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bunny v dinosaur

For Matthew's birthday I gave him a trip to Stockholm and a limited edition set of Badger comics called "Badger Goes Berserk". I don't like card-giving unless I can make one myself, so I used a plastic dinosaur from the Natural History Museum with a bell tied around its neck. His birthday was/is 8 April. Mine is 14 April. I got tickets to see the Essex Green and a tea pot. Matthew is as reticent about card-giving unless he can make it himself as I am. So he gave me an evil chocolate bunny that I had to defeat before I could open my present.

On Easter Sunday I awoke to find another chocolate bunny ready to be feasted upon. The dinosaur got there first.

redirecting an internal mess

Since some time last week my head has been a whirl. I was offered a job, a good one too, with a publishing house as Assisant Editor; an amazing accomplishment given I've only ever had magazine publishing experience. I was given a day to think it over and decided to take it. I'd been unsure about the whole thing, but those people whose opinions I trust told me I ought to take it, so I did.

With one condition.

I wanted to give the people I work for the due consideration of four weeks notice. The company that had offered me the position were offering only three, and that didn't sit well with me. They told me they'd let me know on Monday. That was yesterday. They said no. I've written about it here. Despite the full wave, the full floating, bodily experience, that told me I had made the right choice I just don't feel up to rewriting the whole thing again. But I did do the right thing, the right thing for me, and for the first time in far too long I feel quite pleased.

rhubarb and strawberry crumble

Why, o why does Sunday have to have such ghastly (beastly even..) weather? It's miserable outside and I feel a bit slighted. Like they (THEM) knew I would be dreadfully hungover, but still wanting to go to the farmers market and made it so dark as to be 6am all morning until now, it is a quarter past twelve and I've just finished breakfast. Deeply inconsiderate.

Mind you, I'm still in my dressing gown. It might in fact be a delightful spring shower; the birds seem happy enough. Nonetheless, I shan't know what it feels like to meander across the valley for tomatoes from as far (or near) as the Isle of Wight. No drizzle-sopped ankles within green rubber wellies, nor the slick, vague muddiness of reusable shopping handles and I try to wrestle great stalks of rhubarb into behaving with the potatoes. Indeed, no rhubarb or potatoes to start acting up at all. Because I have slept so late -- and I shall blame them (THEY) for the curtain of dank draped across my windows -- I shall have no such delights at all. I am working this afternoon and am thus going in the opposite direction.

A nuisance to be sure, but I would have had to have gone out and bought a pair of green rubber wellies for effect first, so perhaps they (THEM) have a point. I'm not nearly prepared enough for a jaunt in the drizzle. Perhaps they (THEM) merely wished for me to get myself sufficiently together so as to enjoy the experience more thoroughly. Ah. There you have it. I see clearly now that they (THEM) were only looking after my best interests in the first place. Good old them (THEY)!

Speaking of rhubarb, I've got a gorgeous recipe for Rhubarb and Strawberry Crumble, which I really need to leave here. It's an adaptation of the one my Mum used to pacify late spring pudding desires in her two small children and one quite grown-up husband. Indeed it was her Rhubarb and Strawberry Pie that brought cheers of delight to the table. (We, of course, didn't know at the time that rhubarb and strawberries have such wildly different seasons. Or at least, we didn't know they were supposed to and that one ought to harvest rhubarb in early April. We had it most of the spring, summer and early autumn because it took up most the of wall between our backyard and the people living next door to us.) My reasons for changing the recipe, even to this great length is that Rhubarb and Strawberry Pie is, bar none, the most delicious way to spend a summer evening. But as we're only just entering the warmer part of spring, crumble provides that extra comforting layer against the, albeit fraying, crispness of dusk.

I will post the recipe when I get home from work. One can't rush these things after all.

probing the inner reaches of internet avoidance

Much to my amazement, I looked at my stats this morning and found I've done no posting for nearly a month. A month tomorrow in fact. How can one go from posting pretty much every day to nothing like that? The only explanation I can think of must be borne around the idea that I, or my internet connection, was kidnapped by aliens.

Well, in part it's true. The part about my internet connection. Disconnected on March 22 with promises of reconnection four days later turned into my provider not being able to get into my building without permission from my landlord turned into three and a half weeks of waiting around every few days for an installation that never happened. That is, until last Thursday, when wires and drill bits and heavy boots stomping up and down three flights of stairs MAGICALLY APPEARED and lo! I was blessed once more with the cybersaviour. Though going on what you hear about amnesia-induced probing by curious extra terrestrials, you never know. I did go a whole week before managing to pull myself together to collect enough words to make a post. Perhaps such a probe did occur and I subconsciously made terrifying Lacan-infected associations between the probe I can't remember and my dependence on the internet. Maybe my unconscious avoidance of updating this site was a projection of my secretly harboured fears of partial anonimity compounded by the glow of my laptop's screen which threatened to reopen repressed memories of greenish tubular implements. Maybe I've just been lazy.

While I don't want to denounce my own conspiracy theory just yet, it's much more likely that my internet-avoidance issues have had more to do with the fact we still had boxes in our living room up until last Friday (Good Friday, my birthday, hurrah!) and I was damned if anything was going to get in the way of my unpacking after Matthew came home with not one, but two bookcases. They are now full and we are looking for a third. My promise not to purchase any more books until June got dumped by the wayside on Tuesday when I came home with a stack of historical treaties and post-modern, German spy novels. They have since remained in a stack because of the lack of shelving space to store them.

In other news, I'm getting a kitten.

Much to my amazement, I looked at my stats this morning and found I've done no posting for nearly a month. A month tomorrow in fact. How can one go from posting pretty much every day to nothing like that? The only explanation I can think of must be borne around the idea that I, or my internet connection, was kidnapped by aliens.

Well, in part it's true. The part about my internet connection. Disconnected on March 22 with promises of reconnection four days later turned into my provider not being able to get into my building without permission from my landlord turned into three and a half weeks of waiting around every few days for an installation that never happened. That is, until last Thursday, when wires and drill bits and heavy boots stomping up and down three flights of stairs MAGICALLY APPEARED and lo! I was blessed once more with the cybersaviour. Though going on what you hear about amnesia-induced probing by curious extra terrestrials, you never know. I did go a whole week before managing to pull myself together to collect enough words to make a post. Perhaps such a probe did occur and I subconsciously made terrifying Lacan-infected associations between the probe I can't remember and my dependence on the internet. Maybe my unconscious avoidance of updating this site was a projection of my secretly harboured fears of partial anonimity compounded by the glow of my laptop's screen which threatened to reopen repressed memories of greenish tubular implements. Maybe I've just been lazy.

While I don't want to denounce my own conspiracy theory just yet, it's much more likely that my internet-avoidance issues have had more to do with the fact we still had boxes in our living room up until last Friday (Good Friday, my birthday, hurrah!) and I was damned if anything was going to get in the way of my unpacking after Matthew came home with not one, but two bookcases. They are now full and we are looking for a third. My promise not to purchase any more books until June got dumped by the wayside on Tuesday when I came home with a stack of historical treaties and post-modern, German spy novels. They have since remained in a stack because of the lack of shelving space to store them.

In other news, I'm getting a kitten.