Blogging by VSAT

I'm having trouble putting my thoughts into words at the moment, I am in The Field (well, in a field office, The Field is down the road) and I have a million things to say. The first one is, for anyone watching the situation in the Hot Place, I'm fine. We're all fine.

The rest has to do with stars and sand and guns and water. It feels like a waste of bandwidth to compose online, as bandwidth is hard to come by round here, but tomorrow is our day off, and I shall attempt to write something.

Till then, let's say I'm not spending much time thinking about the recession. It's in the background, but the foreground doesn't leave much spare space.

joella

Going once more a-roving

By popular demand, I am going back to the Hot Place. It won't be quite so hot, but there will be other complications. I will be playing with Jing, so I have got myself a microphone headset, so I will in theory be Skypeable. I won't be Twittering, but I might be Yammering. I'll be blogging obliquely. I'll be MSNing. All of this is of course assuming there's an internet connection. There was last time, but that don't mean a thing.

I'm so looking forward to coming back. February will be over, the sap will be rising, and I can start on Project Gherkin (involving a propagator and some Seeds of Italy) and Project Skirting (involving a sewing machine and something from Clothkits).

joella

Holy Ikea, Vatman!

So I went to Rome. It was a significant birthday of my Significant Aunt, and there was a gathering of the clan. I didn't think I'd be able to make it, as I was supposed to be going back to the Hot Place. But that got postponed (only till this time next week, however, when I will again be engaged with the information management side-effects of protracted instability), my passport came back from the Embassy, and I was good to go. 

When I was 17, I went post A-level InterRailing with my friend R. We spent a few days in Milan, during which time we were harassed so relentlessly (the high point being when a traffic policeman touched me up while we were crossing the road) that we decided to hang out with three boys from Macclesfield who were staying in the same Youth Hostel. They weren't much better: we drank far, far too much, I was sick in a park, and even that didn't stop them trying to get off with us. 

I refused to go any further into Italy, and I haven't been back since. I can hold a grudge for a very long time, but I admit it was time to reassess. 

My very first impression was not great, but one should never judge a country by the men who try to get you into a taxi at the airport. I should also say that the combination of capital city prices and euro exhange rate make pretty much everything eyewateringly expensive. 

But it's beyootiful, it really is, and the food is astonishingly good. It doesn't seem to matter where you eat or what you order, it was all totally delicious. They have the kind of restaurants that we just don't, I think -- little places doing local food all over the place. I had some artichoke ravioli that I think I will remember forever, and the best minestrone soup I have ever tasted. And the Chianti, well. 

It wasn't all eating and drinking, of course, though I wouldn't have minded if it had been. We went on an open top bus to the Vatican, to marvel at the baroque wonders and sheer hugeness of St Peter's Basilica. As a firmly lapsed Catholic, I wondered if I might be smote down by a giant sword, or at the very least feel an urge to get myself to a nunnery, but I am relieved to report that I emerged with nothing worse than a cricked neck and a sense of awe. Dometastic! 

The Sistine Chapel was a different matter. To get there, you first have to walk for about a mile, then you have to part with quite a lot of cash, and then you have to walk another mile, but this one inside, through endless galleries and chambers and chapels and corridors plastered (often literally) with cherubs and saints and gilt and bleeding hearts (but no liberals, not even one). You can't just check out the bit you came all this way to see, oh no. You have to traipse past every last statue and frieze and tapestry and mosaic they've picked up in the last five centuries. It's like Ikea on acid. 

I'm not sure why they make you do that, but it does mean that by the time you stare up at Michaelangelo's ceiling your feet have properly suffered and you have an appropriate sense of your own insignificance. And you've made a donation to the men who did this to you. They're not as green as they're cabbage looking, that's for damn sure. 

There are a few photos here, if you're interested (I'm waiting on the one with all of us and a gold sofa in it). And of course, it was great to see everyone. Jerusalem next time? (Just kidding).

joella

New boots and panties

The boots have arrived! Just too late for me to look glamorous in them in Rome this weekend. Although I am not sure I could ever look glamorous in Rome. Or at all really. However I did get some green sunglasses there that someone said I looked 'mysterious' in this morning, and that's at least as good.

And they fit! And I think I love them as much as I did before the saga started, but even if I don't, I'm wearing them anyway. With my green sunglasses. Watch out Michelle Obama.

So that's the boots. The panties, well I can't be the only woman in the world to have been forwarded this link by her boyfriend. I do have a pair of pink pants (about which, strangely, I have previously written), where do I send them?

joella

I'll be out for a while

But I'll be back in a bit. I am just walking through the snow, finding out if this is it.

(That's a bastardised quote, so extra points if you get it).

I have SO MUCH to write about -- dressing for success, the absence of snow ploughs, the Beautiful Georgian City of Bath, whether or not 25 random things about me are interesting in any way, how much I am enjoying the West Wing. But I am flat out stressed out at the moment, mainly because I am currently doing an old-fashioned five day week in order to complete an impossible assignment.

I have some new photos of toilets, too. Oh well. I have to focus on the urgent, and the urgent is currently a slippery walk away.

laters

joella

When I was a lass...

... it did snow more. It *did*. I remember walking to school in my wellies, which were higher than my socks, and the rub rub rub of cold rubber against bare legs. I can still feel it now. That must have been in the 1970s, so we had more snow *and* long hot summers. Who said the past didn't go anywhere.

And then there was the big freeze of... 1981? 1982? Somewhere round there. School was no longer within walking distance, though it was only shut for a day. It might have been that day, or it might have been a non-school day thenabouts that I offered to go shopping for various little old ladies in a nearby cul de sac. There was a Spar down the road, and I attached the laundry basket to the toboggan with bungee cords (I may have had adult assistance for this) and then hitched up the dachshunds. They couldn't actually pull me, of course, not actually being huskies, but they did manage a load of Ambrosia Creamed Rice, teabags, barley sugars etc with only a couple of disappearing into snowdrift incidents. I felt as much like Laura Ingalls Wilder as it was possible to feel on a housing estate in Lancashire.

We knew how to make our own fun in those days.

joella