cheese goes to heaven, oats go to hell

easter weekend is a glorious thing in the UK, because we get both friday and monday off. of course, that does eat up one-quarter of each year’s public holidays, but i’ll take a four-day weekend when i can get one.

anyway, on easter monday, as i was taking a nap, a colleague from the US rang my mobile. i sent it to voicemail (or into the black hole where my voicemail should be) and rolled over to continue my nap. she called again. then sent me a direct twitter message asking me to call her. when i did (after the nap, obvs) she told me she had accepted a job at another company and asked whether i could come to california to cover her role until they could hire a replacement.

after some to and fro on details with her director and mine, i agreed. thus began my 13 weeks of exile in the US.

yes, i call it exile. that doesn’t mean it was entirely unpleasant. i do really enjoy my colleagues in california, and it was great working more closely with them. i came back home to london 3 times during the period, and i got to meet my new godson in st louis, visit bekah in santa cruz, see tons of my parents and siblings, go to 3 weddings i would otherwise have missed, etc.

on the down side, i lost the work-life balance i had carefully tuned in my london life. i worked, on average, 15 hours each day. i woke up at 5am and generally didn’t finish until 10pm, with a couple of hours off for dinner if i was lucky. i made it to the gym twice in three months.

so…that’s why i haven’t updated my blog in a while.

i got back to london on monday (after a lovely flight in BA first), and i’m excited about some very important things:
- learning python with AB, so that i can build a wicked collaborative tool for historians,
- getting back into shape,
- blogging more,
- returning to my day job and some semblance of work/life balance, and
- having more and more varied cheeses in the flat.

the last one is particularly important. i spent last weekend at the old homestead in spokane, where opening my parents fridge gives instand access to at least ten different types of cheese. this is a source of significant joy to me. and so yesterday, i went and bought halloumi, goats cheese and fresh mozzarella from the cheesemonger in chapel market. so last night andrew and i had homemade hamburgers with pancetta, mozzarella and caramalized onions for dinner. bliss.

eureka!

i’m sitting in the san jose airport right now, waiting for a little bombardier turboprop to take me on an extremely long, loud flight home to spokane. my journey to san francisco on tuesday was extremely long. 20 hours door-to-door, because i had a 3-hour layover at dulles. thankfully, i was sitting up front on my virgin america flight from IAD to SFO, and there was internets, so i was able to amuse myself pretty consistently.

by the time i got to my hotel, i was mar very tired…and sick. last week, mr brennan started every day by groaning and then croaking “get me the thermometer”. i invariably responded “ok, but you don’t have a fever”. i was right then, but he was right to complain about this cold, because it’s pretty bad. and potentially spreading to my left ear, which is awfully sensitive today.

i said it in a tweet, but i’ll repeat it here: last night, i stood in the safeway drug aisle for more than a quarter hour, mesmerized by the number and variety of over-the-counter medications available to me. for the first time, i understood davey warbeck.

anyway, i’ve been trying to overcome the cold with sleep and odwalla juices. it think it’s slowly working.

even though this visit will be punctuated, volcanoes willing, by 3 trips back to Europe, it is my first prolonged period in the US since 2006. and since i arrived, i’ve been trying to figure out what it is about america that makes me cringe. at first i thought it might be the six lanes of traffic between me and the burrito place across the road…perhaps combined with the fact that the nearest pedestrian crossing was about 700 yards away. then i thought it might be the surprising concentration of overweight people everywhere i go. or that people wearing unnecessary (a) ugly white sneakers (b) bluetooth headsets are more or less ubiquitous. i’m still not quite sure precisely what it is, but i think it has something to do with pedestrians being undervalued.

ok. boarding!

a detour

overheard: “can i take my trousers off now?” -brennan, in a taxi

way too long since the last update. easter weekend was fantastic. the weather wasn’t so good, and it sucked that the tabs won the boat race, but the party afterwards was still pretty fantastic (may have had too much too quickly). it was also awesome having bruce and paul in town, and to meet paul’s girlfriend aly, who is double plus great.

this week has been very busy at work, though, and the coming months will be extremely busy, as i’m being sent on a brief assignment to our mothership in california. i’ll still be doing my UK job, but i’ll also be leading our global PR for some stuff for a while. hopefully not too long, as i’m loving my current job so much that i’m really bummed to be distracted from it at all.

i’ll be back in london from 7 to 13 may (for mr b’s birthday) and then again for a week in early june. and then i’m reeeeeeaaaally looking forward to a week at the beach and a then a week chilling in london at the start of july, after which there will be no more trips to the US until august!

the main silver linings are (1) breakfast in no name cafe, (2) hanging out with allison d and bekah in san francisco,  (3) i’ll be able to go to my cousin christine’s wedding, and (4) i’ll get to see my parents 4 times between now and the 4th of july. hurrah!

kids these days

“The trouble with contemporary western education is that far too little emphasis is placed on science, mathematics, and foreign languages, which are the essential foundations of research and have direct practical benefits. Experimental science can lead to all sorts of technical breakthroughs and mathematics is the gateway to science. Foreign languages are essential for trade and diplomacy. Especially now, when relations with the Muslim world are so crucial, it is a disgrace that there are so few diplomats trained in the Arabic language.” (Roger Bacon, 1267…or at least Roger Bacon as quoted by Robert Bartlett in The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages.)

Last night i dreamt that my mother was a spy, and that bad guys were trying to get into the house. We locked the doors, but they tried to get in through the freezer. As one does.

Anyway, I’m in Prague. The Internet cable in my room is way too short, so I had to rearrange the furniture. Also, we lost power for 10 minutes yesterday evening, just as I was emerging from the lift. On the other (more important) hand, the food is great. The bacon cheeseburger I got from room service last night came very quickly and was perfectly cooked and delicious. And the buffet breakfast this morning was fantastic.

Still around tomorrow, but then heading back to London on real BA. Dinner at Nachos 2 (or as I’m trying to rechristen it: Ponchos) awaits.

in our time

overheard: “no, i will not lick the neon paint off you” -1829 party aftermath

what a weekend. kate’s citizenship party on friday night was great fun, and saturday brought rain, but also 8s head and an alex-organised pub lunch at the dove in hammersmith, which the observer calls “arguably the best riverside pub in london”. it was a fortuitous location, because lunch included the appearance not only alex, tony, robin, and dottie, but also keats (up from south africa) and a slew of people (including paul) over from new york. also my roast pork belly was amazing.

after lunch andrew and i dragged ourselves back home for a nap, and then a drinks party at brian & pavlo’s house in marylebone, before another schlep (this time in a taxi) to putney for a party in the crabtree boathouse. the theme was neon. the drinks were cheap, and the pictures will no doubt be on facebook soon.

sunday morning brought a wonking great hangover, but also the realization that mr b had managed to lose his wallet on the way home from putney in the wee hours. fortunately, he had my business card in it, and so i got a text from a very kind person who had found it. after palm sunday mass at farm street, we went to pick up the runaway wallet at vinopolis, where the very idea of wine was enough turn our stomachs. a quick chorizo-based lunch at cafe brood was enough to solve that problem.

the afternoon was improved by a 2-hour nap and dinner at santore with keats. after that, we indulged in one of my most embarrassing joys: listening to a radio show. in a recent london review of books, will self wrote that in our time “has become something of a badge to be worn with pride by the contemporary British dilettante”. true though that probably is, self didn’t seem to appreciate the irony of saying such a thing in the LRB.

anyway, in our time is a weekly radio show about the history of ideas. things like boudica, magna carta or whales, discussed with three experts. last week’s episode (the first of a two part series on the history of cities) was particularly good. i recommend you go download it now. two particularly nice surprises: one of the panelists was also one of my examiners for my doctoral defence. and also they mentioned the role of clerkenwell in the growth of london as the end point for the new river.

i’m off to prague today. bummed to be missing bruce’s stag week in davos, but work sometimes gets in the way.

the gambler and the annunciation

overheard: “i don’t trust the internet” -work

yesterday my boss taught me how to gamble. he and some of my coworkers were going to watch the fulham/tottenham match together last night. so they were heading to william hill to make a wager. kasia and i, of course, spent the evening struggling to create a web app that would say “hello world”, so we didn’t watch the match. but i tagged along with the lads because i’d never been inside a bookie’s. understanding neither football nor betting, i thought i would be safe.

it turns out i was mistaken. being that i’m easily swayed by peer pressure presence, i copied down the same things peter had written: tottenham 3, fulham 1. and i bet ten quid. that, as far as i was concerned, was the end of it. i’ve always thought that all forms of betting are a fee on people who can’t do statistics. as we’re fond of saying in my family, “the house always wins”.

but, lo and behold, the 14:1 odds mean i get a slew of money today. hurrah.

a note on calendars. today is the 25th of march. which, as you know, is the feast of the annunciation. also known as lady day. also, until 1752, it marked the new year in england. all this is old hat for long time readers of this blog. but i learned something new today. setting the new year to start on 25 march is called “annunciation style dating”. makes sense, right? guess what it’s called when you start the new year on 1st january. “circumcision style dating”. amazing.

i hate bicyclists

first: a caveat: i’m a bicyclist. i have been for as long as i can remember. except during my time at oxford (suggesting that i may simply be contrarian), i have always been a bicyclist. and i always hope to be. the biggest problem with bicycling though: other bicyclists.

it’s not all of them, of course. i leave the house every day at around 8.15, and throughout the winter, it’s more or less the same group of us heading down theobald’s road every day towards holborn. they’re all right. but now the weather is improving, bringing out the fair-weather cyclists. the ones who cycle slowly and/or erratically. they’re particularly bad when they insist on passing everyone to get to the front of the group at every traffic signal, so that one has to pass them as they swerve all over the road. grrr.

enough ranting. my friend simon just started cycling to work, and he’s enjoying it thoroughly. in a town where the journey from A to B can regularly take 3x to 4x as long because of traffic, cycling makes calculating travel times a lot more predictable. plus (if you’re like me or kasia) cycling is a great opportunity to collect data about oneself. i’ve started using my tracks every day to calculate all sorts of things about my days’ trips: distance, time, average speed, average moving speed, altitude gain. it turns out that if i average a moving speed of ~13mph, i stay on just the right edge of sweaty to be respectable at work. what i need to do now is compare my average heart rate with the information from my tracks to see whether that’s a good enough workout to skip the gym. only time (and data) will tell.

also, as i mentioned sunday, today is the 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of oscar romero. bbc has a good article about it.

sweet dreams

no nightmares last night, but also not much sleep time in which to have them. google made an important announcement about china, so i didn’t get home until 11, and then left again at about 6.30 this morning. i did, however, discover one of the most mesmerizing sights on the internet: beyonce’s oscillating metallic bustiere at the end of her sweet dreams video.

unfortunately, my life in the past 24 hours has been so boring that i have little else to share. it looks like i’ll be able to make it to st louis in june to meet my new godson. in less good news, i won’t be able to make it to my cousin christine’s wedding in california in june :-(

the mondays

last night i had a dream that some sort of organised crime ring was trying to kill me. not just kill me, but run me through a chipper-shredder during a picnic. my latin teacher refused to intervene, as did my mother (who told me that it’s always best to stand up to bullies). also, i lost my ability to fly.

that dream is the reason i got up at 5.15 this morning. not that i did anything particularly useful with the extra time. i tried to figure out what was actually included in the final US healthcare reform bill. (yay, america, btw, but really: you couldn’t have made it any simpler?). as simon said: it’s particularly offensive when an industry is given preference over the the socially necessary service it is charged with providing. banking and [in the US] healthcare are startling examples of this. sigh.

sara came over for dinner last night. we made two recipes out of shane osborne’s cookbook: a salad of grilled butternut squash, avocado, and parma ham-wrapped potatoes; and a braised oxtail and lentil stew. both were delicious, but mr b was a bit suspicious of the oxtail (which wikipedia describes as “a bony, gelatinous meat”).

weekenders

overheard: “we didn’t have sex, i’m sure. i just woke up in his bed naked.” -dinner at dottie’s

i have learned two interesting things about nature since friday:
1) “medium large gulls are among the toughest of all bird families to separate in the field”…um, thanks, LRB!
2)  2010 is “the first year since 1996 that there have been no bumblebees [sighted in the UK] in January.” (from yesterday’s guardian)

also in yesterday’s guardian there was a good tribute to oscar romero, who was murdered 30 years ago for his stand against injustice in el salvador. it’s a timely reminder that the church can be (and is) a force for good in the world…though that’s no reason not to give it hell when it makes profound mistakes.

anyway, shifting gears to equally boring (but less heavy) matters…friday night it turned out mr b was too tired even to walk to chilango (horror!). he went to bed at 8. i made myself an omelet, watched outrage, and stayed up too late.  a wild friday night, i tell you.

yesterday, after 12 hours of sleep, mr b rose,  bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and scampered off to the gym while i had a lie in. when he returned, we had breakfast and watched the most recent gossip girl. then we finally went for those burritos, and went to waitrose to buy things for dinner tonight before heading over to shepherds bush to watch the rugby with our friend robin.

yes, we watched all 3 rugby matches yesterday. yes, i was disappointed with england and ireland, but i thought wales played well. anyway, the weather was dreadful, but we got to experience a tube station we’d never been to before: goldhawk road. woohoo.

after robin’s we went up to dottie’s for dinner. the food, as always, was fantastic. we hadn’t seen poppy in ages, or anyone since we announced our engagment. but the undisputed star of the night was the tesco value range spanish red wine. which describes itself (on the 1-litre carton in which it’s sold for a whopping £3.17) as “an uncomplicated, soft, fruity red with delicious strawberry flavours”. scanning the interwebs for reviews of the beauty brings up the following endorsement from the scotsman for its white counterpart: “This is almost the closest I have come to finding a wine that tastes like water. It doesn’t taste of wine at all. Not that it’s horrible or unpleasant; it’s just light, dry and flavourless.”

happy 30th…

overheard: “i make small children cry” -david blunkett at PI’s 20th birthday party last night.

today is the feast of st joseph, which makes it father’s day in most catholic countries. hurrah for dads everywhere. it’s also the 30th anniversary of my conception, an anniversary i celebrate every year, much to AB’s chagrin. as my sister A would say, my foetus turns 30 today. sweet.

to celebrate the vigil of this wondrous event, mr brennan and i went out to dinner last night (we’re trying to embrace the new austerity, you see, by going out to dinner no more than three nights per week). we went to santore in exmouth market. it’s a long-standing neighbourhood favourite of ours, to which keats introduced us before he fled the country again. i even took new boss there when he was in london last.

as i told my coworkers yesterday, it’s the best pizza in london…or at least the best pizza i’ve had. in fairness, mr brennan and i haven’t checked the quality of every pizza in london as methodically as we have done the town’s burritos. but, yes, the pizza is fantastic. especially the crusts. i don’t know what they put in their dough, but it’s fantastic.

now, the pizza was wonderful as always, but the true highlight of the evening was what we got to dine al fresco. definitely the first outdoor dining of 2010. and even if it was under heat lamps (which actually made me a little too hot), it does suggest that spring may someday be with us. well, tomorrow (at 17.32 GMT for those of you following along at home) it will be.

that’s all from me, but i do want to say how glad i am that i’m not the only one who can’t see the point of the ipod.

geek post

first off: happy 20th birthday to privacy international today.

and a quick warning: it’s unlikely that anything in this post will be remotely interesting if you’re not me.

my colleague/friend kasia and i are eerily similar. in addition to being the resident geeks on our team at work, we’re also both INTJs, and queer. more worrying is that whenever we do things in parallel, we tend to produce almost identical work, down to the bullet points.

anyway, we’re both dissatisfied with the current tool that our team uses for tactical planning, largely (but not exclusively) because it flagrantly ignores the first normal form. there’s also the fact that it’s difficult to add information to or edit information in.

so we want to destroy the tool and create a new tool. our boss is sceptical, but he’s willing to let us get on with it. the current tool: a collaborative spreadsheet. the new tool: a user front end that’s just a calendar. a boss front end that’s a web page that looks like a grid. and a back end that’s some combination of app engine, a data api, a bunch of java, and a fair smattering of html, css and javascript.

the problem, obviously, is that kasia and i are only armchair geeks, and there’s a decent chance that the demands of this project will easily outstrip our rather limited abilities (but not our enthusiasm). next wednesday we’ll start the process with a pizza party/hackathon. hurrah.

we’ve also recruited a coworker to be our “api shepherd”. chewy will be able to tell us whether what we want is possible, and point out where we’ve messed up. hopefully that set up will work.

i’d say that i’ll show you all when it’s done, but that probably won’t happen. i will, however, crow about it pretty loudly if it’s halfway decent.

engagged (sic)

overheard: “you’re engaged? that’s fantastic! congratulations! to whom?” -my father

one reason to revive the blog, obviously, is to share things at scale (i love you all, but as i said yesterday, i’m frightfully busy and important now).

what sorts of things can one share at scale? well, the silly things people say near me, obviously. photos. quotes i stumble upon in books. the newly-minted web+pdf version of my doctoral thesis, the city of london and the problem of the liberties, c1540-c1640 (don’t go clicking on that link if you get overexcited easily).

in the nearer term, i’m tired of being asked for “all the details” of my & AB’s recent betrothal, so i decided to record them here for posterity. names have been changed to protect the innocent:

SCENE ONE

(a simple but nice restaurant called Quod on Oxford’s high street. bright morning sun is streaming through the wall of windows, through which can be seen an ancient stone church. Two men in their late 20s–DUCK and GOOSE–are sitting at a table. other tables are filled by parents decked out in tweed and their undergraduate children, who are half asleep and invariably wearing college boat club track suits)

DUCK [MAVERICK]

(half speaking to the waiter, half to GOOSE, never taking his eyes off the buffet table across the room)
I’m starving. Thank god there’s a buffet. I think I’ll have the full English, too.  But no black pudding or mushrooms. Can I get extra bacon instead, and orange juice, please.

GOOSE

(looking up form the FT)
Full English for me as well, please. Yes, and orange juice. Thanks.
(turning to DUCK)
Want to go to the Botanic Garden after breakfast to…er…see the ivy? (smirks to himself) I doubt there will be much in bloom. Maybe just the crocuses. But they have a greenhouse with insectivorous plants, and another one full of plants that are also food.

DUCK [MAVERICK]

(eying the buffet table)
Sure.
(stands up and walks toward the food)

SCENE TWO

(a walled garden with a stone building and a greenhouse upstage.  neither the trees nor the many planting beds show any signs of life. the sun is still shining brightly. the garden is mostly empty, apart from half a dozen old ladies wandering about slowly)

GOOSE

How about the house here with all the citrus fruits?

DUCK [MAVERICK]

(Moving to open the door of the greenhouse, then pausing and stepping away)
Oh. Erm…there’s a woman sleeping on the bench there.

GOOSE

(Looking through the door)
What? How strange! She doesn’t look homeless. (pauses, looking around) Let’s go look at that tree there. (he indicates a huge, ancient tree downstage left, next to an ornate wrought iron gate in that stone wall on the curtain line. they walk to the gate and look through, towards the river and christ church meadow).

DUCK [MAVERICK]

The sun is nice. Look, that tree was planted in 1645!

GOOSE

I know; is old [sic]. Listen. I have to ask you something that I think might make you grumpy.

DUCK [MAVERICK]

(his eyes narrow) Ok…

GOOSE

Well….er…what do you think about getting married? To me, I mean?

DUCK [MAVERICK]

I thought that was sort of the plan.

GOOSE

(looks at DUCK nervously) Well, yeah. But I meant, like, do you want to make it the formal plan? Like, get engaged?

DUCK [MAVERICK]

Oh. (then breaks into a huge smile) Yes. Let’s do that. (pauses) Now, what should we do for lunch?

GOOSE

Oh hurrah!

(they kiss, scanalising the old ladies nearby)

###ENDS

few but roses?

like all bloggers who have fallen off the wagon, i occasionally think to myself “i should revive the old dear, and relive the glory days of my youth.” this thought occurred to me this morning, but first i felt like i had to make some changes to my site, refresh the look, &c &c. all that done, i’m ready to make what will no doubt be a short-lived attempt to return to blogging.

so here i am fighting inertia…and time. when i started my daily updates nearly a decade ago, i was in my 2nd year of university. i had significantly more time than sense. not only for writing posts, but for reflecting on my experiences and (indeed) writing down the absurd things people near me said. that’s rather less true now, but perhaps reduced time makes it even more important that i set aside space to reflect on things. or, as is more likely, i can now regurgitate half-digested experiences and observations in a public forum…rather like a mother bird feeding her chicks at scale. appetizing, i know.

one last observation for today, which ties back to my last post (from 18 months ago) about my deep suspicion of modernism and the planned society: during the second world war, there was a group in the UK called the council for the encouragement of music and the arts. its goal was to maintain british culture (whatever that means), and one of its great successes was organising events for captive audiences like deployed soldiers and displaced civilians living in shelters.

after the war CEMA became the arts council of great britain. and with a typical mid-20th century mindset, assumed that by funding a broad swath of cultural events across the country, they could reduce the class divide and raise the general level of cultural literacy (defined, of course, in a rather arrogant paternalistic way). unsurprisingly, it flopped rather badly, and the group changed its wonderfully ambitious motto “the best for the most” to the rather more modest “few but roses”. sad as the change is, i admire the honesty.

i can’t promise the best for the most or few but roses. but i’ll try to update frequently anyway.

stupid modernism

quoted: “i vibrated at the same time” -kirai really like my new flat. really. like an inappropriate amount. i like the view, and the floors, and the dishwasher, and the showers, and just about everything about it. except the approach. every time i walk to the front door of my building i think, “stupid modernism”. now don’t get me wrong. as postwar british social housing goes, berthold lubetkin is tops. but in little ways his designs betray the functional arrogance that, as far as i can tell, was the primary driver of the twentieth century. like the railings that line piccadilly, which scream “we don’t think you should cross the road here, and we know better than you”. only those railings don’t stop people from crossing the road; they only make it more dangerous for them to do so. the attempts at social engineering smack of the same ignorant bureaucratic arrogance.in my own private battle with modernism, lubetkin and finsbury borough council (in their infinite wisdom) decided that there need not be a direct pedestrian route from the outside world into our block of flats. so the sidewalk (pavement) curves around to the driveway, which then curves around a circle to the front door. i dare say its form is very good, and it’s hardly inconvenient in an automobile. but it more than doubles the length of the walk from the corner to the door. and so, for the 54 years since the block went up, most of the pedestrians heading to bevin court have stepped over a 12-inch miniature fence and walked the most direct route themselves. i step over it, too, and every time i do so i think, “stupid modernism”.lubetkin does it in other places too. i mean, look at the penguin pool in the london zoo. do penguins really need so many curves? how do they find the most direct route to food?anyway, i’m in a foul mood today. sigh.  

dreams

quoted: “i’m in love with this duck” -ryan Last night I dreamt I was at a museum dedicated to London’s water supply, and let me tell you: it was fascinating! I was learning all about the pneumatics of the system, and what happens to deprecated infrastructure. They even had a life size model of a london ring main pipe.The trouble, of course, is that I don’t know much at all about water provision in modern cities. So my unconscious self was forced to make it all up. Sigh.Today is my last day of work this week. I’m spending tomorrow through friday relaxing and recovering from what was an overworked and underappreciated september. If the weather holds there will be trips to richmond or widsor or oxford. Either way I have to find food for a dinner I’m hosting tomorrow night. But since I’m not going to work I think provisioning at borough market is in order.

try again?

quoted: “if you’re worried that every stroke is going to be the last, you can’t relax and enjoy it” -ronan on scalp massagesso there’s no telling how bad i’ve been at blogging…well…since i started being an employee two years ago. anyway, andrew and i moved from piccadilly to clerkenwell about a month ago. well, i moved. andrew is still in exile, waiting for another UK work permit. but the new flat is great. it’s in a cool modern building surrounded by trees. it’s quiet and clean and everything works. but the local youths eviscerated my bicycle (my free bike, not my good bike) by stealing the back wheel. it’s very sad now, and i haven’t had a chance to get it fixed. so i’ve been taking the bus to work, which is infuriatingly slow. the ride this morning was made slightly better by my discovery of a sticker for “classwar.org”, which disappointingly wouldn’t load on my mobile phone. but wow. what fun propaganda can be!

drizzly

after several weeks of summery weather, i can’t say i’m overly disappointed by this cool, grey-skied, drizzly weekend. it certainly made it easier for me to do tons of laundry yesterday. and ironing. but not enough writing.

friday i met a PhD student for a drink after work to discuss the fates of london’s friaries after the dissolution, and quite a lot about london mapping in general. for those whom i haven’t bored with the details, i studied the jurisdictional fates of london’s monasteries for my doctorate. this guy is more interested in topography (he’s an archaeologist by trade), and i’ll be interested to see what he comes up with.

i stayed in friday night and then went to brunch with steve and ryan k yesterday, after which he got a pint before they headed up to oxford for the afternoon. we went to a bar in angel called “the green” last night. today, i’ve mostly gone to the gym and tucked myself under a blanket with a cuppa and the sunday papers. very  relaxing.

tomorrow and tuesday i’m taking a PHP & MySQL class at work, and andrew arrives wednesday, about which i couldn’t be any more excited. the only downside: we have to find a new flat in the next two weeks, and i’m getting a bit stressed about it. oh, and i’m really bored at work but my boss seems ambivalent about giving me more to do. double sigh.

it boggles

it’s a sunny summery evening here in london, and i’m sitting at my windowsill sipping tea, reading and hopefully meeting mikes for a beer later. from where i’m sitting at this very moment, i can see 12 TFL buses (including 3 stupid bendy buses), perhaps 30 black cabs, and at least 300 people. how on earth can so many people visit piccadilly circus every day? and why?

i’m working from home tomorrow because i have an absurd amount of writing to do. absurd. like 5,000 words. come to think of it, a day’s not going to be enough. sigh. prioritise!

today i went and had a first meeting with my financial advisor. he reprimanded me for spending too much (fair) and we put together at least a rough plan for how to proceed from here. we’ve got another meeting next monday, so hopefully that will be productive. i think he was a bit sceptical of my ability to prune spending…next meeting i must mention JVC to him. in the meanwhile, i need to stop spending so darn much money…which, sadly, means i will be buying neither a swaine adeney weekend bag, a bespoke suit, nor a racing bicycle this week. self denial is rough.  sigh.

tugboat

just got back from tgif (friday pizza & beer at work), where i picked up a bottle of black chocolate stout from the brooklyn brewing company. at a whopping 10.6% abv, it reminded me of the tugboat, which made me miss portland (and my mac housemates) in a massive way.

anyway, i need to get going, so that i can make it to the gym and clean my apartment before folks come around  this evening. there’s a weird leak in our flat, but i don’t know where the water is coming from. also, my brain is rambling. i’m definitely happy that it’s weekend.