alexist

After several days of not getting a proper night's sleep, I went to bed last night at 20:00 and SLEPT. Man, did that feel good.

FedEx are a bunch of muppets. We went out there last night (total backwater in Brimsdown; Neil was forced to acknowlege that there was no way I could have gotten there without a lift). First, it doesn't close till 19:00, so he could have stayed at work an extra half hour. Second, the muppet on the phone didn't mention a tracking number, and the woman behind the desk couldn't find my package in the system without it. Since FedEx can't get into our block without being buzzed in there was no slip left (unlike with Royal Mail/Parcelforce) so I didn't have one at all. Great database there, FedEx, can't you search by name or delivery post code? In the end she asked someone to look through the cages and they found it. Luckily I was right about what it was and where it had been sent from.

More annoyingly, Neil's wing mirror was knocked off. I don't mean clipped, I mean it was hanging on by wires. He had it bent back, too. Our road really is a rat run :/ Properly speaking it should either be no parking or one way, because there isn't room for 2 cars to pass, but neither is going to happen. There isn't anywhere else for the 326 to go (local residents complain enough about it, and TfL quite rightly points out that it's the only route going through the area so it's staying) and there would be a riot if residents were asked to give up street parking. None of this stops people driving too fast, of course.

My driving is coming along nicely; only manoeuvre I've not got down pat is reverse-parking into a bay. British parking bays are too narrow :P

Yesterday I saw a woman giving her little girl (maybe 2 years old) a bag of crisps. Now I'm not on track to be one of those Nazi parents who fires their babysitter for giving the kids anything but pure organic healthy food (there was an article in the NYT about that a couple of weeks ago) but crisps?! Really, that's bad.

While we're on the topic, the healthy school lunches thing is getting going in the US too. I think some schools might be taking it a little far: white flour is also decreed evil. Now, whole grain everything is great in theory but if you serve whole wheat pizza, don't be surprised if the kids don't like it. (There was a really good article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about Berkeley's attempts [I think: might have been Oakland] to make their meals healthier and the problems they had, which came from both sides: Alice Waters was helping support it and she kept being disappointed they didn't go far enough, not understanding that in a school district that size, you can't have cute little artisan producers helping you.)

It's funny; when I was at school I refused to eat the school lunch because it was so crap. I brown bagged it every day for 11 years. Summer camp was made extra-miserable by the fact that you were not permitted to bring your own lunch. I'm not going to pretend I had a gourmet palate at that age, but limp green beans (canned of course), Tater Tots and hockey puck burgers were beneath even my six year old self. (To this day I have issues with all pears because of the smell of the tinned kind.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to become one of those boob nazis who tell off women who bottle feed. (Yes, I just bitched about giving a 2 year old crisps. But there's no good reason to give a toddler crisps and there are very good reasons to give a baby a bottle.) But I have become hard line on a woman's right to do it. I just told some guys off on a message board:

"To the people who don't think women should feed at the table, where, pray tell, should they do it? Most women would prefer to feed in privacy. Not just because it's more modest, but because it's more relaxed and comfortable. If they do it in public it's usually because there's nowhere else to go (the bathroom is NOT somewhere else) or because it's impractical to move. If you've got a tiny infant who's feeding constantly (and I have known babies that did this), you can't be off in another room all the time.

Fact is, when most women breastfeed, you don't see a thing--your discomfort (and I find it particularly amusing coming from unmarried men) is simply the ick factor of knowing about it. Which is your problem, not theirs."

(Oh, and the people who find it icky are all unmarried and almost all men... :) )

I went into Borders today for the New Yorker and they didn't have it--2nd week running. (Last week was Oxford Street, today Charing Cross Road.) Today I realised why. Central London Borders no longer seem to get their import magazines from Comag, and are self-importing. (You can tell the difference by the way they're stickered.) Based on my experience with Borders Islington, that means unreliable delivery.

I then checked WHSmiths Euston and they didn't have it either. I'm hoping that it's just that they get their deliveries late Wednesday (Borders used to be late Tuesday/early Wednesday) as I didn't see last week's copy either, and that's where I bought it Friday. I really hope they haven't stopped doing import magazines! (I did see Harvard Business Review, though.) Comag/Magazine Cafe's websites seem fine, so I don't think they're having trouble. I know one of the newsstands near Neil's office does import magazines, which is convenient if he picks it up for me, but not so convenient for me to make a trip just for a magazine. If this keeps up I'll actually have to subscribe. :-(

(It's a real headache, because they don't do full content on the website and in any case the New Yorker is more fun in print because of all the cartoons and drawings. I love the New Yorker. There was a profile of the editor, David Remnick, in the Observer a few weeks ago and the article started off by saying, "who would read a 10,000 word piece on [some esoteric subject]?" And to me, that missed the point of the magazine--which is precisely that you WILL get long articles on often-unusual topics, ideas that don't sound promising when summed up in a sentence but which are surprisingly absorbing. It's the complete antithesis of short attention span journalism. It's also got a heavy dose of intellectual snobbery, but I actually like that. It's economic snobbery that fails to impress me [I hate New York magazine because of this; half its articles seem to be about things that are oh-so-awful for millionaires. Colour me unimpressed about the difficulty of finding a good nanny.])

They have released the 8th edition of The Professional Chef (official cookbook/textbook of the Culinary Institute of America). I shall not buy it! (Actually I'd want to have a look and see how much it's changed from the 7th edition before I considered it...) Even though Amazon have it on 37% off (the shipping would kill me anyway).

(Hey, if you haven't got the 7th edition, this means you can probably get it cheap on eBay now ;) )