wildeabandon | Busy busy busy... (part 2)

So where was I? Yes, we'd just celebrated Mark's birthday weekend and got through the Archdeacon's visitation - it's hard to believe that that was only a couple of weeks ago! So the following week I was staying in London, and working from home amongst various appointments and events.

On the Monday I had the ADHD clinic in the morning, where they gave me a prescription for exciting brain drugs, and then in the afternoon I had my Grade 5 piano exam. I'd felt really unprepared for the exam, despite having in some sense been working on it for well over a year, mostly because that work has been frequently interrupted by working away from home and having limited access to a piano. I had spent quite a lot of Sunday (and Monday morning) cramming quite hard, and I came out of the exam thinking that I'd done reasonably well considering, and been fairly lucky with the scales I was asked for. I thought I was more likely to scrape a pass than not, but that failure was a realistic possibility. So when the results came out yesterday and I hadn't just scraped a pass, I'd scraped a Merit, I was pretty much gobsmacked, and very very pleased indeed.

On the Tuesday I actually managed to do some work in the morning, as well as a bit of Thronescamp script-fettling, and then in the afternoon went to church to help out at our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Party. I had been hoping that I'd be able to mostly hide in the kitchen and make pancakes, but the vicar had reasonably enough taken that role for herself, so I had to actually *gasp* interact with small children and their parents. This was slightly terrifying, but I managed for a little while, I think without coming across as too standoffish through nervousness, until it reached the point where it was genuinely helpful to hide myself in the kitchen and deal with the incoming washing up. That evening I went home and made more pancakes for dinner for me and

robert_jones, but these ones were less multicoloured, and filled with bacon and mushroom and asparagus and two different cheese sauces, rather than more sweet and sticky toppings than the willy wonka factory.

On Wednesday I had another morning of lots of productivity, and then for the afternoon headed to Brixton to hang out with

plumsbitch whom I hadn't seen for Far Too Long(tm), and their fabulous fluffy mistress, Gurpreet. It was such a good afternoon - one of those times when you sit down and start chatting and suddenly it's five hours later and you've barely scratched the surface of the conversations you wanted to have. That evening it was back to church for the Ash Wednesday service, which I both love and struggle with, and each year find that I'm getting a little closer to understanding how to resolve the conflict between the Gospel reading (about fasting in secret with no outward signs) and the ashing.

Thursday was mostly spent working, and then in the evening I had dinner with

themidnightgirl at Xi'an Biang Biang Noodles which was very good indeed. Apparently cheap and cheerful Asian restaurants with repeated words in the name are where it's at, since this was the third in a row to be really impressive. We had dumplings in soup, cold sliced chilli beef, and a pork bun to start, followed by hand-pulled belt noodles with cumin lamb and beef respectively as our main courses. The starters were all good, especially the chilli beef, but the noodles were the real star - so much richness and umami, with enough heat to slow you down and stop you vacuuming up the whole plate in seconds, but not so much as to blow your head off. We'd booked a table for 6.30, and were glad that we had, as it was already almost full - by the time we left there was a queue out the door.

Friday was another productive work day, and then off to Cambridge in the evening, where I'll pick up next time...