Frozen Furniture, Satin Peaches, and Jane Austen

Hey, kids. It's me again. I'm going to go ahead and assume that you missed me terribly and that my resuming this blog-action has just made your day. You're welcome.





Life lesson #34


You can only rinse and re-use styrofoam bowls so many times, and that "so many" is never as many as you think it is.





Life lesson #51


Though it takes slightly longer, cereal gets just as soggy on milk-soaked carpet as it does in a styrofoam bowl of milk.





I learned a lot yesterday morning.


It was a great start to an even greater day. Allen and I spent £30 each (that's right - $60) on a show that we never should have gone to, I ran out of money on my oyster card (again) and had to use change to top it up because I had no more money (so embarassing), and a pigeon crapped on my head. Ok...that last part was a lie...but my seemed really horrible and then I started bitching about it and it didn't sound nearly as bad as it was in my head, so I compensated with pigeon poo. Don't judge me. The point is, we're poor.





Our friend Katie knew some guys in a band (The Satin Peaches) that was passing through the area on tour with The Go! Team. We saw them at Astoria near SoHo in central London, which was a pretty sweet venue, but tickets were £10 and £15 (don't ask - it's a sore subject) and after a couple Strongbows and Jack-and-Cokes, our money was gone. We only caught the last couple Satin Peaches songs, which sucked because they were pretty good. We were there for the whole Go! Team set, though, and that was not as good. Not nearly. They all looked about 17 years old (all SEVEN of them - seriously - is that necessary? They had 2 drummers on stage, and I'm pretty sure they were playing exactly the same thing the whole time.) Whatever. It was a night. No more ridiculous outings. If we're going to see a band we don't know, we're setting a limit on our spendings.





My financial woes are about to ebb, though, ladies and gentlemen! I'm getting a job! I've actually already been hired....at....subway....

but that's only a last resort, I swear! I told them I can't start til Monday so I'm going to see how my other interviews go before then. I have one at HMV, a big music store on Oxford Street on Friday and with Gift Fundraising, a company who does street fundraising for charities. I am super-excited about that one.



Yesterday we went to The British Library for our Literary London class. What a horrible thing - spending class time in a world-famous library/museum surrounded by original copies of some of the world's most important works of literature. Seriously, it was miserable. (If you can't smell sacrasm wafting through your computer speakers, please make necessary adjustments.) I saw Shakespeare's First Folio, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sylvis Plath's Insomniac, pages from Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf's Notebook for Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Austen's Vol. the 3rd (one of several stories she wrote to a friend when she was young), Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, John Milton's commonplace book, the Codex Sinaiticus, the original handwritten lyrics of a bunch of Beatles songs, a letter from Charles Darwin to Alfred Wallace, one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta, and LEWIS CAROL'S DIARY. That was so freaking cool. I also looked through a digital copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in his handwriting, with his original illustrations. And that was only some of it. A few little things like the original copies of Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales were out of rotation, so we didn't get to see them. It was still pretty fantastic, though.



I really like my classes so far. My project for Hospitality Design is to "redefine the dining experience." I'll explan more about it as the term goes on, but I'm looking into doing a public-awareness project on the experience of dinnertime as a homeless person. It's looking pretty promising so far, and I am SUPER excited about it. For "research" our professor is taking us to a couple "unique dining venues" around the city, the Ice Bar and Dans Le Noir.




Ok, time for some food. There's an amazing deli down the street that sells everything for £1 after 18:00, and it's totally 18:15 (Yeah, everyone uses "24 hour clock" here. It's weird).


Done and done.


stacy