You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2007.
I have spent the morning happily unpacking boxes and arranging my desk area.
If you look closely, you can see Molly’s glowy eyes outside the window…
Incidentally, all you can see outside our windows at the moment is scaffolding because our building is being re-painted. We’re looking forward very much to the day when it comes down, and we might actually get some natural light through the windows…
Closeup! Look at how fascinating all my junk is!
1) Seriously cheesy mouse mat covered in confused-looking tabby kittens. J got it for me as a joke, and I think he’s slightly horrified that I actually use it.
2) Hebden Bridge Millennium coaster. Probably the world’s most random coaster ever. It’s from Hebden Bridge, the town I grew up in in West Yorkshire, and it was, um, to celebrate the millennium. Clue was in the picture really.
3) A pair of J’s old boxers. Nice! See, the thing is, we really didn’t think it through when we decided to put the catflap in the window above my desk. Because of course the cats get muddy feet, and then they leap through the flap and leave little muddy footprints all over my desk… So the boxers are there as a cat doormat. Except of course the little furry bastards just leap right over them and proceed to trail mud across all my stuff anyway. Woe.
4) Random squeezy cat toy that my Dad brought me back from Spain. My Dad seems to have been unable to come to terms with the fact that I am no longer ten years old, and always buys me random, but actually quite entertaining toys. I am particularly fond of this little guy. And! If you squeeze him, he squeaks! Bonus.
I have also begun putting together all my stuff on my pinboard, although there’s still room left for newly-acquired random junk that most normal people would throw away.
Tie number 1 is my old school uniform tie, but tie number 2 is MUCH more interesting. It is a Lancaster bus driver’s tie from when I was at university there. One night my friends and I dressed up as naughty school girls (oh if only I had a scanner, the photos I could show you….) and went out to a club. I came home earlier than the others, for reasons I don’t recall, and got on a bus to go back to campus, and the bus driver, in what I presume was an inept attempt to flirt with me, asked me to swap ties with him. So he got the plain black tie I had found in a charity shop, and I got his uniform tie. I hope he didn’t get into trouble….
1) My old cats, Emma and Alice. We had them from when I was three. I hope they are in cat heaven now with all the ham and prawns they can eat.
2) Keychain from The Sugarhouse, a club we used to go to at university.
3) I am a reluctant member of the Manchester United supporters’ club, as it’s the only way to get tickets for games and J likes to take me every once in a while.
1) One of the things I had to do during my study abroad year in Illinois, probably to make up for the fact that I was over there with free tuition and health care, was to pitch up at meetings at their study abroad office and sell the idea of spending a semester in the UK to students. It wasn’t that hard, most of them were sold once they found out the legal drinking age in the UK is 18, and my work was done.
2) My first job out of university was working in the book department in Harrods. They MADE us wear these during the sale. I felt like a pony.
This evening J came home from work ravenous, and announced that he was not above taking me out for dinner. I responded that I wasn’t above going out for dinner with him. So we got in the car and drove to Outback Steakhouse in Wandsworth. Yes, Americans, like Chili’s before it, Outback Steakhouse has crossed the pond. Evidently not very successfully though, because when we arrived the place was boarded up and a sign on the door said the nearest open branch was in Staines. I was heartbroken! Now I have to go all the way to Staines for my cheese-coated fake antipodean food. Woe. And of course, Staines is both minging and far away, so I must resign myself to probably never eating Alice Springs Chicken on this small island again. It was a sad moment.
We decided to make the best of a bad situation though, and went round the corner to a McDonalds drive-through. Because we HAD to, because we were HUNGRY, and Outback Steakhouse was CLOSED. There was NO CHOICE. But, just to prove that even while eating McDonalds in a car park in Wandsworth, we still have class, I give you this conversation:
J: You know how I’m not allowed to fart in the car?
Me: Yes
J: Or when you’re eating?
Me: Yes
J: I was just wondering what would happen to me if I farted while you were eating in the car.
Me: I would probably squeeze the very hot middle of my apple pie on your head.
J: Right.
Me: It’s OK though, you can fart when you get out to put the rubbish in the bin.
J: I’m not doing that, that’s your job!
Me: But you’re nearer, and I don’t need to fart.
J: Yes but I could just open the door and the aerodynamics of the warm air meeting the cool air would cause all the smell to go outside.
Me: What? No! You’re not allowed to fart in the car. There are standards!
J: But with the door open you’d never even know! You wouldn’t smell anything!
Me: That is not the point.
J: *Opens door, farts loudly*
Me: I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST DID THAT! YOU WERE GETTING OUT ANYWAY!
J: Yes, but it’s so fun to make you mad like that.
Me: *Simmers*
J: *Gets out to put the rubbish in the bin.*
When I was little, my Mum wouldn’t let me have Barbies, or Sindys (Barbie’s British equivalent). She told me they would give me a warped idea of femininity. I was allowed to play with My Little Ponies though, so apparently warped ideas of horses were totally fine. And yet I don’t ever remember thinking for even a moment that real-life horses were supposed to be pastel colours with drawings on their bottoms, and somehow I was only seeing the crappy brown plain-bottomed ones.
Nevertheless, I suppose my Mum had noble reasons for banning Barbie. She didn’t want to expose me to unrealistic feminine body ideals, however futile a pursuit that was when I just went and played with my friends’ Barbies instead. She didn’t want me to think that the best things in life to aspire to were a mansion, a pink car, and a cute guy named Ken, because this was the 80s, before all those Career!Barbies came along with their cute little work accessories and positive role-modelling. And I am grateful to her, at least, for the sentiment.
Some of my Mum’s other parental bans though, I have always struggled to see in quite so noble a light. The one that still rankles, many years later, is her arbitrary banning of the movie Dirty Dancing, on the grounds that ‘it’s pornographic’. Let me just point out, please, that Mum had never actually seen Dirty Dancing. She was going purely off the title.
At the time the movie was first released on home video, I was spending my weekday evenings after school at a childminder’s named Pam, because both my parents worked. Pam was the mother of one of my school friends, and she took in several kids after school in the same situation I was in. Pam owned two videos – Grease, and Dirty Dancing. And every evening she would make us all cheese-on-toast and park us in front of one of these movies (creative child care it was not). Except when I was there, we had to watch Grease, EVERY SINGLE DAY, because my Mum had banned Dirty Dancing. So naturally all the other kids hated me, and talked openly about how much they liked the days when I wasn’t there because they didn’t have to watch stupid Grease again. This was all 20 years ago, by the way, and the injustice still burns. Also, I will always and forever loathe Grease.
When I finally did get to see Dirty Dancing, it was my first year of university, and after all those years of it existing in my imagination as celluloid forbidden fruit, I fully expected a full-on feature-length orgy. You can’t imagine how disappointed I was.
On my twice-daily walk between my flat and the tube station, there has been, for the last week, a clear plastic bottle half filled with clear yellow liquid. It’s sitting propped up against a tree surrounded by various bags of rubbish, and since the bottle and the other rubbish aren’t in black bags, the rubbish men are clearly ignoring them and not taking them away in their nice big orange truck.
I have developed a morbid fascination with this bottle of yellow liquid, because, let’s be honest, there’s about a 95% chance that it’s a bottle of somebody’s urine. I’m not actually going to unscrew the top to take a sniff, but it has been getting steadily cloudier through the week, and if it was pop or something that wouldn’t happen. Clearly somebody got caught short, and rather than piss up against the wall decided to be tidy and do it in a handy bottle they found in a pile of rubbish. And you know, I applaud that kind of public-spirited consideration, except would it have killed them to put the bottle in a bin when they’d finished, rather than propping it up against a tree?
So, everyday I walk past the tree, and everyday I am a little bit disgusted, and a little bit pleased, to see that the bottle is still there. And it makes me simultaneously love and loathe living in London all at the same time. Who knew that a bottle of pee could cause such conflicting emotions?
After many many weeks of waiting, we finally have some furniture!
This is our ginormous coffee table. It is a beautiful thing, but very very big.
This is our sideboard, which matches the coffee table (also, not pictured, two matching lamp stands, currently lamp-less because lamps are a fight we haven’t had yet). The sideboard is proudly displaying a photo of 84 Charing Cross Road, and an original Erin McCauley.
And inside the sideboard, drawers full of DVDs! Hurrah! They are, of course alphabetised (because I am a nerd). This means that, pleasingly, Hornblower is nestled up with The Hotpants Workout. Now that’s a piece of crossover fanfiction waiting to be written.
Most exciting of all, I have a desk now! With drawers and everything…. After a couple of months of having to keep all my random crap in boxes I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have proper random-crap storage space at last.
And, after about a week of staring at it in a confused manner, the cats have finally figured out how the cat flap works. Our new house is, at long last, becoming a home.
I had quite a day yesterday. I booked the afternoon off to go and give blood, which I in theory do once every three months but in practice hardly ever do, because work gets in the way or I get sick or something else comes up. I was slightly ashamed yesterday to find out that my last donation was in July 2006. Must try harder.
So, I deposited my pint, ate a biscuit and drank some juice, sat on the couch for the requisite ten minutes, and left, feeling perfectly fine. And I decided, since I was on Oxford Street and I had the whole afternoon free, to go shopping. In November I have two black tie events on successive nights – work’s annual dinner on the first, and an evening wedding on the second – and since nobody will be at both events except me, I can wear the same dress to both of them. Hurrah! So I happily trotted over to Coast on Piccadilly and picked out this dress, which I love, except, am I completely insane to buy a strapless dress? I never have before because I am blessed/cursed with a combination of narrow back and huge boobs, and the kind of gravity-defying scaffolding required would normally involve, at the very least, iron girders. This one seems to stay up OK, but I’ve only worn it for a period of about ten minutes, not a whole evening. I may well chicken out and attach the optional straps. We shall see….
Anyway, after that I was beginning to feel the effects of the blood loss, and I wobbled all the way down Piccadilly to the tube station, and then nearly keeled over on the train home. I got back, sweaty and faint, to find J, safely returned from Colorado, in the flat with the surveyor going over the final plans for the new kitchen, and wanting to know what I thought about cupboard space. I replied that I didn’t give a shit about cupboard space, I only cared about lucozade and a lie down, and so I went and had both, and then felt a little bit better so I came back into the kitchen and opined. And then almost the same minute the surveyor left, some delivery men arrived with our new living room furniture. And now we have a side-board, two lamp stands, and a ginormous coffee table that we are both a little bit overwhelmed by. It looked smaller in the shop…
And THEN, we had to get dressed and go all the way to North Greenwich to go and see Prince. Prince! Woo! Except for a while it looked like we wouldn’t be seeing anything except the merchandise stand outside the Millennium Dome (sorry, the O2, as it is now known) because we were there on one of J’s corporate hospitality freebies, and the guy who had invited us had our tickets, and was still stuck in town. So we spent about an hour and a half wandering the outside of the Dome, eating hotdogs and complaining about our shoes (mostly me) until he turned up. But when we finally did get in, it was incredible. We were in a box, with a buffet and free bar, and a chocolate fondue! So J sat me down to watch the show and then plied me with marshmallows on sticks dipped in melted chocolate, because after three years together J has learned that there is no misery of mine that cannot be at least a little bit alleviated by a marshmallow on a stick dipped in melted chocolate. And soon I forgot all about my hurty feet and sang my heart out to Purple Rain. And all was right with the world.
We eventually got home at just after midnight. And J, who had, let us not forget, flown in from Colorado that morning, and hadn’t slept in 48 hours, still let me out at our front door while he went and parked the car because my shoes hurt. Little things like that make me realise how lucky I am to know him.
So, it was quite a day. I am sitting at my desk now utterly shattered, which is no good at all because I have to spend the afternoon writing a database spec, my understanding of which is like the teeniest above-water tip of a massive underwater iceberg of befuddlement. Gah.
When J and I are in the States, we always play the license plate game, whereby you get a point for every out-of-state license plate you see. Invariably when we play, the game devolves either into bickering of the ‘I saw that one already’ variety, or I get fed up and refuse to play because J is better at it than I am.
Last time we were over there together, in California, we kept seeing Oregon license plates, and it got really boring just shouting ‘Oregon’ at each other repeatedly whenever we were out in the car, so we agreed to a more complex scoring method, whereby you got one point for a state within the same time zone, two points for the next time zone over, three points for the time zone after that, and if you saw a license plate from a state in the eastern time zone you got four points. Although, you can probably guess where this is going, we then ended up bickering over whether Indiana was central or eastern, and whether North Dakota should count for more points because although it was only one time zone away, it has a very small population and therefore, the likelihood of seeing a car from there was smaller, and so on and so on. We have made bickering into a sport in its own right.
Anyway, all this is a very long preamble for me to assert that J never plays fair. As evidenced by the phone conversation we had last night. J is in Colorado at the moment for a business trip. I am not in Colorado, I am in London. These are significant details.
Me: How did the meeting go?
J: It was OK, I think they’re going to sign.
Me: Cool, so what are you going to do now?
J: Oh I’m going to go and have some – Washington – lunch, and then take a nap. I’m still jet lagged.
Me: Washington?
J: Yeah, I’m playing the license plate game. I’m winning, by the way.
Me: Fuck off.
Reading
Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History
I have been looking, for literally years, for a good, impartial book about abortion rights. It’s dead easy to find volumes and volumes that take either one side or the other, but this is the first book I’ve found which doesn’t take a stand either way. It just presents all the historical, political, legal and social events that happened to abortion rights since about 1800 up to the present day, with a particular focus on Roe V. Wade, of course. It is entirely America-focussed, which is a shame because I’m interested in how this stuff played out in other countries too, including my own. But America seems to be the country that most gets its collective knickers in a twist about this issue, so I suppose if the book was only going to be focussing on one country, America was the one to pick.
I’m only halfway through but am learning loads, and fleshing out knowledge I already had. It’s not at all dry either, the tone is very engaging and informative without making you want to take a nap. I recommend.
Watching
Thanks almost entirely to Living TV rebroadcasting all of The X-Files episodes from season 1 onwards, at 7pm every weeknight, I have been sucked back into my late teenage adoration of all things X. Also, J being away last week meant that I spent most nights cozily tucked up in bed with a cat and a mug of tea, going through my DVD box sets and picking through my favourite episodes. It’s funny, this time a decade ago, literally almost this very month, I was just discovering the show for the first time around and falling head over heels into fandom. And now it’s happening again. Am I doomed to do this every ten years? I am resisting the temptation to read fanfiction on my lunchbreak at work, because I just don’t want to have to explain that if my boss ever sees my internet usage stats.
Loving
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which has just started showing over here.
Stroopwafels which someone brought into the office
Philosophy Purity Made Simple facial cleanser. Yes it costs £30 a bottle in John Lewis, but my skin has never looked more fabulous. And next time I’m in America I’m stocking up because it’s only $32 there.
Hating
The fact that I have to go on a statistics course tomorrow, and my brain is already hurting in anticipation.
Eczema on my hands
Stupid Transco and the stupid law that only stupid Transco can legally move gas meters, and we need our gas meter moving for the new kitchen, but stupid Transo charge an arm and a leg and take six months to do it. And I WANT MY NEW KITCHEN DAMMIT.
