Major Life Changes

So, now may be a good time to make this announcement:

I am starting a second Master's degree at Aberystwyth University in September. Does that seem like a sudden decision to you? Yeah, well, me too. I applied on a whim about 3 weeks ago. I just checked my email--it was July 18th that they received my application.

Things have been stagnate for a while for me and it seemed like nothing I tried worked out. So, when my live in landlady threw yet another fit and told me I had to leave by August, I jumped on the catalyst and applied to AU. Life had really become unbearable anyway, living with a (genuinely) psychotic, racist, old bigot anyway, so I decided to change things up significantly. I considered going back to the US, but I didn't want to let one bad (albeit Umbridge-level bad) landlady drive me out of the UK. I don't even know how I found this Master's, which is History and Heritage, but it builds perfectly on my first degree and will help to give me real experience managing a Heritage site. I never thought I'd get in this close to the deadline, and figured that even if I did, I'd never be able to get things ready in time. And yet, somehow, everything just combined to make this happen. All the  references and documents just seemed to appear and were processed immediately. I applied for a student loan and was approved two days later. I went to look for housing in Aber and found my dream flat after viewing only two flats. Referencing for the lease was supposed to take a few days, it was done within an hour. I needed documents from the school--it took a half an hour. I feel that it is very obvious that this is what I'm supposed to be doing, and since I'm a religious-type person, I would go so far as to say that I feel the hand of Deity in my life.

The really fun bit is, since I was desperate to leave Harrow (which I will never be able to think about without shuddering) just as my brother and his wife and my nieces and nephew were coming to visit me, they decided to stick around for a month with me. We're living in Nottinghamshire, in a gorgeous historic property with awesome neighbours just 20 minutes away from the Sherwood Forest Trust. We went to the Robin Hood Festival yesterday. In a word? Awesome. In 4 words? It was really awesome.

So, life had a major dip, but is looking pretty amazing now. Cymru am byth!

In Which I Am Brutally Attacked By a Mammoth Moth

I have been being stalked by a moth. It's shown up night after night when I am in the kitchen or brushing my teeth. A huge moth. One of those you-can-see-every-hair-on-its-massive-body type moths.

So last night I was taking a bath. Brand new razor, shaving my legs. Being a brand new razor, I guess I miscalculated either the sharpness or bulk of the razor (it's one of those Venus-wishes-it-were-an-electric-razor kinds) and I ended up cutting my foot. Rather badly. The term 'bloodbath' got new meaning. Anyway, the moth that had been stalking me, in what I can only assume was the supreme act of moth-ly devotion, took a swan dive towards my head, presumably to rescue me from the razor. I dodged right to avoid being face-planted and breathed a shaken sigh of release as the moth flew down to the left of the bath. Just as I was starting to relax, I happened to notice that it hadn't missed the bath. It was in fact there, in the bath water, swimming towards me. I immediately tried to jump out of the bath to avoid its sodden body sticking to me, an act that was complicated by two things: one) the fact that we have no handles on the side of the wall and two) the fact that up to that point I had been trying to keep my bleeding foot out of the stinging water. When I managed to get out and ascertain that the moth was not on my person, I pulled the drain and looked at the moth. It was still swimming, and despite its attempt to grope me, I couldn't just leave it to drown there, so I attempted to fish it out of the slowly draining pool with the round end of my razor. The moth, apparently having seen what the razor had done to me and fearing it, swam for its little life away from the S.S. Moth Rescue and continued to do so for the 3 minutes that I tried valiantly to rescue it. Perhaps it will tell you something about the size, lung capacity and general boss-ness of this moth when I tell you that at the end of this time, it was still swimming around, perfectly alive. Finally, extremely creeped out, wet and cold, I grabbed a lid from the shelf o' product, scooped it up and flung it out the window.

I can only hope that its wet wings and harrowing escape free me from its further attentions.

'Suspect Am Culinary Genius'

If you've ever seen Bridget Jones' Diary, you know that that ambitious statement ends in blue soup, orange marmalade and omelets. And she didn't even make the omelets. Or the marmalade.

As I'm currently looking for gainful employment, I have decided to become the housewife of my flatmate. This involves a lot of cooking, which, as she is an actual culinary genius, tends to be a little intimidating. I made dinner for the first time without any help a few weeks ago and it turned out great! Since then I have had many more successes (with slight amounts of failure) until today. Today was my cooking Waterloo. I got a cookbook that is supposed to incorporate a lot of veggies in seemingly innocuous form. I am starting to learn something that hadn't previously occurred to me (in a cooking context): if it sounds like it couldn't possibly work out, it's not going to. If someone told you that you could add puréed cauliflower to a mixture and still get cheese sauce at the end, you should really think twice. I kept thinking that it must be my lack of knowledge on the subject. It's not. So today, I did my super prepared grocery shopping--with a menu in mind and buying from the clearance sections--and settled in for a day of dips: namely, cheese and spinach/artichoke. I have made the spinach and artichoke before, but I neglected to realize when I found that pound of sour cream for .86 p that it was fat free and that that would make a difference. It turned into great globs of melted cheese with chunks of artichoke and spinach in a cream-ish brine. Sadly, it was the cheese sauce that pulled ahead (dramatically speaking). The cookbook says to boil cauliflower in chicken stock, purée it, put back on heat, add cheese, and purée again. Whatever the end result of this madness was supposed to be, the actual result was a cheesy cauliflower soup. I will never forget the way my dear flatmate sat there with a spoon, eating my 'soup' and said only 'It's got a great flavour profile--the flavours really work together,' instead of saying 'It has the world's mankiest, grainy texture and btw, you promised me cheese sauce for the tortilla chips'. Somehow, watching her gamely going on to finish the entire bowl (which I poured from a blender like it was a smoothie), and saying that if you added a little bit of rocket it was great, made me realize that this was one of the funniest moments of my life to date. It was even funnier than waking up this morning and realizing that a large part of my dream had taken place in the tavern from The Great Mouse Detective, complete with a human-sized mouse in a cabaret outfit singing jazz.

All I can say is, God bless those who eat it anyway.

"The hospitality in this country is as warm as the weather."

So, customs was interesting. Because I used airline points to get out here the first time, and single flights are twice as expensive as roundtrip ones, I am in a cycle of buying roundtrip tickets from the UK to the US instead of the other way around. So when I arrived yesterday, they detained me (and gave me the third degree) for not having a return ticket. They ended up having to call my friend and grill her about my plans to even let me in the country. And made me pull up my bank account online to prove that I had the funds for a return ticket. I'm starting to get un-scared enough to be a little indignant, but for now, this is how I feel: