I've had a lovely Christmassy week and am getting very excited about next week.
I've mostly been trying to finish off once and for all the work I've been doing for Lib Dem man on the election online. The main thing he wants, in addition to articles about what online innovations the candidates harnessed to help them in the election, is videos made by the candidates and associated groups. I finally found a way to download videos from YouTube, thanks to Bambi's computer whizz brother, but our internet works so slow that each one has taken ages to download, robbing me of my will to live as it goes.
By November, I think I'd managed to download something like fifteen videos, then we FINALLY got our internet fixed and in the first day, downloaded about a hundred videos in a couple of hours!
So now the project is done, I've printed it out and got it all properly bound and I've sent it off! Yipppeee! It has taken many trips to Kinkos, but it's done. Phew.
On Tuesday, we had Anne and her Dad and Megan and Jonathan over for Christmas supper, which went really well. Anne is vegetarian and I made mushroom risotto for the first time. I must confess it was very tasty!
Then tonight, I made dinner for Alison, Emily and Brewster. This time I was able to cook meat and treated it as a dry run for Christmas Day lunch next week, so made roast chicken. I am thrilled to report that that too went really well and was deeeelicious. I'm a very nervous cook, so surprised whenever something tastes nice. I needed tonight's dry run because the year before last - mine and Max's first Christmas together - I painstakingly planned
Christmas Day lunch and woke up Christmas morning to a clear schedule. Everything went in on time and was due to be done all at the same point.
With the potatoes going nicely golden, I noticed that the turkey wasn't cooking, despite having been in for ages, so took it out to check it, only to discover that I hadn't removed it from the plastic tray it came in! I'd taken off the clingfilm, but not the plastic from underneath! So of course it hadn't been cooking! The potatoes burned, we sat down to eat at about 4pm and at one point I threw a whisk at poor Max in frustration. Not a great scene. Hence tonight's practice! Here's hoping next week's turkey goes as well...
Emily and Alison spent Thanksgiving - and Alison's 30th - in Peru and were telling us terrible horror stories about all six of the girls in their gang got really really ill and spent long coach journeys in the loo and stuff. Ick.
We got really bad news from home on Wednesday - my friend Adrian and his girlfriend Rie, who have been living in our flat in Maida Vale, are moving out three months early. Adrian moved back from three years in Tokyo just as we moved over here, so the timing was perfect and it was good to know that someone nice was living in our flat. But Adrian has found it really hard to find work since being back (he's a hotshot lawyer, but wants to move from corporate law to media law and there isn't a big market for that in the UK), so is having to take the first job he's been offered in 8 months, which means moving up to Glasgow.
He's really sad about it, as he loves London, and although it leaves us in a massive bind, my eight years of freelancing and feeling between contracts like I'll never work again means I know just how he feels and we're just going to have to find someone else to move in until April, or maybe beyond. Oliver's going back to the UK in a month or so, and funnily enough used to live on our street, so he might be interested. And Max's friend has also shown interest, so all might not be lost, but it's not great.
Yesterday I treated myself to an afternoon DVD - something I dream of doing when in a 
full-time job in an office, but haven't really let myself do much over here. I watched 'Etre et Avoir', a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a one-room school in rural France, which I've been wanting to see for ages.
It's such a lovely film and really cleverly put together - there's no voiceover and hardly any interviews to link the scenes together. It's a series of really touching and funny vignettes from the classroom where ages range from teeny kindergarten age to 11 or 12.
The little children are soooo sweet, and there are some really funny cutaways, when the teacher is attending to the older children, like one little boy sticking a pen up his nose.
The teacher is amazingly patient and really traditional in his teaching. There's a sad scene where a mother is helping her son do his homework and illustrates a maths problem by means of how many hits he'd get if he got it wrong, but it was all part of the insight into rural French life.
I was interested to read afterwards that the teacher sued the filmmaker for a share of the multi-million euro profits the movie has earned, on the basis that he is the 'star' of the film and that his teaching methods are his intellectual property. But he lost his case because of the implications to future fly-on-the-wall documentaries that might be comprimised if the subjects are getting a cut of the film's success. I'm not sure what I think.
I totally understand the reasons for not granting the teacher the money he asked for, but am also aware that he absolutely is the driving force of the film which has unexpectedly made nearly £2million and he's earned very little money from teaching and is now retired, so could do with some extra cash.
In preparation for next week's overeating, I've been trying to get some last-minute workout time in at the gym and went to both yoga on Monday and butts, guts and guns yesterday. It was a really good class again, so I approached the instructor - Carlos - about getting a few personal training sessions with him, to kickstart my exercise regime and learn how to do things properly for the maximum effect.
So today I met with Carlos to get weighed and measured and for him to assess my fitness levels. Turns out, I have the body weight of an Olympic athlete!! I was stunned and am quite sure he did some calculations wrong. Besides, the body fat machine is just something you hold and it magically tells you how much body fat you have. Surely pinching an inch should be involved somewhere?
Anyway, I was thrilled and have high hopes for the three personal training sessions I've signed up for. Though I can't work out whether getting better results than expected gives me carte blanche to eat what I want next week, or whether it's something I should maintain by not pigging out on Christmas treats. Hmm...
No comments:
Post a Comment