In my easter bonnet

It's been a better week here in London. Work has calmed down a lot and I'm finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. When I go back after this long weekend, I only have eight days of work left in the old job, which is very exciting. 

For the moment, though, I'm not going to worry about work as I'm in the midst of a gloriously long four-day Easter weekend. I'd usually be up in Edinburgh, but I'm going up for each of the next two weekends and three in a row seemed a little much for both my bank balance and tolerance of sitting on trains. So instead, I'm spending the weekend pottering about the flat. While I'm missing home tremendously (it's been more than five weeks since I was there), it has been good to finally get down some of the things I've been meaning to do (and working to hard to do) for ages. The spring clean has begun!

I started, of course, with the essentials - like hanging up this chicken which arrived in the post from Mum....

... next to the slightly serious-looking bunnies (dressed in the Easter best) which she sent me last year. I haven't got an Easter tree this year, but the pussy willow stems are doing a sterling job. Unfortunately, they are too flimsy to hold up my wooden eggs, but the stuffed fabric ones are doing fine.

We then proceeded to do all sorts of useful things like clearing out the hall cupboard; going through our huge collection of cables and getting rid of LOTS of USB to mini-USB ones (of which we had about 12); cleaning and dusting everything; and going through our paperwork. All in all, perhaps not the most exciting way to spend Good Friday, but satisfyingly productive.

Today has been a little more restful. When we were in Nottingham for my husband's 30th my mother-in-law gave us some seeds which she'd collected from various sources but not got round to planting. So today I planted seed trays of pansies and penstemon and put some clarkia seeds in a pot outside. I suspect they weren't this year's seeds, but it'll be interesting to see how many of them come up. I don't have my mother's green fingers, but I'm hoping that a little of her talent might have rubbed off!

What a way to make a living

Well, that was quite a few weeks. 

 

As you can see, my daffodils have come out, as have the municipal ones in the bed next door. I'm ridiculously proud of them and they add a little shot of cheer to my day every time I walk past them. It turns out that I chose little short yellow ones with orange centres. They are very cute, although actually I'm not sure they are my absolute favourite kind as I was prejudiced against shown the disadvantages of orange as a colour from an early age. However, I'm pretty sure even my mum likes orange in the middle of daffodils. I think I chose these ones because you got quite a lot of bulb for your buck and also as they were relatively short stemmed and I was worried about them being battered down by the rain on their steep slope.

I needn't have worried though, these photos were taken last Saturday (when I fully intended to blog them) when the sun was shining and the skies were blue. They've come out even more brilliantly since as it has been unseasonably beautiful all week.

However, I haven't really seen much of this lovely weather as I've been working stupidly hard for the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, my husband's 30th birthday was in the middle of all of this and, as a result, both work and birthday got in the way of each other. He says he had a lovely time though. We started the celebrations with afternoon tea with friends. I made scones which turned out to be rather smaller than I'd intended. As a result I got a lot (maybe 30) out of my dough and I was a bit worried that they wouldn't get eaten with just five adults and two toddlers and a LOT of other food. However, it turns out that our friend P (who is one of these people made of pipe cleaners and with a bottomless stomach) can eat scones like crisps. It was quite fun to watch. We also had dinner with friends, followed by drinks with yet more friends and, on the Saturday, we went to Nottingham to celebrate with his parents. 

I was very glad for the excuse to stop for a while and do something social as work has somewhat taken over my life at the moment. I worked from 8.30am to 10pmish most nights this week trying to finish a project and, although he's not a designer, my husband came into the office every evening to assist. We succeeded and I completed the last couple of tasks yesterday, heaving great sighs of relief.

My current job has been hugely stressful but the good news is that I have been offered a new job. It's with a former colleague who now runs his own business and should be substantially shorter hours and much more collaborative (and, thus, less stressful) than the current one. I start in three weeks' time.

So today is a day for relaxation. And fixing the washing machine. With all the time we've both been spending in the office, we haven't done any washing this week and so my plan for today was to sit on the sofa reading a book while the washing machine did its thing. However, when I tried to set the first lot going the machine just read 'end' on its little screen (which didn't feel like a very positive outlook).

So, having pressed all the buttons to no avail, I decided to try to pull it out from the wall. Husband is off doing his own job and won't be back for at least the time it'd take to do two loads of washing, so I attempted this by myself. It took a lot of heaving, but eventually I got it out. As you can see. 

However, it turns out that although we keep a range of small coins, dust and small portions of uncooked pasta behind our washing machine, this is not where we keep the machine's plug socket. I tracked this down to this cupboard:

... which as you can see is where we keep all of our non-perishable food. You can't get the panel which hides the plug sockets out without removing ALL the food and the middle shelf. So, as you can see the floor is now covered in herbs, tea bags, tins and bags of rice; the hall is full of the dirty washing that came out the machine to enable me to move it; and the rest of the kitchen is full of washing machine.

Having established that (having been turned on and off again) the machine now works, I put on the first load and sat down for a little blog. After all, while my mother might be scandalised by the state of my kitchen, she's also probably exasperated by my lack of blogging.

Blog done, I'm now going to put all that stuff back on its newly wiped shelves and find my book and the sofa. Have a good weekend.

Sunrise, sunset

I work in a rather nice area of London. It's the kind of place where people go running in pairs (because one of them is a personal trainer), where dogs are walked by maids, where small girls are dressed like the Queen circa 1936 in tweed coats and bobbed wavy haircuts with little bows on one side.  Everyone is very polite and there's a great range of shops (as long as you don't mind only window shopping). The architecture looks beautiful in the spring sunset.

The sun bounces off the buildings above and really makes the red brick glow.

I've always fancied having a house with a turret. It'd be fun to survey the world from windows on several sides and sit up there doing something romantic like writing a novel or perhaps painting great works. Or just watch the world go by.

I like this strange facade too. Whoever designed it was clearly very keen to get as much light in as possible. It's south facing and I like the fact that they haven't tried to make it look organised, but instead just put in the windows wherever made sense for the inside. I wonder why the staircase stops though - how do you get to the upper floors?

I also admire the way that these two terraces meet. I like to think that there's some reason why the building doesn't just extrude round the corner as normal and, rather than try to disguise the problem, they just added an extra portico and popped a turret on top.

I watched the sun setting tonight from the top of Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath with my friend Anna this afternoon. The tall buildings across London caught the golden glow long after it had disappeared behind our horizon (though it was far from dark yet - don't worry Mum). It really made buildings like Canary Wharf and the towers of Shoreditch look serenely beautiful - little stripes of orange in the dusky cityscape. I'm not one for skyscrapers really, but they must have had a beautiful view tonight.

The grass is riz

 Hmmm... still "must try harder" at this blogging lark!  (Though of course one of the reasons that I didn't blog last weekend was because I was visiting my parents rather than writing to them). Meanwhile, spring has started to spring round here. The photo above, the view from our living room, is in stark contrast to the weather a less than a month ago, when the green was covered in snow. As you can see if you look closely enough, there are a few clumps of daffodils springing through under the trees.

 My daffodils are coming through too. Although I told Mum earlier today there were no buds on them yet, as you can see the one front left does have the very start of a flower, so there's hope yet. I planted them in quite military rows in the pots, but unfortunately my local squirrels have a real habit of digging in my pots, so I think I've lost a few bubs and all my symmetry. Oh well, I'm sure no one will really notice once they come out in all their golden trumpetyness.

It turns out that our neighbourhood is positively daffodillic. We only moved here in May, so had no idea quite how many bulbs were hiding under the grass ready to pop out. I've planted some in the autumn in our front bed, which is just across the road from this lot and may, therefore, be a little upstaged. However, the world can't have too many daffodils in my opinion, and they may be different varieties (I can't actually remember what mine are meant to look like).

As you can see though, none of them actually have any flowers yet. I was surprised when I was home in Edinburgh at the weekend, to see that the spring flowers there seemed ahead of the ones here, but apparently this has been caused by the very cold snap we had which put them on hold. At least I didn't organise a whole festival around my display:

http://www.bavmedia.com/bavmedia/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=205:daffodil-festival-without-the-daffs&catid=19:nature&Itemid=114

Although, I imagine they've planted more than 30 bulbs. A little ploy for next year, perhaps.

All the leaves are brown.

It's the wrong time of year for brown leaves really. There are a few hanging around, but there are little green shoots just starting to thrust their way out the ground. Today was calm and sunny with just a hint of spring in the air. I've been walking past the flower bed outside our front door for some weeks and being disappointed by the lack of daffodil shoots there, as the ones in the pots came up ages ago. However, on Saturday morning there was finally evidence that my good hour of digging little holes in the hardcore-infested slope might not have been in vain! There are no flowers on either the bulbs in the pots or the bed, but I have hope.

The brown leaves in question were paper rather than natural this weekend. My friend R, who I met as a lowly undergraduate, is a creative chap - forever thinking up games and ploys. He's the inventor of cladding jousting - a fun building site game - and Egg Wars (TM) - a game involving raw eggs and homemade forts. He also holds good parties. The latest of these was this weekend and we were all instructed to come as the first line of a song. Not the title, or the first line of the chorus, but the first line. It took a bit of thought.

My group of friends all studied design at university and, therefore, take fancy dress very seriously. Not for us the hired costume or clever hat. No - for us fancy dress isn't fancy enough unless it takes at least an afternoon to put together and probably involves you wearing something on which the paint hasn't quite dried. We also look down on the bizarre trend for sexy-fancy dress and indeed I have been known to attend a party as one of three Oompaloompas (one of whom was male, but no one could tell which).

So I spent Saturday afternoon cutting leaves out of brown paper and sewing them into a skirt to represent the first line of California Dreaming. It ended up being quite a short skirt, but this was mostly because I ran out of time to add further layers. I do apologise for the dreadful (and somewhat manic looking) picture - we meant to take photos of each other before we went out, but forgot, so this is taken mid-party.

There were lots of excellent costumes, but the punniest was a girl dressed as a can of Heinz Tomato Soup (sporting an Ikea collapsible laundry basket, spraypainted red and with a cardboard sign on the front). She was the song Roll With It by Oasis, the first line of which is, yes, "You gotta roll with it". She'd accessorised with a mini baguette. You may now groan.

On top of spaghetti.

I was a fussy child. A very fussy child. Eventually I became vegetarian (at about 12) which allowed me to legitimise much of my fussiness into a moral standpoint. My sister (who enjoyed meat but is more morally determined) soon joined me and, since she'd had only really ever eaten meat to be polite, Mum came out as vegetarian to create a male/female split between our family's meat eaters and vegetarians.

As I grew up I began to realise that I actually come from quite a fussy family. My dad doesn't eat carrots and is allergic to citrus fruit, my brother held out for a long time against bananas and my mum isn't a fan of turnips, squash or hot curries. None of the four of us like raw tomatoes (my sister used to be given all the tomatoes out of our salads). However, because Mum and Dad were so good at eating things that I didn't like - mushrooms, peas, courgettes, rice, cooked tomatoes - it never occurred to my that they might be classed as fussy too.

I used to be quite nervous about eating out, studying the menu to see if there was anything I would eat. However, once I left school I started to realise that there were actually things that I did like that I never thought I would - all kinds of cheese (even goat's cheese or ones with BLUE bits in), asparagus, avocado, risotto. I even learned to eat olives on my honeymoon in Greece. Once every so often I'll wonder to my self whether such-and-such might actually taste ok and give it a try.

This week's experiment was spaghetti bolognaise. As a child I absolutely detested mince in all its forms - particularly when under a thick layer of mashed potato in the form of shepherd's pie. YUCK. Becoming vegetarian was an easy way to avoid having to force down anything mincey.

My husband, a life-long carnivore, is on a health kick at the moment and the other week I persuaded him to try vegetarian sausages. These went down so well that, although I've never been much of a fan of Quorn (I generally prefer my food to taste of something) I wondered whether it'd be worth giving Quorn spag bol a try. It was actually pretty good! It's a lot healthier than its meaty forefather and gives me the protein which my vegetable heavy diet could be low in. All those tomatoes make the Quorn taste of something and I managed to ignore the fact that it's really pretending to be mince.

So there we go. Another thing to strike off the list of things I really don't like. I'm pretty much just left with: tea, coffee, mushroom soup, raw tomatoes... oh and peas. I don't think I'll be trying shepherd's pie any time soon though.

Walking in a winter wonderland.

Well it didn't melt! We woke up this morning to at least six inches of snow over everything. I love snow, so I went out for a bit of a crunch around the block in my site boots. Now I'm back on the sofa warming up. I love winter.