Last night I discovered that if I take extra thick Jersey cream, as well as chocolate with added cocoa butter, plus butter, and mix it all together, I do not end up with nice truffle mixture. I end up with a split, greasy mess. Fortunately Big Boy's working from home today and has agreed to make batch number two ready for the truffle preparation tonight.
Last night I also dreamed rather a lot about cake. Chocolate cake, chocolate brownies (£150 a cake apparently). No misc other, just cake. I really could do with some cake.
Next week a friend who I haven't seen or spoken to in ten years is coming to London. Suggestions for topics of conversation so far include:
1. So, ten years, you've grown!
2. How's the PhD going?
3. All about my PhD (til she gets bored)
4. What's brought you down to London?
5. Sorry I didn't invite you to my wedding or get in touch when your mother died. (scrap this option)
6. Um... So shall we go and get drunk?
I'm nervous, not least because I'm not the most talkative of people at the best of times and it's been so long, but I really am very much looking forward to seeing her. Is she going to ask me why we lost touch (which was down to me)? I hope not, and I kind of wish we hadn't.
So basically since the hot (or balmy) weather is driving me crazy while I'm awake, I'm left to dream about other things for once. Thankfully my subconscious allows me a short break in thinking from all of the [*** fluffy rabbits, bouncing through fields ***] stuff in the day. Which basically means crisps. I've been dreaming about crisps again. Last week I was actually quite smug because I realised that my crisp dream had involved my almost buying them then putting them back uneaten. I thought this was progress. Last night I dreamed about plain crisps again, which brings the total to:
salt and vinegar crisp sandwich (dream one)
plain crisps on ham sandwich (dream two)
cheese doritos (the old favourite - my big downfall in the glory days) eaten for breakfast (dream three)
Misc unidentified crisps put back on shelf (might have been chilli flavoured) (dream four)
More plain crisps eaten (dream five).
But actually I think that for someone who remains addicted to the crisps she can't have, five dreams in six months isn't too bad going. I wonder if it's this hard to give up gak. I'm also quite amazed that I haven't dreamed about wine at all since I've cut it down dramatically and shot my booze tolerance, or about sticky toffee pudding, but I probably keep myself just topped up enough on those to stave off the dreams.
There I go again. Boring, boring, boring. My preoccupations are so very few. Still don't want any cake today, despite the obvious temptation of working near a Konditor and Cook.
I've been so boring lately. Since - uh - well ever really, but especially recently. I've been boring everyone's socks off since January when I started my diet (what, you haven't heard?) and recently - alas - I had a birthday. I'm still not 30, so it's all okay. I'm still younger than a whole ton of people around me. My birthday was last week and I was building up the excitement for at least the previous four to six weeks. It's still my birthday week now because I haven't had all of my presents. I also haven't had a chance to buy rose petals to go in my first ever sorbet in my new Kitchenaid ice cream maker attachment, which is another boring thing that preoccupies me. Oh and today I don't fancy cake.
The only things that have been going through my head most predictably recently have been these, as well as the fact that I'm still (GAH! GAAAH!) waiting to hear about my funding application that could decide my future, whilst the hot weather has turned my mind to less tracks than usual - right down in fact to one. Am I thinking about food constantly? No. Am I thinking about sleep? No. It's the other thing. Constantly. This doesn't bode well for summer. This could be a long, long summer. Hot dang.
I'd say that I'm so boring that I'm boring myself, but that's not true. I'm boring everyone around me - including the readers of my blog - but I remain quite excitable.
Did I mention it's another 51 weeks until my next birthday?
Crossing into Lewisham last night from Lambeth, not quite knowing where I am, and the bus stops. I look up from my catching-up-on-the-Smashing-Pumpkins-listening and wonder when we're going to set off. Crowds of rough people stand either side of the bus on a one-lane road, and a girl turns around at the bus stop - her shoulders covered in blood. I wonder why she doesn't look to be in pain - perhaps it's the design of her t-shirt after all. I take my headphones out as Barry White's just starting as I think I should regain the use of one of my senses. Another young girl (about 18) gets on the bus and starts talking to someone on the phone - apparently the girl drenched in blood has been hit by a hammer and is too drunk to notice. Someone's mother is "going to go to jail for this - it was her daughter who did it". Two women in their late thirties cross in front of the bus and shout something at the injured girl. I find myself catching people's eyes when I shouldn't and wonder if this could all kick off.
Someone, somewhere else, was I think stabbed and killed again last night in London. How long are we all going to sit here and think that nothing unusual is going on. Hit with a hammer? How does an argument between two teenagers in a pub end up with one being hit with a hammer?
I'm not liking London very much at the moment. It appears that life is cheap.
If you could leave notes for the future, what message would you have left in the past for today?
Submitted by Nameless.
What? How are notes from the past interesting? My head is full of 'notes from the past', ie experiences. What's more interesting are notes from the future - aliens, etc. Unless we're talking dinosaurs in which case it would be nice if one of them could have left me a note. I'm very confused by this question as probably shows.
By the way, today I've had to read some feminist philosophy. Feminists who do philosophy. Oh my god, what a bad combination. There truly is nothing worse.
Have you ever broken a bone? If not, what's the worst injury you've sustained?
Not much really. One of my earliest memories is of going up to my friend's mum complaining about having hurt my finger. She ran it under a tap thinking that it was just a scratch and was quite shocked when it split open to reveal the axe wound that went down most of its length. That'll teach her to let her son play with an axe (I simply got in the way). It's a bit annoying when I write with it sometimes as it ends right at the point where the pen digs in, but it's at least a little dramatic. Hopefully one day I can be eaten by a shark and get some real drama going.
Having seen tonight's episode, I want to know where I can get my own. Could I get him to regenerate through, say, the two hunky doctors off tv to improve him even more, or perhaps with Colin Firth?
How are you celebrating the 4th of July?
All the 4th of July means to me is that it's a week until my birthday and, because I'm working from home, I can sing the 'you can have a fishy on your little dishy' song about my lunch that I'm about to cook. Now if you were to ask me about how I'd celebrate the 1st March (St David's Day) I might have to say something quite similar, but it'd be further away from my birthday of course.
I am intrigued.
Last night Big Boy and I were very bad and went out for pizza. I won't claim that we ate too much (we used to eat about twice what we eat there now) but it certainly wasn't diet food. We joked that we'd probably end up losing weight by today on the basis that every time we are bad and go out for fish and chips, burgers, etc, we end up losing weight by the next day. Today, I found that I'd dropped a pound. Thursday isn't even my weight loss day - that's Friday and/or Saturday. Thursday is part of the 'hump of the week' - the wobble, wobble, wobble (before WHOOSH) that I've described in a previous entry. I simply don't lose weight on a Thursday.
It sounds like superstition. It sounds like I must be wrong. But it seems that every time I eat precisely what goes against my diet (and I didn't do any exercise last night) I lose weight by the next day. I wish I even began to have an explanation for this.
Yes, I know, I am so terribly boring always going on about my diet. Did I mention that I fit into my size twelve incentive skirt now? I'm happy to be boring so long as I fit into a size twelve - even if it's just that one item of clothing and everything else is a fourteen. Boring, boring, boring. Yeah, lump it.
Apparently the pain that I've been experiencing on/off in my thigh for six years, but mostly off, and haven't been to the doctor about before because I wanted to prove to myself that it wasn't my weight or fitness level, and because it's very hard to locate the source of the problem, is not in my thigh at all. It's in my arse. My arse is, according to my doctor, "a rather large muscle". Indeed.
