Cooking

I really miss my oven.

I'm making a big old pot of bolognaise sauce, but I really want to put it in the oven. It gets a lovely richness and flavour that you can't really get from stove cooking. Still, it's going to be delicious, and keep me going until Tuesday.

Other excitements today: had my fortnightly T.F.I class, which merely confirmed that I must try harder on grammar. I'm going to start doing daily exercises again, just to add to the litany of things on my to-do list. I'm using Astrid to organise that part of my life, and it's very good. It helps that it won't stop squawking at me until I do things.

Aside from grammar most of my other comprehensions are good, so if anyone knows of any good sites or apps to cajole me into grammar practice leave them in the comments section and I'll take a look.

This morning I struggled with the fact that Google maps won't let you copy and paste their maps. I can't understand it in the slightest; I'm trying to make a poster and a matching invitation to a conference and I can't stick a google maps map on it. Why? I can't comprehend. The same is bizarrely true of all of the other major map sites. I'm getting tempted to draw the thing by hand.

This afternoon, after my lesson (which was comprised of me and one other person) I passed by my colleague's office, to be met by a man with a blowtorch.

This is not a regular occurrence for me, and the day it becomes so I will need to find a new job.

Aside from that, I have a little pile of work to do, including another presentation with figures and an economics paper to read through from my colleague who's come back from Cape Verde looking positively barbaric. He is as softly spoken and eager to learn as ever, however, and we went through a few pages of his work. His paper is really, really interesting, as it deals with the growth and decline of commodities markets during and in the years immediately after the crisis.

If you don't find that interesting, then instead here's a thing I found about how tiny the odds of your existence are. It's unsettling stuff.

I like the text so much I want to recreate it, so you may see something similar before long. I've also been co-opted onto a work committee to come up with entertainment for next year's students. To do that well I'll need input, so if you've got opinions please let me know.

I've also started etymologising again; my current displays charts words connected with "salt." Go and have a look; it's on my office door.

Don't ask which one. Too long a story to recount.