It's the most wonderful time of the year

... Unless you're in London, where it's been raining for most of the last two weeks.

Last weekend James and I visited one of James's old WoW friends currently doing a degree at Loughborough University. (It's pronounced "Luff-bra".  I was calling it "Lock-borough".)  We were well fed and lazy.

This week we celebrated Coffey's birthday (twice) with drinks.  I made a lemon-meringue pie.  Beyond that, it was an uneventful week.

The first half of the week I was on an audit client (Associated Press) in Camden Town, which is the wildest place in London.  Go google it.  It's made up of a series of open-air markets and permanent mini-stores opening to twisty back alleyways.   There you can find any type of alternative, goth, punk, or sex fetish outfit imaginable.  Girls with faces of 60% metal stand in the streets with signs advertising body piercing shops, while across the street dudes who looked like they swam in a sea of open Sharpies advertise local tattoo parlors.  To get to the AP office, you must go down one of these alleys until it dead end with a dumpster on your left and a giant black gate on your right.  After scanning your ID card, the gate so that you can climb the stairs behind it and emgerge- ta-dah!- in front of a very typical newly refurnished brick office building.

Yesterday James and I made Thanksgiving dinner for some of our friends, and today I laid on the couch wrapped in a comforter researching DSLR cameras.  It was a great weekend.

Love always,
Melanie

Lazy Melanie

I had just about decided to forget about this blog for a while and have a week of, but the guilt of not writing got to me. This week was pretty normal. On Friday James and I celebrated our two year anniversary by going to Mildred's, which is an amazing vegetarian restaurant. This weekend I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and (completely legal, courtesy of my student ACM membership) Windows 7. Getting the drivers for the Sony-specific features of my laptop took most of the weekend, blah blah blah blah.

Eh, fuck the guilt, I don't feel like writing. There's plenty of more interesting things to do (like sleep).

Love always,
Melanie

English Holidays are Fun

Sorry for the late post Sarah, I decided to make brownies instead of update my blog. I've started to bake a dessert to bring into the office weekly. Next week will be cupcakes, lemonbars, or possibly something with key lime- any votes?

On Saturday James and I met with some friends to see the Guy Fawkes fireworks. Leaving the house was like a scene from Dawn of the Dead. At the end of the street was a solid stream of people blocking the road from side to side, heading to the heath.

The heath (hence "Blackheath") is a giant open grassy area in the middle of the town. It's attached to Greenwich Park on the north. A few roads and many pedestrian paths cut across the heath, but beyond that, it's just dead grass. The popular legend is that the heath was used to bury the excess bodies leftover from the Black Plague. However, Wikipedia claims it's just a patch of poor soil that gravel is extracted from, causing huge pits, which were then filled with wreckage from WWII bombings.

Anyway, Blackheath hosts the largest gunpowder plot fireworks display in London. The display was pretty good.

Love always,
Melanie

Boots and Cookies

I'll keep this short because I have a sudden urge to watch "The Matrix", and the final hours of the weekend are quickly approaching. This week, I

• Succeeded in making a web demo of a data analytic piolot project actually do something using my amazing (*cough) C# skills,
• Was given even more work to do as a result,
• Went to a geeky Symbian Foundaton party with James,
• Became addicted to Scribblenauts (a new Nintendo DS game),
• Bought two beautiful new pairs of boots from the Clarks Factory store for £45 (one pair of Gortex/brown leather winter boots with leaves on them, on pair of nicer brown leather low-heeled work boots),
  
• Made white-chocolate macadamia nuts cookies with hazelnuts instead of macadamia nuts because the grocery store selection here is a bit slim,
• Presented these cookies to my friend Aliki as a birthday gift at her Halloween party last night,
• Spent two hours getting to the aforementioned party when it should have only taken an hour because we missed our train; spent two hours on night buses getting home because TFL are liars and there is NOT a 1:30am train from Charing Cross.

I love bullet points. They make it look like I put some real effort into this post!

Love always,
Melanie