The other day I went to the Safeway near my house to get some last minute ingredients for the chocolate mousse I wanted to make Sean for Valentine's Day. I have known Sean for almost seventeen years, and I only recently found out that one of his favorite desserts is chocolate mousse, which struck me as funny for some reason, because it just seems so....so....I don't know, so eighties. Oh hey, want a slap wrap with that chocolate mousse? Should we eat it while we watch Alf? I'll wear my jelly shoes if you wear your hypercolor t-shirt!

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I saw the movie Flight on Sunday night, and I don't believe I have slept the same way since. I mean, I knew from the title—and I don't think I'm giving anything away here—that there was going to be a fairly tense plane crashy bit, but I wasn't really banking on it being that tense, so tense that I actually had to manually unclench my fists afterwards and massage my palms to remove the indentations left there by my fingernails.

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I'm turning 33 tomorrow—although since you are most likely reading this on Friday the 8th, I'm actually turning 33 today, right as we speak—and I have planned the waking hours of my birthday as though they were a military operation. They would be a pretty cushy military operation, I have to say—doubtful that Operation Valiant Eagle would include any spa time, for example—but I do nevertheless have a pretty meticulous plan in place for my first day as a 33-year-old, and it begins with not going to work. 

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You are going to have to trust me that this post is not sponsored by Meyer lemons—or any kind of lemons, or any kind of fruit at all, although damn, I hear the boysenberry pays well*—but I am really, really into them at the moment.

* (I don't really hear that. I don't even know what a boysenberry is. Also, I just realized I should have said "I hear the grape pays well" because then you would have said "where did you hear that?" and I could have said "you know, through the grapevine.")

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You may remember that I have a little bit of a thing about driving. The "thing," to be more specific, is that I hate it. Or I guess just fear it, whatever, same difference.

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I must say one thing about Germany before I say anything else: they have got this whole sleeping thing figured out. They have a great many other things figured out better than the rest of us, of course—beer; knives; punctual public transit; gummybears—but it is in the area of beds that they really excel. To wit: did you know that when you stay in a German hotel with a double bed that it's not actually a double bed but two single beds pushed together? And that instead of getting one large duvet between the two of you, you each get your own single duvet?

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A few weeks ago, Sean and I got back from a trip to the UK, where we went to see my best friend Anna get married in a big country house that allowed everyone involved—though predominantly, I am coming to suspect, only me—to pretend they were living in a real life episode of Downton Abbey. Afterwards, we took advantage not only of England's convenient budget airlines but also of its convenient proximity to everything else, and flew to Germany for a few days.

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Happy New Year's Eve from under a blanket on my couch, where I am about to have the most crazy, insane, balls-to-the-wall, rock n' roll evening ever, and by this I mean I have bought a special yogurt. Yes, you heard me right: a special yogurt. I also have a frozen pizza in the kitchen and a load of laundry on the go, plus a 70% chance of being able to live stream a fireworks display on BBC iPlayer at midnight, if I can figure out how it works. Do I know how to live or do I know how to live?

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England is cold and rainy and damp. I'd remembered the cold and the rain, but the damp is a surprise, a cruel curveball I'd managed to block out since the last time I was here in winter.

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Happy Christmas Eve!

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