I had a whole different post lined up and written in my head—what, they don't count when you write them in your head?—but I have managed to spend the entire evening embroiled in one enormous, never-ending, multi-player game of Draw Something instead, and so that one's going to have to wait.
Cape Town can wait; have you seen these videos by a guy called Flula Borg? I know Flula Borg sounds like the kind of noise you make when you're sneezing really violently—"FLULA BORG!" "Bless you!"—but Flula Borg is actually a semi-famous German guy living in Los Angeles who makes hilarious videos about the weirdness of certain English idioms.
Take this one about the phrase "the proof is in the pudding," for instance:
It was all Steve Carrell's fault, really. The Office was a repeat on Thursday, and so we were trying to find something else to watch. "I have two ideas," I told Sean. "There's this reality show called The Only Way Is Essex, which is basically like Jersey Shore set in England. Or I've been hearing good things about Downton Abbey, which is a British period drama set right before the First World War."
Have you heard of Birchbox? Nobody is paying me any money to say this, swear to god—none of my Splendid Things are ever, ever sponsored or given to me for free, by the way; they're just things that I've bought with my own hard-earned cash and liked—but I have become sort of obsessed with Birchbox. Basically, for $10 a month, you get a box of high-end beauty products in the mail every four weeks. The catch? Well, they're sample-sized. Generously sample-sized, though, I might add.
Attention, attention! Cease whatever you are currently doing! I have found the world's most perfect workout top!
Perhaps you, unlike me, have not been on a ten year quest to find the world's most perfect workout top. In which case, you should skip this post and go roll around in your stack of already-perfect workout tops, you show-off. For me, the search for a perfect workout top has been a long and fruitless one---until now, that is.
Look, I am only going to say this once: if you fly, on a plane, with any regularity, there is something you need. I have decided that I can no longer fly without mine, and the few times I've tried to do it, I have regretted it instantly. No, it is not a lifesize cutout of Prince Harry*, but it is pretty close in its awesomeness.
It is a white noise app.
One of the things Sean and I said we were going to do in 2010 was to take more day trips and weekend getaways to the area around San Francisco. As you can see, it's almost the end of 2010 and we've pretty much failed ourselves entirely, but we did also have "buy a house" and "get new jobs" on that list, so we can probably call it even.
I am not so much a chocolate person as I am a candy person. There's a difference, I think. I like gummy sweets and squishy sweets and big crunchy rocks of boiled sugar that a person could lose a filling on. When I was at school in England, nothing made me happier than whiling away an afternoon with a good book and a white paper bag of sweets from the newsagent up the road. I've written about this before, about my nostalgic obsession with traditional English candy.
It may not have escaped your notice, but I'm deep into the process of trying to make my new house look lovely. The thing about moving into a new house, I've found, is that suddenly you need five billion new things: there's more space to fill, your couch is a weird shape for the room, you get seized with wild inspiration and decide to repaint everything turquoise. (Ahem. Or maybe a slightly different turquoise from the turquoise you painted everything the first time.) Anyway, you get it: when you move into a new house, you start needing different stuff.
