quelle erqsome...

physics

I am not scared of science, the way people in the Arts and Humanities are some times supposed. I love science. I love the way learning the inside of something suddenly makes it seem hyper-real -- so real you can barely believe it exists at all. I love the way everything has an answer, even if we haven't discovered it. I love the endless possibilities. 

I spent most of my childhood torn between wanting to tell stories and wanting to play with my chemistry set. I chose to watch nature programmes on TV after school instead of the soaps my peers drooled over. When I was the lighting director for our stage crew during high school, I would spend hours thinking about light refraction, the creation of shadows and colour. By then I wasn't very good at the maths part of science and thus my path was set (you can't do chemistry without maths, so says the School Board). The science I partake in these days is largely situated in the kitchen. And, as you might have guessed, I LOVE the science of food.

However, I have spent the last five days immersed in physics. Physics that I had to copy-edit into textbook shape. Physics by a ridiculously brainy Russian whose grasp of English is passable, but not always particularly clear. Physics I could almost understand, but the sheer weight of it capsized my poor brain more than once.

I am not scared of science. But I think this weekend I might spend a lot of time sitting in a dark room trying not to think about the Large Hadron Collider, xenon, krypton or argon, or electron detection, or double-beta decay. Maybe by Monday my brain will stop spinning and I can go back to thinking about de-oedipalisation and spies who know too much.

a group of three

Some things in life are really rather splendid, here are three from this weekend:

1. I've been completely obsessed with Karen O's soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are. It's admittedly pretty twee, but it makes me want to jump and run and dance.

2. We went for a gourmet burger yesterday for a late lunch. I had a double mushroom burger with feta, pesto and red onion and tomato relish. It was heavenly. I also had a thick strawberry milkshake. It was sublime.

3. I met Laura's little Emmms on Friday. What a way to start the weekend! She's amazing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Laura always has awesome hair, Little Emmms came out of the womb sporting a pristine Mia Farrow pixie cut. Her smile is incredible, all gummy and elfin and so full of the purest of pure joy. When she sleeps she looks like a little Buddha, utterly serene and perfectly plump. She has that perfect baby-balance of edibleness and hilarity. It was very hard to leave for home.

If you declare three splendid things, let me know, please!

brain purge

I delivered a paper last night; it went way better than I thought it would. Although it's based on one of my chapters, it comprised of a huge reshuffling of ideas and because of a slew of migraines I've been having lately I only really began working on it on Tuesday. It should have been a bit of a stinker. Instead, it was met with tolerable success and prompted a really interesting discussion afterwards.

That slew of migraines makes me wonder if I should get my eyes tested. I've spent the last couple of weeks in a haze of daily pounding light-sensitive headaches. It's not as much fun as it sounds.

The British Library is ace! Why had I stopped going there? What possessed me to think the cost of transport was justification? How is that possibly justification in the face of such fantastic productivity? I've put Matthew in charge of forcing me out the door the next time I try to flake out.

The last of my (self-imposed) mandatory reading list, Think Inc. by Adam Diment, came in the post last week. It is a. awesome and b. a really unexpected diversion from the rest of the series. Unfortunately Diment sort of disappeared after this one was published, which is such a shame. I wish he'd kept on writing.

We bought a rug! It's a great rug! It's chocolate and turquoise and is interestingly patterned! But it's not the size it claimed to be. Fighting with the merchant over who gets to pay for shipping it back.

We Lovefilmed Hot Fuzz last week and it is indeed as funny as I remember. I have to admit I wasn't sure it would be: we watched it at the Peckham Cineplex with a crowd that was awesomely in the mood for laughing, and that's infectious. I was a bit worried my memory of an awesome flick was in fact a memory of the feeling of being around so many people having a good time. But it's hilarious. I want to watch it again.

I've started knitting the Julia socks, which is the pattern I received in the Socktoswap, in the yarn I receifed in the Socktoswap. If you have never tried Sundara, DO IT! It's a beautiful thing.

One of my cats has been nibbling on my aloe. Yeti, I'm looking at you. I hope it was tasty.

My friend from long ago who I met up with last week (who is lovely, by the way, we had a really fun time and I'm planning on introducing her to my favourite veggie hot spots across the city) has a fantastic new blog, Chairity Case. She's very modest, but I think it's awesome.

timewarp

Today I am meeting up with a friend of mine who I haven't seen since I lived in Canada -- it has to be about 7 years. She moved to my school when I was eight or nine and we became friends almost instantly. Then junior high came along and I went from social butterfly to bottom-dwelling maggot, so far as the social ladder was concerned. I had no idea who New Kids on the Block were and no interest in watching Melrose Place, and my mum insisted in sending me to school in a purple paisley corduroy trouser suit thing, complete with waistcoat. No wonder I was thrown into the loser pile, I didn't want to associate with myself in that thing.

In high school I found new friends, who liked The Cranberries and Guns n' Roses and Bjork, who thought the Improv Club was pretty awesome, who preferred hanging out backstage, tweaking stage lights and dancing to 'Shaft' (damn right). She was much cooler than me and had friends with cooler extra-curricular activities. 

We weren't friends for years. Then we went away to university and it turned out that not only did we pick the programme at the same school but we were in the same residence, on the same floor. Her room was next door to the international exchange student who would become one of my very favourite men in London.

Though we haven't been in touch in ages, mostly because I STINK at keeping in touch with people (it's genetic, my father is just the same, as is his father before him), I received an email the other day that read:

I don't know if you've heard, but I've moved to London! So glad to hear you're still here. Let's get together!!

I've asked Rory for your email address a million times but no luck. I remember it being erqsome... but not sure if I have the spelling right, or the email provider part. I hope this one works! If not, I'll try another.

Hope you are well!

 xm

so far 3 attempts! now onto a fourth try!

How awesome is that?! So, we're hooking up this afternoon for coffee and delicious vegan chocolate cake at Foyle's.

Incidentally, that's where I met up with Camille last Friday, who is just as awesome in person as she is in writing! I really do have to write about that properly, because it was such a lovely afternoon. We had coffee, then she and her friend Seanan came with me to Shepherd's Bush for a thai vegan buffet and to watch The Woe Betides get mobbed by screaming teenagers at Bush Hall. There were young girls making out with each other and then high-fiving afterwards, and boys looking agog at such displays. And there was crowd-surfing for fuck's sake! Crowd-surfing! I would have joined in but I fear those spindly teenage arms would have splintered. We need a mosh pit of rugby players at the next gig, then I'll crowd-surf.

the spy project

Finally added my old InSpyNoMo posts to The Spy Project, so there is now something to read! New posts are in the works, but it means I need to actually get some reading done before I can write them properly... I'll be putting up a reading list at some point, which I'll keep adding to. Once I begun compiling that list, I got a little overwhelmed: it's HUGE!

A list like that is enough to make me want to pretend like I never initiated the project in the first place, even as it makes me all fired up and excited about the prospect of one day having so many things ticked off.

In the meantime, I'm terribly behind in my crafty blogging. I really must take some pictures of Matthew's various knitted gifts, and the socks I designed for the Sockopods Secret Santa Swap.

insert flailing arms of joy here

This week has been mental in the land of Loumms.

First, our new Kanga bags were included in Lotus's Workshop gift guide.

Then we were a CanaryKnits Indie Designer feature on Friday.

And then yesterday afternoon Lou handed me a copy of The Knitter. Because one of our Sock-Perfect WIP bags is in The Knitter.

 

See that? That is us in print! I still can't quite believe it. At some point this year, that bag is going to be included in one of The Knitter's giveaways in support of Mencap, too, which I'm super excited about. I love the thought that we're going to be part of so much knitterly generosity!

it's fixed

Four weeks, six visits and nine boiler engineers later... We have heat.

We had three engineers milling about our kitchen last night debating over what could be the cause, including two area managers, but it took the ingenuity of Engineer No. 9 to find it. 'It' is this:

Chewed or worn away from consecutive fusing, that wire was nestled in the tangle behind our washing machine. It smelled about as bad as it looks: charred and mildewy. I'm just relieved it was found before it ignited properly and sent the house up.

In any case, all this means that the Great Boiler Saga is (for now, fingers crossed, gods' willing) over. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief, for this surely means more interesting blog posts from here on out!

happy new year!

The new year has begun and yet I've hardly noticed. Barring one (fun but ill-advised) jaunt to the O2 to take our neice and nephew to see Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel*, I have been largely bedridden.

I am not a good patient. Much to Matthew's chagrin, rather than get some rest I am more inclined to decide that feeling a smidge better gives me leave to start dancing, sewing, cracking on with my thesis and generally gadding about, only to collapse a couple of hours later complaining bitterly that I'm all snotty and achy and wondering naively why it won't go away. Finally on New Year's Eve I succumbed and spent most of the day in bed. Yesterday I spent 17 of 24 hours sleeping. Today Matthew's up in Birmingham and though I had grand sneaky plans to sew up a few bags, ponder over some spy fiction and get a head start on a freelance project due back next week, I think I might stay in bed and watch Pride and Prejudice.

However, it is a new year and for that I am truy grateful. 2010 isn't just a new decade in the Judeo-Christian calendar, it's also a new decade for me! This is the year I turn 30. Exciting, no? Exciting, yes!

I've spent a great deal of time in the last months feeling simultaneously stilted and restless and as a result I've decided to begin implementing some changes round here that will invigorate and motivate, beginning with The Spy Project. I've always been quite a firm believer that you should start as you mean to go on, and I suppose in this case I mean to go on an insomniac, but at least I'll be a productive insomniac. I'm hoping to post twice a week with book reviews, analyses and other meanderings, and in so doing that I will continue to remember just why I wanted to do another degree in the first place. The other thing I'm going to do is go into the Financial Services department once it's open again and find out how to get a loan. I really hate that I'm doing it, but for fuck's sake I'm never going to get anywhere if I keep on the way I am.

Fortunately, my other goals for 2010 are somewhat less lofty and a great deal more relaxing. Thank goodness for Loumms.

* In a nutshell (snort): pretty appalling, but funny in a 'they're not going to do that -- I can't believe they actually did that -- and they did it again -- whoa nelly' lather-rinse-repeat kind of way.