wordplay

And, as luck will have it, will be on a boat soon enough.

Headed to London for A & L's wedding and will see some of you soon. The woman in front of me is shepherding 18 students on this trip. My trip SO wins.

Owen just finished reading "Deathly Hallows" and was really touched that Harry named a kid Albus Severus. He wants to have a long talk about it tomorrow. He has no idea how long I've been waiting for him to ask me for that.

Also? He FLEW through that book like a fandom pro - this morning he was at the halfway point.

To celebrate that last night, I got a solid 8 hours of sleep! For the first time in over a week! I am not a girl who does particularly well on the 6 or so that I've been skating by on, so this morning I'm all chipper and energetic. Yay!

Things that have been going on:

+ I followed the UK elections with some interest, and that doesn't seem to be letting up any time soon. I guess we're thinking that Gordon Brown agreeing to step down as Labour leader is one step closer to a Lib-Lab coalition? V. exciting stuff, if sometimes confusing and difficult to get good information on.

+ I went with jumperkid and in_a_tizzy to see the local production of "Steel Magnolias" that bookwench31 stage managed. Very nice evening! If you're local you should go, if only to see their Anelle, who is something pretty special for community theater in my opinion.

+ I went to dinner with reservoir last night - very good time, full of travel talk and bitchery.

+ I went to MD Sheep & Wool with darthfox, ellen_fremedon and somebody else whose LJ name slips my mind at the moment. CHRIST, it was hot that day - maybe not your best day to be looking at wool. The big news is that (a) I bought a huge hank of really gorgeous seaglassy colored merino/wool light fingering wool - trying to find something to make out of that now; and (b) I ate lamb and didn't want to die! A fine grind seems to make the difference, which is good to know.

+ longtimegone and I are well into our travel planning and at this point are just hoping that Icelandic volcanoes don't scupper the whole thing. We're in London for a few days, then Belfast and Edinburgh before heading home, and the Belfast airports have been v. v. hit-or-miss over the last few weeks due to ash. Urgh.

+ I've lost over 10 lbs since I've been home from England! Yay! Operation Starvedown 2010 continues and I'm hoping for another 10 or so before we head off for the wedding. The dress now fits and the wrap to go over it is within 20 or so rows of completion; I'd have finished it last night if I hadn't been asleep by 10:30p. Tonight, for sure, and then blocking begins.

+ I had a very relaxing Mother's Day weekend - very nice and slowed down. We get so busy on the weekend with kid-related activities and it was nice to have a weekend off from the craziness. We spent Sunday morning and early afternoon on the VA side of Great Falls - what a pretty park that is! Nice hiking and A. and I had a great time climbing on the rocks.

+ If you v. kindly agreed to fill out a survey about your graduate school experience, check your email! And if you haven't received anything, drop me an email or LJ message and I'll send it along to you. The next week or so is going to be a lot of school writing for me - yay?

Sooooo... how are you? :D

I am having a very cranky day. I need to write up a little something for work and the words are just not falling out. I hate that. Something not even worth mentioning completely pissed me off on the internets. (People being wrong! I know!) I realized today that I have a Sunday night in London by myself, and London is a theatre-free-zone on Sundays. Just... this whole day has been one giant frustrated goddammit.

Tell me something really good.

Also, if you want to write up a two-page enhanced abstract/outline for the paper I'm going to spend most of May banging out and sending off, let me know. It would help if you knew what it was about, or could figure that out and inform me. (Also if you happen to be a stone-cold expert on inter-rater reliability measures.)

Will post more tomorrow in between the laundry-ing and the kitchen restocking and all that, but for now:

+ traveling in a country where your language skills are poor is tiring; traveling with children in a country where your language skills are poor is just fucking exhausting. My French was coming back by the time we left, but b/c France was such a small part of this trip I didn't spend any time before we left trying to get my feet back under me and ow. Thank god there was a Monoprix just a block from our hotel and that croissants, camembert and strawberries will never not be an amazing meal. Me trying to order and handle lunch in Pierrefonds, which is very provincial and adorable and apparently devoid of English speakers? Considerably less amazing. (Although I did manage to get it together to buy pastries because I am a woman who rises to the important things in life, like eclairs.)

+ great trip, dreadful weather. Kids still had a great time and we had one last clear (if very cool and windy) night at the Eiffel Tower last night. Photos to follow.

And now I need sleep, because I'm closing in on 24 hours awake and I am not as young as I once was. Yay trip! Yay home!

***

Also: right, so what'd I miss?

This is ridiculously difficult to do with two thumbs and an iPhone, but (a) we all know I'll forget if I don't get this down somewhere and (b) I am having a very bad belly day (we're cutting my meds, which is great, but that also means that I have to be more careful about not skipping a dose and, hi, I'm on vacation) and have done nothing but laze about the flat all day and run out briefly to HMV to pick up a CD that hasn't been released in the US yet. So, this is me, trying to compensate for being lazy/sick. (That said, the flat is adorable and very cozy, and the weather has been so bad that I can't feel all that horrible for staying in. But I am working on sucking less, so.)

General notes: this week has me thinking a lot about the relationship between writers and directors, and wishing that more plays went into wider publication so it'd be easier to get hold of the text for myself. Also, I find myself underwhelmed with Rupert Goold, who is supposed to be some kind of wunderkind so I'm a bit disgruntled. I'm sure he'll be crying into his pillow that I'm talking shit about him on my LiveJournal - still. Suck less, Rupert! We're all doing it!

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Today:

+ pedicure! My toes look amazing. Why is OPI Red such a great color and, more importantly, why don't I already have a bottle?

+ longtimegone to the airport. Boo, sad, will miss her etc; on the plus side, we had Chick-Fil-A in the car. Always good to have Kristen here for a while.

+ Finally succumb to the little cold thing that's been trying to catch up to me for a few weeks. Nothing brutal, just snifflies and sinus Issues.

+ Home, at which point Marc called and totally PANICKED me with an "I have bad news" - they're firing-down-to-budget at his job and although Marc's position is pretty secure due to his generalized level of awesomeness and badassery, we've both been a bit anxious about it. Of course, the news was only that BA had canceled our flight for tomorrow. Which, I mean, we knew that was a possibility, but (a) we're not in the strike period and (b) the flight was 30 hours out - they couldn't have made that decision a bit earlier? (And they still haven't contacted us - if we hadn't been compulsively checking, we wouldn't have known until we tried to check in tonight. My previous judgment stands. >:-o) Much panic, etc, and the long and the short of it is that we have seats on a United flight that leaves 2 hours later. The seat assignment is not great (OK, but not great), but fuck it. The upside to all this (because I am a girl constantly in search of an upside) is that it means that we'll be getting into London a few hours after the worst of morning rush hour is over, and that will make that part of the journey a bit easier.

Thanks so much for all of the commiseration and offers of help. This is not a major holiday derailer, but it continues to be an anxiety-producing pain in my ass. Not best pleased, and I hope this is the worst of it.

+ Picked up kids, did the homework harassment, back out the door to drop A at gymnastics and then head to Dulles to pick up darthfox, who is now home!

+ Collapsed on bed to write out cranky LJ entry and try to organize myself a little.

Tomorrow:

+ Pick up a little currency at the bank - we're down to £15ish, and the last time I was in France you could buy 7 francs to the dollar (which is why I have a few 20 franc notes I use as bookmarks) and so although I am generally a have-ATM-will-travel kind of girl, it will be nice not to have to worry about that right away.

+ Um, pack? Marc and O are mostly done - tonight I'll finalize A and then start figuring out what the hell is in my closet and how many pairs of shoes I need for 2 weeks. (Note to self: ALL OF THEM is not the right answer, however right it might feel.)

+ Last minute CVS run, including cough drops, more major decongestants, travel tissues, and Dramamine to sedate the children into unconsciousness.

+ Finish trying to dry out the basement, which flooded on Saturday night.

+ Run the van keys out to abka, who is awesome. (abka, expect an email tonight!)

+ Await the arrival of misscake, who is also awesome and who will be driving us to the airport darthfox, who is suddenly free and can take us to the airport, relieving misscake of being away from home for 16 hours tomorrow! Yay friends!

+ Hate on Dulles, glare daggers at the BA counter, board plane and hope to be asleep before we're over the Atlantic.

(1) the Firefly box set is on Amazon Gold Box for $18 for the next 40 minutes.

(2) it looks like we're going to juuuuust miss the BA strike, with flight dates of 3/23-24 and 4/5. I'm breathing a sigh of relief and crossing my fingers for misscake.

Dear bananas:

How so yummy?

Love,
Carrie

***

So, yeah, that's pretty much my level of intellectual sophistication today. Tune in tomorrow, when I will talk about how great it is that hot showers feel good!

In other news, wow, Kathryn Bigelow, huh? And, you know, James Cameron's utter douchery has left me extra glad for Kathryn Bigelow, who got to neener-neener her bullshit ex-husband on the world stage in an incredibly classy way, and that she's so awesome and he's such a shit is just - well, to hell with the movies, that's an incredibly satisfying story on its own. I fell asleep before they got around to her (tbh I sort of tossed up my hands at Sandra Bullock's win, said 'fuck it', and put my head down) so does anybody know where I can find a link to the vid of Babs and then her acceptance speech?

First things first: Girl Scout Cookies are in! If you ordered in this post (or at some other time in person), that means I have cookies for you! My plan for delivery and distribution mostly centers around the week of Mar 15, as I'm on Spring Break that week (WOO-HOO! NO REALLY WOO-HOO!) and will be able to see people and knock around the Metro area more easily. If you'd like your cookies before then, shoot me an email and we'll see what we can figure out. And FYI: if you ordered Lemon Chalet Cremes, the cases I got are NOT under recall and all seems to be well.

So, right, London. We come in on the 24th and are heading out of town on the 28th. My personal agenda includes a kind of ridiculous lot of theatre ("Jerusalem" on the night we come in, then maybe something on Thursday night if we sort out the babysitter issue, "Wicked" with the kids on Friday, and then "Enron" with aegeus and titanic_days on Saturday afternoon) and seeing some of you guys and putting the kids through their first pass of the London tourist run. malachan is having a birthday do on Saturday, and we're totally finding some way to horn in on that - it's still very up in the air and obv up to the birthday boy :) but there's talk of doing an early dinner that the kids can attend and then moving on to drinks - if it works out that way I think it likely that I will send Marc home with the kids and join you in the drinks, b/c it's 8 am on a Thursday and drinks sound really really good.

I'm already bringing girl scout cookies and Goo Gone - anybody else need things? These requests frequently involve spirits - do the kids get a slot? anybody know how that works? It seems a bit dicey for them to be able to bring in bottles for personal use, but one never knows. :) (And while I'm thinking about it - frayer, thanks so much for the offer to pick up a phone for me! As it happens, I harassed Meg into doing it, but it was an incredibly sweet offer and I really appreciate it. Sorry I haven't responded back - life crazed, etc, but I did want to say thanks.)

If it sounds like I'm running around a bit agitated, well, that's accurate. I'm on a new lab schedule right now that's very heavy on the end of the week and I don't like it AT ALL. Still like you guys, though. ♥