Shamefull Extravagance

Either all the hours I put in over Climate Change Awareness Week are catching up with me, or my brain thinks it's still at UCL where they have a reading week after five weeks- yesterday I overslept to the point of missing a class for the first time this year*, and today I actually fell asleep in Time Series for more than a few seconds- even though I was trying to stay awake. I planned to have a nap after the lecture, but for a while it looked worryingly like he wouldn't finish half an hour early as normal: this week a survey of room use is being carried out and so someone comes to each room each hour to count heads, and the lecturer said at 11.20 that normally he'd stop there, but because of the room survey he thought he should carry on to show it was being used. Since the person had already been that hour, I didn't think that was necessary, but he seemed to think they might come back. Fortunately, he decided after ten minutes of questions that that would probably be sufficient, and I was able to get my nap after all.

I then went to Piccadilly, to the Japan Centre, where I stocked up on umeboshi (pickled plums), soba and udon (noodles), but most importantly on manga- I was having cravings. I only meant to get the December copy of Chorus**, but found they also had October's and November's- the ones I thought I'd missed whilst I was being commendably restrained and unextravagant. Not only that, but they also had the quarterly special issues for both Autumn and Summer; I already had Spring so it seemed a shame not to add those to the collection. The thing with these manga magazines is that a lot of the stories are serials, and it's really annoying if you find an author who's at least vaguely comprehensible, and with a gripping story and characters, not to have as many episodes as possible. So that was five telephone directory sized magazines, which would have been ok in Japan where they're about £2 each, but since they have to cover their shipping expenses, they're pretty steep here- with the two pairs of chopsticks, two Japanese teacups, zaru (Japanese bamboo dish for serving soba) and bamboo box that looked just right for keeping my receipts, which were all impulse buys that I was drawn to by an 'All items £1' display, it all came to more than £40.

At least I'd got a padlock on my way down the strand, so, after the Green Party committee meeting, I was finally able to claim a locker in the Old Building. It wasn't as straightforward as it might have been though- the padlock I'd bought was just two small to close around the locker handle, so I went down to the Students' Union shop where they had bigger padlocks- I'd been avoiding getting one there because they were pretty expensive, but now I needed a lock in a hurry. Guess what, though- this padlock's shaft turned out to be too thick to go through the handle. Which was bizarre as there were no less than four identical padlocks attached quite happily to other lockers- but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get mine to go through (and it wasn't just an abnormally narrow-handled locker, because I tried it on several others too. In the end, I managed to get the original small one to close by holding it at a particular angle. But I think I'll do best to get a third, medium sized lock...

Seen on campus: headlines printed large and attached to the stands in Houghton St where you can pick up the Beaver (LSE's student newspaper) for free, to try to entice readers. One of them was 'Communications Officer Slammed'. I thought this was quite interesting, because I read that article yesterday and it seems to me that by far the most slamming was being done by the article itself. I don't know, does it really count as news if a paper does it itself? Mind you, it was debateable whether it counted as news anyway because it was incredibly one-sided: it contained many allegations of misconduct (or at least accusations of incompetence), and many quotes or paraphrases from people who were critical of him, but none from people who were supportive or at least neutral- and there were some, because CMCC was telling me after the Green Party committee meeting that they'd asked him for a quote, he'd said he didn't have a problem with the Communications Officer, and it wasn't even mentioned briefly in passing (e.g. 'though not all members of the executive consider he's doing a bad job', only better and more journalistically phrased). Of course, I don't know all the inside details. Maybe some of the charges are justified. But as an example of the bias of the reporting, consider this: at the last UGM, the Executive Editor of the Beaver asked the Communications Officer why he hadn't put the updated version of the Codes of Practice (whatever they may be) on the website. The Beaver says "According to Dewji, nobody knows where an updated copy is, but he is trying to track one down. He later told The Beaver that it hadn't been done earlier because he 'didn't know there wasn't an existing copy', and that he 'wasn't in office when it [the new version] was passed, so [he] wasn't responsible for updating it at the time". From this, you'd think he was generally clueless and had maybe even lost the document himself, right? Actually, I was there at that UGM, and the way I understood his response, the Codes of Practice were updated while his predecessor was in office, and his predecessor should have put them on the website but didn't. When the current Communications Officer discovered that they hadn't been updated, he wanted to do it himself, but couldn't find a copy of them and is still in the process of trying to locate one- as he said to the Executive Editor, if the Executive Editor knew where a copy was and could supply him with one, then he could get it done. I take it from the Editor's silence that he also doesn't know where an updated copy is... He also made the point that he didn't have the authority to just put up his recollection of the new version of the Codes of Practice, but needed to do it with reference to the actual document. Of course, all this wouldn't matter (too much) if everyone else had also been at the UGM (though if the Beaver's coverage of other meetings is as dodgy as its UGM coverage I guess they'd really need to be at all those too...), but many more students read the Beaver than go to the UGM so many people probably form opinions based on the Beaver alone (and then go on to vote based on those opinions). In the light of which, I suppose it's actually reassuring that only 1000 of LSE's 7000 students voted in the Michaelmas elections- I dread to think what the results would have been with 6,500 of them getting their view of events solely from the Beaver...

I met up with my friend I to go shopping- something we'd expressed the intention of doing sometime at S's party, but I'd just been so busy I hadn't contacted her since. The main aim for each of us was to get some shoes- mine are falling apart, and she wanted some winter ones. But we got rather distracted by various other shops- including a nice and not that expensive clothes shop, where I tried on four skirts of which one was actually rather nice (well they all were but the others didn't fit too well)...- and a shop with many kinds of interesting paper (once, in final year, I and I*** visited Paperchase in quest of something to wrap the present we got the lecturer who happened to be both of our supervisor**** to thank him for supervising us, and spent hours getting distracted by the many amazing kinds of paper, mentally redecorating our rooms with them, and just generally getting absorbed), a shop with books of patterns accompanied by the same on CD Rom, mostly Japanese as they were by a Japanese publisher*****, and a shop of beads. We did eventually manage to find her a nice pair of moccasins though- she'd been looking for boots but they were very nice, and after all she's going to be sitting indoors working on her PhD, not splashing through mud. I didn't get any shoes (I'll have to have another try this weekend), but I did spend £100 on 5 cardigans and 4 vest tops. This sounds excessive untill you take into account the following:

1. 
   Though I much prefer cardigans to jumpers (I think they look nicer on me), I currently only have 2 wearable cardigans and have recently been alternating them; sooner or later someone's going to notice that the top half of my wardrobe apparently only extends to 2 items...
2. 
   I've been looking for cardigans as long as I can remember; in fact, I don't think I've ever had enough, not even back in the sixth form when I first discovered their possibilities: I have at times had as many as three or four at once, but they seem to wear out or go missing quicker than I can find them in the shops.
3. 
   Last year I was in a particular crisis of cardigans and was very much in search of them; I found just one that was serviceable in colder weather than a chilly summer day (the others had big decorative holes...), so that search could be considered to be still officially open- ie I was still filling last year's deficit with today's purchases.

Anyway, they are very nice and will do wonders to expand my wardrobe!

We had chai lattes and chocolate cake at Cafe Nero, and a good old natter, before finally going our separate ways.

I got back my Principles and Methods test yesterday. It said '28' at the top, so I thought "Ah well, I knew I hadn't done great.", but then LJ, whom I sometimes sit next to or chat to after class, and who was next to me on this occasion, pointed out to me that it said at the top of the question sheet (which I'd lent her as she didn't go to the test) that all the questions would be marked out of 10 so I'd done very well. So then I thought "Wow, how did that happen? Well, looks like although I made a few mistakes I'm at least on the right lines; that's encouraging!". Then after a while I took another look at it in more detail, and observed that one of the questions had got 15 marks, and the others I really hadn't got enough to get 6 out of 10 or whatever, and whispered to LJ that I thought it was actually out of 20 in spite of what it said on the sheet. Then she said she'd just remembered, he'd said just before I came in (I was about 5 minutes late due to a queue for the loos) that it was out of 25. So I really didn't do that well- but no surprises there, that was what I'd thought. I'll have to spend some time going over it at some point...

On the more positive side, the Computational Statistics lecturer said that my idea of doing my project on recycling is fine. So that's good- I know I'm really going to get into it when I start (I was already, to a certain point, when I was looking out the data on the internet). But apparently it isn't just a test of programming, it really does matter if you write rubbish when it comes to interpretation, so I'll have to work hard on that, what with never having done social sciences.

I had a nice supper last night- stuffed little gem squashes (left over from the bumper lot of veg I got for the Food Fair- I realised after I got them that they'd be too much with there already being one variety of squash in the salad as well as all the other many many vegetables), and rice with egg, miso and umeboshi (the egg was 2 new eggs plus all the yolk left over from the meringues)- it wasn't nearly as nice as last time I made it though- too watery. Flatmates 3 & 7 had used the salad that I considered unfit for passing off on innocent Food Fair frequenters to make a curry- when I mentioned I was going to chuck the salad, Flatmate 3 asked to try some and said she'd use it up. They gave me some of their curry, and I gave them some miso rice- there was far too much of it and it was a bit salty and rich to have vast quantities of. The curry was really nice, but I only found out after they'd served it to me and I'd taken a spoonfull that they'd used Japanese curry paste- I'd thought they'd just used Thai curry sauce from Tesco. Japanese curry invariably involves beef or other meat extract, but I didn't want to make a fuss, so I finished it. It did taste good, and it reminded me of the couple of times in Japan when I was served curry, before I realised that it wasn't genuinely vegetarian (which was probably as well as it was by people who thought they'd cooked me a special vegetarian meal, and I wouldn't have felt able to enlighten them). Though we were all pretty full, we went on to finish up the meringues and cream, with some of the pineapple. Flatmate 3 gave me some of her chocolate flakes to try- she didn't like them because they were kind of spicy (she didn't see it said 'chilli' on the label when she bought them...), though they didn't taste spicy in the cream. She also let me test some of her Rachel's Organic Dairy milk. We stayed up really late because Flatmate 7 brought her laptop into the kitchen and showed us her pictures of her holiday in Japan. Sometime I'm going to return the favour... but with 8000 pictures it'll have to be broken into several showings, unless we want to be at it all day...

*It was a three hour class, with the first hour being a lecture and the second two, after a change of room, a computer class, so technically I didn't miss the whole thing, just the first part. Though I was still about 15 minutes late for the second bit...

**Like Cosmopolitan and other monthly magazines, the issue on sale each month tends to be labelled as next month's

***Interpret as you will: she and me or me and she

****I know, I know. But I can't think of a neater way to phrase it.

*****I came across the same series of books in a bookshop in Japan, and just restrained myself from coming home with any of them

My stuffed squash recipe

3 little gem squashes
3 or 4 button mushrooms
1/2 small onion (shallot sized) or equivalent amount of larger onion
1 clove garlic
Lump of butter/ margarine/ hybrid spread/ cooking oil
6 artichoke heart quarters
6 black olives
3 tablespoons marscapone cheese
3 tablespoons sundried tomato paste

Cut a hole in the top of each squash big enough to put a teaspoon through. Scoop out all the seeds. Bake squashes in oven at 200 degrees C for half an hour to an hour (I'm afraid I wasn't keeping too much of an eye on the time- but just till the flesh is soft)
Slice the mushrooms thinly, chop the onion up small and the garlic very small (or use a garlic press). Fry in the butter or whatever till soft and cooked (five minutes or so). Chop the artichokes and olives into smallish pieces; mix in with the mushroom etc (but without heating). Put the mushrooms etc into the holes in the squashes, filling almost to the top of each. Put a dollop of sundried tomato paste and a dollop of marscapone on top of the filling in each squash, and give them a couple of minutes on medium power in the microwave.

The ingredients for this are quite expensive- but you don't use anything like the full tub of marscapone or jar of sundried tomato paste, or whatever, so the cost can be spread over several suppers. I had essentially the same thing again this evening, but with spaghetti instead of stuffed into squashes. And it was pretty good, if I say it myself...