a tale of two schwestern

according to a myriad of insidehighered and chronicle of higher ed articles, as well as a plethora of blog posts and books, the way to get progress done on your dissertation is to write just a small nugget of it a day. most people recommend two pages. i have yet to put this no doubt excellent advice into practice on my own dissertation (especially since i'm currently full of angst and crisis over it, having realized that i really just want to write about diagrams (it'd be fascinating, crossmyhearthopetodie), and thus am throwing a mental temper tantrum every time i consider the monster hiding under my bed/in my closet/ lurking around every corner dissertation), but it struck me that it might be an admirable approach to blogging, not just kee's visit, but this whole london thing generally. you can consider it a haphazard and completely unreliable advent calendar, of sorts, which i suppose negates the idea of an advent calendar, since reliability does seem to be one of the relevant characteristics.

so, in short, kee came to visit. and it was divine, as proved by this visual evidence:

kee masquerading as cindy lou who.

her friend sara came up from paris for the first two days, and we did things like walk through brick lane market and eat delicious food, attend an organ concert at westminster, and stop off at a christmas market which promised to be all germanische which means that it had very expensive wursts. i managed to convince them that it would be nothing short of delightful to walk back to my apartment from westminster (although at a slightly more relaxing pace than the one i had taken on my way to meet them at westminster, since i realized partway through that there was no way i was going to make it on time, but during the weekends they have this particular habit of shutting down entire tube lines for maintenance. i might have outwalked even chules.). it was, undeniably, the correct decision. there was even a convenient wagamama right by the globe to quell desperate protestations of numbed toes and fingers.

Of course you would dress up like a star so that someone could film you in the graveyard of Christ Church, Spitalfields.

kee, heading south over the thames. 

christmas market, from the bridge.

yes, please.

Tower Bridge from the south bank, walking back home.

as a teaser for the recounting of kee's visit, i offer you this representation of when we found ourselves sodden on a hillside in the peak district. there was even a farmer with a tractor, though we didn't talk to him. and our car worked. and we weren't miserable, and weren't there by mistake. but we were very, very wet and cold, with utterly inappropriate footwear.

bad [food] porn

they'd better sell green and red m&m's here. otherwise christmas won't come.

i have a whole host of pics from kee's visit last week (this refrain sounds a bit familiar), but am only going to share a few today (i like to tantalize, titillatingly). blahblahblah (that's me being all academic) said that england and the us are two countries separated by a common language (where does canada fit in? they should protest. loudly.). entire, excellent blogs are devoted to the subject, as are a myriad of books which tend to be aimed at the american audience, since, as we all know, having any sort of uk accent at all immediately makes you more intelligent and sophisticated. anyway, point being that i was prepared for some translation issues (moreish. look it up.). however, coming from a family with serious english heritage, as well as from a country with a sizeable connection to the island, i failed to realize the much larger gulf between myself and my surroundings: the culinary one. i'm not even talking about jellied eels, and i like haggis. despite the fact that i grew up eating roast beef on many a sunday, turns out that a lot of culinary similarities are rather surfacey. for example, they sell bread pans here not by size, but by the weight of the loaf. (so what do you do if you're making a pumpernickel/rye one day, and an angel food cake the next?) and, as kee and i discovered when we set out to make jules' rolls-of-divinity for thanksgiving (you can have thanksgiving w/out the turkey. you can't have it w/out the rolls.), there's no such thing as shortening. you can easily find duck fat, lard, and suet (of both the meat and the vegetable varieties), but no shortening.

panic.

despair.

tears.

rage.

after scouring the shelves of at least five different stores, i finally settled upon the suspiciously-named and malevolent sounding 'baking fat' in the hopes that it would render the rolls at least somewhat recognizable. upon arriving home, i realized that i was also missing some other notable components to the baking exercise, such as the all important rolling pin. (they use them here; i just don't have any kitchen equipment and am too poor and miserly to buy any, choosing to spend my spare pounds on concerts where i can't see the stage and thus fall asleep.) this lack didn't stop me during my freshman, sophomore, or junior years of undergrad, and it wasn't going to stop me now (though discovering that someone had gotten a hold of my bank details and was draining my account via various tabacs in france almost did. it was the thought of the rolls that kept me going. and kee. and a viewing of white christmas.)

it's not instagram, but i documented a few elements of the process for you:

This is what 'baking fat' crescent roll dough looks like. i was going to save half the batch and make it for Christmas, but ended up taking it  out of the freezer the next day. 

The process. Hot chocolate helps with both the rolling process and the eating process.

The baking fat. One benefit to shortening (other than the fact that it takes right) is that it's generally white, which is less disturbing than the lurid orangey-yellow of baking fat, which makes it feel like you're actually dumping fat in what you're going to stuff in your face a few hours later. There are no tomatoes in the recipe. I was experimenting with various rolling pin replacements. The tomato can was helpful because of its weight, but ultimately the hot chocolate canister won out.

The final result. Not too bad. Not as good as jules', but they never are.

back to the hunt for the m&m's. mince pies are great and all, but pastry and cadbury's chocolate will only get you so far.

move over, macgyver

i know, i know, too much radio silence, and i have much to report: meetings with living distant relatives, cemetery hunting for dead distant relatives, trips to exotic places like sheffield, bonfire night fireworks, and more. loads of photos waiting to be introduced to the world. but i feel it very important to state for the record that there are definite drawbacks to living alone in a large, albeit at times unbearably exciting, city in which one knows precisely nobody. one of these is that when you slice your finger wide open whilst attempting to slice your egg bagel from the local bakery and realize in a moment of horror as you watch the blood pouring down that not only are there are no band-aids in your apartment but that you probably need stitches but you don't really have health coverage here and the hospital is a mile away and walking to it with a finger wrapped in a dishtowel would be awfully inconvenient...there is nobody to run to the store for you to pick up some gauze and tape and, hell, some glue because a trip to the emergency room would be awfully expensive.

never fear: as i started going into mild shock while sitting on the kitchen floor with said dish towel wrapped around said finger, i maintained enough self-awareness to reach up to the counter and grab said bagel because blood sugar levels or something, and, after eating both it and a couple of oreos, fashioned a bandage of some sort out of strips of dish towel (sorry, landlord) fastened with brown packing tape. it's not soaked with blood yet, so i think i can forego both the er and the glue.

first the hot water, then the oven, then the elevator w/out working lights (i can affirm that riding in an almost pitch black elevator is, indeed, beyond the pale of creepy to the territory of blood curdling), now my finger. despite its best efforts, i won't let this apartment destroy me. i shall conquer it.

this is war.

stuze my photodump

right. the blog. as an exercise in overcoming my deeply ingrained conviction that i can't blog unless i've written the greatest. post. ever., i'm just going to post these photos of the last few weeks to give you an idea of what i see when i leave the library. 

rainy malaysian festival at trafalgar square:

bloomsbury trees 

on the walk home:

thames views:

columbia flower market (3 bunches for a fiver):

sometimes i go on short walks and turn down the wrong canal and then the walk becomes 10.5 miles:

feed your head

[It turns out that posting is considerably more difficult when you don't have internet access at home, and you're terrified that someone at the library will see that you're not involved in Very. Important. Research. My apologies. Stay tuned for a long post concerning all sorts of exciting things like my birthday (not really: it consisted of attending a lecture on half-uncial), the Malaysian Festival (rainy, as I assume is appropriate for Malaysia, and cold, as I assume is not), and the un-Higginsed descendants of Eliza Doolittle.]

Five brief points:

1. Every day I walk past a restaurant called Mother Mash. It advertises itself as a "purveyor of fine mashed potatoes." Somehow, mind-boggingly, this specialty is of enough considerable enticement to people that it is inevitably chock-full of the bankers and lawyers and traders who people that particular portion of my 3.5 mile trek. It boggles the mind (and turns the stomach).

2. I just spent a considerable amount of time researching the difference between a cooker, an oven, and a hob. The distinctions I found don't seem to hold particularly well when searching for manuals for my specific cooker, whose oven component I have yet to discern how to turn on.

3. If you want to while away your time reading exquisitely written prose about where I'm currently living, look no further than this other blog which is not mine, though I wish it were.

4. The best thing about my hair right now is that it looks like black licorice when wet.

5. I don't really have anything to say here; my OCD demanded that I have a list of 5 rather than a list of 4. And thus I reveal myself to you, my weaknesses utterly exposed. (though I suppose I could add, in a nod to some semblance of substance, that if you for some reason want to capture my mood of the last week, the soundtrack has been a mix of Jeff Buckley and Laibach. Needless to say, I've been stalking around with a glint of madness in my eye.)

store of the day

peter the pleater. (he sells blinds.)