Monday once again

I think Pret completely abuses its position as the lunchtime go-to for stressed, unimaginative professionals, but it does include very cute extendable chopsticks with its sushi boxes.

I seem to have developed a very strange allergy to something spring-time that manifests as a large, angry hive-looking lump under my eye.

My laptop backpack is far from chic, and being the only chest-high tortoise on the tube during rush hour is very embarrassing.

The warm weather is great for romantic, billowy skirts and gladiator sandals, but less so for the corporate look - conscious efforts to avoid sweating only accelerates the process.

I felt bad not wanting to go and watch Iron Man with Weng, and he's so excited about the movie, so we're going tonight.

I'm still thinking about the space between the trees. Rob Bell's Nooma series on how Christianity relates to life is probably the most effective teaching tool I've ever tried. I usually struggle to pay attention to, much less remember, these things for any longer than 11 minutes (which is how long the clip lasted). Miracles do happen, it seems.

Three inches of heel and two inches of sunshine

Second day in a small, windowless room, sitting at a dining table from the 80s, 10 meters away from floor to ceiling views of St. Paul's cathedral on the River Thames. The printer averages a page every 5 minutes, or 2-to-a-page every 10. It too is obviously a throwback from a similar decade. Our 3G cards struggle to work in sync with our email clients, the latest failure of one or both announced with a soft tired sigh of resignation. We threaten to turn in our malfunctioning laptops with a well aimed rant, but also know the humiliation when it purrs like a kitten for those in tech. Yet we persevere, typing up minutes in Power Point, diligently taking notes as the interviewee sits there deciding whether telling us the truth will get him fired. Thank goodness it's Friday tomorrow, thank goodness for Scala pasta sauce and canned sardines.

On other more positive fronts, I finally made it to Alpha. I even sacrificed watching Liverpool's valiant exit from the Champion's League, but it was all that the testimonies promised and so much more. It hadn't even properly started yet (although Weng made every effort to answer everyone's questions), but I left refreshed and am eagerly awaiting next week's talk. Our other achievement this week was that we beat insane DoTA AIs 2 vs 2. Oh, geekdom.

Out of the blue

Lucky if I can so much as manage a single post every quarter. That's pretty pathetic. What's more, without the frequent updates that force me to put thoughts to type, I can hardly recall anything that's happened over the last two months without confusing events/people/places.

I know at some point we visited Young and Aaron in Birmingham and had an amazing time eating nonstop and getting ripped off at their local fruit and veg market (in our own excitement). Then we flew to Amsterdam the next weekend to look for Tom in his pretty little town, where we we got assaulted by bad weather and got given lots of really random directions to Vondelspark once the map stopped making sense (one canal looks very much any other). I didn't get to try any spacecakes, which was disappointing, but I think I'd take slight disappointment over Weng's glaring most days.

I also know we definitely gave Ben a rousing send off because a) I was still feeling the adverse effects of that all-nighter a week later, and b) 'Rousing' for Ben since he spent most of those 8 hours scolding Evan for dying so much. Needless to say, when dawn came, I wasn't really my sleep-deprived self and proceeded to run around the house taking photos of everything.

Cheryl came back from her Easter holiday the Monday after that weekend and showed me a slideshow she had made which featured 15 minutes of photos of Perdy, who's looking pretty good for an 84 year old, and Joel came back a week after bearing my new laptop (for which I will be eternally grateful). My new toy has fancy graphics all over the cover which makes it look like it should belong to a 16 year old MTV-addict type person, but I adore having a laptop that is entirely mobile, weighing less than a Hummer, and one that turns on without having to do the hokey-pokey and wave it all about. We fully tested its DoTA capabilities on the first night and it passed with flying colours.

There, I think that's approximately in order.

I'm still based in London, which is great, because I really need to study. I've started to have small panic attacks at the thought of my impending exam. Weng's settled into his month of college quite quickly, although he is much less fun than he used to be. Now that he's net positive, he's a lot more serious and less inclined to all night gaming sessions and other youth-related shenanigans.

We're also due to say bye to Evan this weekend, when he goes back to good old KL to figure out what he wants to do next, which really sucks.

Dinner's at Shanghai Blues tonight. You know that if it's a Chinese restaurant with an English name that doesn't read "Mr. Harry's authentic Chinese restaurant - real Peking duck!1!!" and qipao-clad waitresses that look Chinese but speak English, then it'll be horribly overpriced and have none of that good kitchen floor flavor.