F*ckin awesome.

Flogging Molly concert at the Astoria. F*cking awesome. I now need to go and wash the sweat of 10,000 shirtless rockers off my skin.

Random Friday

1. New job + longer commute + longer hours = less blog posting

2. I spent at least ten minutes today laughing because of toilet paper.

Every morning at my new office, when I go into the loos, there is a new giant roll of toilet paper in the dispenser thingy. You know, the ones that look like a tire? That's a lot of toilet paper. Although there are quite a few women at my office, there's no way that we can go through two of those things a day, so... what do they do with the not-all-the-way-used-up rolls? Build houses with them? Give them away as toilet paper hand-me-downs? "Here, have this. It's perfectly good, it's just... not good enough for us"?

And what does it say about me that this thought kept me occupied for at least ten minutes.

3. I have been knitting things.

These beautiful socks (The Firestarter, by Yarnissima), which I love, adore and wish that it wasn't going into the sticky months because they have alpaca content and my feet get hot very quickly. I also finished them almost a month ago now, and have managed to not wear them before I took a picture. This is Progress.



And this is the lovely Rusted Root, which I'm knitting out of the Rowan Calmer I was originally going to knit Fifi out of (the pattern just didn't appeal in the end). I am totally not getting gauge, but have been trying it on throughout. This has meant some small modifications to the pattern that probably wouldn't have been necessary had I swatched and was actually getting gauge, but it really doesn't bother me at all. I'm so very excited about finishing this one!


4. Poetry Friday

When You are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

--William Butler Yeats

Lunches

In a lot of ways, things have been hard recently. It took me a long, frustrating time to find a job - not just a job that I liked, or that paid me enough, but just a job. As I'd moved into somewhere in March that, with my optimism, I was pretty positive that I'd certainly be able to afford when I got my new job, and surely, that wouldn't be more than a few weeks, right?, money has been...lacking. When I finally did get a new job, my previous job screwed me over in a fairly massive and unexpected fashion. Which really, I should have expected, seeing as they've been underpaying me and generally being totally unappreciative for the last year. This screwing over didn't really help. Sometimes I think about that Sheryl Crow song, No One Said It Would Be Easy. Some things are good, and generally things are beginning to very much look up again - I've got some amazing people in my life, my new job is going well - but money is still stupidly tight.

I've done this before, in that I know that I can live off $20 or less a week. It's a bit more of a challenge now though, as before I could go and steal as much food as possible from my Mom whenever I went home. Now I'm living off about £10 a week - and £7.50 of that goes on the fresh vegetable box that my flatmate and I get delivered. When you're seriously pushing the limits like this, and still trying to eat a fairly healthy and well balanced diet (hence the large spend on vegetables), it can get really difficult to come up with anything that isn't a soup or some kind of roasted vegetable. Especially when it comes to lunch.

I'm already eating miso soup for breakfast - it tastes fantastic, it's really good for you, it's got loads of vitamins in, and I can get over three weeks worth for £3.30. I love Japanese food anyway, and although my co-workers think that I'm a bit odd, it really works for me. Another bit of inspiration I've taken is from the Japanese is the bento lunch.

This is what I had today.


On the top are two yaki onigiri (grilled rice balls), one with fish furikake and the other mixed with cooked broccoli, a Babybel cheese, and three cherry tomatoes, and on the bottom is a mini-burger with teriyaki sauce, three more cherry tomatoes, and two-thirds of an orange. All in all, this meal probably cost me around £1.

This type of lunch is generally what I'm making these days - it's mostly rice and vegetables in some sort of way, but it's healthy, has loads of vegetables in it, and I'm still getting enough protein in my diet. It's working out well although I have to say, I'm really missing chocolate!

Distracted

Bank holiday weekends always throw me. Having that expected day off, one where you're not calling in sick because you simply can't be bothered to go to work but are actually getting paid to lounge around and do nothing, seems to make the rest of the week unbalanced.

This one was particularly bad, as it felt like I started drinking at noon on Saturday and didn't stop until this morning when I woke up. First there was the Reading Beer Festival, at which I drank some excellent British ale in very good company and ate entirely too many pork scratchings (strangely addicting). A Quick Minute had a gig in Kilburn that evening, which was dutifully attended and many new people were met - the bar was also open until 4 a.m., and this fact was very much taken advantage of. Sunday I got out of bed stupidly early for not falling asleep until 4 a.m., and a gin-soaked 4 a.m. at that, to trek (and I really do mean trek) across London for the Grand Designs Home Show which was more than cool. Even if the thing that I remember the most and am planning to invest in was the Thunder Toffee Vodka table. Sunday night, the plan was to sit around and watch some telly and eat some food. Instead, we ended up at the Belushi's in Shepard's Bush beginning at about six, as there was more live music. Then closed the bar. Monday afternoon (because, let's face it, there wasn't any way I was getting up early after the previous two nights) was spent watching 'Night at the Museum' with Ben Stiller (surprisingly good film, actually) and then, surprise, going down to a pub to both drink more and listen to more live music.

Fantastic weekend. Now I'll just need several days to recover from it.