I am still alive!

[foxe]

... although the lack of communication from me, through LJ or other means, may have led some of you to believe otherwise.

Mid-January Resolution 1: Keep In Touch With Friends
Mid-January Resolution 1.1: Find out where the hash key lives on my Mac keyboard, dammit!

To everyone who has emailed or written to me in the last few months and I haven't replied, I'm really sorry. For reasons that are not clear to me even now, I seem to have spent the last months of 2006 in a state of psychological hiding. This is perplexing, as I can't put my finger on anything I would have been hiding from; but I think it started with being away from contact through lots of travelling around during October-November and then it sort of became too scary to come out again... :-/ But I am back now.

I apologise to anyone who thought I was ignoring them; I know it's no real way to apologise, but I should tell you that even in my hidingness, I was glad to hear from you! It is nice to have friends who will reach out to you, even when reaching back is a scary thing.

Mid-January Resolution 2: Post to LJ!

In keeping with Resolution 1, I will not only endeavour to be a better correspondent, but post to LJ more often, and with real content. I know I like hearing about what's happening in all of your lives, even if it's just everyday stuff; so I ought to return the favour and tell you about mine.

Um, and that's about it for resolutions. I don't really do New Year's ones, or any other time of year-specific ones; these are just things that I've been meaning to improve on for a while and now is as good a time.

So, while I'm at it, here's what I've been up to for the last (eep, is it nearly four?!) months, in a nutshell:

October:

• went to St Petersburg for a week (conference + holiday): stayed in v swish Russian hotel for conference and then slightly seedy-in-a-posh-noir-way-but-still-4-star hotel for another few days; ate borscht, Russian salad (which is a different thing in Russia than in Turkey, or in Alasya) and limousine soup; drank Tsarskoye vodka; slept very little during conference and lots during holiday; bought Russian porn films; saw lots of vast (and sometimes gaudy) pre-Revolutionary churches & palaces, lots of cultural and societal remnants of Communist Russia, Peter the Great's Kunstkamera and Rasputin's severed penis.
  
• came back from Russia and went straight to London the next day to meet my parents; spent a few days there seeing fun London stuff
  
• came back to Manchester for a few days
  
• went to Sunderland for the weekend
  
• went to Ikea (without my passport) and acquired lovely new furniture, including a bed!
  
• went to Strasbourg, where my dad had a conference on: quaint Tyrolean houses; plenty of chance to dig out my rusty French skills and realise they weren't as non-existent as I thought; really good public transport, except when it wasn't; modern art; a canal boat trip; the European Court of Human Rights; choucroute, tarte flambee and pinot gris (and pinot blanc, an unexpected new discovery of which I am now a fan); and a nice chance to go on holiday with my parents
  
• came back from Strasbourg, went to Hazel's party that night and then straight to the airport at 4am the next morning to fly to
  
• San Francisco for a four-day conference: still managed to squeeze in a fair bit of touristing including a Bay cruise, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and sea lions; two Aquariums (the Bay and Steinhart - the latter was better); the Ghirardelli chocolate factory; Golden Gate Park; the Castro (GLBT district) Halloween street party (apparently famous across the state, if not the country - some great costumes!); the SFMOMA; alternative culture and eye-popping street art in the Mission district; all manner of food including cioppino, Dungeness crab, seafood chowder, saltwater taffy, burritos, fantastic sushi at Blowfish (where they had not just uni but two different types of uni, the day I visited!), lobster (don't ask about the lobster tip!), and possibly one of the best meals I've ever eaten, at a little restaurant in North Beach called House. And a chance to catch up with my very old friend Martin (I mean, we have been friends for ages, not that he is very old), and go down to Santa Cruz, where he lives, for an afternoon.

Actually looking at that list, I don't know how I survived October! but it was fun.

November:

• Got back from SF on 4 November and went to a wedding, pausing just long enough to shower and change. Oh, and manage to leave my passport at Manchester airport on my way in. DUH.
  
• Suffered from fatigue-induced memory loss for the rest of the month, apparently!
  
• *thinks* um, did quite a bit of work - lecturing etc
  
• spent most evenings in the week rehearsing - quintet, CAOS, Manchester Chamber Choir
  
• did do something exciting, after all: haring round town with one of Lee's friends for a day in which we went to Urbis, the Xmas market, the new Hilton ceiling-to-floor glass-walled cocktail bar on the 23rd floor, out for dinner and then to Matt & Phred's
  
• as a result of being evacuated without our coats from said bar "in freezing winter night", caught a horrible cold and was sick enough to be off work for three days
  
• OOH!! Bought a piano! And then paid as much for getting it moved up the 5 flights of stairs into my apartment as I paid for the piano itself (ouch). But it was still cheap at the price - a genuine eBay bargain. It's a walnut-finish grand piano, which I thought was a baby grand when I bought it and turned out to be a regular (not concert) grand size.

I have since proceeded to annoy my neighbours a lot, as you can imagine!

December:

• Lots of concerts! MCC on 2 and 3 December (assorted Christmas and Advent stuff including the Wachet Auf cantata), CAOS on 9 December (Ceremony of Carols & Cantique de Jean Racine), MCC again on 10 December (Messiah, and a hair-raising bus trip involving a road not suitable for heavy vehicles, a bridge at the foot of a cliff, an irate bus driver, several interested cows, and being an hour-and-a-half late for rehearsal), a repeat of our Trout performance on 16 December and an "instant" Nine Lessons service on 17 December, which I really enjoyed (the service lasted 2 hours and was basically like a concert with some readings thrown in, and we did some very nice music)
  
• Lots of Christmas parties! and lots and lots of food and drink *burp*
  
• Christmas at Lee's mum's (the usual Christmas dinner, loads of presents, and board games until midnight)
  
• a visit from why_am_i! YIPPEE!! We spent a few days doing London-y things, which she has described on her LJ far better than I can, and then came back to Manchester for
  
• New Year's Eve party at my place (a frantic last-minute-pre-closing shopping trip to Asda, resulting in far too much and bizarre combinations of party food; Cosmopolitans all evening; champagne and fireworks on the roof at midnight; and, um, I don't really remember much after that!)

And now it is 2007!

So far this month:

• had fairly lazy New Year's Day: slept in, made Giant Pancakes for breakfast/lunch/dinner and then went to see Eragon - the city centre was deserted, and we had the theatre almost to ourselves. Must read book now...
  
• deadline for submission of a paper on 2 January, ouch! Got it in at 8:30pm after much frantic writing and editing.
  
• 5th: did another "instant" Mass, followed by a very pleasant evening getting mildly blotto with my friend Dan
  
• 6th: FINALLY (why_am_i will probably be relieved to know!) retrieved my passport from the airport, where it had been since November
  
• that evening: got into the Star and Garter, which I have been reliably assured is an often-difficult thing to do, though its popularity remains a mystery to me (it was ok, but so are many other pub/clubs)
  
• 11th: went to Sunderland overnight for a post-Christmas visit to my uncle; nearly got stuck on the way back due to gale-force winds disrupting train services
  
• 12th-13th: had a weekend of parties; hflf came over for dinner on Saturday
  
• 14th: did absolutely no work on Sunday, but went to see Perfume, which was an unusual and rather good film, also notable because the first 20 minutes or so contain probably the most unpleasant cinematography (in a deliberate way, the way some films are deliberately beautiful) I've ever seen

And that brings me to:

Today, 12:05pm: Handed in my last essay for my course! (now I have a 15,000 word dissertation to worry about, but that's not til summer)

Plan for remainder of today:

• allow brain to recover from intensive effort of producing 6124shh!! about 5500 words in last two days
  
• wash hair, which is mysteriously and ickily greasy (possibly strange head secretions as by-product of all that thinking)
  
• possibly cook dinner for and play music with my neighbours downstairs. Trala!

Postscript: Where the hell has LJ hidden all my icons? So this is what everyone was complaining about with the new interface. It's been that long since I posted... Ah well, guess I'll figure it out eventually.