Fluff piece.

Some shiny bits from the day …

FunkyPlaid and I were referred to as “the septics” by a friend and I guessed correctly what it meant. And it wasn’t even an insult! Well … not entirely.

What? What’s that? A photo of what I made for dinner? Unheard of.

I know you know Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I know this because you are obviously a person of taste and refinement. However, if you somehow missed the recent release of the second Marcel video, I have included it here for your enjoyment:

And then this video made me dance in my seat (via Bradley):

Official Trailer: Girl Walk // All Day from Girl Walk // All Day on Vimeo.

Did you finish NaNoWriMo? My friend Adam did, as per usual. He makes it look so awesome that every year I am convinced that I should do it too. And then on the first of November I am overcome with the lazy. His excerpts make me happy.

Also there were articles about economic collapse and massive climate change. But then there was a piano-duet cover of Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey”!

Never fear! I will return to the hard-hitting journalism this site is known for very soon.

HIDWtS: Thanksgiving in Scotland.

This Thanksgiving edition of How I Decide Where to Sit is dedicated to reviewing all the rookie mistakes one can make when riding public transit in a new city for the first time, because it is kind of like what the Pilgrims did when they– no. Even I can’t torture that metaphor. It is dedicated to rookie mistakes because I made them all today and I need to laugh about them with you.

• I waited thirty minutes for a bus whose arrival time as reported by the phone app was stuck at "21:39" before giving up and walking to a stop of a different bus that seemed to be showing up every ten minutes.
• I assumed that the stops for the line going inbound were in generally the same place as the stops for the line going outbound.
• I forgot about the driving on the left side of the road thing, which means I was waiting on the wrong side of the street for the inbound bus.
• I thought I could easily cross a simple little two-lane road to get to the correct side of the street, but finally gave up and walked all the way around to the subway (underpass) so I could cross without dying.
• When I finally boarded the right bus, I was so set on sitting up top that I was forced to sit on the very back row, which is almost exactly like the rumble seat.
• Despite much rumbling, I fell asleep. But woke up just as the bus approached the landmark nearest my stop!
• I disbelieved my gut telling me to walk THAT WAY home and instead listened to the little blue dot of the GPS which lies.

So really it was like riding public transit for the very first time ever! That is the spin I am going to take because I am in denial, denial that moving to a new country, even if you (sort of) speak the language, means not knowing how to do anything very well for a while and just sucking that up because the alternative is hiding in your very nice flat all the time and pretending to buy postage from the cats just so you get better at counting out the different coins. Not that I have been doing that at all.

Lothian Buses 991 SN57 DBX, by Ingy the Wingy

Anyway, I had thought about doing some sort of Thanksgiving meal here, but the more I pondered approximating turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and the rest, the more homesick I felt, and then I felt disappointed about feeling so homesick. My stomach sold the rest of me out for the memory of pumpkin pie. Yesterday’s vegan baking experiment of pumpkin mini-muffins did not do the trick, although they were tasty. (I used this recipe, with a ripe banana in the place of the eggs.)

Homesickness aside, I am extremely thankful for this new home, for my family and friends, and for owning a lot of candles because this place is very dark just now. I think I will go roast some chestnuts.

HIDWtS Rating: We just debated taking turkey legs to the chip shop that will fry anything. Do you think they will do pumpkin puree?

Bluster.

I like St Andrews more each time I visit, and I already liked it a lot the first time. There are great people there, and books and learning and junk, and also videos of sneezing pandas. To commemorate my deepening affection for this place, here is a really fancy postcard that it took me all day to make.

Or my iPhone did it in about two seconds.

Walking to the market last night, I was gently picked up by the leaf-addled wind and set down a few yards in front of where I started. Since it was generally in the correct direction, I saw no need for alarm. This happened about four more times on the way there and back.

Bluster. I forgot about proper bluster! Such polite people excused themselves as they bounced all over the walk. Every once in a while, I caught a glimpse of someone’s head suddenly spasming backwards. The old leaf to the eyeball, I nodded knowingly. And then got a leaf to the eyeball.

I don’t know how I got it into my head that Scottish people don’t eat chocolate chip cookies, but I had, and so I was craving them horribly. Then I found chocolate chip cookies in the market. Gluten-free ones. Why did I ever doubt Snackland?

The part I hate, the paying part, happened. I couldn’t postpone it any longer. So I milled around near the line for the till until the nicest-seeming clerk was free, then stampeded her. She was, in fact, very nice, and so I bought groceries in a non-humiliating fashion for the first time since arriving here. This also had to do with the use of my debit card instead of fumbling through a too-deep wallet for unfamiliar coins. I’ll take the sad little victory, thanks.

Will it ever seem natural for me to say “cheers” instead of “thanks”? The Midwestern “a” that haunts my “thanks” makes me cringe. I will try to be understood and to fit in — trousers, not pants — but some words still seem affected when I say them.

Sometimes the world is so beautiful I forget to be self-conscious. I am just an awed human in an ancient place, and it feels wonderful. Then I realize, as I did last night, that while gaping at the stone spires silhouetted against the flannel sky, a small line of drool has escaped the side of my mouth.

Nice to meet you, world. I am all class.

Mental map, one month in.

I’ve been in Edinburgh a month already! Really? Really. So I thought it might be time to draw a mental map.

The trees here don’t look anything like that. And I didn’t know how to draw the building we live in without taking up the entire lower-third of the map, so you get a Monopoly house instead.

It took a lot of willpower not to include the tram works, but I didn’t have an iPad stylus setting for “fubar”.

The good news is that my map of the immediate vicinity is very clear. I can now navigate between all places of importance, which is a list that coincides with the places I will find tea.

Additional good news: next week I start my volunteer position at the National Trust for Scotland, which means I will be reliant on public transit once more! Mental map, prepare to be … extended a few miles to the west in a very narrow corridor. With authority.

Shepherd’s pie.

Here is another post about food instead of about anything else, because food is easier to talk about.

Although FunkyPlaid does an excellent job looking after me, I do not do the best job looking after myself. I have allowed myself to be a bit overrun by deadlines and responsibilities, and haven’t carved out enough time to just sit in one place and not do anything. I even have a China Miéville book on my nightstand that has been sorely neglected.

Because of my mental state, I have been falling back on old recipes for dinner. Not so tonight, when I decided to make Alton Brown’s recipe for shepherd’s pie.

This involved a trip to Waitrose, which I love. It is very posh and has nearly everything … except for a glass baking dish, which we neglected to pack, so I had to do some on-the-fly adjustments.

I was skeptical of these adjustments until most of the hard work had been completed. Then I decided that no matter what happened, I was going to devour it because it smelled so good.

Lucky for us, it tasted good too!

Despite the preponderance of iPhone photos, my dSLR still exists. I just haven’t had the wherewithal to reacquaint myself with it yet. Soon, soon. First there is a glass of wine …

Simplest sauce.

There is plenty to report, but no time, so here is my pinboard of home cooking. There are just a few photos up now, but I hope the collection will grow as we continue to explore our new culinary horizons.

Dinner tonight involved an old standby, this excellent recipe for tomato sauce with butter and onions. It is not only tasty but very easy and inexpensive to make.

• Two 400g tins of organic peeled tomatoes: £1.50.
• One organically-grown yellow onion: £0.25.
• One 240g packet of organic unsalted butter (only used 70g): £1.50.
• One 500g packet of Doves Farm organic brown rice fusilli (only used 200g): £2.50.

Approximate total cost of two servings: £3.50.

Share a simple yet tasty recipe in the comments, won’t you?

Contented.

Mental map sutures.

O, look! It is a photo of the castle! Another photo of the castle! And not at all because it is one of the only places I can recognize in the city! No, no, not that.

Actually, it is a photo of the castle because I watched FunkyPlaid take a picture of the castle with the moon just so and I had to take one too. But his is better. But I took one too. So, you see, I am twelve.

The exciting part is the part that has no picture, where I somehow recognized not just the castle but a whole string of things — including Starbuxen and libraries, yes, okay, so I am predictable — and was able to recognize them not in some arcane card-flipping memory game but in the actual field, the actual walking-about time and needing-to-navigate time, the pertinent time, the errand-running time of today.

There were lots of errands! Some of these errands were less errandy than others, like our visit to Transreal Fiction. It is as glorious as I expected it to be, and despite just transporting hundreds of books across an ocean, we left this excellent shop with several more.

Along with all of those books, our kitchen arrived, which manifested itself (after FunkyPlaid’s careful unpacking) in an evening meal of garlic courgettes and balsamic-mustard glazed salmon fillets. I did not misspell that last word; it is pronounced as it looks, to rhyme with billets. Also, zucchini are called courgettes, which perhaps should offend my Italian sensibilities. (It doesn’t.)

Today’s exciting linguistic moment in marketing is “flu jab”. Get your flu jab today so you don’t get sick!