmade, really zisha clay, etc., etc.). I wouldn't have paid £30 for one, if I didn't know it was THE one I'd been looking for, in a style that's rarely made now (it's easier to manufacture and ship the simpler, more minimalist designs, and that, more than any 'modernist aesthetic', is why people limit the range they produce and market). Anyway, it'll be good to have a few, because technically you're not supposed to brew different types of tea in the same pot as the clay is porous and this fucks the flavour. (This is why, and I must remember this, I am not to use soap on the pot or place it in the dishwasher.) According to folklore, if you use the pot thus for long enough it'll assume so much of the character of the chosen tea that just putting hot water in will be enough to brew up. I do wonder if I'll be able to smell what the pot was dedicated to before? Probably not, but it'd theoretically be nice to keep a pot dedicated to oolong all its life chaste in its union.
It's weird to think about antiques and money. Clearly the effort and expertise required, the time it takes, to make a Yixing tea pot is worth £150, and with any luck it's a purchase that will last forever, through generations of a family. Spending that kind of money of anything fragile would terrify me, because I'd worry about breaking it. I can always find another old, cheap tea pot like this, though, and try my best--there's two more up for auction this month, and if the price is right I'd go for it just to have a back-up to soothe my paranoia. So what you're still paying for after this has had several owners, is like, residual labour value. Ghost labour. Equity-mandated re-screening payouts.
For the home, I don't like buying things that are virgin, that have had no life before me and that I expect to die with me or in my lifetime, like that weird 20 year period where Egyptians tried to bury living human servants in their graves with them (mostly, this did not work: the practice of using people who'd been involved in the tomb's construction led to a lot of scampering back through a hole you'd made earlier for the purpose, with an arm-full of grave goods as a bonus). Ideally I want not to have that many things---and that's relative, but for scale, my house is the size of my mom's garage. But the things I have, I want to maintain and improve. I would like them to hold or accrue value, and for the possession or sale of them to be valuable for whoever has to do the admin related to my death. Actually, Victorian furniture just isn't worth a lot in the UK, right now. It's cheap to buy, relative even to an Ikea piece. But Ikea is a car, depreciating even as you drive it off the lot. You can hardly move that shit, it retains relatively little resale value. Whatever you paid for a Victorian piece, you can probably realise back, provided you weren't stupid in how you bought it (like, a public-facing dealer? Bad idea. Don't do that. What you save time-wise in admin, you'll pay over and again.).
I suppose I like understanding almost everything I own. Having made decisions about it. Knowing that if it breaks, it can be repaired and is worth repairing. Doing up the house has been immensely effortful, but when I'm very depressed I can see myself in it. Trim I went to some bloke's shed for, paying £1 a piece and riding back with it in a bus or a van with a taciturn man, which I then painted myself. I had to talk to three handymen before I found one who knew, or who would understand me, when I said picture rail had to be screwed on as well as glued to the wall in order to support the weight of frames (aka, the entire point of 'picture rail'--it's not just fucking decorative, it's load-bearing). I can see all the work I did---the reading, the historic houses I visited, the notes, the sifting I do every day when I look for bargains on my standing auction alerts. The Saleroom system covers every sale in the UK, and some abroad. The stair rails I had to go to Exeter for, when an architectural salvage yard closed down and I spent days alone down there, going through the warehouse with a tape measure. Some poor other building was destroyed, but someone thought to save this fragment of its bones. I bargained away the rest of the lot to some mean Cornish Tories in exchange for some of the newel posts they had and I needed. (Actually, I had no use for the other rails and didn't want to haul them back, but the Tories didn't need to know that.) What a lot of trouble it was, to finally find the elderly Romanian man who could put the stair rails in. But how quick and good at it he was, when I finally found someone competent---as if it really had been simple, all along, as I'd imagined it must be.
And when I think I've done nothing lasting, nothing that matters---which is easy to think, when I'm very ill and lying on the floor of the bath---I can manage to turn my head and look up at the window, and see the 1890s tile I put in around the frame. Beautiful tile should be used, not collected: it should be a part of a house, a living thing. I didn't make them, but I cleaned over two thousand four-hundred encaustic, geometric floor tiles, rescued from demolished buildings. I inventoried them and consulted with the Tile and Architectural Ceramics Society and the Ironbridge Museum to get the Victorian design catalogues I'm going to use to lay them out. I made something better by being alive, and I can look at it and touch it---the raised texture of Minton chrysanthemums, beautiful and everyday, a thing you can forget and remember. We moved so often when I was young. I want to move once more in my life, perhaps, or never. And I suppose it won't matter if, when I go, the new owners completely fuck up my Glasgow-school inspired bathroom design, but fuck I never want to know about it if they do.
Dickens the Home Renovator
Nov. 9th, 2022 01:31 pmFor one weekend this year, Gad's Hill--a working school that was once the only home Dickens ever actually owned--was open to the public for tours. Here are interesting aspects of the house the writer both lived in and extensively remodelled.
( Hot Home Reno In Your Area )
( Hot Home Reno In Your Area )
Knobs Knobs Knobs
Nov. 4th, 2022 08:31 pmWhen we moved into this house (an 1860s 2-up, 2-down factory worker's cottage, a row house) five years ago, none of the interior doors actually had a real knob that opened and closed the door. They had what looked like knobs, or could have been knobs in another life, but these were just screwed on, static. You used them to shove the doors, which also had, on their profiles, odd little nubs like you sometimes get on the doors of cabinets. This meant that a change in air pressure or a cat leaning on the door popped the sucker right open. You were a showering guest? Too fuckin bad, mate. Time for everyone's favourite TOS episode, "Naked Time". Nothing locked in the house; nothing even actually shut.
When a massive salvage yard closed in Exeter, I went down for the several days of the sale and hauled back most of what we've been using since to slowly redo the place.
The door handles we finally got put in are from that sale.
So the area where the old handle used to be needs cleaned up, and all these might need base plates. I'll see if I have any. This is a simple wood handle I chose over all the Bakelite options. I need to figure out how to oil it. Perhaps some beeswax?
This Bennington Brown handle looks like stone, but it's actually a mid 19th century American ceramics technique. I don't really know how it got to the UK: was this imported, or did the UK's then-amazing ceramics firms clone the popular Atlantic seaboard technology?
I need to get a little paint off this bathroom handle, but I'm not entirely sure how.
A painted porcelain knob with blue roses.
The older step in place for this bathroom edition was very narrow, and presented a trip hazard. Time will tell if I've gone too far the other way. This is a seasoned, 1930s threshold from a demolished house I got off Freecycle. I need to sand and then oil it with something; I don't know what yet. I think I'm also going to ask them to build out the profile underneath. Structurally, it's sound. Cosmetically, I'm not loving it. One of the issues raised, however, was that any build-out would be softer, newer wood, aka deal. Very much not my thing.
When a massive salvage yard closed in Exeter, I went down for the several days of the sale and hauled back most of what we've been using since to slowly redo the place.
The door handles we finally got put in are from that sale.
So the area where the old handle used to be needs cleaned up, and all these might need base plates. I'll see if I have any. This is a simple wood handle I chose over all the Bakelite options. I need to figure out how to oil it. Perhaps some beeswax?
This Bennington Brown handle looks like stone, but it's actually a mid 19th century American ceramics technique. I don't really know how it got to the UK: was this imported, or did the UK's then-amazing ceramics firms clone the popular Atlantic seaboard technology?
I need to get a little paint off this bathroom handle, but I'm not entirely sure how.
A painted porcelain knob with blue roses.
The older step in place for this bathroom edition was very narrow, and presented a trip hazard. Time will tell if I've gone too far the other way. This is a seasoned, 1930s threshold from a demolished house I got off Freecycle. I need to sand and then oil it with something; I don't know what yet. I think I'm also going to ask them to build out the profile underneath. Structurally, it's sound. Cosmetically, I'm not loving it. One of the issues raised, however, was that any build-out would be softer, newer wood, aka deal. Very much not my thing.
AN ACTUAL ENTRY OMGWTFBBQ
May. 14th, 2012 12:46 amBadger was over all weekend. Watched most of A:EMH S1, which largely holds up on rewatch. Never sure if Wakanda is doing something cool in imagining an isolationist G8-bitch-slapping world-power African nation that challenges viewers' basic colonialist assumptions, or if Wakanda is simply a weird amalgam of African stereotypes that's simultaneously doing positive and racist things. I think a bit of both, though obviously the second possibility sort of admits the first.
Lost a lot of games, which disappoints me a bit. Normally Katy and I do about equally well, and this weekend we did about equally poorly, both in Carcassone and Tigris and Euphrates. Kind of want to play a game I know I'm fine at to regain mojo and feel generally better. Haven't won anything since Trivial Pursuit like two weeks ago, I don't think, despite since playing 3 games of Carcassone, a game of London, and a game of T&E. This is unusual and more annoying than it should be, given am grown ass woman and, like Dar Williams says, cooler than this. Wish I were generally less twitchy and neurotic about feeling dumb. On the plus side, getting more used to T&E, and may not actually hate it! Still don't know about that Caylus (the game, not the founder of the Klingon warrior code). It seems crap, but might /not/ be, if we played with an additional person.
Cleaned up all the lingering photos on my computer, deleted what I didn't need, and popped anything potentially relevant onto fb. If by relevant you mean 'a picture of Sasa looking unspeakable stupid'.
Made pizzas with Robin. She did nice bases, but must remember these take longer to cook through than plain Morrisons cardboard wafers, and as such need like 18 min, perhaps. Also made meatloaf with roastinis and optional mushroom gravy on the side, combining Nigella's technique with the Joy of Cooking 'making it actually taste of anything'. For Nigella's bacon wrap, I have GOT to remember to use more bacon than I did, and to actually swaddle it around the sides/top it generously, so things don't curl up in this niggardly fashion.
Today I applied for like 6 McDonald's level food service jobs. Modified my food!CV and wrote individual cover letters. Created a profile on a childcare site and addressed a question to a specific job-poster. Doing half and half hours-long academic admin and quicker basic NEED SOME MONEY TO LIVE!! job aps now.
Also finished edits for P4 and asked Katy to shift scenes around according to her editoral whim. Reading it through tomorrow, so she can do the same, I can make last changes, and hopefully we can have the draft out to people late Monday night, so they'll have some time/two days before the readthrough to look it over.
Showed the house Friday and today. Have another person tomorrow. Put up everything possible for ebay free listings. Cleaned the hell out of the house Friday, and did some more today.
I listened to all the music mock-ups the composing staff have done for the radio plays last night, and some of it was awesomely good. One of the main character themes sounds sooomewhat like American McGee's Alice's soundtrack. I'm on the whole really impressed with the professionalism, and with the sort of--reality of the project? Composers!! We met with them, I gave feedback, they worked MAGIC!! with scores and bullshit, I gave feedback, music baby was formed. It's part power and also like, part kind of--awe? It's a fanproject, I know, but there's something awesome
about like, a total thing coming together, and being made where there was nothing, and developing it cradle to grave.
Wrote people about council tax, job ap writing (the QM job centre), the Jubilee event (which Cambridge House no longer wants to do, so I'm left with THREE WEEKS to hook up with other people, plan my own from scratch, or find something else good to go to--thanks a /lot/, guys), book requests for Tor, the music, upcoming social plans, etc. Updated calendar and flatmates spreadsheet, cleaned out emails, etc. Kind of productive weekend despite the heavy social aspect.
Lost a lot of games, which disappoints me a bit. Normally Katy and I do about equally well, and this weekend we did about equally poorly, both in Carcassone and Tigris and Euphrates. Kind of want to play a game I know I'm fine at to regain mojo and feel generally better. Haven't won anything since Trivial Pursuit like two weeks ago, I don't think, despite since playing 3 games of Carcassone, a game of London, and a game of T&E. This is unusual and more annoying than it should be, given am grown ass woman and, like Dar Williams says, cooler than this. Wish I were generally less twitchy and neurotic about feeling dumb. On the plus side, getting more used to T&E, and may not actually hate it! Still don't know about that Caylus (the game, not the founder of the Klingon warrior code). It seems crap, but might /not/ be, if we played with an additional person.
Cleaned up all the lingering photos on my computer, deleted what I didn't need, and popped anything potentially relevant onto fb. If by relevant you mean 'a picture of Sasa looking unspeakable stupid'.
Made pizzas with Robin. She did nice bases, but must remember these take longer to cook through than plain Morrisons cardboard wafers, and as such need like 18 min, perhaps. Also made meatloaf with roastinis and optional mushroom gravy on the side, combining Nigella's technique with the Joy of Cooking 'making it actually taste of anything'. For Nigella's bacon wrap, I have GOT to remember to use more bacon than I did, and to actually swaddle it around the sides/top it generously, so things don't curl up in this niggardly fashion.
Today I applied for like 6 McDonald's level food service jobs. Modified my food!CV and wrote individual cover letters. Created a profile on a childcare site and addressed a question to a specific job-poster. Doing half and half hours-long academic admin and quicker basic NEED SOME MONEY TO LIVE!! job aps now.
Also finished edits for P4 and asked Katy to shift scenes around according to her editoral whim. Reading it through tomorrow, so she can do the same, I can make last changes, and hopefully we can have the draft out to people late Monday night, so they'll have some time/two days before the readthrough to look it over.
Showed the house Friday and today. Have another person tomorrow. Put up everything possible for ebay free listings. Cleaned the hell out of the house Friday, and did some more today.
I listened to all the music mock-ups the composing staff have done for the radio plays last night, and some of it was awesomely good. One of the main character themes sounds sooomewhat like American McGee's Alice's soundtrack. I'm on the whole really impressed with the professionalism, and with the sort of--reality of the project? Composers!! We met with them, I gave feedback, they worked MAGIC!! with scores and bullshit, I gave feedback, music baby was formed. It's part power and also like, part kind of--awe? It's a fanproject, I know, but there's something awesome
about like, a total thing coming together, and being made where there was nothing, and developing it cradle to grave.
Wrote people about council tax, job ap writing (the QM job centre), the Jubilee event (which Cambridge House no longer wants to do, so I'm left with THREE WEEKS to hook up with other people, plan my own from scratch, or find something else good to go to--thanks a /lot/, guys), book requests for Tor, the music, upcoming social plans, etc. Updated calendar and flatmates spreadsheet, cleaned out emails, etc. Kind of productive weekend despite the heavy social aspect.
Just Venting
Mar. 1st, 2012 02:41 amSo there is NO vent fan in our house kitchen, and the window only opens a few inches because someone sloppily installed the gutter waaaaay too close. Thus the kitchen gets smoky and the over-sensitive fire alarm constantly goes off, because the heat from an inert twizzler being unwrapped is too damn much for it. So: smoky hell, mucho wall damage, irritating alarm every other night.
I ask the landlady if she'd consider installing a cheap vent fan.
"Hello Erin
We have never had this problem before. You all must be cooking with high heat on a regular basis to set the fire alarm off. Initial answer is no "
What. Like, seriously? I am not sitting here BURNING BACON LIKE THE WIND!!!! There's no fucking vent fan in the sort of kitchen that was obviously built for one, which has no ventilation? You can say 'nope', but not 'OMG WHAT?! YOU GUYS MUST BE COOKING TOO HOT!!' What does that even mean?! Is this a thing?
Buying and installing this thing cannot be £50 all told. It's upkeep that would improve the house's condition. She gets thousands from the property every month. Why is she so dumb? How not to manage property, ladies and gents. Vent faaaaan!! *shakes fist*
I ask the landlady if she'd consider installing a cheap vent fan.
"Hello Erin
We have never had this problem before. You all must be cooking with high heat on a regular basis to set the fire alarm off. Initial answer is no "
What. Like, seriously? I am not sitting here BURNING BACON LIKE THE WIND!!!! There's no fucking vent fan in the sort of kitchen that was obviously built for one, which has no ventilation? You can say 'nope', but not 'OMG WHAT?! YOU GUYS MUST BE COOKING TOO HOT!!' What does that even mean?! Is this a thing?
Buying and installing this thing cannot be £50 all told. It's upkeep that would improve the house's condition. She gets thousands from the property every month. Why is she so dumb? How not to manage property, ladies and gents. Vent faaaaan!! *shakes fist*
Have Nice Things
Jan. 16th, 2012 03:25 am* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere PRETTY!!
* http://bookshelfporn.com/ House decorating! ideas! pretty!
* LULZ!!
"Intended to be the launch of a series which would involve Julius Caesar, Marco Polo and cavemen (sound familiar?) the audios were rejected for a slot on BBC Radio:
Martin Esslin, head of sound drama, wrote in a memo: “As a typical commercial production for unsophisticated listeners in Australia or even some parts of the United States, it stands up quite well. As a piece of science fiction, however, it strikes me as extremely feeble.”"
http://www.kasterborous.com/2012/01/another-uncovered-oddity/
* Also, should you ever want to fix crusty old paint brushes (I've only done house paint on various types, but I think it should work in most everything), I find it works well to try these instructions http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-revive-old-paintbrushes-with-vinegar, then rinse them under hot water, soap and scrub them, then use a wire brush.
* http://bookshelfporn.com/ House decorating! ideas! pretty!
* LULZ!!
"Intended to be the launch of a series which would involve Julius Caesar, Marco Polo and cavemen (sound familiar?) the audios were rejected for a slot on BBC Radio:
Martin Esslin, head of sound drama, wrote in a memo: “As a typical commercial production for unsophisticated listeners in Australia or even some parts of the United States, it stands up quite well. As a piece of science fiction, however, it strikes me as extremely feeble.”"
http://www.kasterborous.com/2012/01/another-uncovered-oddity/
* Also, should you ever want to fix crusty old paint brushes (I've only done house paint on various types, but I think it should work in most everything), I find it works well to try these instructions http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-revive-old-paintbrushes-with-vinegar, then rinse them under hot water, soap and scrub them, then use a wire brush.
Today I:
* made Katy a big detailed grocery list
* gave her some instructions so she could (very kindly) do two things I needed for me at the bank (GOOD to have those done)
* dealt with the fallout from abandoner!room-mate, telling everyone, doing damage control, posting new ads w/ Katy and showing the house to three people/following up with them (HUGE amount of shit)
* fed the Christmas cakes brandy
* answered many an email
* did some dishes
* made/decorated three Pomanders for the tree (a traditional one, one that says 'Merry Xmas' in cloves, and a Star of David one just 'cause)
* helped Katy a little as she did more decoration--but mostly she did it all, tbh.
* figured out how to fit the caulk into the skeleton gun holster
* made gingerbread dough
* made sugar cookie dough
* made gingerbread house dough (this Joy of Cooking recipe went wonky and needed almost half a cup of water to hold it together--it looks fine now, and I'm more concerned w/ its tensile strength than its flavor, but I *do* wonder what went so wrong. Sas it that the molasses was English and thus different somehow? That I ran out and Morrisons had no more and I had to cut it with black treacle? That is was old as the hills?
* Endured shitty, shitty migraine
* made Katy a big detailed grocery list
* gave her some instructions so she could (very kindly) do two things I needed for me at the bank (GOOD to have those done)
* dealt with the fallout from abandoner!room-mate, telling everyone, doing damage control, posting new ads w/ Katy and showing the house to three people/following up with them (HUGE amount of shit)
* fed the Christmas cakes brandy
* answered many an email
* did some dishes
* made/decorated three Pomanders for the tree (a traditional one, one that says 'Merry Xmas' in cloves, and a Star of David one just 'cause)
* helped Katy a little as she did more decoration--but mostly she did it all, tbh.
* figured out how to fit the caulk into the skeleton gun holster
* made gingerbread dough
* made sugar cookie dough
* made gingerbread house dough (this Joy of Cooking recipe went wonky and needed almost half a cup of water to hold it together--it looks fine now, and I'm more concerned w/ its tensile strength than its flavor, but I *do* wonder what went so wrong. Sas it that the molasses was English and thus different somehow? That I ran out and Morrisons had no more and I had to cut it with black treacle? That is was old as the hills?
* Endured shitty, shitty migraine
Housethings
Dec. 15th, 2011 10:54 pm25 clever ideas: http://www.thedailybuzz.com.au/2011/11/25-clever-ideas_household-tips_storage-ideas/#.TuhxO-dqqAG.facebook
I don't normally go for this sort of thing, but it included some actually quite cute cooking/house tips I'm going to try.
http://www.chow.com/recipes/30185-vanilla-extract : How to make your own vanilla extract, because that shit is expensive.
http://www.drugs.com/imprints.php : An incredibly useful way to identify spare/unlabeled pills you have lying around (provided they're of American origin).
I don't normally go for this sort of thing, but it included some actually quite cute cooking/house tips I'm going to try.
http://www.chow.com/recipes/30185-vanilla-extract : How to make your own vanilla extract, because that shit is expensive.
http://www.drugs.com/imprints.php : An incredibly useful way to identify spare/unlabeled pills you have lying around (provided they're of American origin).
In which it is nice to feel appreciated
Nov. 16th, 2011 11:46 amOur nerd-only new flatmates ad (http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/nice-double-rooms-in-camberwell-green-for-fun-nerdy-folk/91663126), posted on Gumtree (Craigslist for the UK) late last night, has several responses already. Woo!
A particularly nice one:
From: Gumtree Mail
Date: Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:13 AM
Subject: Isobel replied to your ad: Nice double-rooms in Camberwell
Green for fun, nerdy folk
Ohhhh, I wish to god that you laydeez were living somewhere that
worked for me coz that was the BEST AD ON GUMTREE. I said it, I'm
sold, but I am not applying, sadly enough.
But I just wanted to say that your ad made my day, and good luck in your quest.
-Isobel.
p.s. I would hella have fit your nerdy requirements... I roleplay.
Something way more obscure and nerdy than DnD. :|
From: Isobel
A particularly nice one:
From: Gumtree Mail
Date: Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:13 AM
Subject: Isobel replied to your ad: Nice double-rooms in Camberwell
Green for fun, nerdy folk
Ohhhh, I wish to god that you laydeez were living somewhere that
worked for me coz that was the BEST AD ON GUMTREE. I said it, I'm
sold, but I am not applying, sadly enough.
But I just wanted to say that your ad made my day, and good luck in your quest.
-Isobel.
p.s. I would hella have fit your nerdy requirements... I roleplay.
Something way more obscure and nerdy than DnD. :|
From: Isobel
The Female Gothic and assorted notes
Nov. 16th, 2011 01:53 am- Bit sorry to have commented on the Guardian time story and the Kate Bush album when, in the end, I like neither. Sad as that's a subject and an artist I'm typically fond of.
- Found out today our cat is 15 in human terms, if one believes 'cat years' as a relative indicator of development. Katy and I were a but surprised that 'one year old' was SO DAMN OLD. Get a *job*, Sasa, jesus.
- This Ikea Hackers DIY makeover of Ikea products site seems cool, and I want to check it out more: http://www.ikeahackers.net/
- If you have access to JSTOR or something like it, think about reading "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic" by Roberta Rubenstein. It's an interesting retrospective on Shirley Jackson's career and life, the Female Gothic genre, psychoanalysis, mothers and daughters, and the uses and significance of food and home in her writing and life. I found it striking and resonant. The paper's prose style is a bit uneasy at first, but strong once it reaches We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Anna downloaded it and gave it to Katy, who gave it to me. V. good of them. It's made me want to read Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, ed. Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, which it sites. Good notes, too. Several quotes very resonant in them, re: eating disorders, object-relations psychoanalysis. This struck me for the beauty of 'love safely and hate safely': "As Thomas Ogden outlines Klein's position on this primitive mechanism of emotional division, "Splitting allows the infant, child, or adult to love safely and hate safely by establishing discontinuity between loved and feared aspects of self and object," in The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue."
This description of the Female Gothic seemed, oddly, particularly resonant for the Radiosonic Workshop Shalka audios:
"More specifically, Jackson's later narratives contain distinct elements of the type of Gothic narrative that has been termed "Female Gothic." Claire Kahane identifies the characteristics of traditional Gothic narratives, including "an imprisoning structure" within which the protagonist, "typically a young woman whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery, while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness" (p. 334). Kahane notes that critical approaches to Gothic narratives characteristically emphasize an underlying oedipal or incestuous struggle between a powerless daughter and an erotically powerful father or other male figure (p. 335). She proposes, instead, that the central feature of Female Gothic is not an oedipal conflict but, implicitly, a preoedipal one, embodied in the daughter's search for/ fear of "the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront" (p. 336). Thus, in these narratives authored by women and focusing on female protagonists, traditional elements of the Gothic genre are elaborated in particular ways, notably through the central character's troubled identification with her good/bad/dead/mad mother, whom she ambivalently seeks to kill/merge with; and her imprisonment in a house that, mirroring her disturbed imaginings, expresses her ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection."
We spend a fair amount of time making the TARDIS a space of imprisonment and safety, an unheimlich home, confining and freeing, in this series. There's worry about the disintegration of the self and the body and the personality for our TL protagonists, the mysterious Forces on the Phone (no spoilers) exerting a 'bad father' sort of control over them. There's threats that aren't deliberately dealt with, hovering over the narrative. There's a deliberate problematizing of existential senses of inside vs. outside.
TAKE THE FOLLOWING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because I am always a bit ambivalent about psychoanalytic literary theory: Does the way that Slash treats male characters as psychologically female enable this? In an object-relations way, you COULD talk about D/M as simultaneously a post-Oedipal conflict and rivalry, a man's eroticized worshipful admiration for and wish to be rivaled (with a possibility of being bested) by another man, and as a pre-Oedipal relation, with the distinction between Who They Are being a contested subject, and a tension between liberty and being subsumed in one another, with either option posing risks to their autonomous selfhood. I *think*, though I might be wrong, that a traditionalist would say most men aren't eligible for a pre-Oedipal reading, thus the 'slash men are actually women' Joanna Russ and others postulated (She did it, I believe, in 'Another Addict Raves About K/S') here would play out in the narrative with some interesting psychological/character conclusions.
- Found out today our cat is 15 in human terms, if one believes 'cat years' as a relative indicator of development. Katy and I were a but surprised that 'one year old' was SO DAMN OLD. Get a *job*, Sasa, jesus.
- This Ikea Hackers DIY makeover of Ikea products site seems cool, and I want to check it out more: http://www.ikeahackers.net/
- If you have access to JSTOR or something like it, think about reading "House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic" by Roberta Rubenstein. It's an interesting retrospective on Shirley Jackson's career and life, the Female Gothic genre, psychoanalysis, mothers and daughters, and the uses and significance of food and home in her writing and life. I found it striking and resonant. The paper's prose style is a bit uneasy at first, but strong once it reaches We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Anna downloaded it and gave it to Katy, who gave it to me. V. good of them. It's made me want to read Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, ed. Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, which it sites. Good notes, too. Several quotes very resonant in them, re: eating disorders, object-relations psychoanalysis. This struck me for the beauty of 'love safely and hate safely': "As Thomas Ogden outlines Klein's position on this primitive mechanism of emotional division, "Splitting allows the infant, child, or adult to love safely and hate safely by establishing discontinuity between loved and feared aspects of self and object," in The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue."
This description of the Female Gothic seemed, oddly, particularly resonant for the Radiosonic Workshop Shalka audios:
"More specifically, Jackson's later narratives contain distinct elements of the type of Gothic narrative that has been termed "Female Gothic." Claire Kahane identifies the characteristics of traditional Gothic narratives, including "an imprisoning structure" within which the protagonist, "typically a young woman whose mother has died, is compelled to seek out the center of a mystery, while vague and usually sexual threats to her person from some powerful male figure hover on the periphery of her consciousness" (p. 334). Kahane notes that critical approaches to Gothic narratives characteristically emphasize an underlying oedipal or incestuous struggle between a powerless daughter and an erotically powerful father or other male figure (p. 335). She proposes, instead, that the central feature of Female Gothic is not an oedipal conflict but, implicitly, a preoedipal one, embodied in the daughter's search for/ fear of "the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront" (p. 336). Thus, in these narratives authored by women and focusing on female protagonists, traditional elements of the Gothic genre are elaborated in particular ways, notably through the central character's troubled identification with her good/bad/dead/mad mother, whom she ambivalently seeks to kill/merge with; and her imprisonment in a house that, mirroring her disturbed imaginings, expresses her ambivalent experience of entrapment and longing for protection."
We spend a fair amount of time making the TARDIS a space of imprisonment and safety, an unheimlich home, confining and freeing, in this series. There's worry about the disintegration of the self and the body and the personality for our TL protagonists, the mysterious Forces on the Phone (no spoilers) exerting a 'bad father' sort of control over them. There's threats that aren't deliberately dealt with, hovering over the narrative. There's a deliberate problematizing of existential senses of inside vs. outside.
TAKE THE FOLLOWING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because I am always a bit ambivalent about psychoanalytic literary theory: Does the way that Slash treats male characters as psychologically female enable this? In an object-relations way, you COULD talk about D/M as simultaneously a post-Oedipal conflict and rivalry, a man's eroticized worshipful admiration for and wish to be rivaled (with a possibility of being bested) by another man, and as a pre-Oedipal relation, with the distinction between Who They Are being a contested subject, and a tension between liberty and being subsumed in one another, with either option posing risks to their autonomous selfhood. I *think*, though I might be wrong, that a traditionalist would say most men aren't eligible for a pre-Oedipal reading, thus the 'slash men are actually women' Joanna Russ and others postulated (She did it, I believe, in 'Another Addict Raves About K/S') here would play out in the narrative with some interesting psychological/character conclusions.
Post-mortem
Sep. 29th, 2011 02:27 amH'okay, so there was too much food. There was... way too much food. Well. I can freeze the bread and one of the boxes of tzimmes? x_x
In the end went with the baked fish with the cream sauce. Katy didn't love it, so shan't make it again, though I thought it was pretty nice, with its butter-basting, cream and crunch bread-crumb crust. I also braised the last of the old celery we needed to use or toss with it, and that went well.
The tzimmes, as per usual, promised a QUICK carrot cooking time and then even after I gave them another HALF HOUR, carrots: still too crunchy, fruit component: over-stewed. Ah well. Still nice. Have discovered I like a sweet rather than a sweet and savory version of this, though. Will omit the salt and pepper next time and let people add that individually, if they liked. Last year I had this as a nice breakfast a lot (there were leftovers aplenty), and was looking forward to doing so again, maybe with a lashing of cream, but this batch seems perhaps too savory for that.
Roasted two HUGE sweet potatoes, one sweet (brown sugar, unsalted butter, option of marshmellow fluff) and one savory (salted butter, paprika, salt and pepper).
In the end made apple cobbler from the Guardian's Ultimate Recipe. Not quite as ultimate as I'd been led to believe--not a perfect fruit to topping ration. Next time more fruit. I cut the caster sugar and substituted honey for a RH twist, and it worked very well, texturally and taste-wise!
I also made butterscotch apples from Leon: Baking. Unfortunately there's a step where, having made this hard-sauce toffee, you have to rest the pan in ice-water to halt the cooking process QUICKLY. In my nervous rush to not fail what's basically candy-making, a tricky business, I sloshed a little cold water into the pan. I thought I's scooped it all out, but I must not have done it right, because the caramel/butterscotch would NOT adhere thickly to the apples, and fuck did I try. I thought the wateryness might be gross, but the toping was too delicious to chuck, actually, and really the basin I used to cool the pot in was clean, I was just being overly precious in worrying about it. The molten butterscotch was boiling hot, it's not like any badness could have come in without having been incinerated, AND I scooped out the little water that infiltrated. Bah. Anyway, so the apples sort of have to be SMASHED into the hard sauce stuff, but are otherwise fine.
Will make earl grey applesauce another time. Also Peter brought WAY too much cider--have to find a stew or something that uses that. x_x
I got a HUGE migraine after finishing, had to take pills and lie down. Is it weird that I really enjoy Sue Perkins in The Great British Bake-off and the old nan who's part honeybadger in that she don't care, she just bakes what she wants?
I emailed my maybe-advisor a revised proposal last night after he told me at our meeting Monday that he'd like to see a few specific changes. Now too nervous to send out this proposal OR the other one to anyone else, because I have to see whether he thinks I've done this right. So I guess tomorrow's narrowing down Ox and Cam people, and job aps. Joy. I really just want to read the rest of Bleak House and Hard Times, the AWESOMELY CHEAP (seriously, 2 pounds and 5 pounds respectively, the latter with a TON of good supplementary academic materials) Dickens books I had to buy Monday at the UCL campus Waterstones when caught out without my power cord.
And I haven't wanted to say anything about this for fear of jinxing it, but it looks very much like Katy officially has the downstairs room as a tenant, and we have an absolute-for-sure subleaser. This should ease some of her tension about being an illegal tenant, eliminate the threat of someone moving in and giving us away, and do the subleaser a favor. Also enable us to get the cat. Huzzah! Still, my fingers are crossed against some last-minute catastrophe because I am paranoid, and I won't be happy until the lease goes through on Monday, even though our mad bat of a landlady has signed off and the deposit's being made tomorrow (from the subleaser to Katy to Mrs. Mad-Battums).
Still, this potential near-miss will hopefully teach me to be more careful in future.
In the end went with the baked fish with the cream sauce. Katy didn't love it, so shan't make it again, though I thought it was pretty nice, with its butter-basting, cream and crunch bread-crumb crust. I also braised the last of the old celery we needed to use or toss with it, and that went well.
The tzimmes, as per usual, promised a QUICK carrot cooking time and then even after I gave them another HALF HOUR, carrots: still too crunchy, fruit component: over-stewed. Ah well. Still nice. Have discovered I like a sweet rather than a sweet and savory version of this, though. Will omit the salt and pepper next time and let people add that individually, if they liked. Last year I had this as a nice breakfast a lot (there were leftovers aplenty), and was looking forward to doing so again, maybe with a lashing of cream, but this batch seems perhaps too savory for that.
Roasted two HUGE sweet potatoes, one sweet (brown sugar, unsalted butter, option of marshmellow fluff) and one savory (salted butter, paprika, salt and pepper).
In the end made apple cobbler from the Guardian's Ultimate Recipe. Not quite as ultimate as I'd been led to believe--not a perfect fruit to topping ration. Next time more fruit. I cut the caster sugar and substituted honey for a RH twist, and it worked very well, texturally and taste-wise!
I also made butterscotch apples from Leon: Baking. Unfortunately there's a step where, having made this hard-sauce toffee, you have to rest the pan in ice-water to halt the cooking process QUICKLY. In my nervous rush to not fail what's basically candy-making, a tricky business, I sloshed a little cold water into the pan. I thought I's scooped it all out, but I must not have done it right, because the caramel/butterscotch would NOT adhere thickly to the apples, and fuck did I try. I thought the wateryness might be gross, but the toping was too delicious to chuck, actually, and really the basin I used to cool the pot in was clean, I was just being overly precious in worrying about it. The molten butterscotch was boiling hot, it's not like any badness could have come in without having been incinerated, AND I scooped out the little water that infiltrated. Bah. Anyway, so the apples sort of have to be SMASHED into the hard sauce stuff, but are otherwise fine.
Will make earl grey applesauce another time. Also Peter brought WAY too much cider--have to find a stew or something that uses that. x_x
I got a HUGE migraine after finishing, had to take pills and lie down. Is it weird that I really enjoy Sue Perkins in The Great British Bake-off and the old nan who's part honeybadger in that she don't care, she just bakes what she wants?
I emailed my maybe-advisor a revised proposal last night after he told me at our meeting Monday that he'd like to see a few specific changes. Now too nervous to send out this proposal OR the other one to anyone else, because I have to see whether he thinks I've done this right. So I guess tomorrow's narrowing down Ox and Cam people, and job aps. Joy. I really just want to read the rest of Bleak House and Hard Times, the AWESOMELY CHEAP (seriously, 2 pounds and 5 pounds respectively, the latter with a TON of good supplementary academic materials) Dickens books I had to buy Monday at the UCL campus Waterstones when caught out without my power cord.
And I haven't wanted to say anything about this for fear of jinxing it, but it looks very much like Katy officially has the downstairs room as a tenant, and we have an absolute-for-sure subleaser. This should ease some of her tension about being an illegal tenant, eliminate the threat of someone moving in and giving us away, and do the subleaser a favor. Also enable us to get the cat. Huzzah! Still, my fingers are crossed against some last-minute catastrophe because I am paranoid, and I won't be happy until the lease goes through on Monday, even though our mad bat of a landlady has signed off and the deposit's being made tomorrow (from the subleaser to Katy to Mrs. Mad-Battums).
Still, this potential near-miss will hopefully teach me to be more careful in future.
House of LEAVE
Sep. 11th, 2011 04:49 amThis will be incoherent, it's 5 am and I am le tired.
Frustrating day. Woke up with a bit of a migraine, but dosed it off. Made sweet potato falafel and helped Katy hunt the gas meter a bit (it proved illusive, landlady's proxy had NO idea where it might be, had to email old roommate Rob).
BUT, from roommate Kasia, got some disturbing info--said Proxy-Doxy might be moving someone into the downstairs room. Now this is ODD, given that, at our meeting, we established that I could pick a friend the housemates were comfortable with to move in there, and it was implied this could be taken care of when the repairs to the house were complete (they're not yet).
Kasia said the landlady thought she might have someone for the downstairs. The landlords finding a tenant themselves has never happened in all three years of Rob's tenancy, and due to this, and also because the landlords had moved to America, Katy has moved into my room but isn't ON the lease. So if this person is some bosom chum of proxy, we face a REAL issue. I have no guilt on this score--the people are getting paid, and Katy and I and undertaking improvements and necessary cleaning, directing the builders to a silly degree, recruiting other tenants of good habits and facilitating their lease-signing processes (Jo, Phillippa, probably Peter later) and generally being excellent stewards of a property that had been allowed to fall into dilapidation. My parents' rentals were often trashed by vile occupiers, and I've seen and heard some dubious shit in the course of helping them/working for them, and this wouldn't make even my mercenary mother bat an eye. My role here is pretty similarly unpaid!Property Managery (apparently when I said 'I will never work for my mother ever ever again' I meant 'but I will find her clones on another continent and somehow wind up doing similar work for /them/, wooooo!'), but I didn't mind because it allowed me the control I needed. BUT if some little schmendrick comes in and whines about my girlfriend living with me, /well/. It puts the kibbosh on our cat-related plans for the mo, as well.
Also, just generally, I feel in a shared house that having no say over who the roommates are is--weird, creepy, etc. Invasive. Not what I signed on for, given my phone conversations, emails, and meeting with the landlady in which we discussed her preference that I have a group of friends in the house to create a feeling of mutual responsibility for it, etc. I know you can't spell 'non-consensual' without 'sensual', but bitch this was NOT my understanding when I signed the dotted line (of your poorly constructed contract with no rider-signature-line and thus little legitimacy/protection for /you/, what what WHAT were you thinking? *Sassy Gay Paralegal* Seriously though, don't c/p your contract together when you don't know what you're doing and haven't had anyone who does look it over, you wind up with some indefensible bullshit.).
We currently only have girls, and Peter I really like and trust, and it's not like I necessarily think every strange dude is not to BE trusted, but I don't get on with every random guy THAT well, I don't feel SUPER safe. The landlady says the potential new tenant is a student, she THINKS not my friend, and that she'll tell me more when she knows more. In a sense this is heartening: if she doesn't even know whether the potential tenant is the friend I was earlier told I could have in the downstairs bedroom, how close can they be/how likely is this person to rat us out? Yet how can the landlady not know this information? Where is this person coming from, if she doesn't know that? Say it's a friend of the landlords' family, so potentially like them Indian, from a relatively traditional background--how cool is she going to be with the lesbian relationship upstairs? Say it's a 17 year old raver, or a brat, or a studious SILENCE!!nazi, or, like my last flatmates, someone language-barrier-tastic?
I can work this out when it comes to it: if the child comes at all (which won't be immediate) (and given the family's general disorganization, I have my doubts, and I'll sweep in with alacrity to arrange an alternative candidate), and if she's not for winning, there's always saying 'my girlfriend's housing's fallen through and either she needs to share my room (and we can make arrangements to compensate you (though privately I'd rather not, this rent is sweet and I'm pretty dependent on it until my job improves or I get more student loans)) or, or I'll have to sublease and move out', or Katy 'living' elsewhere but actually just staying there like two nights a week.
I just hate having put Katy in a precarious situation, even if we can sort it. I didn't think I was being a chancer on this one, because Rob has had SO few problems for years. Even Katy's mom and mine, relatively stern-eyed ladies, smiled beneficently on the arrangement. Damn damn damn damn. There's nothing to do for it but wait, but I know I'll stew until I hear more.
So after that mess we went out to Anna's--Mexican was fine (kinda uninspiring, after the build-up, with the sort of blandness and limited ingredients I dislike about El Maguey-style commercial Mexican), got Anna coffee-syrups, then went to Eds for GOD AWFUL cheesecake I wrote them a 'come-to-jesus' note about on the back of a customer membership card and then pocketed because it was too mean to leave. I got violently ill--the migraine blossoming into a full and fruity nausea--and the bus home did me no favors. I proceeded to be Really Really Ill.
On a positive note, we watched like three episodes of Next Gen today! 'Inner Light' is next!
Too worried about stupid house shit to sleep, I applied to the last ten of this weeks' jobs. Too many landlady!emails today for my pleasure or productivity. :/ Talked to Bess--the audition posts are up! Yay.
Frustrating day. Woke up with a bit of a migraine, but dosed it off. Made sweet potato falafel and helped Katy hunt the gas meter a bit (it proved illusive, landlady's proxy had NO idea where it might be, had to email old roommate Rob).
BUT, from roommate Kasia, got some disturbing info--said Proxy-Doxy might be moving someone into the downstairs room. Now this is ODD, given that, at our meeting, we established that I could pick a friend the housemates were comfortable with to move in there, and it was implied this could be taken care of when the repairs to the house were complete (they're not yet).
Kasia said the landlady thought she might have someone for the downstairs. The landlords finding a tenant themselves has never happened in all three years of Rob's tenancy, and due to this, and also because the landlords had moved to America, Katy has moved into my room but isn't ON the lease. So if this person is some bosom chum of proxy, we face a REAL issue. I have no guilt on this score--the people are getting paid, and Katy and I and undertaking improvements and necessary cleaning, directing the builders to a silly degree, recruiting other tenants of good habits and facilitating their lease-signing processes (Jo, Phillippa, probably Peter later) and generally being excellent stewards of a property that had been allowed to fall into dilapidation. My parents' rentals were often trashed by vile occupiers, and I've seen and heard some dubious shit in the course of helping them/working for them, and this wouldn't make even my mercenary mother bat an eye. My role here is pretty similarly unpaid!Property Managery (apparently when I said 'I will never work for my mother ever ever again' I meant 'but I will find her clones on another continent and somehow wind up doing similar work for /them/, wooooo!'), but I didn't mind because it allowed me the control I needed. BUT if some little schmendrick comes in and whines about my girlfriend living with me, /well/. It puts the kibbosh on our cat-related plans for the mo, as well.
Also, just generally, I feel in a shared house that having no say over who the roommates are is--weird, creepy, etc. Invasive. Not what I signed on for, given my phone conversations, emails, and meeting with the landlady in which we discussed her preference that I have a group of friends in the house to create a feeling of mutual responsibility for it, etc. I know you can't spell 'non-consensual' without 'sensual', but bitch this was NOT my understanding when I signed the dotted line (of your poorly constructed contract with no rider-signature-line and thus little legitimacy/protection for /you/, what what WHAT were you thinking? *Sassy Gay Paralegal* Seriously though, don't c/p your contract together when you don't know what you're doing and haven't had anyone who does look it over, you wind up with some indefensible bullshit.).
We currently only have girls, and Peter I really like and trust, and it's not like I necessarily think every strange dude is not to BE trusted, but I don't get on with every random guy THAT well, I don't feel SUPER safe. The landlady says the potential new tenant is a student, she THINKS not my friend, and that she'll tell me more when she knows more. In a sense this is heartening: if she doesn't even know whether the potential tenant is the friend I was earlier told I could have in the downstairs bedroom, how close can they be/how likely is this person to rat us out? Yet how can the landlady not know this information? Where is this person coming from, if she doesn't know that? Say it's a friend of the landlords' family, so potentially like them Indian, from a relatively traditional background--how cool is she going to be with the lesbian relationship upstairs? Say it's a 17 year old raver, or a brat, or a studious SILENCE!!nazi, or, like my last flatmates, someone language-barrier-tastic?
I can work this out when it comes to it: if the child comes at all (which won't be immediate) (and given the family's general disorganization, I have my doubts, and I'll sweep in with alacrity to arrange an alternative candidate), and if she's not for winning, there's always saying 'my girlfriend's housing's fallen through and either she needs to share my room (and we can make arrangements to compensate you (though privately I'd rather not, this rent is sweet and I'm pretty dependent on it until my job improves or I get more student loans)) or, or I'll have to sublease and move out', or Katy 'living' elsewhere but actually just staying there like two nights a week.
I just hate having put Katy in a precarious situation, even if we can sort it. I didn't think I was being a chancer on this one, because Rob has had SO few problems for years. Even Katy's mom and mine, relatively stern-eyed ladies, smiled beneficently on the arrangement. Damn damn damn damn. There's nothing to do for it but wait, but I know I'll stew until I hear more.
So after that mess we went out to Anna's--Mexican was fine (kinda uninspiring, after the build-up, with the sort of blandness and limited ingredients I dislike about El Maguey-style commercial Mexican), got Anna coffee-syrups, then went to Eds for GOD AWFUL cheesecake I wrote them a 'come-to-jesus' note about on the back of a customer membership card and then pocketed because it was too mean to leave. I got violently ill--the migraine blossoming into a full and fruity nausea--and the bus home did me no favors. I proceeded to be Really Really Ill.
On a positive note, we watched like three episodes of Next Gen today! 'Inner Light' is next!
Too worried about stupid house shit to sleep, I applied to the last ten of this weeks' jobs. Too many landlady!emails today for my pleasure or productivity. :/ Talked to Bess--the audition posts are up! Yay.
Everyone Is A Fucking Napoleon
Aug. 1st, 2011 10:01 pmI wanted to decoupage our downstairs bathroom in MAPS!!, which I went all the way to Dagenham/BACK IN FUCKING TIME to the 1980s to get, but they turned out to be a bit crap. Le sigh. Can still use them for art projects/to line drawers and cupboards in interesting fashion. If you're in the UK and want some, I now have TONS. So Katy wants to decoupage our downstairs bathroom in an old falling apart Hornblower book, now, which I initially resisted because I get Too Jewish about book destruction, for reals. Also that bathroom already lacks light, and too much black ink+black floor=we stay in there too long-->we become cave trolls? But I am not insensible to the attractiveness of this: http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/decoupaged_wall
Also we painted our Cath Kidston!living room white (replacing Nicotine Snot Cream), and then we accidentally painted our upstairs bathroom police-box blue. With lacquer red wood and accents, and a good deal of white, true, but omg, how did we not fucking see it? We were just like 'la di dah, this blue looks really comforting for some reason, laaaaaa...' I blame the TARDIS bar in Brooklyn's Who!toilet.
Thus this conversation:
me: Baby, you know Minard? http://cartographia.wordpress.com/category/charles-joseph-minard/
Katy: i did not, but yes - sure
me: if we do the hornblower bathroom, we should frame the really famous diagram of Napoleon's defeat
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
which would be funny
because it's two kinds of wordy graphic art about Napoleon's defeat IN ONE TOILET!!
NO ONE WILL CONTEST OUR NERD CRED THEN!!!
also the upstairs is france/red white and blue
and the bathrooms are competing for your patronage
but the England bathroom is just /better/
metatoilets
Katy: i thought we could have a framed 'pull to open' sign upstairs actually
me: !!
I love it?
theladyofconte: ha
But should it be inside against the walls or ON THE DOOR?! Decisions!!
Also we painted our Cath Kidston!living room white (replacing Nicotine Snot Cream), and then we accidentally painted our upstairs bathroom police-box blue. With lacquer red wood and accents, and a good deal of white, true, but omg, how did we not fucking see it? We were just like 'la di dah, this blue looks really comforting for some reason, laaaaaa...' I blame the TARDIS bar in Brooklyn's Who!toilet.
Thus this conversation:
me: Baby, you know Minard? http://cartographia.wordpress.com/category/charles-joseph-minard/
Katy: i did not, but yes - sure
me: if we do the hornblower bathroom, we should frame the really famous diagram of Napoleon's defeat
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
which would be funny
because it's two kinds of wordy graphic art about Napoleon's defeat IN ONE TOILET!!
NO ONE WILL CONTEST OUR NERD CRED THEN!!!
also the upstairs is france/red white and blue
and the bathrooms are competing for your patronage
but the England bathroom is just /better/
metatoilets
Katy: i thought we could have a framed 'pull to open' sign upstairs actually
me: !!
I love it?
theladyofconte: ha
But should it be inside against the walls or ON THE DOOR?! Decisions!!
Bwuh?! MY ROOOOOOOOM!!
May. 23rd, 2011 11:59 pmI'd been told the plasterers were coming Thursday for like, a few hours. They didn't show, and I assumed it was just relatively quick ceiling-mending that needed done over the ugly patches.
So I leave my house Thursday night and go to my first day at work from Katy's Friday, then spend the weekend there. Today I come into town, do an ass-ton of errands, and meet a friend who's visiting London/bunking at mine. We hang out downtown, then when Katy gets off work we go back to mine, where we find my carefully arranged living room deconstructed, my room entered and everything moved, rooted through and covered in heavy dust sheets, bits of wall everywhere (which makes Katy's dust allergies go nuts), and evidence of plaster-work all over the place--big, grimy, fly-spackled buckets of the gooey stuff and a legion of paint buckets--laders in the garden, for some reason. And the doors all gone, replaced by painted unfinished planks of wood with no handles.
No one told me this was happening.
Not happy.
About as annoyed as it is politely possible to be.
Noooone of the other roommates, who I'm subleasing from, let me know, they didn't like--drop me an email. And when I asked Rob was sort of bemusedly, unconcernedly like 'yeah, I didn't think this replastering was going to be such a big deal...'
Have uncovered stuff for the night, but no idea how many days this shit will take, and it's and embarrassing/annoying when I'd cleaned /for a guest/. Now I have some Kafkaesque unfathomable, uncontrollable, seemingly irrational and potentially endless invasion of privacy-cum-intense home improvement project which involves replacing our old but okay doors with freaky handle-less planks of wood, for some reason. Can't even close my door to sleep at night, for fear of never getting it out of the jamb again. Grrrrrrr.
Given the landlady thing, this is the third time in as many months I'll have to completely reassemble my bedroom, and the second time I'll have to put the living room into some semblance of order. It doesn't get easier, it's always equally. fucking. annoying.
So I leave my house Thursday night and go to my first day at work from Katy's Friday, then spend the weekend there. Today I come into town, do an ass-ton of errands, and meet a friend who's visiting London/bunking at mine. We hang out downtown, then when Katy gets off work we go back to mine, where we find my carefully arranged living room deconstructed, my room entered and everything moved, rooted through and covered in heavy dust sheets, bits of wall everywhere (which makes Katy's dust allergies go nuts), and evidence of plaster-work all over the place--big, grimy, fly-spackled buckets of the gooey stuff and a legion of paint buckets--laders in the garden, for some reason. And the doors all gone, replaced by painted unfinished planks of wood with no handles.
No one told me this was happening.
Not happy.
About as annoyed as it is politely possible to be.
Noooone of the other roommates, who I'm subleasing from, let me know, they didn't like--drop me an email. And when I asked Rob was sort of bemusedly, unconcernedly like 'yeah, I didn't think this replastering was going to be such a big deal...'
Have uncovered stuff for the night, but no idea how many days this shit will take, and it's and embarrassing/annoying when I'd cleaned /for a guest/. Now I have some Kafkaesque unfathomable, uncontrollable, seemingly irrational and potentially endless invasion of privacy-cum-intense home improvement project which involves replacing our old but okay doors with freaky handle-less planks of wood, for some reason. Can't even close my door to sleep at night, for fear of never getting it out of the jamb again. Grrrrrrr.
Given the landlady thing, this is the third time in as many months I'll have to completely reassemble my bedroom, and the second time I'll have to put the living room into some semblance of order. It doesn't get easier, it's always equally. fucking. annoying.
I have /no idea/ what I'm going to be able to do with a LOT of this. Any good ideas? Recipes that would eat up the alcohol w/out needing it to be particularly fresh, things that use some of the weird starches or any of the Other Ingredients (Molasses?!) particularly welcome!
May just do sesame chicken tonight to hit up the sesame seeds and rice. :/
Starch:
mung beans: daal?
flour
chapati flour
soya mince
rye flour
triple rice blend
basmati
Other Ingredients:
yeast
molasses
sesame seeds
fish sauce
beef bouillon
Other Random:
chocolate sauce
chocolate spread
mango pickles
Spices:
ground nutmeg
mint
chili
basil
Alcohol:
a lick of cab sav
most of a bottle vodka
lick red wine
full bottle cab sav
2/3 chardonay
1/4 tempranillio
lick white grenache
Teas:
peppermint
valerian
PG
gunpowder
chamomile
berry
green
dandelion
Other Beverages:
cocoa
Ovaltine
May just do sesame chicken tonight to hit up the sesame seeds and rice. :/
Starch:
mung beans: daal?
flour
chapati flour
soya mince
rye flour
triple rice blend
basmati
Other Ingredients:
yeast
molasses
sesame seeds
fish sauce
beef bouillon
Other Random:
chocolate sauce
chocolate spread
mango pickles
Spices:
ground nutmeg
mint
chili
basil
Alcohol:
a lick of cab sav
most of a bottle vodka
lick red wine
full bottle cab sav
2/3 chardonay
1/4 tempranillio
lick white grenache
Teas:
peppermint
valerian
PG
gunpowder
chamomile
berry
green
dandelion
Other Beverages:
cocoa
Ovaltine
omg omg omg I hate these people
Apr. 11th, 2011 01:55 pmFrom a conversation with Alex:
So last night I return from Katy's to the place I moved into a few weeks ago (and have already severely cleaned the bathroom, living room and kitchen of). She's making dinner in the kitchen, I'm writing at the table and keeping her company. I notice the bin is missing, and I think well, there's probably a reason. Today I go into the filthy back garden to hang laundry where there is some sun and find: the bin, which I had spilled a bit of grease on on Friday. Just--sitting there, with its dappling of grease. Not soaking or anything, just--there.
Surely, I think, they would not just have... put it outside rather than cleaning it, or even, though it'd be stupid, throwing it away. I look around the back garden and see TONS of just /abandoned shit/. Before I'd thought it was just Unkempt. Oh no. It is a /graveyard of crap/, because like /five year olds/ they cannot fucking CLEAN A BIN, or even /chuck it and buy a new one/. They would rather leave an open garbage bag in the kitchen and exile the bin to the island of unwanted toys. I know the grease was my fault and I was running late and didn't stop to clean it right then, but jesus.
So, enraaaaged, I clean the bin, repatriate it to the kitchen with a shiny new bag, hang the laundry, and DESTROY THE BACK GARDEN. Like, sort the living fuck out of it. Sounds like it was pitchfork time? Ah, but my only gardening tools were: thin dish-washing gloves and my trusty friend: abandoned wood circle! I found it in the 'garden.'Now we are like, best mates. Together we discovered: a drain in the middle of the patio under a thick cover of leaves and junk! WE ARE EXPLORAS LIKE DORA, YO. Also--a lovely granite(?) tile barbecue area allowed to crumble almost to nothing due to neglect! Woo.
And then--theeeen I made the mistake of emptying the compost bin.
Things worms can do, friends: THINGS WORMS CAN DO:
* eat organic matter
* poop soil
THINGS WORMS CANNOT DO:
* CONSUME ALL MATTER IN A FIERY RAGE OF DESTRUCTION, INCLUDING:
* POT PLANT CASES
* TERRACOTTA
* STONES!!
* PLASTIC WRAPPERS
* CELL PHONE PACKAGING
* BUSINESS CARDS
* APPROX. 80JILLION EGG SHELLS
I have been out there something like two hours and it is better, but I still probably, on a different day, have another two to go, cleaning the perfectly good bbq which they have abandoned to spiders and weeping for humanity. Sorry to just SAGA at you, but like--how do these people exist? Perhaps so many have passed few it's slipped into a state of neglect due to inconsistent attention? (...but I would have googled 'composting egg shells', tbh)
Just--decent gardens are hard to get in London. This could be /such/ a fucking FIND of a house, and they really do not give a shit.
So last night I return from Katy's to the place I moved into a few weeks ago (and have already severely cleaned the bathroom, living room and kitchen of). She's making dinner in the kitchen, I'm writing at the table and keeping her company. I notice the bin is missing, and I think well, there's probably a reason. Today I go into the filthy back garden to hang laundry where there is some sun and find: the bin, which I had spilled a bit of grease on on Friday. Just--sitting there, with its dappling of grease. Not soaking or anything, just--there.
Surely, I think, they would not just have... put it outside rather than cleaning it, or even, though it'd be stupid, throwing it away. I look around the back garden and see TONS of just /abandoned shit/. Before I'd thought it was just Unkempt. Oh no. It is a /graveyard of crap/, because like /five year olds/ they cannot fucking CLEAN A BIN, or even /chuck it and buy a new one/. They would rather leave an open garbage bag in the kitchen and exile the bin to the island of unwanted toys. I know the grease was my fault and I was running late and didn't stop to clean it right then, but jesus.
So, enraaaaged, I clean the bin, repatriate it to the kitchen with a shiny new bag, hang the laundry, and DESTROY THE BACK GARDEN. Like, sort the living fuck out of it. Sounds like it was pitchfork time? Ah, but my only gardening tools were: thin dish-washing gloves and my trusty friend: abandoned wood circle! I found it in the 'garden.'Now we are like, best mates. Together we discovered: a drain in the middle of the patio under a thick cover of leaves and junk! WE ARE EXPLORAS LIKE DORA, YO. Also--a lovely granite(?) tile barbecue area allowed to crumble almost to nothing due to neglect! Woo.
And then--theeeen I made the mistake of emptying the compost bin.
Things worms can do, friends: THINGS WORMS CAN DO:
* eat organic matter
* poop soil
THINGS WORMS CANNOT DO:
* CONSUME ALL MATTER IN A FIERY RAGE OF DESTRUCTION, INCLUDING:
* POT PLANT CASES
* TERRACOTTA
* STONES!!
* PLASTIC WRAPPERS
* CELL PHONE PACKAGING
* BUSINESS CARDS
* APPROX. 80JILLION EGG SHELLS
I have been out there something like two hours and it is better, but I still probably, on a different day, have another two to go, cleaning the perfectly good bbq which they have abandoned to spiders and weeping for humanity. Sorry to just SAGA at you, but like--how do these people exist? Perhaps so many have passed few it's slipped into a state of neglect due to inconsistent attention? (...but I would have googled 'composting egg shells', tbh)
Just--decent gardens are hard to get in London. This could be /such/ a fucking FIND of a house, and they really do not give a shit.
Victor Krumbelievable!
Jan. 2nd, 2007 01:30 amI had a nice New Years' Eve over at Meg's, watching girl films, eating, drinking too much, and whispering to her dog that Meg and I were going to kidnap him, yes we were.
Of the past 72 hours, 15 have been spent working at the Hunan, where I hostess and drive delivery. John D'Agata called Friday to snark at me. "Erin, are you wearing one of those Chinese dress things? With a bun?! Can you deliver us the food yourself in said Mandarin dress?" I've made enough money, between the job and the haul from home, to buy my new MacFriend. Everything I make after this/horde from my living alowance is gravy, to be put towards the Vienna plane tickets, which my mother doesn't have money to cover, and the couple hundred dollars difference of expenses between there and here, which my mother won't comp.
Back home Sam got a 9 week old Schnoodle puppy he named Smokey for it's ashen coat (with tiny cream colored paws). Smokey just cuddles with you, not a very yippy creature. It got sick and seized on the 26th, and we took him into the vet. I had to feed him medicine mixed into his food by rubbing it on his little muzzle so he'd lick it off because he was reluctant to eat. Smokey is fine now, but it was all very Babe.
I've fallen in love with the show House and now own the first two seasons. It's Sherlock Holmes if both of them were modern doctors, basically, with the incredible Hugh Laurie of BBC productions fame coping an American accent. Watson is Wilson, a cancer specialist, and the problem of Watson's variable wives, sometimes estimated to be 3 seperate women throughout the cannon, is solved by Wilson being philandering and going through Mrs. Wilsons. Lestrade and Gregson have been fused into the inimatable Dr. Cuddy, Dean of Medicine. Dr. Greg House is the pill popping misanthrope protagonist, cocaine addiction replaced with viccodin. Similarly, the reliance on the drug of choice is suspended for the duration of a case, during which the thrill of the mystery overwhelms the need for the drug. The mystery aspects of the show seems twinned to Sherlockian cannon as source material.
The Holmes social apathy and distaste for human connection have been elevated to a medical misanthropy that seems to emboody the horrors of public fears about doctors who have knowledge, privlidges, and possibly intelligence not available to everyone and always carry the potential of abusing these. There's even a cousin of The Woman, Irene Addler, in the form of Stacey Epstein. Of course the relationship between the cannons is entirley my interpretation and I could be off my nut. Nevertheless, it's amazingly written.
I have no idea who I 'ship, though. Crisis! House and Stacey or Wilson or Cameron or Cuddy?!?! Maybe Ducklings for the OT3. I think Heather Gibson might like this show.
Of the past 72 hours, 15 have been spent working at the Hunan, where I hostess and drive delivery. John D'Agata called Friday to snark at me. "Erin, are you wearing one of those Chinese dress things? With a bun?! Can you deliver us the food yourself in said Mandarin dress?" I've made enough money, between the job and the haul from home, to buy my new MacFriend. Everything I make after this/horde from my living alowance is gravy, to be put towards the Vienna plane tickets, which my mother doesn't have money to cover, and the couple hundred dollars difference of expenses between there and here, which my mother won't comp.
Back home Sam got a 9 week old Schnoodle puppy he named Smokey for it's ashen coat (with tiny cream colored paws). Smokey just cuddles with you, not a very yippy creature. It got sick and seized on the 26th, and we took him into the vet. I had to feed him medicine mixed into his food by rubbing it on his little muzzle so he'd lick it off because he was reluctant to eat. Smokey is fine now, but it was all very Babe.
I've fallen in love with the show House and now own the first two seasons. It's Sherlock Holmes if both of them were modern doctors, basically, with the incredible Hugh Laurie of BBC productions fame coping an American accent. Watson is Wilson, a cancer specialist, and the problem of Watson's variable wives, sometimes estimated to be 3 seperate women throughout the cannon, is solved by Wilson being philandering and going through Mrs. Wilsons. Lestrade and Gregson have been fused into the inimatable Dr. Cuddy, Dean of Medicine. Dr. Greg House is the pill popping misanthrope protagonist, cocaine addiction replaced with viccodin. Similarly, the reliance on the drug of choice is suspended for the duration of a case, during which the thrill of the mystery overwhelms the need for the drug. The mystery aspects of the show seems twinned to Sherlockian cannon as source material.
The Holmes social apathy and distaste for human connection have been elevated to a medical misanthropy that seems to emboody the horrors of public fears about doctors who have knowledge, privlidges, and possibly intelligence not available to everyone and always carry the potential of abusing these. There's even a cousin of The Woman, Irene Addler, in the form of Stacey Epstein. Of course the relationship between the cannons is entirley my interpretation and I could be off my nut. Nevertheless, it's amazingly written.
I have no idea who I 'ship, though. Crisis! House and Stacey or Wilson or Cameron or Cuddy?!?! Maybe Ducklings for the OT3. I think Heather Gibson might like this show.
