Sushi For Breakfast

Apparently many people of my acquaintance haven't started their Christmas shopping yet. As per usual, I've got lots of mine done.

( More )
I found out very late last night that Dr. John is at my local Arts Centre tomorrow night. They have a few seats left (at the back or extreme sides) but I've no-one to go with. Not sure any of my friends have heard of Dr. John :(

It's only Tuesday but I seem to have done quite well so far at spending money this week. It's stuff I need (really), and I've done OK in terms of bargain-hunting etc. The only negative in this was my trip to Hobbycraft and subsequent search online for card blanks for the cross-stitch cards I currently have in progress - I was hoping for red or green card blanks with large round apertures but have only been able to find white ones, and they're only just big enough. The tricky part will come when I have to wash & iron them without anyone noticing me taking over the kitchen for a big seekrit cunning plan.

So, the successes yesterday & today have been:

• New trainers (even though they have pink trim), which means the old worn ones are now in the bin


• A new watch strap


• Pizza bases! Just scoffed the first home-made pizza, with rocket, mushrooms, sweet peppers, tomatoes, and two types of cheese. Way better than the ones they make up instore


• Three pairs of little flower clips for my hair (black roses, cream roses, sunflowers) for an office-friendly trombone-less Elizabeth Lea look


• Jellybeans, naturally


• Hotel Chocolat selectors, including rose & lime creams


• Marks & Spencer yummy food, including Macarons, which I've never had before


• Two pairs of jeans - I have to go to M&S for jeans as only they & Next (sometimes) do them short & wide enough. Not a fan of the current trend towards lightweight denim & engineering though, when I first saw them in Sainsburys I thought they were just cheapo supermarket ones but it seems they're all like that now :(

Tomorrow we're picking Jessica up from nursery - she's now in the top age group, as it's the start of her final year at nursery. She now also goes to pre-school one morning a week at a nearby church hall - this is to give the kids more of an idea about what school will be like, and she's also there alongside other neighbourhood children, so when she starts school there will be children there she already knows. So I guess for now I'm making the most of these opportunities.

I am on leave all week this week, and have had the good fortune to pick the week with incredibly unseasonal weather - high summer weather, cloudless blue skies.

( The week so far )
Tomorrow is my birthday. There are two cakes waiting, a giant French Fancy cake for friends and family, and a large Madeira cake with Haribo sweeties on it to share at work next week. I will try and get pics to share before they are eaten.

I visited Birmingham having high hopes of buying some DM boots, preferably not in black. Didn't see any so will be venturing online and hoping I choose the correct size. Bought a Gap T-shirt, some Jellybeans (they've replaced the lever things with little shovelly things, and removed the Ice Cream flavours, boo) and some sushi.

On the train towards Birmingham I was sat across the aisle from two middle-aged men on their way to a business meeting. One of the men was very upper-middle-class looking and sounding, the other was more a standard guy in a suit. UMC guy was talking about how he had no plans to see The Iron Lady, he was definitely not a Thatcher admirer, even though not seeing the film meant missing out on seeing Meryl Streep. Other Guy looked rather crestfallen at this anti-Thatcher revelation, and talked about how she did this or that and you can't argue it wasn't successful. UMC guy then started talking about watching TV news reporting of the Leveson Inquiry, and what a horrible man Richard Desmond was, I think Other Guy was a secret Daily Express reader cos he was not impressed by the direction of the conversation.

I must have been in a train carriage near the end, because when I got off at New Street I was near the signage for the exit to Victoria Square, so I thought that would be a good opportunity to visit the da Vinci exhibition at BMAG, which opened today. I'd only heard about it a couple of days ago so I wasn't sure if I'd be visiting, especially given the queues there'd been for the Staffordshire Hoard, but the queue this time was officially half an hour and actually more like 20 minutes at 11am. The pictures - mostly studies da Vinci made for paintings, anatomy drawings - are wonderful, very detailed, and accompanied in many cases by his famous mirror-writing. There's also lots of stuff alongside about the materials he used, and the papers. There's only ten items in a single room, but well worth a visit, to see with one's own eyes the works of one of the greatest creative minds of Western civilisation is too awesome to miss.

I bought some da Vinci postcards from the giftshop, and a three-colour pen, which seems to have vanished :( I came back into the main shopping area via New Street, I went in Shared Earth, which is undergoing a liquidation sale - sad, but I was surprised it had lasted this long. There were two women in there accompanied by a guide dog, a beautiful creature apparently called Rupert-No who had to sniff everything on display within nose height.

I stopped at the food court for lunch, but for a veggie taco bowl rather than my usual jacket potato, as I had a jacket potato for dinner last night. Waterstones had lots of children's Christmas books on sale, and I was tempted by a pop-up book about How Santa Works, which tells how the elves read letters from children and check on a computer to see if the children have been good, and how after the party Santa throws for his elves on Christmas Day, everyone sleeps until the spring. However, I managed to resist this, and a copy of That's Not My Puppy - if I start buying books for Bean every time I visit Waterstones, she's going to need a separate library as well as a warehouse to store all her toys.

As well as looking online for DMs I might also look for soaps. I found out that Lush have moved from Corporation Street to somewhere else I didn't see, and The Body Shop only had the same stuff they always have in. I prefer soaps to shower gels, will see what Lush have on their online store but am also interested in looking up some natural ingredients soaps, can't remember if it was Oxfam or Greenpeace or someone else but a while back one of the major charities used to sell a big box of assorted cubes of soap made with olive oil, sage, rosemary etc. Something seasonal, preferably.

I finally found a new coat I like. I wanted something to replace a medium-weight jacket I bought about six years ago, which is still awesome except the lightly fluffy stuff inside is starting to come out - but this embroidery on the back is still cool:



I went to New Look first, and they had so much choice, including some really nice duffel coats. When I buy clothes I vary between sizes 14 & 16 depending on what it is, how it's supposed to fit, and where it's from, but I always look for size 16 in outerwear. So I tried on a couple of size 16 duffel coats in New Look and neither would fasten over my bust. One didn't even meet in the middle. Be warned, New Look are now officially a waste of space.

I looked in Marks & Spencers, thinking they'd at least have something that fitted, but they don't seem to have got going in terms of coats & jackets, unless it's a little furry jacket to wear over your Christmas party dress or you're a mad middle-aged aunt in cerise lipstick and clip-on fake pearl earrings. Thankfully I found something at Next - this blue Parka with furry trim - which fits, although it assumes my waist is a bit higher than it really is. It is a bit snug with the zip fully up, but nothing like the zip on the jacket it's replacing. And it's not too thickly padded - I have a big black quilted jacket with gold lining for the really cold weather, so it only needs to be something in-between.

After the clothes shopping I went to M&S food hall, their coleslaw is the yummiest ever and they're in full swing with Halloween goodies. Even their plainly-obvious-what-it-really-is stuff is good fun, for example they have big bags of cheesy puffs which they describe as Witches' Toes, and lots of fun chocolatey things too. I bought a bag of salt & vinegar flavour spider's webs, and a last-gasp-of-summer mango & prawn salad for tomorrow's lunch. It's such a shame the excellent Borders went out of business and was replaced with the pointless New Look, but I'm so pleased I've got access to this little row of shops near me, so cheering when I need to be cheered.

I would've posted last week, I'm sure, if LJ hadn't been hit by the DDoS. I had a week's leave last week, I wanted to get a bit of a break in before everyone else starts their summer holiday leave. I didn't really do much, got plenty of studying in (trigonometry, which is for me one of the easier branches of mathematics), went to Birmingham and bought lots of sweets as usual and also as usual had a jacket potato for lunch.

I also bought Bean's birthday present - she's a year old mid-month, and is growing up fast into a proper little girl. She's still a bit away from walking I think, but I think the main obstacle is that she's not interested and can get about quickly by crawling. She can now crawl down the step into the extension. The first time she crawled of the big step at the bottom of the stairs she overbalanced and ended up gamboling off the end - she was lying there on her back, there was a brief silence which I thought was one of those brief silences you get from little children just before they wail and howl the building down, but instead she started laughing and giggling and then got up.

The only downside to all this time spent with Bean recently is that picking her up on Saturday I twinged something in my back. It hadn't been great to start with, I must have been sleeping at an odd angle, and picking her up finished it off. It's much better than it was now (ie I can walk and I don't need painkillers during the day) but I think a return to Zumba classes will have to be postponed.

I did dye my hair, with newly-bought hair dye. My current colour is terracotta red, and I've got some honey-chestnut to use as well, because it was two for £10 at Tesco. As expected, Dad's first reaction to my newly-coloured hair was to do a Janet Street-Porter impression.

I dyed my hair yesterday, and today I went into Birmingham. Going out early (8.30am) paid off, the bus/train ticket is more expensive but worth it, by 9.45am I was walking through New Street Station, if I'd waited for the off-peak I would've just got on the bus by that time and saved only around £1.20. The peak fare is worth it to me, so long as I can set out sufficiently early to notice the difference.

I bought most of my intended purchases - a new watch strap, Hotel Chocolat goodies (the chocolate marbles), JellyBelly Jellybeans - the assistant in Selfridges also gave me three 10g sample packs of Jellybeans, a new bag, and summer dress & cardigan set for Bean. I stopped at the Waterstones branch of Costa for breakfast of coffee and a scrambled egg & mushroom toastie-type thing (delicious), and ended the shopping spree with my usual lunch of jacket potato with tuna.

( Couple of pictures )

Tomorrow I am visiting my friend for her birthday, which means I get out of visiting my cousin for her birthday and to meet her son's very pregnant girlfriend. I hope all goes well for them in that department, but I have to be honest and say I'm really not interested. I have Bean, I have the six of us, that's where my interests lie.

...and ordered a Kindle. The one with 3G + WiFi, and a blue cover with light. £200ish altogether! I ordered it to be delivered to work, then five minutes later thought it would be better to come direct to here, so I tried to change but got error messages, went back a few minutes later and got the message about the order being prepared for despatch so cannot be changed. Except it's being prepared for despatch in two day's time, so could it really not come here? Bah. Although it does mean that according to their estimates, by this time next week at the latest, I should be Kindling.

Day 363 Have been to Sainsburys - it's very foggy out, this was the view from the car park:



No sleep until well past 4am again, my nose is still fdksjfkljflkasjf but not as much as it was, but am still coughing at night, which is what keeps me awake for so long. Have bought a few more items for sushi-making, which will happen tomorrow (I have shop-bought sushi for today), plus a few dips but DUH! I forgot breadsticks, will have to make do with plain tortilla chips :(

Day 343 Went shopping after work, the little collection of shops near me with the giant Tesco, plus M&S, Boots, Clintons etc. They have their Christmas decorations up, this is their tree:



I managed to get a replacement for Bean's lost tree ornament with her name on. Also bought some assorted food from M&S. Found out at work today that the guy I picked out for Secret Santa won't be there, which means I had to pick another name. I don't know if New Name is a tea drinker, if not that means I'll have to buy another gift.