Shocking

I am feeling accomplished this evening. I had this very optimistic to-do list for my evening at home and, as I sit here on my comfortable couch, it is ALL done. Hurrah!! However, I do not plan to blog about my wonderful to-do list mostly consisting of bathroom cleaning tasks, thrilling though it is. I plan instead to blog about my comfortable couch. It is the couch of an S&M lover I fear. It is electrically charged. I wish I knew quite how this occurred but just getting near the cushions makes all the hairs on my arms stand up, quite a weird feeling. A bottom shuffle produces a lovely crackling sound from beneath my trousers and touching anything vaguely conductive while sitting on it is quite painful. In the dark you can even get a cheap light show..... I guess I got more than I paid for in that aspect but the 'oooh pretty' is quickly replaced by an 'ow.'

Tomorrow's to-do list: buy Static Guard.

Space pen lives to write another day

What I am about to say is a total nerd thing, but I fully embrace my identity so here goes..... Back last March, shortly after my Ph.D. defense, I was at Space Center Houston looking for a space themed gift to buy myself as a little pat on the back. I purchased a space pen, quite a nice one too (John covets it). It has become my favourite thing to write with so I was upset last week when it went missing. I searched high and low and there was no sign of it. Sigh.

A few days later I was doing my laundry and the drier was being unreasonably loud when I went to check on it. I opened the door and rooted around a bit and found the barrel of my pen, which had been separated from the nib, and the inner ink cartridge. This is all slightly puzzling since I was washing my sheets, my WHITE sheets, not items with pockets I may have put the pen in. However, what really struck me was:

1) The pen went through the wash and yet my sheets have absolutely no ink on them at all.
2) The pen writes like a dream still.

I love it more now. It is the pen love of my life thus far. I take thee space pen to be my lawful writing instrument, in washer and in drier.....

About bloomin' time I blogged

OK so rather a long time has passed since my last blog so perhaps I should recap the last month and a half. My 2008 ended very well. I went home (as in the UK) for the last two weeks of the year and John even joined me for the first week. He then flew back to spend Christmas Day with his own family. It was a little weird as I usually spend most of my time at home relaxing, with a little traveling around. This time I felt it was sort of my duty to show John a little bit outside of the little village in which my parents live. So in the first week I went to London for a few days, had a day trip to Banbury, and another to Oxford, then we also managed a night out with some of my nearest and dearest friends. My parents, being the loves they are, then threw a pre-Christmas Christmas for John so that he could experience the way us Brits do it (yay for Christmas pudding and brandy butter) before he went home. It was so much fun and I felt privileged to experience John's first foreign travel with him - and the company on the flight out there was wonderful. The rest of my trip was much less eventful as I got sick (I succumb easily to British germs now - I am pretending I never used to) so most of it was spent with my nose in a tissue and a mug of lempsip in my hand.

2009 did not start well. I had:
1) My harddrive crash right before an important deadline. This meant I lost data (a weeks worth, but enough to be REALLY inconvenient at that time) and all my holiday pictures (some of which have now been recovered).
2) A bent rim on one of my tires which required a trip to a scrap yard and several trips to the garage - oh and a new tire as well. Sigh.
3) A cough that made me sound like a sea lion. It was obnoxious.
4) Half a tooth fall out. I had already planned to book an appointment as I was looong overdue but this forced my hand. It fell out a week before my deadline too and I had no time to get it fixed that week and it was sore. I was grumpy.

2009 is already improving though. I shall post more news later.