A Most Disturbing Package ...

Dear Glasses-Website,
Might I suggest that the best way to thank someone for making a purchase through your website is not a wide wide staring squishy eyeball candy.
That's less oh hey, thanks! and more Oh Sweet Jesus What Is That??.
It is also kind of awesome!*



However, Thank you for my glasses. I now have an option for when I'm not feeling so emo.







Sincerely,
Sarah-Rose

p.s. Sarah's super secret s ... project (blast) is back underway!

P.p.s. Oh! Oh no. I've just noticed that according to the indredients the eyeball contains Strawberry Flavouring. Which indicates the presence of something red.
And you have to bite before swallowing.
I'm officially terrified.



* But then I enjoy both bad puns (glasses = eye candy) and pretending I've received a package from a serial killer.

Transpontine

Our New 'Hood



Transpontine (trans-PON-tyn) adjective

1. Across the bridge.

2. Situated on the south side of the Thames River in London.

3. Melodramatic (alluding to the type of dramas once performed
in theaters south of the Thames).

[From Latin trans- (across) + pont (bridge). Ultimately from the
Indo-European root pent- (to tread) that also gave us words such as
English find, Dutch pad (path), French pont (bridge), and Russian
sputnik (traveling companion).]

As of last night Craig and I are officially transpontine.
I'm not going to shout my address to the world-wide-web but the above is a satellite image of our neighbouhood. We are on there somewhere. The green arrow indicates the Tate Modern, the circle just to the right (underneath the words "Bankside Jetty") is the Globe Theatre and the whiteline across the Thames is the Millennium Bridge, which leads up to St Paul's Cathedral at the toptoptop of the image.

And that's the way I walked to work this morning! The sun was out and it was absolutely beautiful.

Someone found this website by searching google japan for "inside sarah rose"

Last night I rushed into the bedroom and slammed on the light. Craig turned to look at me (blearily, he had been asleep) and I, sodden & dripping, could only press a finger to my lips and turn away, repeating lines in my head.

They really should invent waterproof dictaphones:

'Don't you see?' she wanted to say as his madeline fingers twitched away form her mouth. 'Don't you see that choosing to kiss this, the whorls near the tip of your middle finger, is how much I love you? I love each square inch enough to kiss' but his eyes just looked at hers. His, her ghostly reflection, pale & open. Why then was she the one who felt so translucent?
Simon watched her moth-eyes flicker as she chewed her lip & stared at him, at the wall, the ceiling and back, focussing, on him.
"Claire? Claire please?" It had been three days since her last sentence, at least two since her last word. Simon sighed. She could see it in the cold, pale shafts of moonlight, she saw it settle, grey & potent, on their bed, their photos on their dresser, the clothes she never put away. She felt as though they would be buried, by her silence and his sighs.
A twitch of her head and a curtain of hair fell between them.
She felt Simon turn away and lie back down. 'Maybe tomorrow' she thought as she stretched her mouth curiously and breathed into the grey black night.

I've never seen one from New Zealand before!

When the Religious Right Goes Too Far
Teen #1: Did you know tumors can sometimes grow hair and teeth?
Teen #2, stunned: Um, those aren't tumors. Th-those are babies.

Wild Thyme Restaurant
Queenstown
New Zealand

via Overheard Everywhere, Aug 16, 2007

This may be my new favourite photo of Craig & Myself

(photo by Tanya)

Walking home from The Ruby just past Midnight, after a night of cocktails (Mojito! Raspberry Collins!) and free Champagne from a Multi Millionaire (seriously) I found a brick and thought it very important to carry it the entire way home.

p.s. The brick has been very useful. As a door stop. I wasn't just drunk & crazy. For once.

p.p.s. 19 days out from moving, we've found that our current flatmates are lovely.
It's almost a shame that the new flat is so so perfect. Almost.

p.p.p.s. in 117 days Craig & I will be touching down in New Zealand. I may bring the brick!

Ode to the Tate on a Thursday morning in August

Nothing is more perfect than walking into a room, tall & cool & echoing, cavernous as a cathedral, with canvases floor to ceiling.
These windows to other worlds, other times hang silent & stunning.

I enter & pause. Take a deep breath. Here there is no jarring of the senses, no feeling of hours & minutes but years & centuries, no outside world.

I walk through with reverence as though, if I am still & quiet & calm enough, I can absorb the beauty of the world.

This is my church. This is my spirituality, this is my holy writ.
This is my inspiration & hope.

To add insult to injury ...

We got Egged!

I'm half mad-as-hell and half impressed because in some improbable act of ... physics or something, the egg made it through the top 1/4 of our window (all that opens in the flat-from-hell) which is on the third storey, and it made it all the way down the other side to break on the windowsill.
Craig and I didn't even notice until the next morning when it had baked in the sun.

AND! there were no other eggs in sight from outside the flat so someone must be a crazy good shot.

This is such a nice neighbourhood. I will be sad to leave it.

p.s. that is our cute new reversible bed spread from Ikea. I'm in love with it.

Plotting our escape ...

So Craig and I went to look at two flats last night.

We saw the estate-housing outside of one and sent a message to the agent saying we were no longer interested.

We saw the outside of the other, the one suggested by a friend of a friend & the area and realised that it was perfect. Less than 5 minutes walk from the place Craig is starting at on Monday and unbelieveably close to the Tate Modern. I mean, out the front door, turn right, at the end of the street (which is ... fewer than 100 steps away) you look left and bam it's right there. A block away.

I was certain that we weren't going to get it. We looked around inside and it's tiny but it all looks new and pristine and the other flatmate is a girl called Sally who markets haircare products and brings her work home with her. She once had 70 bottles around the bathroom.
We talked and joked and asked about her and she asked about us, told us that there were 8 other people viewing it and that we would know by Friday.
We walked back down the 7 million stairs (on the 4th floor. No elevator). Outside, Craig turned to me and said "it's perfect. Yea. We're never going to get it".

You know where this is heading right?

We walked to the central line tube station at St Paul's (yes. St Paul's Cathedral is walking distance. I was in love) talking and talking about how pefect it is. How we were so never going to get it.
It's in SE1 which is ... about as close to the absolute centre of London as you can get. There is no SE0.

As we were sitting on the bus I got the call from Sally.
Craig saw me on the cellphone, peering around the legs of the man standing in the aisle between our seats and trying (failing) to sound cool & calm I eyebrow-ed him as I said to Sally "It's ours!?!"

It is more expensive than the place we're living at the moment. But not much more considering we're moving from W(est)4 to S(outh)E(ast)1.
I'm not even going to tell you the rent because you may make the mistake of converting, like I did. And my head hurt just a little. I have to remember that we're paying less than 25% of one income for rent. In New Zealand we were paying close to 45% of two. So London is cheaper to live in.
Comparatively.

We're still living ... in the flat of horrors until the 5th of September.
As we walked home from the bus stop (across the park & field where I expect to find a body one say) we discussed how to tell the people we're living with that after only a week we're moving.
It was not made any easier by the fact that when we got to the lounge (through the wide-open front door) they were all sitting around playing cards and were genuinely nice & funny & oh gosh I almost feel guilty ... almost.

We have a place to live! we need another. ASAP.

Everyone's so happy that we finally got a flat but I have to say that it is HELLISH and we're looking for a new place already.

8 people in a flat? too many. We moved in on Wednesday and it was nice. The people were friendly and welcoming. I noticed a funny smell in our room and the bathroom but put it down to settling in problems ...

Then Saturday night and Sunday morning came around.
I was already feeling a little wary because the girls (house music & cocaine girls) make me feel bad about myself, the room smelled stuffy & felt stiflingly hot even if the window was open as far as it would go & I'd forgotten my pashmina & had to run back up 3 flights of stairs to grab it. But I thought that was all teething problems.
Sitting around before we're meant to be going out one of the flatmates mentions that she's put a lock on her bedroom door. Apparently she has had drunk people walking into her room in the middle of the night. Drunken friends of flatmates. Not cool.
But Craig & I went out to the movies & dinner and had a mini fight on the way home (he wanted to go home and I wanted to go to a bar for a bit. We went home) but when we got there? the front door was WIDE OPEN.
And the person who (thankfully) was home? didn't even look up to see who it was wandering through the front door (not so thankfully).

We decided that the next day we would make a pro/con list to see if we wanted to look for a new place or stay here for awhile.

We were up until just after midnight but after we went to bed, and sleep, some of the flatmates came home. Drunk. With friends. We think. They ran up and down the stairs, screaming and yelling (every so often they would Ssh but then 2 minutes later ...) and even using an electric fucking drill. It was still dark so I guess at about 2am it started and they were still going just as it hit dawn. 5am.
Craig slept through most of it but I was awake & horrified. And in that too-asleep to move too-awake to sleep stage. I fell asleep at 5 and then at fucking 7 am on a SUNDAY MORNING one of the girls was screaming at one of the guys for one reason or another and it was too too much.
Craig was awake by now so I just looked over at him and said "Well, guess we don't have to make that list anymore" and thank everything, he agreed.

It may have just been that one night but their whole behaviour pattern is indicative of a lack of respect for people and property.
It may be that we're over-reacting. It may be just settling-in issues.

Sadly, they're fun, nice people.
But it's kind of like how I had 2 groups of friends, one great only for going out to bars and drinking and dancing, and one that is good for the bars and drinking and dancing but also sitting around and watching bad tv and bitching over wine. And I know which group I want to live with.


If we had done the Pro/Con list? it would have looked like this:

Pro : entire fridge (but we don't need that much space, really).

Cons : Barely any freezer space.
Worst shower EVER. Worse than we saw travelling around Asia.
2 bathrooms but even the better one is crappy.
Smelly room.
Only a tiny portion of the window in our room opens, room gets very hot.
3rd storey so if you forget anything ... lots of stairs.
Outside of house ugly, inside dark.
Not the best area, too far from tube.
Have to cross an un-mowed park of a park to get the path to cross the park to get to bus.
Flatmates are inconsiderate. Sometimes.
Danger of drunk people walking in to room.
Front door left wide open.
I don't feel like we or our property is safe there.
£50 per month (per person) for bills but they don't have internet, telephone or pay tv (well, at the moment. Apparently tv and phone are being connected soon).
Barely any plates/bowls/cutlery let alone oven trays.
Too many people. Too many people for my moody little head.

And that is just too too many cons for that one poor little pro.

From "Misery Patch" to "Britannia" & everything in between!

I finally finally finally have all our trip photos uploaded and online!
There are One Thousand and Thirty Nine of them.
Ouch.

Luckily for you (ha) I gave into my ocd-tendencies and have sorted them into sets according to city, and then region.
And all of those sets are gouped into a collection here:
Travelling.



Or you can see them all in a big mess o' photos here :
1,039 Photos