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October 31, 2011

Joyeaux Samhain!

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Crafty, Personal | Tags: halloween, jack-o-lantern, poirot, pumpkin |
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Terrible photo courtesy of my phone.

Glorious Tidings on All Hallows Eve? Or, you know, Happy Halloween and all that.

I’m being even witchier than usual (I know: hard to believe) and hiding behind our blackout curtains this year. I love trick-or-treaters, but the prospect of answering the door all night while having to juggle a curious dog and a bowl of sweets was pretty daunting. So instead, I’ve got no decorations up and have left the hallway as dark and “nope, definitely no one home here”-esque as possible. I’ll make up for it by breaking out the Christmas decorations IMMEDIATELY.

At least there was pumpkin carving at work! The above is my handiwork. I admire all the elaborate jack-o-lanterns that show up in slideshows this time of year, but when it’s crunch time I always revert to the classic triangle-eyes, grinning mouth pumpkin that I’ve been carving pretty much since I started celebrating Halloween. I’m also afraid that’s an LED candle in there, disappointingly; call me an old-timer, but to me it’s not really Halloween unless there’s a significant fire risk.

Anyway, so I’ve eaten myself mildly sick on chocolate and am holed up in my living room with some knitting and a large glass of red wine, waiting for the Halloween episode of “Poirot” to start. So far, this witch thing isn’t bad at all…

October 19, 2011

The Music of the Night

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge | Tags: glee club, musical theatre, neighbours, singing, whining |
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We have musical theatre students living next door. Or perhaps Glee Club members? Whoever they are, there’s singing leaking through our living room wall on a weekly basis. And it’s definitely not drunken-carousing-singing—living in my share of student houses, I am MORE than familiar with being awoken at 3 a.m. with the delightful strains of the Spice Girls, Simply Red, or whatever evil guilty pleasure my sodden housemate is enjoying. (On a side note, a friend of Luke’s has on occasion rung him at a ridiculous hour and sung portions of “Les Miserables” into his voicemail. Does it become funnier if I mention said friend is a baritone, and his song of choice is “Stars?” It should…)

No, this is too early in the evening for pub aftermath, and too harmonised for weekend pre-gaming. It’s clearly four or five girls getting together to sing vaguely jazzy selections from a catalogue I have yet to recognise.

And no, I haven’t banged on the wall or anything. I have thought about it, though. Not because they’re singing, but because they’re flat. Seriously, it’s been about two months now, and their second soprano is seriously letting the side down, and it’s THAT (coupled with my nerdy history of decades spent in choirs) that’s actually driving me nuts.

I get that knocking on the wall wouldn’t be neighbourly, and nor would be a pointed anonymous note (sing through the upper end of the note! not the middle!)…but I’ve found myself more and more tempted to just sing back at them on the correct pitch, even though I know that would shatter the anonymity (and thus increase the likelihood of a disgruntled chorister having a wee in our letterbox). I guess I’d better cross my fingers for both of our houses that they don’t have another choral practice while I’m pre-gaming.

October 7, 2011

Death March

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Personal | Tags: ugh |
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I had a post planned for today about herbs, but I’m afraid my plans for today went pretty spectacularly out the window. Did you know that if one is walking from, say, my house to my job, once one is past the 25% mark, there is literally nowhere you can stop with a bathroom? So if one, completely hypothetically speaking of course, started feeling ill past that point, one would have to walk a further FORTY-FIVE GODDAMN MINUTES before reaching the safety of work’s bathroom. That’s forty-five minutes of perpetually feeling as if one might be about to ralph into the nearest bush.

Yeah, today was rough. At least I didn’t barf on a cow.

September 14, 2011

Well, that was embarrassing.

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Personal | Tags: can't dress myself, clothes, whining |
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As I write this, it is 2:19pm. I’ve been at work for several hours. And I have only…just…noticed…that my shirt is buttoned on the wrong buttons.

I mean, in the grand scheme of humiliation, this is pretty low. I don’t have anything in my teeth, my skirt isn’t tucked into my tights, and nothing more suited for Cinemax has fallen out of my shirt (okay, maybe that last one’s only a risk if you’re Tara Reid). But if I hadn’t just aimed a more-than-cursory glance at myself in the bathroom mirror, I still would have no idea that the right front of my shirt was hanging a solid three or four inches lower than the left front.

Questions have ensued. Did anyone else notice? Did anyone notice and not tell me? Or worst of all–did anyone notice and say "Wow, Meghan’s looking super disorganized and like she got dressed in the dark…SO BUSINESS AS USUAL THEN"??!?!!

August 31, 2011

Don’t Comment, Send Ice Cream

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge | Tags: cambridge, heat, whining |
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The air in my office has gone out.

This doesn’t sound like a big deal, I know–I’m in England, after all. How bad can it be?

Pretty bad, as it turns out. It’s lovely and cool outside, but two floors’ worth of people all using computers at varying levels of warp speed throws out a surprising amount of heat. I heard horror stories of it reaching 29 degrees Celsius (around 84 degrees Fahrenheit) upstairs, and while it’s not *quite* that bad on my floor, it is…cozy. Very, very aggressively cozy. Combine that with a hearty lunch, and it seems like come 2pm, absolutely everyone in the office is dragging. Yawns are rampant. A higher-than-is-plausible number of people have been pulling the "staring intently at something on my desk with my head in my hands" maneuver, and I swear at least a couple of them are snoring…

Supposedly it’s going to be fixed tomorrow. I might come to work in pajamas just in case.

August 27, 2011

Pirate Jokes are Always Appropriate

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge | Tags: joke, pirates, yarrr |
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Yesterday someone started a joke thread on the company forums (hey, it’s the Friday before bank holiday weekend, don’t judge). I chickened out of posting the funniest one I know because it is fantastically work-inappropriate (it involves a vicar and the porn channel of a hotel), but here’s my favourite of the ones that went up. If you know me in real life, please trust I will be performing it for you, complete with mimed peg-leg antics, at the earliest opportunity:

A sailor walks into a bar and sees a pirate with a peg leg, a hook hand, and an eye patch.

He decides to have a couple of drinks with him. Eventually he loosens up around the pirate and asks "So how did you get that peg leg there?"

"Yarrr, I harpooned me a narwhal, I caught me boot in the line and had to chop off me own leg lest I be crushed in the depths of Davey Jones’ locker"

The sailor then asked "well how about the hook? How did you get that?"

"We were boarding a vessel and a young lass swung at me true with a cutlass, took me hand off at the wrist"

The sailor then asked "How about the eye patch?"

The pirate responded "A seagull took a crap in it"

"That doesn’t make any sense", the sailor asked, "how would that take your eye out?"

"It was me first day with the hook."

August 10, 2011

London Calling

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, News | Tags: cambridge, grafton centre, guardian, london, riots, zoe williams |
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Here’s the thing: this blog post has to be about the riots, because all anyone in England is talking about right now is the rioting. You could do worse than read this piece on the psychology of the looters by Zoe Williams—I’ll provide the usual caveat that of course, as someone living outside of the immediate danger of violence, it is very easy for me to be concerned about the mindset of the person smashing a Debenhams window rather than, say, my personal safety…but that said, this excerpt really struck me:

"These people aren’t interested in tuition fees. In constituency, it’s most similar to a prison riot: what will happen is that, usually in the segregation unit, nobody will ever know exactly, but a rumour will emanate that someone has been hurt in some way. There will be some form of moral outrage that takes its expression in self-interested revenge. There is no higher purpose, you just have a high volume of people with a history of impulsive behaviour, having a giant adventure."

Of course, the difference is that, in a prison, liberty has already been lost. So something pretty serious must have happened in order for young people on the streets to be behaving as though they have already been incarcerated.

One personal anecdote and I’ll get out of the way. Last night, when I was dropping off to sleep, a police car with its siren on went past my house. This isn’t a very noteworthy occurrence—our street heads straight towards the city centre, so we get ambulances and police going by at regular enough intervals that a siren isn’t totally out of place. This time, though, it made my heart start racing. It sounded more urgent. I found out this morning a few dozen people tried to loot the Grafton Centre, so presumably the car was on its way to get to them.

I think this is changing England. It may be temporary, or it may not, but right now at least the country feels different.

August 8, 2011

Tai Chtree

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Personal, Running | Tags: c25k, dogpark, running |
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After a brief break from running (knee troubles instantly. Clearly god wants my people to be the human equivalent of french bulldogs—we’re all torso and sudden movement causes bodily revolt), I’m back to my early morning jaunts round the park.

In my absence, there’s been a bit of a changeover in dog park regulars. Sadly, the wake-and-bake dog walker hasn’t been seen lately—either his dog has been toilet trained or he’s been busted. There’s a new guy who runs laps the opposite direction as I do, which is the saving grace of my pride, since he runs about three times as fast as I do. If we were running in the same direction I think he’d be lapping me every twenty seconds or so.

My new favourite, though, is Ambiguously Tai Chi Guy, an older gentleman who shows up in a sweatsuit and does…some form of meditative martial art? Whatever it is, this morning he spent about twenty-five minutes holding a Karate Kid pose while walking in tight circles around a tree. He motivated me to run faster so I could get round again and see if he was still twirling. So Karate OAP, you are my new best park guy.

Even if you do probably still run faster than I do.

August 5, 2011

On Rejoining Civilization

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Personal | Tags: freezer, gimlets, gin, martinis, peas |
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We’re having a freezer delivered tomorrow. Let me back up: we’re having a freezer delivered tomorrow after NOT OWNING A FREEZER FOR A YEAR.

Perhaps this seems bearable to you. “Sure, it means you can’t have popsicles whenever you want, but it’s not like not owning a REFRIGERATOR,” you think. “How bad can it be?”

Bad. Oh, so bad, and in so many weird ways. For one thing: do you have any idea how much you will miss peas? Because for eleven months of the year, fresh peas do not exist. If you want peas, they are in the frozen aisle, and when you finally give in you will end up with approximately 5,000 grams of peas you need to use up in the two days you have before your thawed peas go moldy. In hot weather, you will buy a bag of ice and let it melt all over the counter as you and your boyfriend attempt to drink your body weight in iced tea as quickly as you can. You will not be able to cook many recipes, or you’ll have to divide all the quantities by four, because who’s going to make twelve bean burgers for a household of two (and let’s be honest, when it comes to bean burgers, a household of one) when you have nowhere to store the leftovers? YOU WILL NOT HAVE A GIMLET FOR A YEAR BECAUSE GIMLETS ARE CRAP WITHOUT ICE.

So we’ve caved, and a freezer is happening. God bless modernity. And Dixons. Now pass the gin.

July 6, 2011

Winken, Blinken, and Longbows

Posted by meghanpurvis under Cambridge, Medieval | Tags: archery, eyepatch, robin hood, winking |
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Back when I was at university, I remember one of my professors telling me that medievalists are the dorkiest of the history/literature crowds because we always take that step too far in getting involved in our subject area. Like, would you expect someone specialising in the Victorian novel to work as a chimney sweep at the weekend? Or for someone especially interested in midcentury fiction to be super into their aspic recipes? Of course not. But a medievalist…odds are high they have a broadsword stashed away somewhere, or have taken a class on making chainmail, or have tried out a Viking recipe for gingerbread. (I have ticked two out of those three boxes, and I’m not telling you which ones.)

All of this is a long intro to mentioning that at a work do earlier this week, I got to try my hand at archery. Like so many other little girls, I’ve often dreamed of massacring a fleet of French soldiers and Genoese mercenaries on the fields of Crecy, so this was exciting for several reasons. And I’ll put it out there right now, I did hit the center of the target on one of my three shots. However, it turns out there’s a tiny little step involved in archery I wasn’t expecting: so apparently, if you are a right-handed person, aiming correctly involves closing your left eye. And guess what I struggle to do? I can wink my right eye totally fine, and I have a long and fruitful history of blinking. (Weirdly, it turns out my twin sister is the opposite: she can wink her left eye and not her right.) But tell me to close my left eye and left eye only, and I look a little like my dog when he’s got a smear of peanut butter on his forehead: aware of what physical action needs to be taken, but a bit stymied on how to accomplish it.

It turns out that around a third of people have the same problem, and so if any of them get into archery they wear an eyepatch to compensate. This leaves me with a dilemma. On the one hand, I’m pretty sure with some concentration I could get the winking thing down. I taught myself to whistle when I was about seventeen, so I think when it comes to plowing through random minor physical abilities by sheer grit, I’m your woman. But then again, if I don’t figure this out, I could pick myself up a new hobby that involves the prominent use of an eyepatch, which is a whole other area of badassery I have yet to explore. Decisions, decisions…

The Nervous Purvis