Watashi wa bit busy desu

School and work take their toll on my time. In brief, then... Ollie and I had a lovely meal on Sunday c/o John and Susan. Orange and ginger baked salmon, whole new potatoes and some flash-fried courgettes, sugarsnap peas and pak choi. Mmmmmmmm. Read the beginning of Jane Eyre. OUCH that's a mean story. Othello is really boring. Especially the Branagh/Fishborne version. Miss Jean Brodie is fun though. I spent a couple of hours yesterday forcing Stephen to make some simple sense of Japanese at me. Which left us both a bit frazzled, but I feel slightly more ready to learn some now. I've been answering the question how are you with snotty. Which is, I expect , due largely to the damp, cold weather getting in my face. I'm also suffering a teeny bit from soggy feet, as the shoes I wear most often have worn out just enough to let some damp in under extreme wet conditions. And the nice new shoes I bought really aren't WET shoes. Let's see if anything exciting happens tonight.

"Looks like a no-brainer"

Last night it became VERY icy while Ollie and I were at Helen Sivey's. Which was very pretty.

As often happens when I'm walking home I called my mother for a blether, but unfortunately Steve must have been online because the line was engaged. Aha! thought I, she's likely to be on Skype! Why not try to get her through that? A bit of internetting later I have Fring installed and prepare to Skype. Or course it doesn't work as hoped. She was very quiet, I was very loud and the call died after about 15 seconds. However, the Chat side of things (and this is for Skype, MSN, GChat, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ...) is very simple and works as you would hope. So I wandered home 'chatting' to her, pausing only to take the occasional photo of the ice (see above).

Today continued to be remarkably cold. I met up with Stephen and Ollie at Favorit, had some nachos and then went back to Stephen's to play with food. I had slipped into a weird, uncommunicative mood and wasn't feeling particularly FUN but there was a plan to have people round to watch Grindhouse later. So I played Overlord, Joe fell asleep and Stephen did some homework. Ollie came back from the library and then went to Tesco with Stephen to get supplies. I made preparations for cooking... Dinner consisted of: Home-made beefburgers (beef mince, onions, spices, stuffing mix, egg), mashed potato and some broccoli, sugarsnap peas and courgette fried together in a pot, all topped with a drizzle of sweet chilli sauce and soy sauce. Yum. But by the time I was halfway through making the food everyone had arrived and wanted films! So I ordered them to start it and settled down to sit quietly in the kitchen...... By the end of Death Proof lots of people had left and I gave in to peer pressure and joined the room for Planet Terror. Which is very silly. Odd things I have noticed recently:

1. Great bit number 90 up on the first floor above Ripping Records on North Bridge. The numerals are tatty and old so I must have been not noticing them for a looong time. 2. Middle Meadow Walk. The litter bins are ALL on the opposite side as the pedestrian lane. WHY??

"It's all forehead!"

Quoth Helen Sivey.

Made dinner for Ollie and Aaron. I think I may try to keep track of culinary, er, things here, so... I got some big German sausages and cooked then with lots of fried onion, salad, potato croquettes and some pasta sauce adapted to be a little bit more scrumptious than it was to start with. This was a special Chris Creation which should have been disgusting and may have been but I enjoyed it.

Then we went to see Helen Sivey and there was much hilarity. And the Macarena. Nuff said.