What's making me happy this week: the only way is cosiness

Honestly, this week - despite being a short week - has been pretty bleak. It is totally, officially winter, and I am totally officially experiencing the dull glumness that comes with going to and leaving work in the dark, and being freezing cold at home because of our ridiculous lack of insulation and the southerly blowing through the cracks in the windows and floor.* Cold! In my house! All the time! So, given the constant fight to get and keep warm, the thing that is making me MOST happy this week is cosiness, which I imagine looking a little like this:

Stella Nicolaisen

I am writing this while sitting as close to the fire** as I can without my clothes melting, dressed in full tracksuit. I am wearing slippers with fur liners and stockings under my yoga pants, and a polyprop that smells a little strange, in the way that only old polyprops can.

The creme de la creme of cosy, is of course, Bed, and the last few days I have been going to bed as early as seems reasonable for a 31 year old woman. While in bed, I like to curl up with two delicious hot water bottles, in full pyjamas, under a feather duvet and two crochet woollen blankets, and with another person. In a nest of pillows. There can never be too much cosiness!

Other things:

READING: Yep, still working my way through The Confusion. Can't help thinking I'd be making better headway if I was reading just the one book? But why not wade rather than rush... it's not a competition after all.

I've also begun my anticipatory holiday reading. Fran leant me a copy of Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey. Parisian "outsider" history, allegedly. TBH, I've perceived it as only vaguely outsider thus far - but I'm only up to the Renaissance so there is defo room for further developments. I hear the nineteenth century was good for such things, and I hold high hopes for an excess of twentieth century material.

WATCHING: After a discussion during a drunken Friday catch-up, Katherine sent me a link to food history series Supersizers on YouTube. Basically, the premise of this show is that Giles, a restaurant critic, and Sue, a comedian (allegedly), investigate the food and costumes of a particular historical period and are completely gluttonous in the process.

Shannon has described the show as 'nihilistic' and there is something deliberately bleak about the way that they throw food around. I keep thinking 'ARGH! WASTE!'. And how they complain - about what is essentially my dream job.

There are umpteen complete episodes on YouTube, and you should definitely check it out, if only for the cockatrice and the cock riding a piglet in the Medieval episode.

helmeted cock

FAVOURITE PODCAST EPISODE: Wireless Nights with Jarvis Cocker - Nights of Passage, mostly because of the story about a woman falling off the Newcastle-Amsterdam Ferry and into the waters of the English Channel.

I usually find Wireless Nights self-conscious and a bit annoying - it takes the "radio-ness" of Radiolab to the Nth degree and it feels rather laboured. I think that the more recent episodes are a bit more settled into the format.

Maybe I'm just not enough of a Pulp fangirl to be listening to this podcast.

KNITTING: Cast on a new pair of socks! And after completion I will have a break from socks for a bit I think.

Do you have a good solution for dealing with all this COLD?


*This sounds only a little more Dickensian than it actually feels.
**heater that likes to pretend it's a fire.\

Shamelessly Trawling for a Flatmate

Are you looking for a fabulous flat in fabulous Mt Victoria with three other people? Drop me a line and I can let you know the deets. James is moving out, and Hayley and Shan-diggity-dawg and I are looking for someone equally fabulous to take his place in the flat (they couldn't take his place in our HEARTS).

Edited to add: the Trade Me advertisement is up, finally.

The best time a bird flew into my house and pooed all over a curtain

I was working in my bedroom when I heard super loud bird-shriek. This was so much louder than the bird-shriek that one would hears inside the house and my first assumption was that we finally had a kaka in our back garden. Imagine me! rushing excitedly through the house and towards the backdoor into the courtyard only to discover that the noise was emanating NOT from a large native parrot outside the house, but from a blackbird that was unremarkable except for the fact that it was in our lounge. The moment I saw it, it pooed decisively on the hardwood floor. It then flew straight into the corner window in a desperate and pathetic effort to leave the room and flapped against the closed sash window.

I wanted to close the door into the rest of the house, open a window in the lounge and hope like hell that the blackbird would find it's own way out while I studiously ignored it,  but instead I used my recently-found powers of responsibility and non-procrastination to remove the bird myself. Using a tea towel, I tried to firmly grasp the bird while it flapped about and pooed copiously all over the corner window and the curtain. I've never seen such a bad case of the anxiety shits from a bird - possibly something that it had eaten in the kitchen on it's way into the lounge had upset its stomach. If the bird had been outside I would have said that it serves the greedy fucker right but, as it was, the only creature getting any kind of comeuppance was me.

Eventually, I managed to gently grasp the blackbird, and as I walked it back towards the front door it saw the opening and flew outside where it proceeded to heave and shudder on a nearby ngaio branch. I washed the curtain and wiped the floors down with some hard out chemicals. How many times did I wash my hands afterwards? I estimate somewhere around the millions mark.

THE END.

In which my camera isn't dead after all

I was absolutely convinced my camera was dead, but before I chucked it entirely I thought I'd give it one last go.

And it worked! The first photo I took was of the view from our back verandah:

And then I took photographs of the little things I am knitting for lovely Bex:

I look forward to truly celebrating this fantastic discovery, just as soon as my batteries are recharged. Awesome.

Your hair smells pretty

Hello lovelies; time for some shameless self promotion (the BEST KIND).

Are YOU looking for a flat in Wellington, New Zealand? Are you looking to move in at the beginning of February? Are you super cool with a love of eating everything drenched in butter and with none of those pesky "special dietary requirements"? Do you like to play a nice game of Cranium in the evening?

YOU COULD BE THE PERSON WE'RE LOOKING FOR.

Behold the lounge.

We have a Trade Me advertisement. Or you can email me direct! Please spread the word x

The inside of my head this Monday

Photo via Vintage Photos.

I'm feeling grumpy like this grumpy man. Grump grump grump, eating worms etc.

The Boy was here in the weekend on a break from his epic around the country trip looking at radio transmitters. It was awfully nice to see him because I am rather fond of him. We drank and gossiped and had a bit of a dance off on Friday night, and then went to the vege markets on Sunday morning. It was all terribly domesticated and rather cosy and lovely. These are the things that living together is good for!

I now have a little less than a fortnight to wait until he is back for good, and I’m so stoked. The flat dynamics are all wrong without him around too, and it makes it kind of horrible to live there. Flat dynamics are a subtle balance indeed, especially given my apparent intolerance for almost everyone in the world. The dynamics need to be perfect or else I find myself raging about and re-organising what has recently be re-organised by someone else. ("I CAN'T BELIEVE HE MOVED MY TOASTED SANDWICH MAKER" *basilisk glare*).

I scrimmaged in the weekend for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks. I forgot how much I love hitting people. I’m still a bit overly cautious and appear to have become afraid of falling over, but still - it’s just a matter of working through these head things. It’s been a drag trying to convince myself that I still have the abilities that I had last year, and to keep motivated to train when I know that I won’t be skating in the first bout. Also, admin stuff is making me hell grumpy at present, and so despite my little bit of joy in skating again, I am piking this evening to be quiet and far away.

My flat has been pretty much abandoned - Shannon and Dave are away, and my third flatmate, James, is pretty much always busy and is never there. It's fair to assume that I'm going to have the place to myself until next Thursday - quelle excitement! I'm planning my perfect evening for tonight in an effort to make myself feel better in my grumpiness. Thus, I am planning to make Italian Meatball Soup, hula hoop in the lounge to Beyonce, MIA and Missy Elliot for the hour or so it should take to cook this, then oil my spinning wheel and spin for an hour while watching an episode of Rome. Does that sound some kind of awesome or what? Wish me luck!

Baby Steps

Lately it's benn a bit of a mission trying to find new/old routines, and especially a routine in which blogging will fit. We'll just have to take baby steps for the time being and darlings, I'm afraid that you'll just get what you get. This is a cardinal blogging rule broken (people want REGULARITY, dontcha know), but until I'm paid to blog full time about my own shit, strict regularity is just not going to happen, I'm afraid. I stop blogging when I start feeling guilty about not blogging what I thought I would blog, which leads me into a vicious cycle of procrastination that can only be broken by being kind to myself.

I have been feeling The Burn more than I have for an awfully long time. I am back at roller derby training after a somewhat unintentionally long hiatus; I've recovered from my 2009 Season Burn-out and am trying to balance out my commitments a little better this year. One of the nicest things that I've picked up, and recently with a kind of vengeance, is Astanga yoga. It's a very physical form of yoga but it works very well with the very high impact stuff that we do at derby and has helped me with my recovery time from that high impact exercise. I started with yoga because I am obsessed with the tightness in my hip flexors - they're the muscles at the top inside of your leg, which control how wide you can (ahem) spread your legs and the rotation that you can get during that spread - getting my legs rotated further would be good for skating because I want to be able to skate with my feet facing out to either side so I only present my back to the opposition as I take a corner. I saw Smarty Pants do this when she trained with us last year and it was super impressive. Some of the women I skate with can do it and it would be a fantastic thing to have in my arsenal I think.
However, I am so inflexible in my hip "flexors" it's as though my body was made of a ball of plasticine and my legs were two toothpicks jammed in the bottom. When I try to face my feet out they are never straight enough and I end up going around in circles. I don't think I've explained this very well but basically, to do this move your feet should look like this:

And mine end up more like this:

Does this at least partially explain this? I'm hoping so.

You'll be pleased to know that my flexiness is increasing. Once you start making a regular effort to do these things it's impressive how quickly the difference is obvious.

I had a weekend with my Boy and with sleeping and with knitting and it was lovely, and it happened mostly in bed. Because, yes, we are now living together (did I mention?).  One of the best things about this is not having to leap out of bed in the weekends to rush home and do things, or sleep in at his knowing that I am making a trade off on "things that will be achieved". Living together means that I am achieving and sleeping in. It's heaven, wrapped in a duvet, wrapped in bacon with a delicous coffee dipping sauce on the side.

I spent a bunch of birthday vouchers I was given by the Menfolk (and one left over from Christmas), and bought the most beautiful merino possum yarn. Merino possum yarn is the most INSANELY SOFT GORGEOUS YARN ever, like knitting with hand fulls of unicorn based loveliness wrapped in marshmallow clouds. Vouchers give one a much better excuse to buy two $15 balls of yarn. Normally, I could never justify such an expense. On Saturday then I rushed home and made a pair of handwarmers from the yarn and using a pattern from a new book that I bought at Minerva - normally I would just throw a pattern together myself but why the hell not since I bought the book? It's a lovely book too and I want to knit many many things from it.

My earlier rush of obsessive knitting has slowed to a trickle, but I've been awesomely happy with what I've produced which is a nice feeling. I bought a new set of plastic drawer thingumies for stash storage and have been relentlessly frogging disappointing early projects. It's pretty much the most awesome feeling reclaiming wool from pure hideousness mistakenry that I've been trying to wear in homage to my
perserverence. I can't recommend it enough.

LAST DAY LAST DAY LAST DAY LAST DAY LAST DAY LAST DAY

Last day of my job today. I have been filled with cake and coffee and been given a Spotlight voucher to spend on crafty bits which I’m excited about. I think I shall buy some circular needles. $60 dollars on circular needles feels so naughty and good. Most looking forward to it.

I’m also looking forward to starting a new job tomorrow but I’m feeling rather fluey/coldy and ill. Feeling ill is ANNOYING. I’m not into it at all.

I started packing for my impending move (last weekend of this month) during this weekend. I have so much stuff, it’s overwhelming. I’ve been trying to jettison some of it but it feels as though every time I throw something away I’m inundated with something as equally hard to get rid of. Which reminds me – if you want a knitting machine and ribber and table and accessories for $50 flick me an email at the address in the side bar and I’ll let you know all the details.

I’ve been a bit dreadful at sticking to my “picture a day” project. And then I decided that I’d missed so many days there was no point. But I’ve recently read this post on ZenHabits about forming good habits and it spurred me to get back at it again. Thank goodness I don’t try to take photographs like this all year round – the amount of guilt I end up feeling when I forget to do it is just silly.

Nothing else is going really except that I seem to have lost my mojo for heaps of things – I’ve lost my blogging mojo, knitting mojo, tidy bedroom mojo, healthy eating mojo. Derby mojo most of all. Sometimes the looking towards big things (house and job change) totally affects my day to day functionality. Too preoccupied or something.

Musings

Hello my darlings, I hope that today finds you happy and wealthy and wise. I’m feeling two of those at least, and wealthy in other things besides money (say, pour example, debt). It’s Tuesday today, which usually means that I’ve overcome my Monday resolutions to work harder and have resettled myself into the kind of pace I work at most of the week which is principally: work/look something up on the internet/become distracted/down load photographs/blog/remember I’m at work/work/receive email from friend/send email to friend/look something up on the internet/become distracted and so on ad nauseum.

The good news tho’ is that I’ve found a new job! I don’t start for a couple of weeks but I will be based in town which is very exciting for me. I’ve missed working in the city and in Wellington in particular, namely; meeting my friends for excellent coffee and lunches and breakfasts, and picking up bits that I need from around and about. Being able to commit to social engagements that start at 6pm or before. Visiting galleries at lunch time. Running into people I haven’t seen in forever.

I should also stress that the job itself is pretty awesome and is much closer to what I imagine is my ideal job – history and heritage and New Zealand culture and the internets. It makes me extremely happy – nay, I feel contentment – knowing that I have this job to look forward to.

♥♥♥

More changes: it’s looking for sure that I’m going to be moving at the end of March. I’ve spent most of the last few days fantasising about how I will decorate my new room – I’m still feeling the urge to paint everything white that isn’t already wood, but I also want to make a patchwork duvet cover with some of my fabric stash, and hang tiny stuffed birds from the ceiling, and make my fairy lights into a canopy so I feel like a princess while I’m lying in bed. I’m moving into the Boy’s flat but I will have my own space, and after living in my aerie tree house room for so long I’m ready for a room change. I do love parts of my tree house room tho and I shall miss it terribly. I wish I could move it with me.

I’ve been collecting images of rooms and things that have enthused me and have two albums, one on Flickr and one on Picasa.

♥♥♥

My Boy is leaving for some exotic trips this Friday – a week in Auckland for work (not so exotique) and then a month in Nepal; traipsing the mountains, wearing hand made knitwear, drinking yak butter tea, standing on rocks with his hands on his hips and surveying the landscape, and growing a beard like a crazy mountain man.

While he’s having a fun holiday I thought I might repeat my experiment from last year while he was in India – this was taking a photograph a day while he was travelling. I’ll begin on Friday for me but I’ll put up the photographs together once a week. It’s something to do to distract me from sexual frustration I guess.

♥♥♥

In other blog news, I am moving slowly through my CALH round up. Did I say slowly? I meant at a glacial pace. You could use me as an evolutionary measuring stick at present.

I saw Megan on the bus yesterday and we talked about how lazy blogging made one about one’s writing, never drafting or reading over anything and never really having a point, meandering endlessly and finishing sentences with ellipses instead of coming to any kind of conclusion… My new diary has been awesome for facilitating my writing. It’s fantastic to be liberated from the computer keyboard – I think differently when writing in different mediums and process of transcribing from handwriting to blog entry is effective in terms of editing closely.

I like writing. I forget that.

♥♥♥

Finally, I am totally in love with this woman at the moment. She makes every day a good day. I suggest that you download her and stick her on your desktop for maximum AWESOME.

VIA

Do you know what I LURRRRVE?

Saturdays with NOTHING TO DO and POTTERING. Is this the

BIG SATURDAY AROHANUI?

I suspect it is.
Today couldn't have been much better and I anticipate it's only going to get better... Why so great?

• Woke up and slept in close and warm with the Boy. This included reading a deliciously trashy novel while he curled up around me. Yes, this is as awesomely awesome as it sounds.
• Coffee coffee coffee to my little heart's content.
• Finished making my cardigan. I'm super proud of myself; I love how eccentric it looks; I love that I made it myself; and mostly, I LOVE LOVE LOVE finishing craft projects, especially ones where I've put a whole heap of work in
• Cleaned the kitchen. Wow! It's so much nicer when clean! You'd think that I'd realise this more often.
• I spent all day wearing a pink sweatshirt with a growling tiger on it. Does a weekend wardrobe get much better? I don't think so.
• I ate a whole heap of chocolate cream cheese muffins (I made them the other night). Um - they're awesome.
• Discovered the genius of Genius on iTunes. This is quite great fun... I didn't even realise that I had half of this music!
• Caramel Popcorn anticipation. I've never made it before but suffice to say, I'm rather excited by the prospect. I'm planning to take it out tonight (if I haven't eaten it all) to
• BRYNA'S PATRICK SWAYZE MEMORIAL MOVIE MARATHON!

Listening to: Vivian Girls - Where Do You Run To

A Room With a View

Do you know anyone in Wellington who is looking for somewhere to live?

Tom and I are looking for a new flatmate... all the details are on Trade Me.

That is all.

Arohanui

Things I love, for the first time in ages, and in an effort to neutralise some of my angst of the last week.

• Riding my velocipede along the waterfront at a leisurely pace on a sunny day. I like watching the people strolling, everyone seems to be in a good mood. I also like pulling up to a park bench on Oriental Parade and reading in the sun while listening to the sea. Yay!
• Baking cupcakes. I love the anticipation, the smell, and the fact I get to ice them afterwards, with ridiculous pastel coloured butter icing from a piping bag.
• New flatmate anticipation - don't get me wrong, there are many things *wrong* with the process of finding a new flatmate, but it is exciting to get to meet some new people and to think what they could potentially bring to your life as well.
• Living with my brother Tom. He's so quiet, keeps to himself so much, but he has an absolute heart of gold. He's taken to checking that I'll be home for dinner, and he makes good burritos.

• Being excited about Richter City Roller Derby's inaugural bout "The Grudgemaker". I am going to be MCing and I bought a suspender, fishnet stockings and false eyelashes the other day, to go with my new peacock blue and emerald green brocade 60s mini dress. I am going to have SO MUCH FUN. I've never worn false eyelashes. If you're in Wellington, you should totally come BTW.
• Having a great Shannon around.

 

(the photo is by the Polaroid Kidd, who seems to have taken his site down *sad face*)

Tonight my exposure-to-idiots quotient goes through the roof

I made a Trade Me advertisement for my flat. I've very clearly advertised for fabulous people...

And the people who have emailed me, are not.

A "female fulltime worker" sounds like a prostitute. And "leme"? Oh, and "allright"?

And so many idiot questions. I clearly state "3 Weeks TBC" and someone asks if they can move in next week.

As of yet, only four replies received. So many more adventures in Trade Me to come.

thnx

Not my story

Earlier today Tom (presently on overnight shifts) was woken by a strange scratching sound from the kitchen. He wandered from his room next door to find that we'd partially caught a mouse: the trap had caught on its tail, and it was dragging the lump of plastic around behind it. When Tom came into the room the mouse tried to escape into a hole in a cupboard but the trap prevented its escape; it was too big to fit in the mouse-sized gap and wedged itself firmly on the wrong side of the hole, ultimately preventing the mouse from avoiding Tom's rodent-wrath.

Tom then gave the mouse to the neighbours cat, Elvira. This cat has recently lost quite a lot of weight and has become more enthusiastic about killing small animals. Clearly Tom supports Elvira's development programme.

I heard this story and it seemed quite slapstick (especially the bit about the mouse being prevented from escaping by the trap on its tail). Now that I've written it out I'm realising that the slapstick patina  belies the fact that it's quite cruel tragedy when perceived from the mouse-perspective. However it does mean that we're winning for once: Us: 2, Mice Invaders: 0

Today: nothing to see here

This is my bedroom. The wind is blowing something dreadful, feel as though I might get blown out to sea... delicious feeling you know. The week is hurtling towards Elections, Dumpling '08 and other Decisions. I won the Melbourne Cup Sweepstake at work, and am now heavily laden with $20 in change.

Looks like: my first peony of 2008. Einfach fabelhaft. Das gefaelt mir ja gut.

Smells like: I've drunk too much cheap bubbly.

Sounds like: the wind wants to be inside my bedroom.

In which the Declutter is Complete

 

My bedroom is super hott. It is so decisively decluttered that visitors have been known to swoon from their surprise at seeing the floor.

What is the secret? The secret is: a place for everything and everything in its place. If something doesn't have a home you have a choice of either finding it a home or getting rid of it (chucking, donating, selling). Sounds super obvious doesn't it? A lot harder to undertake, especially when you have a lot of stuff. Time to be brutal. Incidentally, letting your friends go through your bag of random clothes and stuff is a great way of getting rid of stuff without feeling so much of a wrench - its good to know that your once-precious things are going to a good home.

This bit has involved me thinking inventively about ways I can store things. I have a new rack for my shoes, and clear plastic stackable boxes that have cleared up my floor no end. I used this tutorial by Susan Beal on CraftStylish to make embroidery frame display-things for my badges and brooches...

...and this tutorial by Ana Maria Braga to make the stand for my prettiest records and random parcels of goodness (these are knitted presents for various Lucky Girls)...

...Gala Darling was my inspiration for the pegged-up pictures.

A second rule: the clearer the floor space, the bigger the room will appear... if the line of sight is drawn upwards then the room will seem more spacious. This is especially important in my room because it isn't especially big - although lots of glorious windows and my fabulous view give the impression of spaciousness. So I've tried to keep lots of my surfaces clear and tidy, and to hang pictures very high.

Finally, I'm lucky that I have lots of windows, and I've discovered that exposing the windows as much as possible by tying the curtains back with ribbons shows the windows to their optimum size... more light, more air, BETTER!

I believe the declutter will be ongoing, as I find more and more exciting ways to tidy and retidy and re-order. I am such a girl for Stuff, and I don't think that will change in a hurry. But it sure is nice to be able to see all my stuff and not feel overwhelmed by it. Huzzah!

Convalescence Day 11

Since my uncontrolled ranting of mid-last-week, I'm feeling only a billion times better. I'm in my nest again, on my hill, up my stairs. This morning I watched a succession of birds (tui, waxeye) leap from the tree in front of my window to bathe themselves on the roof.... I lay in bed and watched them preen.

I've read James Meek's The People's Act of Love, leant to me by Jennifer and Simon during my hospital stay. I'm rating it. Fascinating subject matter and satisfying personality puzzles falling neatly into place before being grossly obvious. Beautifully written.

Keeping in a Russian theme, I've just started reading Katerina: the Russian world of Katherine Mansfield by Joanna Woods.The introduction to the book is written by Vincent O'Sullivan - who also wrote an article about KM in last weeks Listener - which was essentially a preview piece to his release of KM's last volume of letters. Sadly, I only own a copy of the "Selected Letters", very slim given the fact that the collected letters stretch to five volumes.... plenty of time to collect these later, perhaps.

Warmth is achieved by two blankets, a duvet, a sleeping bag, a sheet and two hot water bottles. And a nest created by the manymany pillows. Today I have spent most of the day curled on my armchair, on top of The Bear Fur and wrapped in a crochet Old Ladies' Blanket. There is nothing greater than being curled up warm in a Room of Ones' Own.

Meeting the Landlord

I met the landlord for the first time today, stayed around all morning in order to nag him to do something about the water that pours out of my roof (and more specifically, out of my light fitting)  in inclement weather. I think we've reached an understanding.

Also, I am going to the doctor's finally about the itchiness/itchy bruises. There is nothing more bizarre than an itchy bruise.

Bella moved in yesterday. I made prototype Gingerbread Broken Bones for the G&L Fair on Saturday - have to practice icing them now. The recipe I used tasted good but was very dry, I'm planning to try a different gingerbread recipe tonight and see if it is a better one. Otherwise, I would really really like to lie in bed with a book and ignore the world.

In which Sarah declares her love for Roller Derby and bemoans her inside leg muscles.

1. I fucking LOVE roller derby. Yesterday we got to tussle a bit too which was super neat, except I was then tickled by Emi from the other team...? THAT'S not Derby. I only fell over once and skated fast and my T-stops are way better and knee stops fucking rock. I have NO new haematomas.
2. But I do have rather tender inner leg muscles, right up by my *ahem*.
3. Shannon started working on the sound for the Radio Documentary which was terribly exciting - listening to bits of the audio was fab; sounds awesome and suddenly it felt as though it was tangible as oppose to a mere concept conceived over beer.
4. Very exciting storm last night: raining in my room again, and this time out of the light fixture. So, I'll be attempting to sort that out today. And if I don't have some movement on the issue I'm going to pepper a post with the name of the property agents so that when they're Googled my post defaming them will appear on the top of the search and their name will be MUD. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha. But really, it's really unsafe.

Good good day!

Everything's falling into place... super. Lots of achievement at work, feeling much more on to it than I have the last week or so (really, since I've been back). I harassed an elderly Northland woman into showing me her collection and felt really in touch with the retail bitch within. Deliciously pushy.

I can't wait for my flatmates to move out and for Bella to move in. I swear, sometimes I just want to shriek they are SO FREAKING DULL. Dull-ness is THE Cardinal Sin. I think I could excuse nearly everything else, but people who are so wilfully boring... I could be using that patient tolerance, you know? For someone who is more deserving of my patience and tolerance, and would be more appreciative also. Honestly, I really have tried... but in the weekends, when the weather is amazing, and they'd rather sit inside and watch some absolute fucking drivel of an American movie... all the tolerance and the patience in the world is necessarily put to the test.

Dull, dull, DULL.

And the white bread that turns into powdery orange mould before it's used up freaks me out no end.

And they eat canned fish. EWWWWWWW.

And when they "cook" they mix two cans together. And we share food, so I have to partake in the resulting slop.

And when one of them eats anything I make the first thing he does is smother it in tomato sauce, and then he thrusts it between two of the six slice of white papier-mache-esque bread that he eats at every meal.

And he uses metal instruments in the pots and pans and it makes a terrible screeching sound.

And he unplugs the router and decoder all the time so it is always a huge, massive mission to access the internet.

Enough. I was actually having a Super Day before I started on this rant. Now I am hungry for salad and blue cheese. YUM.