quelle erqsome...

in which i explain my whereabouts

So, I've been working in-house at my old publishers again, two days a week, for nearly a month and I cannot believe how it's affected my ability to do things. For one thing, actually having spare cash to go out -- awesome! For another, total exhaustion and a subsequent flake out on the sofa when I get home -- awful.

I've been cycling the 25 minutes from my house to Vauxhall, an exhilarating way to start the day if there ever was one, then taking the train out to the office where I induce forced brain collapse for 7 hours. Then I take the train back to Vauxhall and cycle sweatily home again. I actually rather enjoy the way this new routine makes me treasure the time I have for my research, but it's knackering.

I fully appreciate that anyone who actually works in an office FIVE DAYS a week will now either be flipping me the bird or laughing at me for being such a wuss. But as well as working in-house, I've also started teaching at uni again (little first years for critical theory, two seminar groups, loving it) and have started working with a new supervisor while my old one is on sabbatical, which means I REALLY have to work now. I'm glad for the change, really though, as I was getting too complacent with my old supervisor.

I've not had any time to sew at all for three weeks, which SUCKS. However, my knitting time has been completely amped up. The train journey affords me at least 40 minutes every day just for knitting, which is lovely. When I get home in the evening, I usually try to get some reading done but for the most part I flop in front of the TV and knit some more. I've watched more utter drivel in the last month than I have in the last five years.

My radio silence over the last few months has been driven by two key factors, both of which I've wanted to keep largely to myself but for very different reasons.

The first is I'm betrothed! I turned 30 and was whisked away by my dearheart to Paris, where, while breakfasting on the south bank of the Seine, Matthew clutched my hand nervously as he got down on one knee, produced a diamond-bedecked nose stud and asked me to marry him. I laughed and cried and said yes and it was wonderful. I LOVE being engaged, having an Engagement Freckle is giddingly lovely, but I cannot wait to get married. Marriage is going to be fucking awesome. Matthew is the most wonderful person I have ever known and it is my privilege to be part of his life. While marriage has never been something we've particularly discussed, knowing we're going to do it seems to have made everything brighter, more vivid and more pertinent.

The second thing also brought us closer, but for less awesome reasons. In August I miscarried. It was very early-stage, I couldn't have been more than about three weeks along, and quite unplanned; other than the faintest of faint pink lines on the home pregnancy test, the miscarriage was the one clear confirmation I was pregnant in the first place. Although I can rationally commend my body for rejecting a collection of unhealthy cells, I really wish it had done so less dramatically. Most early-stage miscarriages go practically unnoticed, with none of the symptoms attached. I, on the other hand, had the ginormous boobs, the strange pulling and stretching of my body as it got its womb together, the sudden waves of faintness, the hypersensitivity to smells and taste, the inability to concentrate on anything for more than three minutes... And all of that lingered with sick cruelty for the next six weeks (damn you, nature!). Regardless, it sucks but good things have come out of it: for the ten days between my beginning to think I might be pregnant and the actual miscarriage we both got super excited, which bodes well for when it does happen.

In any case, I've been mostly blogging over at Loumms, but as I've started teaching again and working in-house again, and want to start delving into my personal life again, I'll be here more often. For real this time.

06/30 sewn

Matthew is a bum. Even if he did stop his upload that will save his single, just so I can post before midnight.

'Sewn' refers to my original post, which was all about the lovely, lovely bags Lou and I have been stitching together. I've been sewing in all my spare time for the last week, and with lovely results. Unfortunately, pictures will have to come later. It's time for my bed.

05/30 smashing glass at midnight

...is not fun to wake up to. Especially when you're tucked up and asleep and not expecting to hear any sound but for those in your dreams for hours to come. Fortunately, it was just the Mozcat knocking over a drinking glass on her way out the kitchen window and not something more sinister, though perhaps strangely fitting, to be awakened by a heart-jangling crash in the middle of the night, given it's Guy Fawkes today.

So, it appears, my NaBloPoMo has already failed, which kind of stinks. I had great plans to post yesterday, but alas was held up with the making of Sock-Perfect WIP bags, swooning over button choices with Lou and meeting up with Arianna for coffee and a sneaky piece of apricot-almond loaf, a Ray's Jazz Cafe specialty for which I have a particular love. And I'm afraid, that's about as 'taking it easy' as this week is going to get. It's back to Bond and his various issues with the Name-of-the-Father.

Actually, I am practically frothing to get stuck back into it. My friend Judes called me yesterday evening and something she said sparked an enormous brain wave. I think I might just have the rest of my thesis mapped out, with each of the series I'm focussing on slotting with unusual ease into each chapter. Oral, anal and phallic stages in the development of the individuated subject's libidinal economy, here I come!

1/30 nablopomo begins

Today is the very first day of NaBloPoMo and so I begin my third run at all-blogging-all-the-time November with three things:

1. I handed in the beginnings of my Introduction and a pretty well complete Chapter One to my supervisor on Friday. It's just about finished. It could do with more work. I'd quite like another week to work on it, but I recognise that Evidence of Research is required and Further Editing can come later.

2. Last week Made by Loumms sold its third Sock-Perfect WIP bag!! And I did a little dance before jumping on Matthew to tell him the good news. We have so far sold one bag to someone in America, one SEKRIT bag for a Secret Pal swap partner and now this one (and to Ali, no less, for whom its buttons are perfect!)!

I shall have to post, one day, about when Lou called to tell me that we'd had our very first WIP bag order and I nearly fainted and how we both started jumping up and down screaming in delight and how, after we had calmed down a bit, Lou asked tentatively, 'So what do we do now?' and I replied, 'We send it off, I guess,' and she said, 'That's it?' which sent us into shrieks of hysterical laughter, because it just seemed so ludicrous that we could have sold something to someone who lives on the other side of the world and all we had to do now was take it down to the post office. The Other Side of the World. It's mental.

3. I had a dream last night that I found a huge hand-knit blanket in one of our closets, which I had apparently made but stashed away and forgotten. When I opened it up, it was covered in moth holes. I was kind of pissed off, because nothing else anywhere had been touched but this one blanket I'd made. But then I realised it was made with acrylic yarn and was really annoyed with myself for making a whole blanket out of acrylic -- it was a patchwork of puke pink, pus yellow, conjunctivitis red acrylic. No wonder I'd hidden it away. So I put it back in the cupboard and decided that if it made the moths happy, they could take it.

fete-ing with carrot cake

It turns out red lipstick is an AWESOME hangover cure. Perhaps not so much 'cure' as 'makes me feel less like dying because now I'm at least pretty'. The reason for the hangover is very definitely the result of having a fab time at the Urban Village Fete. It was so much fun!

 

Our booth -- me frantically finishing Get Gone, Moths! lavender and rosemary sachets.

Our hand-made project bags and rolls -- soon to be up on our Etsy site.

Lara and Lou reenacting a sale!

Our hand-made kid-sized apon/bags -- so cute, they make my ovaries pang!

We met heaps of crafty crafters, hung out with Lara and Laura (who missed each other by about twenty minutes) and actually sold enough to cover our costs, which is amazing. Naturally we celebrated with a pint. And then another. And a couple after that. Needless to say, I awoke this morning feeling a little tender of brain.

I started feeling alive again some time mid-afternoon and to celebrate this time I've decided to go with some Japanese noodly curry and whipping up this droolworthy carrot cake from Vegan A-go-go, using carrots I grew myself! My first harvest!

This is especially exciting because these carrots come from the same selection of seeds that Lou and I use for our Grown Your Own Soup kits. It's so gratifying to see that the seeds not only work, but with fanfuckingtastic results! I want to frame that little nubbly one.

 

Much better.

holidays and fetes and more!

Matthew and I have had his parents' car this week, which meant we had our summer holiday by the sea in Hastings on Tuesday*, hurrah! It was quite a perfect getaway from the a combination of freelance deadlines**, pathetic attempts at research and this***:

 

which has been threatening to do away with me.

As my laptop's speakers are pathetic, and I can't sew in silence, I've set up my sewing machine in the living room in front of the TV. Which means that with all the sewing I'm doing, for Urban Village Fete purposes, I can legitimately leave Alibi: British Television's 24-hour Murder Mystery Superstation on all afternoon while I'm hard at work. It's all Murder, She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder and Father Dowling all the time, with only The A-Team for respite. If I can't hack together a pitch-perfect mildly worrying whodunit by now I DON'T THINK I EVER WILL.

* Yes, only the one day. We're indulgent like that.

** Including typesetting the least thrilling thriller EVER, full of people 'deciding' to do things instead of just doing them. 'He decided to tell them they were going to die...', 'She decided to sprint to her safety...', 'They decided it was time to detonate the bomb...' It's awful. Just awful.

*** Our first Loummsy craft fair outing! Lou and I will be displaying our wares (a heap of knitting project bags, project rolls, gardening aprons, seed kits) at tomorrow's Urban Village Fete at Bar Story in Peckham Rye, and I can't wait. There'll be lots of food and other crafty types there, and while the craft bit is only from 2--7, the party should last till the wee hours.

Her dearheart will be DJing, which I'm very excited about because Aneet has awesome taste in music and can read a party's mood like a book. My dearheart, on the other hand, will be touring the UK with The Woe Betides.

hangover crispy herbed tofu nuggets, with mushrooms

I awoke this morning covered in the stench of a fab night out. It's been a looooooong time since I've been able to indulge in such things as a hangover, and it was a bit of a doozy. Since the middle of February, I've been immersed in my very own schedule o'crazy, involving huge freelance deadlines, essay-marking deadlines, paper-writing deadlines, design deadlines, pattern-writing deadlines... A full-night's sleep became a bittersweet memory; sex was rushed through in a shared shower; blogging was something I did in my head walking to uni and back.

It's not over yet, but I'm past the properly insane bit, which is why this morning my head felt like someone had injected me with nanobots hellbent on dismantling my cerebral cortex.

At the beginning of last month, Lou and I launched Loumms Creations, our very own Etsy site, where we are currently selling Grow Your Own Soup kits, but will be adding various knitting kits, patterns, projects bags and whatever else catches our imagination. Though we haven't made any sales through the site itself, it led to our first wholesale order -- awesome! It's an fab opportunity for us and means our stuff (stuff we made with our hands!) will reach heaps of people who we probably wouldn't have connected with otherwise. And we made it! Over a hundred supercute individual kits, with wee instruction booklets, origami seed packets and hand-embroidered labels, made by us!

Since I've decided to ignore my freelancing this week and have a mere four delinquent student essays to mark, last night Lou and I met up at the Royal Albert in Deptford to celebrate with a quick drink after she finished work. That quick drink turned into two bottles of wine, which later morphed into a third bottle, oatmeal cookies and a slightly burnt loaf of bread back at my place. Today I hurt.

Throughout it all, I've been very careful to block out 6--8 in the evening for dinner. Cooking, like my morning potter about my garden with my first cup of tea, is the height of relaxation. And thus what better way of easing my poor lumpy noggin than to fix myself a greasy breakfast, nonetheless packed with the vitamins and minerals I need. I have no picture for this because I was deeply hungover and in no mind to remember such things, but this is one of my very favourite brunchy/lunchy/make it bigger and call it dinner meals.

ingredients (makes 1 serving)

half a packet of firm tofu
6 mushrooms (any size, though preferably a bit large)
approx. 3 tbsp. each cornflour and ground almonds for dredging
1/3 c. mixture of olive oil and vegetable oil
1 tsp. dried oregano
freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste

method

Press the tofu in a clean towel to remove as much liquid as you can. It takes a good couple of minutes, but it totally worth it. Tear the tofu, rather than cut, into roughly 1-inch pieces. Cut the mushrooms into fat slices.

In large pan, pour your oil and add the oregano and salt and pepper and set the hob to a medium-high heat. As olive oil shouldn't really be used at high heat, I've used it mixed with vegetable oil. When it's sizzling round the edges of the pan and beginning to show bubbles at the centre of the bottom of the pan, it's ready, just make sure it doesn't start smoking because then it's too hot. While the oil is heating, dredge the tofu pieces in the cornflour and ground almonds. (I use a separate plate rather than a cutting board for this: 'dust' the plate with the cornflour and ground almonds and then dunk the tofu into it. Try to make sure the pieces are all pretty evenly coated.)

When the oil is nice and hot, carefully place the tofu in. Don't move it around, otherwise the coating will dislodge itself, which defeats the purpose entirely! After a couple of minutes, it should move on its own if you give the pan a gentle shake. Turn each piece (carefully, don't burn yourself!). Now add the mushrooms and turn the heat down. The mushrooms will take about three minutes either side.

Serve up, using a slotted spoon, on buttered toast layered with spinach. Nom!