Do you ever get the feeling you’re missing out on something? When you’re so busy with a million different pies in the air (ah…the mixed metaphor) that Real Life seems to be passing you by?
That’s the feeling I have right now.
We’ve had a class test and two essays in the past 3 weeks – one in genetics, which is a foreign language to me; plus it’s been frantically busy at work as things round up to the last corner before this beast of a project comes to a close. Because I’m only part time now, I’ve been known to stay until past 7:00 some nights. Tomorrow I have another essay to churn out, then it’s a day of rest then another test and another report for the end of the week.
I feel like I should be getting more done, but I’ve also been sacrificing any semblance of a social and personal life.
I took a break from studying at the weekend to spend some time with my oft-neglected boyfriend. We went to the Farmers Market on Saturday to stock up the fridge, then hit the charity shops in the afternoon and finished off at Courtyard Antiques in Causewayside – this time it was old maps we came home with, and a full set of beautiful copper frying pans of varying sizes, which we got for a song.
We cancelled on one of our friends coming round as we were knackered from too much wandering and far too much spending; ended up with folk round anyway, but it was a pretty chilled out evening…with hats.
I bought a velvet sombrero from a charity shop. It’s very…ornate. I also bought an 80s style round wicker coffee table with just enough room in the base to fit a cushion and perhaps the cat, if it pleases her.
Charity shops are amazing, I love them. You can get anything, you just never know when it will appear in your life. Some of my proudest finds have been from charity shops.
Yesterday I locked myself into the bedroom with my laptop and did a good few hours of solid essay writing before we went into town to buy some jammies (for both of us – flannel reindeer for me and a reasonably sedate red plaid for him). Boyfriend was oh-so patient with my shopping compulsion, bless him. When we came home he didn’t nag me to come out with the puppy (I took Baby Boy out on my own in the morning for the first time ever), and I got in a few more hours of productive time.
After class this morning, I had to wolf down my packed lunch and rush off to catch my bus to work.
I would have liked to spend a few minutes chatting with my friends from my course. There are a few people I get along with really well who I don’t see much of outside of class – there was a really sweet girl I got along with who I found out today has dropped out.
Today’s jumper colour: orange
Showing posts with label weekend roundup. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weekend roundup. Show all posts
Monday, 15 November 2010
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Weekend roundup
Last weekend there was the infamous midgie massacre of my legs, from which we are still finding casualties. Despite this the boyfriend and I had a lovely couple of days at our friend’s farm. He picked us up on Saturday around lunchtime, which was lucky as I was starting to feel the Festival Rage. It’s an unfortunate affliction which seems to come on around this time in August when tourists start invading my city and treating us lowly locals as part of the entertainment. Anyways, enough of that…we shall only speak of nice things!
The puppy sat in the back with me, dressed in his Sunday best…
Saturday afternoon we raided the vegetable patch. There really is nothing quite like eating sweet peas straight off the plant, and I must have devoured a hundred of them. They were so sweet we could have had them for dessert!
I left a pile of empties behind me…
Sunday was for lazing about and not doing a whole lot. We didn’t want to tire ourselves out before the drive home! The boyfriend and I found a couple of sun loungers and settled into a nice reclining position. Even the puppy decided to adopt a distinctly horizontal stance.
We resurfaced for long enough to have a wee barbecue…
The buffalo steaks were from Puddledub Buffalo at the Farmers Market, and everything else – the carrots, the sugarsnap peas (my favourites) and the onions - came from the veg garden less than ten feet away. You really can’t beat zero food miles, from plant to plate in under a minute! The carrots were super-sweet and tasted like no carrot you could find in a supermarket and I think I ate more peas in those two days than I ever have in my life. We didn’t do much to them, just grilled with a little bit of oil and did the steaks in a splash of Lea and Perrins.
The puppy sat in the back with me, dressed in his Sunday best…
Saturday afternoon we raided the vegetable patch. There really is nothing quite like eating sweet peas straight off the plant, and I must have devoured a hundred of them. They were so sweet we could have had them for dessert!
I left a pile of empties behind me…
Sunday was for lazing about and not doing a whole lot. We didn’t want to tire ourselves out before the drive home! The boyfriend and I found a couple of sun loungers and settled into a nice reclining position. Even the puppy decided to adopt a distinctly horizontal stance.
We resurfaced for long enough to have a wee barbecue…
The buffalo steaks were from Puddledub Buffalo at the Farmers Market, and everything else – the carrots, the sugarsnap peas (my favourites) and the onions - came from the veg garden less than ten feet away. You really can’t beat zero food miles, from plant to plate in under a minute! The carrots were super-sweet and tasted like no carrot you could find in a supermarket and I think I ate more peas in those two days than I ever have in my life. We didn’t do much to them, just grilled with a little bit of oil and did the steaks in a splash of Lea and Perrins.
Monday, 2 August 2010
Weekend roundup
I had a mini adventure on my way to see the boyfriend on Saturday night. It all started when I got in a taxi at Leven bus station…
Everything started out fine. The driver was friendly, said he hoped I liked old time rock-and-roll, then proceeded to stick on a Bobby Darrin CD. This was going the way of an old Buddy Holly tune, and I had no objections. He even quoted me twenty quid for the journey, including a brief stopover at Sainsburys so I could pick up a few groceries. Not bad considering I have sometimes paid thirty quid just for the journey from Leven to St Monans, without a stopover.
After we left the Sainsburys car park, the driver mentioned he wasn’t that familiar with St Monans, and asked if I cold get directions – the place I was headed to was on land that belonged to a local farm, so he had no idea how to get there. I said fine and phoned the boyfriend. He was halfway through rattling off directions when I heard a sentence you never want to hear coming out of the mouth of someone driving you to a remote cottage, halfway to your destination and nowhere near your starting point on a deserted road.
“I think my car is breaking down.”
Ah crap. At that point I noticed his car was making a clunking noise that most definitely did not sound healthy. It was stuck in second gear, and the driver was concerned if he stopped the car, it may not start back up again. The house I was going to was not quite in St Monans, and would take us slightly off-road for a few hundred metres, so I told the driver it would be ok to drop me off by the bus stop on the main road – he felt bad as I was a lone female and it was getting quite late, but there really wasn’t anything for it and I didn’t want him to be stranded on a farm road waiting for help! He’d already phoned his dispatcher, who’d said unfortunately they couldn’t send anyone for ages to pick him up. His plan was just to ease the car back to Leven and hope for the best.
As we neared the bus stop, the driver gave me a two minute warning and I undid my seatbelt, opened the passenger side door, and chucked my overnight bag onto the pavement. Then I jumped out. He couldn’t stop the car completely, but he did manage to slow down enough so I didn’t have to do a ninja-style dismount. As he pulled away I heard him shout “are you alright?”, but I’d landed on my feet and other than a dusty bag, no damage at all.
About five minutes later my boyfriend rocked up with the puppy. The sun had vanished completely but I’d started reading a magazine by streetlight.
We had a bit of a tearful hello as we’d not seen each other in over 48 hours – the longest we’d been separated in ten months. I know he’s at our friend’s for a reason – it’s a damned good reason too, and he is doing a good thing – but I miss him like crazy. He was looking good – and more importantly healthy – but a bit scruffy. The boys never do care about hygiene much when left on their own for a few days, although our host Chris can be a bit girly sometimes, with his love for aromatherapy oils, Kiehls moisturiser and fairylights.
The walk down to Chris’s cottage is quite nice in the dark, though in late July the sun never entirely goes away, so the sky wasn’t entirely pitch black. The puppy was even relatively well behaved.
We had a pretty chilled out evening, though it was weird having Chris’s cottage all to ourselves. We usually end up there with a few people sitting round the fire, but on Saturday night it was just the two of us and the animals. We made a beef stew with the groceries I’d bought in my 30-second-dash through Sainsburys and settled in to watch the rest of “Gangs of New York”. Quality film, if a bit traumatic in parts. It’s done a lot to redeem Leonardo DiCaprio in my estimations after the entire “Titanic” debacle – oh hell that was a shit film. I really think he’s much better in films where he isn’t portrayed as the romantic hero – he’s not got the face for it, but he’s a decent character actor playing quirky roles, like in “What’s eating Gilbert Grape”.
We didn’t talk much, just sat with the coal fire burning and the film on the laptop in the corner. I dozed off for a few minutes when the boyfriend went to check on the food, but this time I made it through the whole film. Chris’s cat came in at one point, and the puppy decided to investigate – that cat is so much more chilled out than ours, and he just sat there and took it as puppy prodded him, gave him kisses and nuzzled his ear. We took a few photos because, as per usual, we are like the pet paparazzi.
“Get your coat, you’ve pulled”
The next morning we went on a short walk into town to grab some groceries and provisions for Sunday lunch. The fridge was bare when I turned up (I thought it was an exaggeration – it wasn’t) so we were looking for a meat, some veg, and maybe snackage. I love the idea of living in a seaside town, but what I would find very hard to live with is the lack of choice. There are two shops in town open on Sunday, and one of them is a generic chain convenience store. To be fair, it does stock some unusual produce – I’ll get to that later – but it’s mostly generic over-farmed meat and ready meals full of additives and E-numbers.
On the walk home poor puppy was a bit ill, so we stopped at the local vet’s surgery to jot down the emergency number. We had to tie puppy up and this was the only thing we could find. Cute! I’ve no idea what he is doing with his tail though.
Chris arrived home with his dad not long after, so we dispatched Pa of Chris with the leftover stew from the night before and “Orange County” on DVD. We stuck the whole chicken in the le Creuset pot I’d unearthed for Chris a year ago from my infinite stores of kitchen equipment (still no signs of depletion) with a drizzle of oil and rubbed with some sundried tomato pesto. It was a pure lazy Sunday lunch, but Chris doesn’t have an oven so the choices were limited. We had to cook the chicken in a toaster oven – oddly something I’ve had to do before for Christmas and Thanksgiving at my mum and dad’s house, as my mum cannot use her oven and relies on a small toaster oven they’ve had since I was in primary school. The actual oven is used to store baking trays, muffin tins and frying pans.
We gave Chris his wee pressie – we found this sitting on top of the deep freeze in the Spar and I thought it was too random to pass up. I hope he never eats it at it may kill him, but the fact someone has marketed this is amazing to me.
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Everything started out fine. The driver was friendly, said he hoped I liked old time rock-and-roll, then proceeded to stick on a Bobby Darrin CD. This was going the way of an old Buddy Holly tune, and I had no objections. He even quoted me twenty quid for the journey, including a brief stopover at Sainsburys so I could pick up a few groceries. Not bad considering I have sometimes paid thirty quid just for the journey from Leven to St Monans, without a stopover.
After we left the Sainsburys car park, the driver mentioned he wasn’t that familiar with St Monans, and asked if I cold get directions – the place I was headed to was on land that belonged to a local farm, so he had no idea how to get there. I said fine and phoned the boyfriend. He was halfway through rattling off directions when I heard a sentence you never want to hear coming out of the mouth of someone driving you to a remote cottage, halfway to your destination and nowhere near your starting point on a deserted road.
“I think my car is breaking down.”
Ah crap. At that point I noticed his car was making a clunking noise that most definitely did not sound healthy. It was stuck in second gear, and the driver was concerned if he stopped the car, it may not start back up again. The house I was going to was not quite in St Monans, and would take us slightly off-road for a few hundred metres, so I told the driver it would be ok to drop me off by the bus stop on the main road – he felt bad as I was a lone female and it was getting quite late, but there really wasn’t anything for it and I didn’t want him to be stranded on a farm road waiting for help! He’d already phoned his dispatcher, who’d said unfortunately they couldn’t send anyone for ages to pick him up. His plan was just to ease the car back to Leven and hope for the best.
As we neared the bus stop, the driver gave me a two minute warning and I undid my seatbelt, opened the passenger side door, and chucked my overnight bag onto the pavement. Then I jumped out. He couldn’t stop the car completely, but he did manage to slow down enough so I didn’t have to do a ninja-style dismount. As he pulled away I heard him shout “are you alright?”, but I’d landed on my feet and other than a dusty bag, no damage at all.
About five minutes later my boyfriend rocked up with the puppy. The sun had vanished completely but I’d started reading a magazine by streetlight.
We had a bit of a tearful hello as we’d not seen each other in over 48 hours – the longest we’d been separated in ten months. I know he’s at our friend’s for a reason – it’s a damned good reason too, and he is doing a good thing – but I miss him like crazy. He was looking good – and more importantly healthy – but a bit scruffy. The boys never do care about hygiene much when left on their own for a few days, although our host Chris can be a bit girly sometimes, with his love for aromatherapy oils, Kiehls moisturiser and fairylights.
The walk down to Chris’s cottage is quite nice in the dark, though in late July the sun never entirely goes away, so the sky wasn’t entirely pitch black. The puppy was even relatively well behaved.
We had a pretty chilled out evening, though it was weird having Chris’s cottage all to ourselves. We usually end up there with a few people sitting round the fire, but on Saturday night it was just the two of us and the animals. We made a beef stew with the groceries I’d bought in my 30-second-dash through Sainsburys and settled in to watch the rest of “Gangs of New York”. Quality film, if a bit traumatic in parts. It’s done a lot to redeem Leonardo DiCaprio in my estimations after the entire “Titanic” debacle – oh hell that was a shit film. I really think he’s much better in films where he isn’t portrayed as the romantic hero – he’s not got the face for it, but he’s a decent character actor playing quirky roles, like in “What’s eating Gilbert Grape”.
We didn’t talk much, just sat with the coal fire burning and the film on the laptop in the corner. I dozed off for a few minutes when the boyfriend went to check on the food, but this time I made it through the whole film. Chris’s cat came in at one point, and the puppy decided to investigate – that cat is so much more chilled out than ours, and he just sat there and took it as puppy prodded him, gave him kisses and nuzzled his ear. We took a few photos because, as per usual, we are like the pet paparazzi.
“Get your coat, you’ve pulled”
The next morning we went on a short walk into town to grab some groceries and provisions for Sunday lunch. The fridge was bare when I turned up (I thought it was an exaggeration – it wasn’t) so we were looking for a meat, some veg, and maybe snackage. I love the idea of living in a seaside town, but what I would find very hard to live with is the lack of choice. There are two shops in town open on Sunday, and one of them is a generic chain convenience store. To be fair, it does stock some unusual produce – I’ll get to that later – but it’s mostly generic over-farmed meat and ready meals full of additives and E-numbers.
On the walk home poor puppy was a bit ill, so we stopped at the local vet’s surgery to jot down the emergency number. We had to tie puppy up and this was the only thing we could find. Cute! I’ve no idea what he is doing with his tail though.
Chris arrived home with his dad not long after, so we dispatched Pa of Chris with the leftover stew from the night before and “Orange County” on DVD. We stuck the whole chicken in the le Creuset pot I’d unearthed for Chris a year ago from my infinite stores of kitchen equipment (still no signs of depletion) with a drizzle of oil and rubbed with some sundried tomato pesto. It was a pure lazy Sunday lunch, but Chris doesn’t have an oven so the choices were limited. We had to cook the chicken in a toaster oven – oddly something I’ve had to do before for Christmas and Thanksgiving at my mum and dad’s house, as my mum cannot use her oven and relies on a small toaster oven they’ve had since I was in primary school. The actual oven is used to store baking trays, muffin tins and frying pans.
We gave Chris his wee pressie – we found this sitting on top of the deep freeze in the Spar and I thought it was too random to pass up. I hope he never eats it at it may kill him, but the fact someone has marketed this is amazing to me.
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