yonmei

06:30 am: throat hurty dammit
My throat hurts. It's the kind of *ouch my tonsils are infected* clutching pain that used to happen to me once a year or so, and would often make me lose my voice.

Friend arrived, with milk, vegetable-cheese bake, carrot and coriander soup, 4 oatmeal rolls, a pot of carrot-and-coriander soup, and two strawberry tarts: Marks and Spencer have a foot outlet in the station and she'd figured we should just buy our food there. I contributed some delicious cheesy tear-and-share bread with garlic butter that I'd had in the freezer. Om nom nom nom, as they say on the Internet. Oh wait, this is the Internet.

She's here till Sunday lunchtime. Unfortunately it is raining, blowing a gale, and now both of us are coming down with colds. I don't think I gave her mine: I think she arrived with it. We will probably give each to each other. Great guest gifts.

I'm awake at 20 to 7 on Saturday morning because I needed some hot tea...



Tags: being ill, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

03:26 pm: Still ill
Friend arriving on a long-planned weekend visit this afternoon. Her train will pull in at 4:30: I've suggested she get a 22 to Ocean Terminal and I'll meet her there. She counterproposed that she ring me when she gets to Ocean Terminal and I direct her from there: also, she can buy milk on her way over.

Except I've been sitting in the house all day. Unfortunately it's miserable and rainy out. Also, if I go down to Ocean Terminal I can buy myself another fruit smoothie with a shot of echinacea, which, by the way, I still can't spell without looking it up.

However, good excuse to phone for a curry tonight.




Tags: being ill, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

10:13 pm: I have the best friends-list
das_dingsi asked his f-list to recommend "someone on your friends / reading list" (comments screened).

And I had to give him a short-list of 3, because how could I pick just one of you all? Even subtracting the ones who are already on his reading list. And the ones who probably wouldn't want to be rec'd. And the wonderful jekesta who would have been rec'd instantly except she f-locks all her posts.

Three people off my f-list. It was like recommending three kinds of chocolate, out of a whole box of Fairtrade Belgium truffles. You are all creamy and delicious.

(Thanks to kind anon who pointed out mistake, now corrected.)




Tags: imaginary friend meetup

03:50 pm: Brew Dog Tokyo
I just discovered that the health food shop across the road is selling Brew Dog Tokyo - cost £9.95 for half a pint. (Okay, 330ml: somewhere between 1/2 a pint and 2/3rds of a pint.)

This beer is blurbed on their website as

The irony of existentialism, the parody of being and the inherent contradictions of post-modernism, all so delicately conveyed by the blocky, pixelated arcade action have all been painstakingly recreated in this bottles contents.

This imperial stout is brewed with copious amounts of speciality malts, jasmine and cranberries. After fermentation we then dry-hop this killer stout with a bucketload of our favourite hops before carefully ageing the beer on French toasted oak chips.

It is all about moderation. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself. What logically follows is that you must, from time, have excess. This beer is for those times.

It's also 18.2% alcohol content - so that one small bottle contains twice the daily recommended alcohol limit. (The BBC news page related Internet links include the British Liver Trust, and considering what would happen if you routinely downed this stuff in pints, I am totally not surprised.)

But.

But.

But...

It sounds totally existential and post-modern and definitely worth trying at least once... if I can find someone to split the bottle with. (165 ml in a wine glass; three units apiece: you can't drive after that, but it's not immoderate... yet!)

So: any of my friends out there (who I'll be seeing, probably, sometime in the next three months) willing to split a bottle of Brew Dog Tokyo with me? Be post-modernist! Be existential! Be... probably a bit drunk?



Tags: beer, drinking, imaginary friend meetup, weird stuff

12:32 am: I just read this on my friend's journal....
"...and I must follow him because I am meeting yonmei for breakfast tomorrow 2 hours earlier than I usually wake up."

I am still awake, and likely to be awake for another hour at least, as the first layer of cake is baking (maple! yummy delicious) and ideally I need to have all three layers of cake baked before I sleep. (I can then force myself to wake in time to meet afrai for breakfast at the farmer's market, buy the butter and cream and cream cheese I'll need to ice and fill the cake, and eggs for more scones, and take myself home to bake scones, get ready for PARTY, layer the cake (marmalade-with-whipped-cream filling) spread the icing (this may be as uncomplicated as plain icing sugar made briefly liquid with orange juice and maple syrup, probably), and wait for it to almost set before I decorate it with maple sugar candies. Or possibly, if I have time to stop off at the Sicilian bakery, marzipan fruits. In which case I shall probably not put any maple syrup into the icing.

The point is it has to be a BIG cake. A street party is not a party unless there's a cake so big the children dream about it months later and no matter how much cake they eat they cannot eat it all. *beams* And I made a cake like that last time, so I need to do it again this time, because that's how traditions happen. Yay.

I also have to make more sesame seed scones with cheese. I may try making the next batch with the end of a bottle of red wine. Why not?

I'm running late because of my parents, and then a neighbour who came round. She's also baking for the party and has killer period pains and she's running late because she went to a workmate's husband's funeral today, so I feel a bit bad about complaining.




Tags: baking, breakfast, cake, imaginary friend meetup, scones

11:28 pm: Ann Purna and meeting friends
I booked a table for 3 at Ann Purna and was only 15 minutes late to meet afrai and Cephas. They are both lovely, and the food at Ann Purna is delicious. I usually eat there with my parents, who have a fairly standard choice of food, so it was interesting to roam the menu a bit more adventurously with nice companions. Also, have I mentioned they are both lovely? I was a bit uncertain about meeting Cephas because sometimes the boyfriend/girlfriend of someone you like is not necessarily someone you also like, but it was like meeting Mr Sweetie, only younger. And with less beard. (This is the lovely melancharisbron's lovely partner. I just realised I probably should explain that.)

We walked back via The Forest, which was a bit crowded that time of night to have tea (also, afrai was totally full, she declared) but there is a small display of b/w photos of a road trip, which we looked at. And then I left them on Queen Street just below Urban Angel, and walked on home as it began to rain. I got home somewhat soggy and very tired. This is good (I am still tired) because I really need to sleep properly and wake at a good British time of day. Which is not 10-ish.


Tags: eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

01:24 pm: Chocolate, art, cats, and warnings
Danish chocolate isn't particularly good. At least, not the box full of berry-flavoured marzipan chocolates Transamurai brought back from Oslo. I like marzipan, but these were dull.

I'm going to an art exhibition tonight in Glasgow, meeting up with solo. I think it's going to be fun, but I'm glad I'm going with solo.

Because I wasn't going to be back till late, I turned Bob back from eating grass in the garden this morning. She was not a happy kitty.

On warnings for fanfic: The distinction is not between people who have suffered a trauma and people who have not: it it is between people who like being warned of anything untoward in their reading before they take a look at it, and people who do not. The categories are not identical, and indeed I am not sure they even overlap in any significant way.




Tags: cats, chocolate, glasgow, imaginary friend meetup, meta

10:30 pm: Blast the midges
I used to be able to say that midges don't bite me. This was certainly true at one point.

The sore bumpy places on my neck, my back, and did I mention my neck, and a couple of places on my face, say that this is no longer true. OUCH. Midges are horrible.

Today I went to South Queensferry to meet up with a bunch of photographers from Redbubble. I'd never met any of them before. It was a nice day. You'll see some of my pics on Redbubble, once episode 2 of House Season 5 is over, and I can leave the TV and go upstairs and do that.

There isn't a ferry any more in South Queensferry, though there was one for about a thousand years: Queen Margaret used to cross back and forth from Fife and the Lothians and paid to improve it, or some such. Then about 120 years ago they built a beautiful rail bridge, and about 45 years ago they built a far less beautiful road bridge, and, well, no more ferry.

Yesterday I went out to the gym and exercised for about an hour and a half, and then I came home and it was the hottest day so far this year and I lay down on my bed and went to sleep. I woke up and Bob was asleep at my right hand and Wolf was asleep at my feet. I still slightly regret that I didn't have the nap in my garden, in the sun, even though I would probably have got sunburned in advance of my trip to South Queensferry.



Tags: friendship, imaginary friend meetup, just my life really, nonphotos, redbubble

11:40 pm: Lunch, writing, tempura
I met helenraven for lunch - she operates without a mobile phone, so we met at the hotel and walked to an Italian place not far from there: she left for a movie: and I met afrai shortly afterwards in a Starbucks. She is as lovely in person as she is in print, and we walked down to Charing Cross and looked in bookshops and I bought a new Robin McKinley and we ate Japanese food and found a Caffe Nero and had coffee, and it was altogether a very social, very nice day.

I never took any photographs. Well, two.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup

02:05 pm: London, 28th-1st December
I've booked a tiny hotel room in Belgrave Road Cartwright Gardens (the "Euro Hotel") for 3 nights. (TripAdvisor reviews say it's "spotlessly clean", it's close to two tube stations Euston Station! yay, which is all that really matters. The free breakfast is fine if limited, but so long as there's muesli, fruit, and tea I'm good. Full English breakfast cooked to order comes with room.)

I briefly hoped I was going to be able to book an ultra-cheap room via the lastminute.com sale (they were boinging "1000 hotel rooms for £10!" all over their website) but I think they were all for dates in October (lastminute.com's 10th anniversary) and in any case, whenever I tried to book, their server crashed. Which is pretty much lastminute.com in a nutshell. But this will be fine.

I thought I had booked a not-quite-so-ultra-cheap-but-still-pretty-good-for-London room in Belgravia, but just as I was composing the post to tell you all about it, I got an e-mail from their parent company telling me the booking had been rejected - their really-ultra-cheap rooms had both gone. So I booked somewhere else. Hopefully I'll get to keep this room.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup, travel, travelling

11:30 am: Hooray
I have just arranged to go to London for Friday 28th November to Monday 1st December, inclusive (Bargain Berth on Caledonian Sleeper, travel down Thursday night to arrive in London 7am Friday morning, and home again on another sleeper train on Monday night to arrive in Edinburgh Tuesday morning.)

I have not yet figured out where I am staying on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, but *handwave* these things can be booked on lastminute.com, if nowhere else.

PS: Breakfast Borough Market Saturday morning. At least I hope so.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup, travel

11:28 pm: Saturday 20th September: a poll
Poll #2319 Saturday 20th September - the options
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What should I do on Saturday 20th September?

 

Tags: food politics, imaginary friend meetup, iraq, polls

10:39 am: This is Scotland
I am sitting outdoors in a gloriously green garden, in warm sunlight. My feet are bare and if I'd thought to pack them I would be wearing shorts.

(My back feels lots better: I kept telling people "sore but normal" yesterday, when it was still worrying me, but it really is today.)

I should be writing a complex and and sarcastic story involving House and a flock of other characters, not all of them ducklings or Wilson, but somehow I can't focus on that.

Hey ho for mayhem, angst, torture, suicide, and despair! I think I can focus on that.

Tags: fannishness, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, write write write

01:16 pm: Insane Picnic
The sun is shining, on 1st July I'll be promoted (no more money, lots more work, honour, and significant amounts of What Fresh Hell Is This, WFHIT, I need an icon that says that...) and I want to have a picnic.

I invite you all! (This may have to be an imaginary picnic. Or a virtual one.) We will meet on Whinney Hill on Sunday 6th July, at noon, and stay there till we run out of (a) food (b) drink (c) the glorious view. (I have decided not to worry about the sun not shining or it raining.)

I have a clever container which is luggable in which I can bring ice-cubes and cold drinks. (I do not do fizzy sweet stuff with chemicals, so if you like Fanta or Coke or champagne, you need to bring your own supplies.)

Besides large quantities of orange juice, and lots of ice-cubes, and a litre of water, I shall bring:

A couple of bottles of wine. Red and white.
A large supply of home-baked rolls.
Butter and cheese and whole-grain mustard and chutneys.
Apples.

Also, if I figure out a way of transporting both, a flask of espresso and a carton of ice-cream so that we can have iced coffee, because there is Nothing Nicer.

What will you bring to my picnic? (While I don't myself eat meat or fish, I'm not actively opposed to other people doing it in front of me. I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals: I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.)

PS: I have reasons to be depressed, but we'll talk about those later. Right now: picnic!

Tags: coffee, eating some delicious food, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, weather

11:11 pm: Bob and the Great Outdoors
bubosquared and calapine and Ajay winolj were round last night, for an evening of skiffy and slash and wine and curry, and as bubosquared smokes, she was nipping out every so often to stand on the top step and smoke. Which Bob observed with great curiosity, sometimes following bubosquared to the door.

( more about Bob )

Tags: bob, cat politics, cats, imaginary friend meetup

06:57 pm: Coffee and Mackintosh
I wrote a very elegant post about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his art, and then I made the mistake of pressing Return and this appears to have the effect of deleting the post completely, never to return. Here's what I remember of what I wrote.

I wrote about meeting surliminal, hfnuala, and chillies in Harvey Nichols coffee shop. The view is splendid, the little biscuits they serve with the coffee are very nice, the coffee is fine, the muffins are poor, the scones (by report) are very nice indeed.

chillies has grown a very successful beard since I last saw him. Suits him.

Then we went off to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibition at the Dean Gallery, and walked around and generally feasted our eyes. CRM is best-known as an architect, and all architects draw, but CRM seems to have done water colours all his life but done most of his painting when on an extended holiday in the South of France in the last five years of his life. His wife, Margaret Macdonald, outlived him by five years but had stopped painting by 1921: her career was destroyed where it was not subsumed into his. (In a letter to her in the 1920s, CRM acknowledges that "half or threequarters" of all his projects were hers....) Someone should write a book like Joanna Russ's How To Prevent Women Writing - a companion volume, How To Prevent Women Painting.

I found most interesting a painting by CRM of a French hillside town, but he had changed the red tile roofs to grey and the sky was grey and overcast. It looked more Glaswegian than you could believe a French hillside town could look. He must have been homesick....

I liked best a painting of a fort, on a rock, with the rock and the fort most detailed and exact - but over the shoulder of the fort you could see in the distance a harbour (he painted it elsewhere) with the water rippling and shadowed by cloud. Another painting of the harbour, the warehouses across from his hotel, showed the warehouses clear with almost architectural exactness, and their reflections in the water rippling and elongated, and the waves at the foot of the painting almost abstract glints from the paper.

Update: chillies wrote about the exhibition here. hfnuala wrote about the day here.

Tags: charles rennie mackintosh, coffee, imaginary friend meetup

07:11 pm: I am tired.
I didn't get enough sleep last night, but I have finished one section in my current long story that I was struggling to complete.

(The couple were never going to resolve all issues by the end of the chapter, but I wanted to make it clear that there was a strong possibility that they would resolve all issues - or at least all major ones, or at least find a way of dealing with them that worked - by the end of the chapter.)

I will be working full time as of, probably, next week. :-D Till December. And it's looking good - I mean as a job, or rather as a project.

I need to sleep more, and eat less when I'm sad, and drink less coffee, and exercise more*. (I had lunch yesterday with marrog, and I swear to you, that vegeburger still feels like it's sitting there. It was a good lunch, though, and as usual went on till about six. Not eating all the time. Indeed, we walked for part of it. And looked at henna tattoos. And afterwards I went for a very very long Edinburgh walk, out to Comely Bank and back down along to Ferry Road, which was pleasant until I thought it might actually start to rain, so I caught a 21 home. Besides, Ferry Road is boring.)

*Of course, I keep telling myself that. Sometimes it works, though.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup, walks, write write write

08:34 pm: Health warning
If guybles offers you his homemade baklava, be aware that they are potentially lethal and should be consumed in extremely small quantities.

With tea.

Tags: baklava, imaginary friend meetup, tea

10:04 pm: I had a good weekend.
( and a long one: cut for length )

Tags: books are what i read, eating some delicious food, films, imaginary friend meetup, london, pride

12:00 pm: Midnight in the mad bakery
I got in past midnight last night and remembered I'd planned to ice the orange cookies and to make cheese/mustard scones for a lunchtime fundraiser at Dementia Plaza today. Just cheese scones would have been fine: I could have whipped up a batch of scones and had them baked by one am. Icing the orange cookies too... I wasn't asleep till after two. Bah. Still, it meant I had time to clear all the booze out of my system, so that I woke feeling sleepy but at least not fuzzy-headed this morning.

The orange icing was good, though. The juice of an orange plus a capful of orange vodka, mixed with a lot of icing sugar. The cookies? Turned out more cakie than cookie - one of these days I will learn how to get the proportions of sugar, flour, butter, egg right, but till then I keep producing these big fluffy things. With peel that had been soaked in hot raspberry vodka for nearly 24 hours, and the zest of two oranges.

To dinner last night at green_amber's, with sneerpout and Pam WINOLJY. By some chance sneerpout and I had never happened to be in the same non-virtual room before, so it was interesting to meet her at last. It had been years (we had trouble working out how many years) since Pam and I had met - certainly we'd lost track of each other since well before 1997, when Pam went to York.

Dinner was fabulous: much wine (served in pink fluffy glasses), a delicious soup with fresh coriander, pasta with a rich mushroom sauce, and white chocolate key lime pie that was orgasmic. Pam and I both had a second helping. green_amber showed off her matching slippers as seen on Sex in the City. sneerpout noted that she was now drinking from green_amber's slippers. Pam WINOLJY admitted to a pink fluffy dressing gown. I wondered out loud about drinking wine from a dressing-gown.

A lovely evening on the whole, marred by two things: I'd walked over (and walked back, this time via Victoria Street where Pam WINOLJY was staying) and was breaking in a new pair of boots. Unfortunately this was overkill on my feet - the one hour walk to green_amber's would have been fine, but the same back again was too much, and this morning I have blisters, which is a sod. Also, the other thing, about which all I can say is: If you really feel that way about the past six years, all I can do is apologise. I'm sorry.

Tags: bake sales, baking, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup