Behold...

... my first substantial Finished Object (FO) in a very long time!

It's a bag made out of an oversized t-shirt that was too big for me to do anything with! So it has now started a new life as my project bag. Whatever sewing or knitting project I will be working on shall be stored in that bag from now on. Hopefully, from November, these projects will be more and more regular occurrences as I love it so, but can't bare to give it the dedication and commitment they deserve when I am still completing my Masters degree! Full steam ahead with the dissertation now, following the go ahead on a very exciting research method! More to come when more is done!

Last week, Ben and I went for a walk around the City of London following dinner at Pizza Express and we came across this sight...

It's a nice picture to look back on as to why I enjoyed London. As I am now no longer a Londoner, it's nice to be reminded why I wanted to live there in the first place. However I am now officially a Brummy once again and I am genuinely excited to be back, just as excited as I ever was to be moving to a new city. It's wonderful to think that because I know Birmingham do well, it's so easy for me to explore slightly more out of the way suburbs I have avoided in the past. Wanderings around Moseley, Harborne and the Jewellery Quarter will all be occurring in the coming months and an imminent flatsearch should also be quite good in helping me reacquaint myself with my beloved City.

Living It Up

I'm a major proponent of living it up. I enjoy the finer things in life, and I work so that I can live, and I work hard so that I can live well, doing lots of fun things and spending nice times with family and friends. Yesterday was an example of my propensity to live it up, when my Mother and Aunt took me to Afternoon Tea at The Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, London.

Tea, perhaps?

It was a very pleasant experience, tea and sandwiches and Champagne and scones and the lovely company of my Mom and her big sister, Iris, who I don't see often enough.


The Champagne in the picture above was complimentary from our waiter, Javier, as we found out yesterday morning that I had passed everything I had attempted in my Masters degree and my extenuating circumstances claim has been supported wholly by the University board. It was much a time for celebration, and indeed we did. My Mom and Iris were very proud of me, and proceeded to tell all of the waiters that served us how clever I am and how well I've done, resulting in many congratulations and free Champagne! It was definitely the nicest restaurant experience I've ever had.

As I'm obsessive, I will now detail my whole tea...

Rossini Cocktail

Chedder and Mango Chutney on Walnut Bread
Egg Mayonnaise x 2
Cream Cheese and Marinated Cucumber
Smoked Salmon
Chicken and Wholegrain Mustard x 2

Lemon Cream Dessert

Raisin Scone with Clotted Cream and Blackcurrant Jam
Plain Scone with Clotted Cream and Strawnerry Jam

African Autumn Tea - Rooibos with Orange and Cranberry - delicious!

Laurent Perrier Champagne Brut

Chocolate Mousse

Apple Slice

YUMMY.

Mom and Iris had much of the same, except no meaty sandwiches and no cakes. Silly women. We all had a lovely time and we had enough time to go up to Regents Park and walk through the Queens Gardens. We saw and smelt beautiful scented roses and saw a couple of frisky ducks having a fight.


So, now I've got quite the taste for posh hotels, particularly The Dorchester, and I'd quite like to have another Afternoon Tea there, and maybe even stay a night for my birthday... Looking at the prices, I am in great doubt it will be for a birthday within the next decade!

Racing For Life

On June 25th, a balmy Wednesday evening, I took part in a 5k run, for which I sought sponsorship in aid of Cancer Research UK. This is a very important charity to me, because without them, my Dad wouldn't have had experienced the quality of life he did in the final 7 months of his life. Their work involves researching treatments, making advances on diagnosis, prevention and cure. Their work didn't help to cure my Dad from the cancer he had but he did undergo a full course of chemo which helped him to see in 2008, 7 months on from his initial diagnosis. My Dad was very unlucky, as more people do tend to recover from their cancers. More than ever before. And that is largely thanks to Cancer Research UK. So in February, I decided to run the Race for Life. 5 kilometers. 3 miles. Not a long way, and I professed to undertake a training routine with vigour. But life got in the way. I was doing a Masters degree, my Mother was living 120 miles away from me, and for the first time since we started going out together, Ben and I were living in the same city. So I didn't do as much training as I wanted to but Wednesday came and I nervously pulled my running kit out and donned my trainers and set off to Cannon Hill Park to just do it™. I completed the 5k in 43 minutes, which isn't great but isn't too bad either. I guess I was at the midway point, as there were hundreds of women behind me. I ran for the most part, probably 2 of the 3 miles. And I've raised £245. And I did it to commemorate my Dad. To celebrate his life in a way that he would have found hilarious. Me, running = funny stuff.




And I feel really proud of myself for that. It would have made my Dad laugh, but I proved something to myself and to people that know me. I can do it. Doing it made me think some very sad thoughts but more than anything I felt proud and like I was doing something positive. I felt like I was a good person, putting myself through that pain (seriously, I'm injured now) with my only objective being to raise money for a charity. So it got me thinking about myself too... I'm hard on myself a lot of the time. I'm very busy most of the time and I always have things to do. Usually stressful things, like work and studying. So I don't think about myself in a good way very often, and I certainly don't look after myself like I should. So when Gala Darling posted this, it pushed me into thinking positively and thinking about my good attributes and good attributes that I want to have. And then I made this...

... and I felt really good about myself. So now when I'm feeling awfully low and a bit useless, I have something to look at to remind of my good points and be enthusiastic about them, and my low mood will just float away, as , very egotistically, my low moods are often generated by myself. Now, head off to http://www.wordle.net/ and make one yourself!

A post within a post

A few weeks back now, I wrote this post, as I was so enthralled with my curry. I didn't post it, probably because of tiredness or confusion. However, last night, I made something quite similar, so I thought it was about time the world got to hear about my magical creation...

"Last night was like any other. I studied, read, was planning to watch a film and was starting to get a bit hungry. So I ventured off kitchenwards to see what I could rustle up. And then the wonderous happened. I did some experimenting, and made the best curry EVER. For all you foodies, here's my recipe. Or at least how I remembered doing it...

Ingredients: 1 aubergine, 8 mushrooms, 400g chopped tomatoes, honey, cumin powder, coriander powder, garam masala powder, yogurt.

1. chop up aubergine into chunks, slice mushrooms




2. heat olive oil in frying pan




3. add aubergines and mushrooms, fry until aubergine soft and mushrooms are looking fried




4. add tin chopped tomatoes, heat until tomato juices are slightly reduced and HOT




5. add generous amounts of spices, stir in




6. add generous dollop of honey




7. mix it all about




8. serve, with any carb based item and top with yogurt.
   

It serves 2, and took about 25 minutes to prep and cook. If you try it, let me know how it comes out. I had it with pasta shells, which worked surprisingly well."

Hope you enjoy and modify!

A few days ago, I bought an amazing piece of crap, not too dissimilar to this:

[http://www.kristengrace.com/rhinestone_eiffel_tower_earrings]

It is so very tacky, and I love it. I think I love it most because it is the Eiffel Tower, landmark of my favourite place in the world, Paris. But I also really love it because it is just so tacky. Not really classily done like the haute couture pieces visible in various fashion houses and upmarket high street stores, but totally garish and gaudy and it looks like a bit of tin foil. Wonderful.

Contrarily, I bought some clothes of excellent quality on the same day. I guess my conscience is getting to me, after being bombarded with imagery and theory about how I am evil because I bought cheap clothes. It is true, I know. Primark are an absolute travesty, and I doubt H & M, Peacocks, or Matalan are much better but I would have preferred to have made my own decision, rather than feeling as though I had been guilt tripped in buying the organic cotton jersey t-shirts and knitted jumper from New Look and Zara today. Saying that, Primark and H and M were packed today, with people clutching bags full of their cheap finds. Not me though, no siree. The allure of everyone wearing the same thing as me has definitely passed, plus evil corporation, exploiting labourers, and all that.

Music

I've been quite surprised recently with what I've been finding auditorily pleasing on the radiowaves. I'm a 6music devotee, and the dial rarely switches from the station. Their tagline is "closer to the music that matters" so they are a pretty good starting point in that they play new, exciting, influential music. So influential that it is actually profoundly enhancing my musical tastes.

Today I heard the stunning vocal talents of Martha Wainwright, who I'd heard do of but never actually heard. Artists that have been played in the last two hours include Hot Chip, Santogold, Morrissey and Florence and the Machine. These artists are all very different from each other. But produce amazing music. Which I never thought I would find remotely appealing. Yet, here I am. I know all the words to L.E.S Artistes by Santogold and find myself bopping happily along to Morrissey. Which I honestly would never have done 3 years ago. Never. It may not seem to be a particularly prominent revelation to most people ("Ooh, she heard new music and liked it, big woop!") but I have always been a very picky person when it comes to music. I tend to not like big bands, I like bands with a bit of an edge, and artists that are wrapped in controversy and mystery. So in admitting that I am beginning to see the attraction of alternative dance music, dancehall and ambient instrumental is a very big thing for me. I like it. My tastes are becoming more eclectic. I am creating a more varied playlist to my life. Thank you, 6music*.

*This isn't really a blog in which I just gush about how awesome 6music is. Really, it's not.

As a postscript: The exam went okay! And my sleep pattern is back to normal.

Something nice

The point of this post: Ben buys me nice things <3

Covers

I fully appreciate that the Arctic Monkeys are probably very talented in their own right, but their cover of Girls Aloud's Love Machine is far superior to anything they've done independently, in my opinion. Firstly, it's a great pop song anyway and the twist the Arctic Monkeys give it make it even more infectious than it ever was. So I guess I'm saying, although a great song by Girls Aloud, the Arctic Monkeys perform it better.

In my opinion, this is the case with a number of song covers - as great as a song they may be, the covering of it by another artist produces a much better version. And there are so many examples... Here are my personal favourites, in no particular order.

1. Nirvana - "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" - originally by Leadbelly
2. Jeff Buckley - "Hallelujah" - originally by Leonard Cohen
3. Pixies - "Head On" - originally by Jesus and Mary Chain
4. Johnny Cash - "Hurt" - originally by Nine Inch Nails
5. Cat Power - "Sea of Love" - originally by Phil Philips

There was no real point to this post, I was just thinking and wanted to be doing something slightly more productive than watching Facebook for movement and waiting for my washing to dry. Quite an interesting post though, for me at least. I love covers of songs. I'm like a Chan Marshall that can't sing...

The Pixies

Talking fairly recently about the Pixies with 2 fellow Pixies fans, dear Matt and Gilly (currently in the process of moving house), I started thinking about how much I could remember of when I saw the Pixies in 2004 at T In The Park, because to me it was a pretty significant event, as I was watching one of my all time favourite bands, that I had wanted to see since I had first experienced the Pixies, which, granted was only 3 years prior to actually getting the chance to see them. However, 4 years on from that and my love for them has never waned. In fact it may have grown after seeing Frank Black and now seeing the Breeders in 2 weeks time. So, back to the point. It appears I wrote an account of seeing the Pixies in my dear old and neglected Livejournal, and so I thought I'd post a brief note from it...

Then Kings of Leon appeared and they were better than they were last time I saw them. I also have a new found respect for them as they kept talking about the Pixies and played the opening of Gigantic to the cheers of about 30 people (ME!)....then.......the PIXIES!! *squeals* I spent 10 minutes of their set in tears. I couldn't believe I was standing there looking up at my all time favourite band whom I'd never imagined I'd witness at a live performance in the SECOND FUCKING ROW! They came on stage, all in black trousers and white shirts, and launched straight into Planet Of Sound. For the next hour they played one long song, stopping twice for Kim to say "Thanks, thanks a lot!" The songs they played in their set were:

Bone Machine, Broken Face, Something Againt You, Debaser, Tame, Caribou, In Heaven, Monkey Gone To Heaven, Gigantic, HEY, Dead, Number 13 Baby, Wave of Mutilation, Here Comes You Man, Velouria, Isla De Encanta, U-Mass, Nimrod's Son and Vamos

They closed with Vamos in a highly amusing fashion, with Joey leaving his guitar on the stand, just playing with the effects pedal. And at the end they all stood on the stage together and waved and I cried again. It was amazing. The nice Irish lady next to me kept telling me about when she'd last seen them 12 years ago, or so. Wow.....

Bless. Isn't that sweet? How excited I was. It's sad to think I rarely get that excited about anything that much these days. Years of mind numbing academia and growing up into a fairly stressed busy adult has ensured that... However, that's about to change. It is seemingly obvious that although I am coping exceptionally well with everything that's going on in my life, particularly my Dad's death, I'm not really looking after myself. I overly worry about things I can't control and should let be. I put increased importance on unnecessary issues. So, with that all in mind, I'm going to undertake some things which will make my life better. This includes...

• doing more creative stuff with my spare time,
  
• making sure I spend quality time with friends and family,
  
• getting a medical check up,
• exercise and eat sensibly.

This has all become quite involved for a Friday afternoon, but following on from this positive post I've made, here is a positive photo to complete it. I look happy and relaxed and I want to look like that more.

My Blog looks like Philippe's!

Hello! And welcome to my blog. I got very excited that I could choose a layout that looks like Philippe's from Achewood! Look! http://philippesblog.blogspot.com/

So I decided maybe having my own blog would be fun. I'm not too fussed whether people comment, but I guess it's a lazy way of letting people know what I'm up to as I become ever so increasingly busy with this MA doodah and the assignments associated with it, work experience, full time employment, learning to drive, holidays, making new friends, keeping in touch with old(er) friends, the restaurant... What else? My burgeoning desire to knit, draw, craft in anyway possible but currently can't, and my desire to cook inventive, exciting food, and along the way become an exclusive cocktail obsessive/borderline alcoholic. I'm sure Matt's interest can help me along the way with that one...

Now, my very exciting evening entails preparing a draft abstract for my dissertation, knitting a pencil case(!), eating some stew and mayhaps a burst of the Pixies on the stereo and standard hilarious dancing when nobody's watching. I demand for every one of you reading this to add it to your favourite websites and read it regular-like, because I guarantee it will stay updated... At least for the first 2 weeks...

Say whaaaaaat?!