For the first time in I don’t know when, I have nothing to do today. Nothing. No job to go to. No cats to find homes for or drive to their new homes. No wedding to plan or do. No one to pick up or take to the airport. No furniture to sell or donate. No boxes to unpack. No job interviews. No cleaning.

I slept in until 10:00 AM which was amazing. Drinking some coffee and putting around on the Internet. It is gorgeous here today again. Crisp, clear fall sky.

The fall light here is really throwing me off. I can usually feel what the time is by looking at the sky but being down south and then zooming up north I am thrown off. The light reminds me a lot of Seattle, which makes sense.

Going to finish my coffee and walk around my neighborhood. Maybe go to the Ritzy in Brixton and go see a flick. Who knows?

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I did an assignment from the Learning to Love You More page.

51. Describe what to do with your body when you die.

Ultimately it is about the people that are left behind. What do they want? I’ll be gone so it doesn’t really matter. . . But if I do get a say so, I’d like to be mulched. I read about this in the wonderful book by Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

So how does a girl get mulched? I would like my body flown to Jönköping, Sweden to The Promessa Foundation- (unless by the time I die, croak, kick the bucket, say the big sayonara, there is a closer facility that does this process).

My body will be treated with liquid nitrogen which will freeze dry me, transforming my body into organic, odorless, hygienic powder. Extensive use of embalming fluid is eliminated.

I’d then be placed in a biodegradable coffin and buried in a shallow grave, Maybe there are some trees or plants near by.

I hope sometime before this or after or both, there is a party where everyone that loves me gets really lashed and tells stories of me tripping, falling down and hurting myself. I hope they laugh a lot and maybe cry a little. I hope that I am missed but that they move on and think back on me fondly.

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Somehow in my surfing I came across this wonderful site. Click on the assignments and see what people have submitted. Maybe get inspired and submit something.

I loved Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone We Know which came out this summer in the US. Well, in LA anyway.

Learning To Love You More is a project of hers and Harrell Fletcher. Is very nifty.

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I agree with Mel, no wonder I have had a crush on Mr. Cusack since The Sure Thing, Journey of Natty Gann and Better Off Dead days. (I feel so old.)

I have been well aware of his politics for a while. Check out the fantastic film Bob Roberts written and directed by his pal Tim Robbins. Cusack has a small but biting part.

He ends the article with a quote from Dr. King: “A time comes when silence is betrayal. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak out with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

You can read the article here.

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Sainsbury’s has the best juice ever. Orange and Banana. They don’t have orange and banana juice at the store in California. You might get a blendy type of Naked juice maybe or at Jamba Juice but in the big OJ cartons, they don’t have anything like this.

I know it is bad for me but I bought some anyway. I am a simple, sad girl to be excited by this, but there you have it.

Today, walking along The Strand to go to interview the sixth- (which actually went very well and I hope that I get it. It has a spin that makes it different from what I have been doing so that on paper it doesn’t look like the kind of gig that will make me want to kill myself.) I’m walking along and the sky is clear and crisp and the buildings are old and I felt really good. Like I belong.

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Before

At our flat you put your trash bags in little front courtyard, which we share with the man who has the ground floor flat below us. Because of my move, I had A LOT of trash stashed in the front. The picture doesn’t even do it justice to show how much was there. It was 99% bags full of paper, but still. . .

Was a little worried that the trash men wouldn’t take it away today, but they did!

So, (because he always does stuff like this to others) I decided to play on the fear of S because I knew he was afraid too. I IMed him and said that they took about half of it away and then told me that because there was so much, that I needed to arrange a special pick-up, that our neighbor was pissed and that I was really sorry and that I would take care of it.

He took the bait completely, called and asked me some questions and said that anymore trash that we have this week that we will stash in other people’s yards in the cover of darkness.

I then handed it off to Preston who told him that I didn’t want him to know but that she was telling him anyway, that they were going to charge me 2 quid a bag because it was a “labor intensive” job.

Hee hee.

I told her that we couldn’t let Stu stew too long because this would upset him all day. So as soon as I finish composing this, I am sending him the link to the blog so he knows.

After

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I took this last week. What you can’t see (because my camera was too slow and I was too far away) is the dad playing hopscotch and skipping with his daughter as they go down the street.

So many families in my area. If you don’t watch it, you will get knocked about every which way by parents pushing prams (strollers). From what I understand, this area has become recently gentrified so all these families have moved in because they can afford it- although a three bedroom flat that S and I saw advertised at a estate agent office on the high street was 500,000 pounds, so it is relative to what it would cost in the center.

But I likie it here.

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Evil recruiters. She sent me for a job where there was a senior top level VP job or a few graduate entry-level bullshit things. Nothing for Goldilocks.

If I am only going to be earning 18 K a year I want to be doing something that I actually like goddamnit.

I am marinating in annoyance at my recruiter who sent me off to speak to someone who didn’t actually have a job for me, wasting my time and theirs, winding my way through the labyrinth that is the London Underground until you finally get to wait for the train and I realize . . . no buskers.

Where did the buskers go?

Are they not at the stops that I go to? Been to Balham, Charing Cross, Embankment, Goodge Street, Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road in the last nine days and no buskers.

Is this because of the bombings or is this not busker season?

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I was hoping for Katherine Hepburn but Rosalind Russell is pretty fabulous.

Rosalind Russell You scored 14% grit, 42% wit, 33% flair, and 23% class!

You are one wise-cracking lady, always quick with a clever remark and easily able to keep up with the quips and puns that come along with the nutty situations you find yourself in. You’re usually able to talk your way out of any jam, and even if you can’t, you at least make it more interesting with your biting wit. You can match the smartest guy around line for line, and you’ve got an open mind that allows you to get what you want, even if you don’t recognize it at first. Your leading men include Cary Grant and Clark Gable, men who can keep up with you. Find out what kind of classic leading man you’d make by taking the Classic Leading Man Test.

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First day that I was here, (has it only been a little over a week?) I noticed people wearing red plastic flowers on their lapels, sweaters, coats and bags. I thought there was an odd misplaced fashion attack that was consuming Londoners. I didn’t ask S or Preston was about.

Mid week I was reading the Guardian and I discovered the flowers are plastic poppies sold by the Royal British Legion for Rememberance Day which is sort of like Memorial Day in the States, but it seemed a bit more. . . more here. Probably because so many people are wearing these little plastic flowers and the date is commemorating the end World War I.

The Royal British Legion does a lot of good work assisting ex-Service and Service men and women and their dependants. I found myself wanting to wear a poppy.

From the Poppy Appeal Website:

The first official Legion Poppy Day was held in Britain on 11 November 1921, inspired by the poem In Flanders’ Fields written by John McCrae. Since then the Poppy Appeal has been a key annual event in the nation’s calendar.

In Flanders’ Fields:

Some of the bloodiest fighting of World War I took place in the Flanders and Picardy regions of Northern France. The Poppy was the only thing which grew in the aftermath of the complete devastation. McCrae, a doctor serving there with the Canadian Armed Forces, deeply inspired and moved by what he saw, wrote these verses:

In Flanders’ Fields
John McCrae, 1915

In Flanders’ Fields the Poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders’ Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though Poppies grow
In Flanders’ Fields.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the First World War ended. Civilians wanted to remember the people who had given their lives for peace and freedom. An American War Secretary, Moina Michael, inspired by John McCrae’s poem, began selling Poppies to friends to raise money for the ex-Service community. And so the tradition began.

If you are curious, you can see the statistics for the casualties for WWI by country.

Another interesting fact I just gleaned from a fun little book I just read, A Treasury of Royal Scandals, Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V had the same grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Imagine that war made where to spend Christmas dinner a bit uncomfortable at the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha or, as he changed to appease British nationalist leanings, The House of Windsor.

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