she said yes!

after months and months of procrastinating ("i'll just get through this term..." "i'll wait to get this paper back..." "well this is the last term i'll just get this out of the way...") i finally got around to trying to disinvest myself of my assigned dissertation supervisor and getting the one i wanted. and she said yes!

thank you thank you thank you!

now i have alot of work to do as we are meeting on tuesday and i have no idea what the hell i'm writing about and i am supposed to have been thinking about this for the last 2 years.

details details

spring

amazing volcanic properties

hoppy easter*

* favourite ale at margate beer festival last friday

after having cooked, then squaffed a (may i say so myself) really really good lunch, our friends having gone home to nap ("nap"?!), we are now outside in the garden for the first time this year, fire raging, humph all tucked up in a fleece blanket, listening to odd music (neal's player - mine ran out of battery). there's wine left over from lunch (oh happy days) and contentment runs high.

this easter weekend has been cold, rainy and windy. not at all what we had envisioned but probably what we should have expected, y'know, living in england and all. it was, however, perfectly conducive to staying in, napping, and getting all comfort food-y. risottos and carbonaras, curies and natchos. yum.

and today, i finally made a successful caramel (on the 2nd try). this was almost a disaster as i only had enough double cream for one batch of caramel and one batch of ganache (dark chocolate tart with salty-peanut caramel base - and yes, it was as good as it sounds). and, yes, i burned the first batch of caramel beyond belief. and then i STILL poured the cream in, thinking, (not believing) maybe it's SUPPOSED to be that way. there really is such a thing as being too open-minded.

so, no cream, no problem, this being 2010 and all, we'll just nip to the shops and pick up some more. except that due to some historic (hysteric) law, stores with more than a gnat's crotchet of floor space are not allowed to open on easter sunday in the uk, which knocked out the 2 main supermarkets. This left the small co-op ("smaller than a gnat's crotchet" - you heard it here first). we rushed (literally) to the shop, only to gaze upon an empty shelf bearing the sign "two for one double cream".

"maybe" we said to ourselves, "tesco won't really be closed and we can still buy double cream." neither of us believed this for one second but desperate times, desperate measures, and lo, our faith was rewarded . the tesco garage was open, and had two cartons of long-life double cream, which we snapped up with unseeming (and, undoubtedly to the cashier, inexplicable) haste. i will never understand the workings of uk supermarkets.

anyways 2nd time lucky, tart a triumph, and if anyone has further recipe suggestions for the pint of single cream (bought at the co-op just in case) or the pint of double cream (just in case i needed multiple caramel attempts) please let me know.

insurance cream. good grief.

more for your childish amusement

adopt a greyhound!

you know you want to...

and an unfortunate author name...

well of course it is!

"the sales boost that will now inevitably occur..." !!

Should you have kids?

http://www.momlogic.com/2010/03/should_you_have_kids.php

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

i actually did this once. ok - not exactly, but with eerily similar overtones. and of course, i'm not a cat (i really shouldn't have to be drawing attention to this sort of detail).

the "well crap" moment i am referring to took place many years ago in my parents' house in vancouver. i still lived there so i must have been around 15. the house had an entrance on the ground floor, but the living area was on the first floor - reached by a rather steep staircase with one 90 degree turn about one-third up. there was a ceiling light above the bend, which had burned out.

my family is not the sort of family that have ladders. we don't really do diy, or gardening per se. i do, now sometimes, but growing up - these things were things that "dads in garages" did. we didn't have a garage, and if we did, my dad would have used it as ancillary book storage.

so the ceiling light had burned out, and it stayed burned out for lack of said ladder. one day, i decided that i could fix this without a ladder. i was home alone (a simple fact that would later have frightening and humiliating consequences) and bored. this was a fairly constant state of mind for me as a teenager which, looking back, would have been completely alleviated by the internet - but alas, it was 1989.

the reasoning behind my confidence lay in a thin dado rail that ran around the stairwell walls at the level of the top stair landing. i found that, in sock feet, i could balance one foot on each side of the dado railing and edge out over the stairs towards the light, crab-style. i held the replacement light bulb - gently - between my teeth, and edged out over the stairwell towards the light fitting, until i could grab it for balance. I unscrewed the defunct bulb and screwed in the new one.

"i must switch it on" i thought, and then realised to my horror that effecting the same maneuverer backwards was going to be rather more difficult - nay, impossible. i couldn't turn around on the narrow rail, and without something to grab for balance, i couldn't move without risking falling fifteen feet onto the steep staircase.

my parents, as i remember, were not as surprised as one might expect to return to their home and find their daughter balanced precariously 15 feet above the stairwell, spread-eagled, clutching the light-fitting and, it must be admitted, pretty pleased to see them. i don't remember them laughing at the time but i may have been too busy trying to get the circulation back into my numb feet.

i would love to say that's the only time i completely mis-judged spatial ratios but unfortunately that was only the beginning...