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July 2013 Part 2: Arts, crafts, and roller skates
Monday, 12 August 2013 18:26The second half of this month has turned out to have been as eventful as the first.
I wrote the first part of this journal at Emily's mum's, where we slept out in hammocks; I used the hammock I bought for Blean Woods way back at Uni for the first time since then. Having a duvet rather than a sleeping bag proved rather cumbersome in the end and I went inside to bed around 3am.
The next day, we got out a single-use barbecue pack, placed it on the base of the pizza-oven-to-be, and drank pina coladas while our dinner cooked. It was all delicious!
I've dropped the Gastronomy coursera course on account of it largely stating the obvious and teaching me very little, and partly because I've just been too busy. That said, I've also taken up a Stanford course on Algorithms, which is stuff that my Uni (Kent at Canterbury) really ought to have taught me but I have no recollection of. The lecturer is really good and I feel I'm learning lots in it, which is rewarding.
On the 18th Emily, Tim, Matt and I scooted over to Vauxhall where there is a roller disco! The music started off with 80s cheese (matching the outfits we'd dressed up in) and progressed through until it was playing Daft Punk's latest single by the end of the night. I took to it well and thoroughly enjoyed myself, and everyone else did too. We'll probably end up going back at some point.
The next Tuesday, Emily, Tim and I went to Hampstead Ponds for the second time; this time the water was a tropical 23C. We got there very early in the morning, so we had time for a few laps before needing to go to work. It was wonderfully serene that morning, and there was a small amount of mist floating silently above the water. I felt really refreshed for the rest of the day.
In the evening we decided to go to a supposed art exhibition called the Forest of London, which was billed as a pictoral and audio landscape imagining of what London would be like if it hadn't turned into a city. In actuality, it was a table with some earphones in one corner of the Liverpool St Hotel which played some recorded forest audio. So afterwards, we went to St Dunstans-in-the-East, which is a public garden in the site of a ruined church, and very picturesque.
Did you see me waving in this picture taken by Cassini?
I have also helped make cupcakes decorated to look like dormice (they definitely didn't look like ghost hamsters), and watched a badger enjoying a human-provided meal in my street several times. The first time we saw it, Emily and I were walking back home from the train station in the dark, and the humans in question shushed us and gestured to the black-and-white badger not five metres away. We saw him again a couple of nights later, and recently I managed to get maybe two or three metres away from him thanks to some parked cars giving me some cover. He crunched his food for a while, and in the end I left him to his meal.
On Tuesday evening I left work and walked through Richmond Park to Camden, where I caught the Overground to Hackney. In Hackney, above a cinema, is the Hackney Attic, where The Make Escape happens each month. I arrived a bit early, so I got a tour of the room for free; they have a cross stitching station, knitting tutorials, something to do with making clay models, and this month, since the theme was video games, four or five retro games consoles were also set up.
Shortly after I arrived,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
squirmelia and atommickbrane arrived, and it was nice to catch up with and meet them respectively. I decided to give cross-stitching a go, and got half-way through stitching a Mario mushroom for a badge before it was time to leave. In the background, music from Sonic 2 was playing.
Here's the finished badge:
I wrote the first part of this journal at Emily's mum's, where we slept out in hammocks; I used the hammock I bought for Blean Woods way back at Uni for the first time since then. Having a duvet rather than a sleeping bag proved rather cumbersome in the end and I went inside to bed around 3am.
The next day, we got out a single-use barbecue pack, placed it on the base of the pizza-oven-to-be, and drank pina coladas while our dinner cooked. It was all delicious!
I've dropped the Gastronomy coursera course on account of it largely stating the obvious and teaching me very little, and partly because I've just been too busy. That said, I've also taken up a Stanford course on Algorithms, which is stuff that my Uni (Kent at Canterbury) really ought to have taught me but I have no recollection of. The lecturer is really good and I feel I'm learning lots in it, which is rewarding.
On the 18th Emily, Tim, Matt and I scooted over to Vauxhall where there is a roller disco! The music started off with 80s cheese (matching the outfits we'd dressed up in) and progressed through until it was playing Daft Punk's latest single by the end of the night. I took to it well and thoroughly enjoyed myself, and everyone else did too. We'll probably end up going back at some point.
The next Tuesday, Emily, Tim and I went to Hampstead Ponds for the second time; this time the water was a tropical 23C. We got there very early in the morning, so we had time for a few laps before needing to go to work. It was wonderfully serene that morning, and there was a small amount of mist floating silently above the water. I felt really refreshed for the rest of the day.
In the evening we decided to go to a supposed art exhibition called the Forest of London, which was billed as a pictoral and audio landscape imagining of what London would be like if it hadn't turned into a city. In actuality, it was a table with some earphones in one corner of the Liverpool St Hotel which played some recorded forest audio. So afterwards, we went to St Dunstans-in-the-East, which is a public garden in the site of a ruined church, and very picturesque.
Did you see me waving in this picture taken by Cassini?
I have also helped make cupcakes decorated to look like dormice (they definitely didn't look like ghost hamsters), and watched a badger enjoying a human-provided meal in my street several times. The first time we saw it, Emily and I were walking back home from the train station in the dark, and the humans in question shushed us and gestured to the black-and-white badger not five metres away. We saw him again a couple of nights later, and recently I managed to get maybe two or three metres away from him thanks to some parked cars giving me some cover. He crunched his food for a while, and in the end I left him to his meal.
On Tuesday evening I left work and walked through Richmond Park to Camden, where I caught the Overground to Hackney. In Hackney, above a cinema, is the Hackney Attic, where The Make Escape happens each month. I arrived a bit early, so I got a tour of the room for free; they have a cross stitching station, knitting tutorials, something to do with making clay models, and this month, since the theme was video games, four or five retro games consoles were also set up.
Shortly after I arrived,
squirmelia and atommickbrane arrived, and it was nice to catch up with and meet them respectively. I decided to give cross-stitching a go, and got half-way through stitching a Mario mushroom for a badge before it was time to leave. In the background, music from Sonic 2 was playing.Here's the finished badge:
