Beyond Selidor

Day 15: Tell us your favorite junk food.
My favourite junk food that can be eaten as a meal is pizza. It's pretty much the only fast food I can tolerate. The smell of places like McDonald's or KFC makes me gag, and the cheapness of the food makes me suspicious. But throw some melted cheese on something and I'll eat it forever. Hence, pizza. I like non-fast food-type pizza too, of course.

My favourite snacky junk food is probably various types of sour sweets, like sour coke bottles, Haribo, wine gums, sour strawberries and so on.

( the other days )

I also want to relate a rather surreal experience of my Cambridge housemate J2. Her room is on the ground floor of our house, and has a door that opens onto the back yard. She had wandered out one morning to get her laundry off the line, and was standing around sleepily when she noticed a woman, crouched in our driveway, talking to a man who was also standing on our block. Because she was so sleepy, it took her a little while to recognise that this was a little odd. Then she asked them if everything was all right.

Perfectly all right, they replied.

She then said something along the lines of 'why are you on my driveway, then?'

'I'm just putting together this vacuum cleaner,' the woman replied.

J2 stared in stunned silence for a second and then said, 'you do realise this is our driveway, right?'

The woman replied, 'but I left the vacuum cleaner in the vacant lot two weeks ago'. (We have a vacant lot next to our house.)

J2 pointed out that this was no reason to be on our driveway. Finally, in a great huff, the woman moved off into the street, acting as if it were unreasonable to be asked to get out of someone else's garden. Bizarre.

I'd noticed recently that people seemed to be coming up our driveway but never making it as far as the back yard (I'd run to the garden when I saw them, to try and tell them to get out), but just assumed that they were the normal drunks peeing against the wall of the house (we live in a charming neighbourhood, yes). But apparently they were stashing dismantled vacuum cleaners in the vacant lot next door. As you do.

Why is it that in all rental properties, there's always something that goes wrong? We've been having problems with our washing machine for ages. When you put it on, it can't get to the spin cycle at all. Initially, we got around this by physically switching it to spin when the other parts of the cycle had finished. After a while, this stopped working too, and so we first had to switch it to drain, then to spin.

Today, it refused to drain at all. When I woke up this morning, I thought, 'well, it's a beautiful sunny day, I don't have to be in the department until 1pm, so why don't I wash our sheets and M's towels? That way, they can dry on the line in the sun all day!' But the Washing Machine of Death had other plans, and our sheets and the towels have been stuck in the machine for three hours, while I desperately tried out every damn setting trying to get it to drain. If I could've just opened the door, it would've been okay, as there's a laundrette down the road and I could've used its dryers.

As is usual in such situations, the landlord's gone AWOL. J emailed him ages ago, and M emailed him again two weeks ago. He promised to be in (last) Monday to check it out. He wasn't. I just phoned him. He claimed to be in a meeting and that he'd phone me back in half an hour. We'll see.

In other, happier news, I simply CANNOT STOP PLAYING THIS SONG. It's a clip from the Tiësto concert in Victoria Park that I went to last year, but it's not your usual shaky camera-phone footage. I'm also pretty sure it's me jumping around like a lunatic at 4.42. Woo! Youtube fame!

ETA: The landlord's called and tried to sort some stuff out. No one can actually fix the machine until Wednesday, but apparently there's a way to drain it manually. I don't have time to try it now, but hopefully I can sort that out tonight.

ETA: M fixed the washing machine on Monday and we tried it out yesterday with a load of H's laundry. When it got to the spin cycle on its own, I danced around the kitchen.

It's taken me ages to get photos up of my new room, and it's probably a little bit narcissistic to post them, anyway, but I'm so ridiculously happy to be living in this house that I couldn't resist.

( photos behind the cut )

That's the room from three different angles. Sorry the last one's so dark, but it's the wrong time of day for sunlight. In the afternoon I get flooded with light.

It's a lot smaller than my last room, but it's in a house with people I like and choose to live with, and that counts for a lot more than floor space.

I moved into Aarhus on Saturday. We celebrated my move, and gave former housemate D an appropriate send-off: a spontaneous drunken Youtube party.

( It was the usual suspects when it came to the playlist )

I compounded the bizarreness of the party by forcing everyone to listen to 'Land Down Under'. Yeah, I don't even know why I did that myself.

There's some weird editing going on there, but here's my latest Bookshow blog post.