Hey! They're learning for free!

It is rare that living in the modern world makes me feel full of joy, but I picked up my copy of Oxford Today magazine when I was staying with my parents. From my limited perusal, Oxford Today appears to be a magazine for people who have proved they can routinely read ten books a week and are now content with a thrice-yearly magazine. (The adverts which fell out of it were: 15% off Homebase stuff, a discounted subscription to The Economist, a flyer for the Ramblers, another for an investment trust and a plea from Amnesty International to help them stop rape as a weapon of war. Make of that what you will.) Anyway, in amongst all the articles was, ohmigod, a pointer towards this. Podcasts! Clever podcasts! Free clever podcasts! Many, many, many free clever podcasts! I think I am going to have to go on the trans-Siberian express in order to listen to them all.

So much free knowledge. The internet is wonderful.

Incidentally, I have started reading The Group by Mary McCarthy, a sex-and-anxiety-filled novel about eight Vassar graduates in the 1930s - quite apart from the pertinence of reading about lots of intelligent and angsty women, beginning their adult lives in a time of economic recession, I have also learned a LOT about pre-Pill contraception, both technically and sociologically. Fascinating.

"God! I must pack and take a train"

I am not unaware of the indignity of wailing into the internet about how my parents are so mean and don't understand me, so I shall skip over that, despite it occupying much of my headspace this week...

Had to go to London yesterday, and I can officially declare that there is nowhere in the whole of Canary Wharf to buy a copy of 'Country Smallholding' magazine. Also, that the first time I've actually been chatted up on the Tube, I was reading a radical feminist text. Go figure.

Unearthed some bees on my allotment and sent an email to the council saying, 'I have bees... get rid of them... but please don't kill them... we need bees, and they're in trouble.' Apparently they're digger bees rather than honey bees, and they're going to be taken away and released in some woodland. Yay!

Also, I have to get yet more time off work, despite possibly being over my limit since I'm leaving halfway through my 'year', to go to a wedding in July. However, both my friends who are getting married within a week of each other in July have very considerately conferred with each other and arranged to hold their hen dos on different weekends. Which was most thoughtful of them. ;-)

Off to Northumberland later this afternoon to spend the weekend hopefully not sniping at my parents. I have:

• a big pile of exciting books
• gorgeous yarn, needles and pattern
• a week's worth of Farming Today podcasts (note to self: get antidepressants)
• potatoes boiling for salad for dinner.

=)

Computer woes

Please, geriatric laptop, I know you're suffering. But if you could just bring yourself to open Outlook attachments, that would be really peachy. I kinda need them for work.

Also, if emails I delete could please stay deleted? Also helpful.

This thing is so not going to last me through my MA. Curses.

Help!

Can I really commit to spend the rest of my life with someone who talks about having a baby as 'an opportunity cost'?

*gulp*

Stuff wot I've done

Have just received a leaflet about swine flu from the government. I wonder if their advice to 'set up a network of "flu friends"', taken out of context, could be counter-productive.

I have also been reading many interesting books which I splurged on last week on the (middlingly spurious) basis that they were course-related, i.e. not set texts but the sorts of things that would turn me into a well-read person. On the plus side I have learnt an awful lot of exciting things about beer and class and urbanisation in the Victorian era. On the other hand, my dreams of having a smallholding have been more or less crushed. Boo. I wanted pigs and an orchard.

I went to a farm in Devon to learn how to make wine and ate lots and lots of yummy things. I also went to a fab, myth-busting talk about the Special Period in Cuba - yes, they were all growing organic vegetales and yes this probably kept people alive, but most agriculture still used pesticides and was very intensive.

Once I've written up these minutes for work, I've finished helping oil companies sack people for the forseeable future. Huzzah.

The allotment is also shaping up and soon I am going to plant some peas out in it. Yay! Peas! Nik has been heroic doing Heavy Lifting and Ferrying of Things to the Tip on the allotment while I am floored by a mysterious fatigue. I don't know if it's physical or psychological, but I had 11 hours' sleep on Friday night and woke up feeling like a normal person again. I then slept badly on Sunday and now feel like a rubbish person again. Boo. This has been going on, on and off, since February and is probably Not Healthy. Unfortunately my doctor is on holiday and I can't get an appointment until 2nd June. Boo.

Anyway. Lunch.

I wonder....

I wonder if.... if Nik and I eat the rest of the cannelloni that I made yesterday for my dinner... does that mean that technically I cooked and he has to do the washing up?

Blah, I said I was going to write a proper post, but I spent all today wandering around Reading trying to find a thing that would connect my computer to, well, some electricity so that I could actually, well, work and stuff. And I'm tired. And I'm going to eat cannelloni (when Nik gets back) and drink more shiraz (hey, we need three more screw-top bottles to put our home-made wine into, so technically this is a public service) and read my new book ('Surviving and Thriving on the Land - how to use your time and energy to run a successful smallholding', since you ask) and cuddle my fiancé (you know about him, he doesn't need parentheses).

Said fiancé has been away since Tuesday morning. In the intervening time, my dalliance with Charlie Brooker has kept me more than occupied.