my uk life

feline friend

sidney, our gorgeous but very needy cat, is curled up on my lap with her head in the crook of my arm. every few minutes she reaches a paw up toward my face and gently touches my cheek. it's a bit hard to type because she is sitting on the edge of my laptop, and on top of my left hand, but i don't have the heart to push her to the floor. she is purring really loudly and every time i look down at her, she looks up at me in adoration. if it wasn't so annoying it would be quite sweet.

wireless woes

i'm discouraged about my daily posts at the moment because my laptop can't seem to keep a wireless connection. i'm tired of rebooting and troubleshooting for 20 minutes each night to try to get a brief connection, only to have it go back down a few minutes later. it's a true waste of time. tonight i've done all the tricks i know to do and can't get internet access, so this is going to have to be posted another day.

[written 30 Jan at home, posted 31 Jan at work]

toot sweet evidence

when i was a kid i had a tootsie roll whistle maker. at one point, i thought i had imagined it, but i wrote about it a couple of years ago and it turns out there are quite a few people out there who shared my memories.

one of these people found her toot sweet, still in working order, and made a video of it recently:

thanks cheryl!

car sick

we went to visit friends in south london today. it took about an hour to get there, and we had a fantastic time at lunch. at 3pm, we decided to set off for home so we would get back in plenty of time for madeline's dinner. tom-tom, our not-so-handy sat nav, said our journey home would be 49 minutes.

he was wrong.

we drove for five minutes. at 3:05pm, a smell wafted into the front of the car, and we turned around to see that madeline had been sick all over herself and her car seat. yuck. we pulled over and wiped her down. i had a change of clothes with us, but as sick was everywhere and there was no way to get her seat clean, we thought it was best to get home as quickly as possible and get her clean. we cleaned her up the best we could, given the circumstances, which in all honesty wasn't very well, plugged our noses and continued on our way.

at 3:45 we were 10 minutes into our 49 minute journey, and tom-tom was directing us over the river into central london to drive along the embankment. we were moving at a snail's pace, and driving along the embankment tends to be more of the scenic route than a speedy journey. so we turned south, in an attempt to cross the river later and return home by a similar route to that we took in.

at 4pm, we saw the first of the football fans. on the outskirts of chelsea, the riot vans joined the fans, and the traffic literally stopped. we had plenty of time to enjoy the smell of vomit and admire the chelsea jerseys, as we sat in a queue from the game for the next hour and a half.

we finally got home just after 6pm. poor madeline was patiently waiting for three hours in sick, and we were sitting in agonizing traffic and a smelly car for the same length of time. i have never been more happy to see our driveway.

mixed vegetables

today we went out for lunch as a family. i generally still bring maddie's food along, not because she won't and can't eat food from the restaurant, but just because if i bring it we know just what she's getting. today she had chicken casserole, a banana, some rice cakes and a serving of mixed vegetables.

this is pretty standard fare for madeline, and she loves mixed vegetables. since she started on finger foods, we have bought the frozen cubed bags that include peas, carrots, corn and beans and cook them in the microwave for a few minutes before serving them cold. our local supermarket has an organic bag that we buy when possible.

today the waiter in the restaurant came up to serve us and said "that's the cutest thing i've ever seen." not sure if he was commenting on the general cuteness of our little girl, or something else, i looked up at him inquisitively. he said "you're serving your baby real vegetables. i've never seen anyone do that."

sad. very very sad.

friday night

it's only nine-thirty, but i'm really sleepy. my eyelids feel like they have weights on them, dragging them closed. i'm trying to focus on the screen but the words are fuzzy and fading to grey. i am obsessed with the thought of lying down, and rebooting our wireless router so i can post this seems too much to concentrate on let alone actually accomplish.

[published on saturday because, in fact, i didn't.]

take that!

my normal routine is to read for a few minutes before i go to sleep, but my novels have been set to one side recently because i've been playing phoenix wright ace attorney on my nintendo ds.

i'm a half-hearted gamer. i like first-person shooters, and most logic games. i had a nintendo 64 for a while and played zelda on it. i really enjoyed the sims for a few months, and really loved animal crossing. when richard and i heard a recommendation for phoenix wright, i wasn't sure it would keep me interested.

i have to admit, it has. while the music is embarrassingly cheesy, and i wouldn't want to play it with the volume up in public due to the frequent yelling of "take that!" and "objection!" i do really enjoy it. i'm on the fourth trial, and the stories have kept me entertained. there's really one route through it, and it's a bit annoying how you sometimes know what the logic flaw is but can't quite figure out what evidence you have to present to prove it in quite the way they had in mind. but overall, i do like it, and i expect i'll finish it, which for me, i believe is a first.

take that!

my head fell off

when i was pregnant, my mom and dad gave me a brooch. it's a copper one, with a figure of a man and woman, holding the hands of a child. the bodies are engraved, and the heads are made of turquoise.

my task for this morning is cleaning out my jewelry drawer, which is long overdue and one of my minor annoyances. in sorting through this drawer, i came across the brooch and found that the head of the mother has fallen off. which frankly is quite representative of how i feel and thus an interesting bit of coincidental symbolism.

the dog of pavlov

twenty-nine million. that's the number of times it seems i have opened up the cabinet under our kitchen sink to try to throw trash away today. yesterday we had a water softener installed and while it's small for what it does, it still takes up half the space beneath our kitchen sink. unfortunately it's the same half where our rubbish bin used to live.

i went out today and bought a nice chrome pedal bin, which is sitting conveniently at the end of our counter but rather than benefit from this, i have gone to the sink over and over and over and OVER to throw everything away.

blast that pavlov and his dog.

daily reflections

if you've been tracking progress on my new year's resolution to write and post daily, you might think i've missed a few days already. amazingly i haven't! if you don't see a post on this site, you might find one on the remember section.