May 2012
7 posts
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Reading
Just been taking a break from essay writing to check out my Goodreads lists. There are so many books that I’ve started recently and haven’t finished (Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections and Peter Carey’s Parrot & Olivier to name a couple), so I’m going to start trying to finish them as well as beginning to plough my way through the endless list (and piles on my...
4 weeks and counting until I’m finished. I’ve started looking for somewhere to live because I thought it was about time I left home. Flat hunting is a strange experience - I’ve lived in the same house my whole life, so have never had to move home until now. Standing in someone else’s house and trying to decide if you’d like living there is pretty weird, particularly...
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The Happiness Project: May
Okay, so as I said a while ago, I started reading the Happiness Project again, and this time around it occurred to me that I should actually make some resolutions. If this isn’t the best time to do this, I don’t know when is. With a large amount of time about to be freed up in under 5 weeks now, I need to make sure that I’m working towards goals so I don’t fall into a void...
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You know that scene in The Perks of Being a...
jennyowenyoungs:
in which Charlie, Sam, and Patrick drive through the silent, vacuum-y tunnel and then emerge to a tremendous nocturnal view of the city, sparkling with that magical sense of the unknown and the possible, your future, the whole world… that way which (I suspect) cities can only feel to suburban and rural teenagers…
Well I just came out of that tunnel, except it’s daylight, so...
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Talking about chocolate on my baking blog →
April 2012
5 posts
1 essay down, 1 to go, 6 weeks left.
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So holiday is over, and I’m back to working and writing essays and…watching X Men with Alex. I think my love of comic book based films is quite at odds with the rest of my film love, but X Men and Batman and Spiderman are way awesome. It may have something to do with the large amount of time I spent as a child watching cartoon versions of all of the above.
Last night I had the best...
Watch<3 peter broderick
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New laptop. Lacking excitement for it though. Particularly as it seems to have predictive text when I’m typing. (I still love it though, and I’m excited because the screen isn’t half broken.
Over the last week I have learnt to make a fire (in the absence of my parents and warm weather) after much trial and error and far too many firelighters. I have made aubergine risotto....
March 2012
3 posts
It’s April on Sunday.
I’ve been busy the last couple of months - although seemingly not that busy, but all my time seems to disappear rapidly - February turned to March, and now March is turning to April, and I’m thinking, hey? where did the last couple of months go? I’ve been taking some holiday time the last couple of weeks, mostly just hanging out and not really doing...
February 2012
2 posts
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Jenny Owen Youngs. An Unwavering Band of Light. Totally Amazing.
Writing essays, making plans, keeping lists. A while ago I finished reading the Happiness Project, and it was really good. I’ll read it again soon, and try to focus on things I need to improve. Right now I am focusing on 5 things each day that I need to do. It’s the most productive I’ve felt, because it feels...
January 2012
2 posts
Have just returned from a few lovely days in Bath. Normally when I go on holiday I try to pack as much as possible into my days, soaking up as much of the place I am in as I can. Instead, this time I wandered and meandered and sat and drank tea, and gave plenty of time to stare at beautiful places like this:
And this:
I am exhausted, but relaxed, and finally appreciating the good that not...
Feeling pretty chilly.
Once again it has been an inordinately large amount of time. Apologies for infrequency.
This Christmas has been the busiest ever, seeing friends, old and new, running backwards and forwards between my house and Cambridge on an increasingly frequent basis, eating a lot of amazing food, procrastinating over essays, baking, drinking, playing Sopio, and occasionally...
December 2011
1 post
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Oh, hey, I didn’t see you there…
I would like to pretend that I’ve been so quiet recently because I’ve been writing on here a whole lot, but that would be a lie (although I have been writing a bit, so read that).
Instead I have been caught up in the Christmas world of retail, which at best is busy, and at worst, completely mental, learning to play Sopio and feeling cold...
November 2011
7 posts
5 tags
I have been a little quiet of late. Things are getting busy in the run-up to Christmas. One thing I have been doing recently though is starting up this transatlantic baking blog with my Canadian friend Jordi. We are writing about all of our baking experiences, good and bad, and today I have been making maple cheesecake (which I’ve yet to taste, but man, it smells amaaazing - so you can read...
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A few days ago now, a couple of large heavy books landed on my head. This was mostly my fault (the book has to accept some responsibility), and perhaps the only real hazard of working in bookselling (apart from paper cuts). A trip to A&E followed, because I was incoherent enough to provoke my colleague to ask me if I’d been smoking weed as well as being hit by a falling object.
...
October 2011
21 posts
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Finished ‘The Blind Assassin’ today, very good. I will read more Atwood when my book pile is a little smaller. Now onto ‘The Joy Luck Club’ by Amy Tan. After which I will be making a conscious effort to read all my DFW books. I’m lending my copy of Infinite Jest to someone who I have a vague hope might read it - I was flicking through it last night, looking at all the...
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Today I tried baking with cups for the first time. It is truly an alien concept to not be putting ingredients onto scales and knowing the exact weight of each ingredient as I add it to the mixture. I thought that using cups would result in some kind of disaster due to lack of exact measuring. The good news is that it didn’t.
I made berry-walnut upside down cake, from the lovely magazine...
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Have you ever spent time around embarrassing... →
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Do More Of What Makes You Happy
On the 17th October every year I make resolutions. A list that for most people would be written at the end of the year is, for whatever reason, not what I do. I always feel like things change more in autumn than they do in January - on 31st December it’s the middle of winter, and it’s the same on 1st January, but on a randomly selected October day such as the 17th, the seasons are...
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listening to the Drive soundtrack. It is so cool. I need to start listening to it when I’m driving instead of Ke$ha. Yes.
Today I’ve been reading about modernist and postmodernist theory, which is something I find incredibly boring. Art theory is something I’ve never really got into - every time I have to read about it, I just switch off. So for the time being I’m...
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This evening I Wrote Something and thought...
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Isn’t it a shame when someone makes a film of a really good book you read recently and casts Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock in leading roles?
I’ve been watching the trailer for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book narrated by a young Jewish boy named Oskar, whose father died in the 9/11 attacks. Part of what I found so brilliant about the book was Oskar’s eccentricities -...
After gaining a more acceptable work-life-internet balance over the last few weeks, I have now decided to return to this.
About a week ago, I sat at the top of a hill on Dunstable Downs reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. The sun was beginning to set, and there was a chill in the air. I watched the planes land at the bottom of the hill, and realised it was the most balanced and happy...
September 2011
6 posts
i am giving up on this for the foreseeable future in order to spend more time on the following:
reading
baking
writing music
photography
it has recently occurred to me that there is little point in trying to disconnect yourself from the internet whilst simultaneously writing on the internet about how difficult it is to disconnect yourself from the internet. counterproductive I think is the...
the other night I accidently killed a spider that was crawling on me whilst I was asleep.
I have not been sleeping that well recently. I believe these two things to be unconnected.
in other news i have been playing a lot of sudoku and spending vast amounts of time in the library sitting with people who breathe too loudly. yep.
just found out Judy Blume has a blog. this is really exciting.