Skip to content

{ Category Archives } etc.

Booketty booketty books galore

It’s page-flickin’ time, yo! The Magic Toyshop - Angela Carter I first fell in love with Angela Carter when I read Nights at the Circus which I recommend to everyone which such fervour that I’m no longer sure where my copy is (if anyone sees it, tell it I miss it and I hope it’s doing well). [...]

Tagged

Today’s tutorial: using lemons to rebel and buffer against the forces of economics

Everyone keeps talking economics to me. There are nervous ripples all around me as everyone gets nervous about the US economy, the Euro economy, the Iceland economy. It got us talking about the Great Depression, about conservation, about frugality. So I did what any slightly off-in-the-head, not-really-sure-how-the-economy-works munchkin would do and did a stocktake of [...]

Tagged ,

Multitask mythos

I had a whole draft post typed up on multitasking. It was called ‘Multitasking Mythos’, and there was a poem in rhyming couplets about dispensing with multitasking. I couldn’t post it because I think I might have been fibbing. Here’s the way I see it: multitasking is a risky business. There aren’t many things I [...]

Tagged ,

The best kind of problem.

I looked up collective nouns for books and discovered that “library” and “pile” seemed to be the most common ones. That kind of surprised me: I thought when I was saying “pile” I was being casually vivid and descriptive — “oh, I have a pile of books waiting by the toilet” — but no: it [...]

Tagged

Indecision, self-doubt, satisfaction: all this from one hat.

I finished my Slouchy Sockhead hat and we’re very happy, thank you. But when I first finished, there was a hovering ‘ehhhh’ about the whole thing. A little post-completion malaise, if you will. I’ve had it before and I’m never sure what to do with it. Finishing a knitted project is like…let me think. It’s [...]

Tagged ,

Blogging on the road

I am blogging on the go! The old-fashioned way: this post was originally drafted by pen, in a moving vehicle. A long car trip, not of our choosing, appeared on the schedule. As someone who guards their weekend with the snarling jealousy of a griffin defending its hoard of Snickers bars, this was not an [...]

Tagged ,

Page-flicking

It’s that time again! I’ve been reading, gorging my brain on others’ leavings, and now I have to burp about it. Portrait in Sepia Oh my God. I first encountered Isabel Allende’s writing while studying: I read The House of the Spirits. And it didn’t blow me away. Beautiful and interesting and unlike anything else [...]

Tagged

Cool things I have known

I would like to mention two extremely cool things I have encountered. My life, as I am sure I have mentioned from time to time, is supremely awesome. These cool things are just little out-shoots of awesome, like sparks that fly joyously upwards from the BONFIRE OF AWESOME that is my life. Cool thing the [...]

Tagged

Season of shifting gears

Autumn never ceases to grab my attention. You’d think I’d have worked out the pattern of seasons by now, but no. I be the daft-yet-delighted one. Summer bundles along, and I’m just thinking I’ve got the hang of things — warm, long days, sticky backs-of-knees — and then one morning I think it’s slightly cooler, [...]

Tagged

A mantra for our times

Midway through the Easter long weekend, I had a mini-revelation. I had spent far less time doing fun things than doing not-fun things. Not-fun things aren’t necessarily unpleasant, and have to be done, but why prioritise them? When it comes to allocating my spare time, I tend to follow a dessert approach: you get your [...]

Tagged