I had another birthday this week. I'm long past being excited about birthdays, but this years was extra dull because I wasn't feeling particularly healthy thanks to the boyfriend sharing his cold germs with me a few days earlier. We basically spent the evening coughing and sneezing in front of the TV.
However I did manage to make a cake - raspberry, blueberry and lime (without the drizzle).
I've done this one as a birthday cake before, but I wasn't really feel like trying anything new and I remembered it being very yummy. It didn't get iced, and I forgot to take... continue reading »
So, perhaps inevitably, I failed miserably at blogging every day in September.
Actually, I take that back. It wasn't a 'miserable' failure - I averaged one post every two days overall. Most of which I count as proper content. Best I've managed for a long time!
I've been blogging for many years now - on this domain and previous ones - and what I use it for has changed hugely over that time. I remember when "weblog" was still a brand new word. I've gone from geeky updates as I taught myself coding/websites, to comments on news/current events, to general stressed out venting... continue reading »
Time to add another number to my age - but I'm back to a prime number again so maybe it's not completely awful.
This year's cake was cherries, berries and apple (and muesli, and yoghurt). Yum yum yum.
As for actual birthday celebrations... we headed down to Bristol for the day to visit ss Great Britain and do their 'Go Aloft' experience - climbing up the rigging, then shuffling out along the main yard. Predictably, the views were quite good from the top!
Then we had a BBQ and went into town for a few drinks. Not a bad day really!
I turned 30 on Friday, and celebrated with a BBQ yesterday. This involved large amounts of cake - I'd made some cupcakes (plain sponge with swirled blackcurrant jam and chocolate ganache), then various friends brought chocolate cupcakes and a big choc/strawberry cake. Good stuff!
Note watermelon in the background, being used as a fruit bowl. Slightly more grown up than soaking it in vodka...
To the apparent surprise of both of my parents, I've signed up for French evening classes.
It's not actually that surprising - I did French at GCSE many years ago, and have been half arsedly trying to relearn for a few years now, because I hate the attitude of "I speak English so why do I need to learn anything else when everyone else speaks it too?". Genuinely jealous of people who can speak more than one language with relative fluency.
About a year ago I signed up to Duolingo - to try and learn a bit of German in preparation for... continue reading »
This year's effort was a raspberry and blueberry lime drizzle cake, with a few blackberries mushed into the buttercream icing (I was going to use more blueberries, until I remembered that the colour comes from the skin rather than anything that would mix nicely and colour the icing)
I spent many weekends of my teenage years obsessively painting my nails. But then I grew out of it, sort of.. mostly due to laziness/having other (better?) things to do with my time.
But then recently I've realised that the internet is full of websites dedicated just to photos of pretty coloured nails. Oooh.
And nail polish technology has obviously come a long way too. Before xmas I discovered crackle top coats, and now I find you can get 'magnetic' polish. Yes please!
17 polish from Boots, in 'gunmetal'. Such a cool effect! There's teeny iron filings or something within the actual polish,... continue reading »
What better excuse for baking myself a deliciously yummy cake?
It's a raspberry, almond and white chocolate cake, iced with raspberry buttercream (ie normal buttercream with raspberries mushed in) and white chocolate stars
Yes, I do rather like raspberries.
I threw chocolate chips in rather than bothering to melt the chocolate like the recipe said, but obviously it still worked. The raspberries sank more than I thought they would (picture of the actual cake here), leaving the bottom very sticky, so I ended up flipping it over to ice.
And oh wow was it tasty! My work colleagues demolished most... continue reading »
ooh look, here's something very exciting which I've been trying to keep quiet about until it was all sorted and stuff..
email this morning confiming an offer to do a MSc in Computer Science at Birmingham, starting this autumn
Yay! I've been slightly jumping around the flat in glee about this today, heh. Just have to wait for some forms through the post to fill in and send back to accept it.
So yeah, I'm going back to uni This is very exciting! Ever since about half way through the second year of Keele I've had a nagging feeling that... continue reading »
Various websites tell me that it is now my birthday. Woo, I'm 23
I thought this was a boring number and was a bit meh about it but then this morning (yesterday morning) I had a very sad geeky moment where I actually said - out loud with much glee - "oooooh, prime number!!"
Given that I will be 23 in a month's time, this is almost annoying. Actually I don't really mind, because it doesn't happen that often and it is just them doing their job with the "if you look under 21" thing. If I thought it was because I looked under 18 I would be upset.
But urgh, it's the way they do it. Last week at whatever club in Hanley, that's fine because they simply asked, looked, then said ok and that was it. But today in Somerfield the woman was really... continue reading »
Katy decides she is not blonde enough and needs some highlights. Katy cannot afford to get them done 'properly', and hates all hairdressers anyway on principle because they're useless chavvy twats.
hmm, let's look back at previous hair colourings shall we?
I had red streaks in the first year of uni, they worked fairly well until they faded and stayed pink for months.
Then I had several failed attempts at going red all over, ending up ginger and then orangy pink.
Then there was the bleach. That worked, but left me with a nice dark halo an inch down my hair. ... continue reading »
