The winner of the ham battle is you!

IT'S EARLY. My US -> UK jet lag is less bad than I anticipated so far, but we'll see how I'm feeling around 3pm. :/

We are completing on our house today! We move on Sunday and most of our things are packed. We won't have internet for the first two weeks, which is TRAGIC but we really should have called earlier eh oh well. Other things we won't have right away include:

a fridge or freezer

a washing machine

££ to acquire either of those before the end of the month without falling behind on my student loan payments

BUT I'M SURE IT WILL ALL BE FINE.

I have spent the past two weeks in Portland OR with my family, and it was an extremely successful trip I think! Firstly, my family isn't as bad as many - it is of course bonkers as all families are, but it is bonkers in a loving way that evinces itself in eg spontaneous rounds of applause at someone opening a gifted pair of socks and taking 500000 photographs of everything, rather than eg malicious emotional manipulation or anything like that. (My grandmother does tend to nick people's wine - as in, I have turned around to talk to someone and turned back to see her replacing my now-empty wine glass in front of me, having dumped its contents into her glass - but I think that falls under Lovable Quirk.)

I want to do a bigger post about it later because I did many fun things and met up with many good people. We came back bearing a pound of See's candy which is excellent. I'm going into work today, which in retrospect was a kind of foolish decision, as again I'm sure I'm going to be falling asleep at my desk in the afternoon.

Hi Britain, it is nice to be back!

Sunday and yesterday were very nice! _jenjen_, joranj, hoshuteki and self went to Posh Afternoon Tea at the Lanesborough hotel, which was, well, delicious and posh. The pianist was quite funny, and started playing Fancy Hotel Reception Riffs On a few '80s pop songs and Phantom of the Opera before settling into Cole Porter.

Ewan got me two books, Watching the English (which I am halfway through and is very funny, if not necessarily totally accurate) and Jerusalem: A Biography, which I have heard great things about and am excited to sit at home and read with a cup of tea.

Jenny, Josh and I went to see Cowboys and Aliens before tea, which was a thoroughly hateful film. I like Daniel Craig and most other people in it, and the fact that the capitalist bad guy was a cattle owner named "Dollarhide", and I wish they had stuck with A Lone Amnesiac Gunslinger Comes To Town, Then Everyone Fights Aliens (which was a very enjoyable 45-minute film trapped inside the one we saw) without the unnecessary, stupendous racism and misogyny. THANKS HOLLYWOOD. BY WHICH I MEAN FUCK YOU.

When we returned home VERY FULL in the early evening, I discovered that my mother-in-law got me a Kindle for my birthday in a bald-faced attempt to buy my love! As you may recall a few months ago I had been trying to decide whether it was worth buying one, and decided it wasn't really something I needed, but it is a brilliant gift and I am very happy and thankful for it.

The best thing I have downloaded so far is the Silent Voices Bible, which swaps the gender pronouns on everything and everybody. I remember a conversation with my rabbi early in my conversion, when he described how surprised and dismayed he was when he realised in university how severe the difference was between women's and men's experience of reading patriarchal texts. Aside from things like a female Abraham arguing with a female god, there are things like:

"Isn't a woman forced to labor on earth? Aren't her days like the days of a hired hand? As a servant who earnestly desires the shadow, as a hireling who looks for her wages, so am I made to possess months of misery, wearisome nights are appointed to me."

And, like, is this what it is like to be male? Texts are just all written for you? Male is normative and male pronouns are used to describe the general, the plural or the non-gendered? You don't have to work to find yourself in the text because it is all overt and easy and handed to you? IT IS BLOWING MY MIND BASICALLY. I want to do this with every text ever. I am definitely using this version for the "blog every book of the Bible" project that is on my 101 Things list.

What else should I be using my Kindle for other than "reading public domain books"? Can I get academic journals on it? I am already subscribing to the New Statesman and have bought a few trashy looking crime and romance novels for 86p.

***

Yesterday Ewan and I went to lunch at Dinner (this was my big birthday present from him), which was VERY VERY TASTY. I had a fantastic cocktail with gin and orange peel and rose tea from the Mandarin Bar as well, which I wish I had noted the ingredients for so I could make it at home.

After lunch I had an appointment with the admissions adviser at Rabbi School. We'd been exchanging emails intermittently after I signed up for, and then decided not to go to, Rabbi School Open Day, where I said "so I almost definitely do not want to be a rabbi, and I really love my current job, but I do enjoy higher education and Jewish stuff, so it would be nice to know if there are options for me", and she said "oh that is fine, there aren't really at the moment, but let's have a chat anyway", and we did, and it was nice and non-pressured but I still came away thinking (a) I probably don't want to be a (congregational) rabbi and (b) it is a giant bummer that there is no progressive Jewish body that will let me earn an MA in Jewish Stuff without going to classes during working hours. Oh well.

After Jew Class we looked at three properties, two of which were not great and one of which we love but is £20k more than we can afford and the estate agent said they are definitely not going that low. I suppose we could put an offer in anyway just for fun.

When we got home my stomach started doing odd things so we scrapped the plan of Ewan cooking me a romantic dinner and instead I lay in bed munching potatoes, watching 30 Rock and whimpering. Boo!

It is VERY RAINY today but I actually quite like this, as I have been feeling a bit sad and worn-down this weekend despite it being MY BIRTHDAY HURRAH, and now I can huddle over tea at work and have it feel OK to be sad and worn-down. There were very nice things about the weekend though! Like my lovely husband most of all, and also the bit where the Rabbi School admissions adviser said that of all the potential Rabbi School students she'd seen over the past few months, I was the least interested in but (in her opinion) the best suited for the rabbinate. Soz guys, I will be saving the world through financial journalism instead! I hope!

In our microcosm, at least, it has been a good few days.

On Saturday we went to the flat we FELL IN LOVE WITH and on a second viewing discovered that we are not so keen on it. We are not un-keen, but it is much less "I WAAAANT IT!" now than it was after the first viewing. The moral of this story is that second viewings are key! However, we had a nice little walk around the area (Tufnell Park and the back of Archway) and discovered that it is basically amazing and we love it and it has a really good wine shop and a really good curry takeaway place, so we are focusing OUR SEARCH there for now. The estate agent, having scented our keenness the first time, is now emailing us desperately to get us to make an offer, and we are trying to figure out how to let him down easy.

Saturday afternoon, joranj and _jenjen_ came over for Tongan food. As far as I can tell, this involves digging a big hole in the ground, lining it with rocks, setting lots of things on fire inside it and then ducking for cover when things explode.



tigerpig preparing the DEATH FIRE PIT umu.

I did some Googling "campfire explosion" to find out what had made the explosion (which fortunately was directed away from us), and ended up cheerfully reading aloud news items like, "The campers had to be airlifted to a hospital with third-degree burns across their upper bodies" while Josh and Ewan covered their ears and cringed.

After wrapping some vegetables in a wire cage and a damp sheet and lowering it into the ground, we decided what was needed was MORE FLAME.



Later we brought the hookah out, because there were just not enough things on fire in our backyard at once.

NB with the exception of Josh and Jenny, we were all moderately to very drunk at this point on fizz Ewan and I bought at Theatre of Wine that afternoon. I had bought a whole salmon at Nunhead's excellent fishmonger, FC Soper, with the expectation that it would go in the umu, but we decided it would be better to pack it with some lemon and parsley, wrap it in aluminum foil and bung it on a flaming brazier instead. THINGS WRONG WITH THIS PLAN: NOTHING! In fact everything turned out delicious, especially a surprise raw fish salad Sara had made, and nobody was critically injured or even cosmetically burned.

We also watched Whip It, and I was quite intoxicated but I really really do not understand why Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat were not kissing at the end of it.

Most of Sunday morning I spent whining in bed to Ewan about how my head hurt, before making a feeble attempt to clean my room. In the early afternoon our Portuguese neighbors invited Sara and I over for "coffee" and then force-fed us Licor Beirao for several hours, until we staggered home and made drunk polenta before turning on "Hello, Dolly!" (which Sara got me for my birthday last year) and napping on the couch.

At 8pm last night (Monday) Sara and Dan surprised us with a BBQ feast, and I made paper cup daquiris and Dan set yet more things on fire, and we all ate amazing halloumi skewers and salmon and corn on the cob and mozzarella salad and it was delicious.

Summer is great.

The flat I fell in love with online was HILARIOUSLY "in need of work" aka "1950s-era kitchen and bathroom, most of the window panes in master bedroom splintered, broken and with a mouldy red sock rolled up and stuck in one". I am still basically in love with the space, but sadly I don't think it's salvageable unless they REALLY REALLY drop the price. (Even the estate agent was like, "haha yes I have not seen a property that needs this much work in a VERY LONG TIME. They will have to be, um, VERY FLEXIBLE in the price I suspect.")

This flat is my new OMGWANT. Spiral staircase!! I also like this one, mostly because the current residents have a poster of Han Solo on the wall, and this one (floorplan), because I can fantasise about knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the reception room for a SUPER RECEPTION ROOM, plus bonus bedroom (although I have the vague feeling living in a house with more bedrooms than people is somehow unethical).

Currently my main struggle is getting estate agents not to call me at work. I've left a note in each "please contact me about this property" saying "I can't take calls from 9am-5pm but respond to emails very quickly", but so far exactly one of five agents has emailed me rather than calling and leaving a "PLEASE CALL ME BACK ASAP" message.