naked in the office

no, i wasn't drinking! we have this thing in our office called naked lunch where, several times each year, three people get chosen to give a 20-minute presentation about themselves and essentially "bare all". if there's anything scarier than standing in front of your co-workers preparing to tell your life story, i don't know what it is (except maybe teaching English to very excited adolescents OR paragliding, but i digress :-).

i was one of the lucky few this year who got picked to go naked, and i've spent the last few weeks plotting, scheming, and stressing about what to say. who am i, really? how did i get here? it turned out that some of my story was quite easy to tell and some of it was actually unbeknownst to me until i started putting this thing together:



(Current and/or ex-members of the good ship Klamath will recognise the format!)

essentially this 9-up = brand Jennifer and even though it is not the prettiest thing, it felt like an accurate representation of ME. what is all this stuff? from left to right, starting with the top row:

top left
the big fish in a small bowl stands for who i thought i was in cincinnati, loving my job and my life but knowing i wasn't being challenged enough. the little fish was who i aspired to be, even though she is smaller, she has a bigger bowl to swim around in.

top middle
the fab deca logo. andy rodgers got me into this and it was the one extracurricular that taught me how to write a speech, give presentations to thousands of people, and got me on the right path. i know you were all thinking it was my part time job with the Colonel that got me where i am today, but i really think it was deca that acted as the springboard.

top right
the track stands for how much i love running, even though i am STILL burned out from the flying pig marathon and not sure if i ever want to do 26.2 again. running is something i enjoy with my dad, something that gives me a sense of place no matter where i am, and something that keeps my crazies in tact. the smell of that track in the late afternoon sunshine takes me right back to 7th grade and the milford eagles racing crew...

middle left
my passport = a girl's guide to freedom. i have to thank my parents on this one for letting me go to spain when i was 17. that travel bug bit me right in the ass at a young age and has never let go!

middle middle
i love reading, writing, and everything in between. i adore bill bryson and secretly (or not) long to be a travel writer.

middle right
this wall in cusco is red, just like the little piece of my heart that will always remain in the amazing sacred valley of peru. the trip that changed my way of looking at the world...

bottom left
if i was going to be a muppet, it would totally be beaker. i love to make stuff, which is always an experiment and makes me feel like a mad scientist sometimes (especially in the kitchen). coupled with the fact that i get really high-pitched sometimes, well, can't you just see the correlation? meep, meep!

bottom middle
my eternal mental age. i had the wisdom of my twenties (parents stop laughing at me) but the ENERGY of a twenty-something. it's orange because i have synesthesia...

bottom right
EC1...the postcode...stands for being that little fish in the big bowl now, traveling to random places for £24.99 on easyJet, drinking random beers just because i can, and most importantly, where i met my Ads.

so there you have it. if you ever needed written explanation of my nuttiness, look no further.

birthday celebrations

the lovely adam celebrated his 32nd birthday on thanksgiving day last week!


wednesday night we had dinner with friends at our favourite italian place, ciao bella


the group got a bit rowdy after too many bottles of value-priced house wine


friday afternoon it was off to a seaside town called brighton, about an hour away on the train. we stayed in a wonderful little b&b called the cavalaire, which was in a restored victorian mansion. breakfast in the mornings was amazing, everything from a Full English to salmon and scrambled eggs! i didn't want to leave.


our first stop in brighton was the fish bowl pub, where we feasted on giant fish finger sandwiches and seasonal ales.


since it was really, really cold in brighton, our second stop was at a cosy pub called the bath arms, where we sat by the fire and enjoyed more seasonal ales and a lovely woodford reserve.


saturday morning we braved the cold for a walk on the beach and down to the famous pier. the ocean was beautiful...too bad we were wearing ski hats!


that blurry thing in the corner is my MITTEN, which i wore to the BEACH


heh, heh. the brits call cotton candy "candy floss" which makes absolutely no sense to me


cheeky illustrations on the side of the women's bathing house


i tried my hand at some skee ball in the arcade, although the game was actually (appropriately) called "ice ball"


after a very cold morning on the pier we walked back down the beach to a place called mdtea, which i didn't take a picture of because the staff wasn't very friendly and they scared me. that aside, i had the BEST cup of tea there ever. it was a peppermint and chili infusion, absolutely amazing.


adam's friends mike and amelia drove in from kent to have dinner with us saturday night! we went to a great seafood restaurant called english's, where we dined on oysters, scallops, and fresh lemon sole. the meal took 3.5 hours, so we really got to enjoy every course and not feel too rushed.


i would smile here but my face is actually frozen

snowed in

in case you haven't caught the london weather lately, it's bloody freezing here and snowing to boot. it snowed all day yesterday but it didn't stick much within central london. however, in kent where adam lives, they have over a foot! needless to say the trains aren't running and he is stuck in greenhithe for the foreseeable future...



Adam's monster truck, covered in a mountain of snow

thanksgiving in london, year two

for the second year in a row, my american friend beth hosted a lovely thanksgiving meal for us turkey fans who are far from home. beth's friend michael also joined us, along with adam, who was also celebrating his birthday!


a wonderful spread to be thankful for


good company to share the meal with


eating my veggies...mama would be proud!


birthday candles for my sweet boy (guess who made the pie!)


happy thanksgiving everyone!

london weekend

two weekends ago, i decided to spend some time getting to know my little city a bit better. i started by having dinner at a chic-chic pan asian fusion restaurant called cocoon in piccadilly circus. normally i wouldn't go near piccadilly unless i have guests in town OR if i needed to visit the anthropologie store, but it's Christmas and there are nice lights up, so i braved the crowds for a friday evening out with the girls:



saturday night adam came over and we embarked on a mini ec1 pub crawl. we realised that there are about 50 pubs in my postcode (or more. no joke.) and that we only go to three of them, even though there are a bunch we have always wanted to try. we found that a few of them were closed (ec1 is next to the city, which is primarily a mon-fri community) but we did enjoy delicious beer at some new local haunts:

the rising sun, a samuel smith pub with a fireplace - score!

the castle - not bad, but smelled like a club and was playing bad music

betsey trotwood - they let me try the beers on draught before making me commit

the wilmington arms - oh my. this one smelled like bleach, which makes you wonder WHAT they had to clean up that required the involvement of chemicals. we didn't linger in this one.


the reigning champion of the evening, the rising sun






enjoying the sights along the mini pub crawl

on sunday we headed up to chapel market where we hit our favourite butcher shop, the fresh meat market, for a leg of lamb and some pork chops. we also braved the horror that is sunday afternoon at the islington waitrose, so that i could get cans of pumpkin for thanksgiving! finally a local store is stocking canned pumpkin and i don't have to go all the way to stoke newington!

with the groceries purchased, we embarked on what i hope will be the first of many "monthly cultural outings". this month we went to the museum of london, which is a 10-minute walk from my flat and is also FREE. we only had an hour to spend but got too see some really cool displays on what london was like millions of years ago.


exploring the museum

all in all it was a fun weekend and a great reminder of the variety of things london has to offer! if i ever get bored here, it is my own fault...

Meece

Yesterday was my monthly turn at the cleaning rota, and I usually tend to do OCD things like wipe under the microwave, move the 57 bottles of olive oil so I can wipe under them, attempt to clean the George Foreman grill that no one uses yet is inexplicably dirty, etc. I sometimes find interesting things like rubber bands, crumbs, and one time, an olive. However, yesterday, I got an unwanted surprise when I discovered...mouse droppings. A lot of them. We have had mice in the garden and the garage since Summer but I had never seen any evidence of them in the main house. Ew, ew, ew. I grabbed the bleach and went to town, then planned to send an email out to my housemates regarding our new pets.

After 2.5 hours of cleaning (most of it in the kitchen), I went to take a nap and was awoken by a loud crash. No one was crying or yelling, so I figured I would let it be and went back to sleep. Adam came over a little while later and we went to the kitchen for a quick snack before heading out for the evening. We encountered one of my housemates making her own snack, and she mentioned that she and another housemate saw two mice earlier (meece :-), which was what resulted in the crash. Gah. She also said she had found a hole in the wall in the hallway where she thought the mice had come in. She had put a lot of duct tape over the hole, so we hoped the problem would be solved for the time being.

Everyone was chatting merrily over our food when out the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny grey thing scurrying down the hall towards the bathroom. My initial instinct was to scream, loud, which prompted Adam into action and he scuttled after it with one of Ly's shoes. I had just mopped and I REALLY wasn't in the mood for a massacre, so I screamed some more while he played whack-a-mouse to no avail. It was looking for the hole we had taped over and when it couldn't get through, it came BACK down the hall towards the kitchen. And towards me. I hollered again and hopped up onto a kitchen chair as Adam and the mouse chased each other down the hall. My housemate, who had been cooking, was quiet but also up on a chair, watching with interest to see how the situation would unfold.

By this point, our other three housemates had come down to see why I was screaming (no need to send that email any more). We discussed possible ways to get rid of the critters:

- Open the door and let them run outside (quickly dismissed, as Adam mentioned these are not like pet cats and probably more would come in while the door was open)

- Feed them poison bait (still under consideration, although we don't want dead ones in the garage or the walls)

- Get glue traps (dismissed as inhumane, since this doesn't kill them quickly)

- Get snappy traps (still under consideration, but no one wants to clean up the carcasses especially since their heads tend to snap off in these things)

We decided to contact the landlord and everyone went their separate ways for the night.

Fast forward twenty four hours and I'm in the kitchen again with Adam and a different flatmate and I went to use the downstairs bathroom before we started roasting our leg of lamb (£6.99 y'all). I was facing the sink when suddenly, a tiny grey creature rushed at me. Talk about an invasion of privacy, hello mouse! Not in the loo! I screamed bloody murder and we danced around the tiny bathroom, then the dumb thing finally ran behind the toilet. I came out of the bathroom to a chorus of "shut the door!". Adam then went in with one of Ly's finance magazines and shut the door behind him to avoid further infestation.

There was a lot of scuffling and Ads emerged five minutes later, only to announce that there are holes where the woodwork is unfinished:

- Behind the sink (big one)

- By the radiator (two small ones)

- Behind the toilet (medium size one)

He then rummaged around the garage, found...something, and used it to plug one of the holes.

I'm not a fan of these encounters with nature. I know we live in the city but come on. I've given five people near heart attacks with my screaming and Adam said his ears are still ringing. My own heart is pounding and I find myself looking suspiciously at the refrigerator and the bathroom now. I bet no one goes in there for a while!

Anyway, hopefully the landlord will sort this out quickly, especially since I've decided to stay here for the time being and not go spend 75% of my income to live in a shoebox. :-)

genius

In case you're ever bored in London... :-)