...And Back

And, my god, it feels good.  Everyone's quite stressed, what with finals coming up and a whole week of (unproductive) break right behind us, but I am just so happy to be back with my friends that it's almost okay.  I had a rather mixed week at home.  On the one hand, it was brilliant to see my friends (and Brokeback Mountain.  Awestruck) and go to school - I stayed in the art room this time so there was no awkward biology-crashing, and my teachers seemed happy to see me and everyone who didn't know I was coming to visit treated me like I was back from the dead.  I also ate excellently and feel very pretty as a result - I love the way my back looks when I've gained a little weight.  However, there was a lot of fighting going on as well, and if a breast cancer scare (false alarm, thank god) can't unify my family and get us to stop bickering for ten minutes, I don't really know what can.  But, yeah.  If you have breasts and are thirty-ish or older you should go get a mammogram.  Now.  Did you know that one in eight women in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer? 

I just joined the swim team.  Yesterday was the first practice, I hadn't done butterfly since eighth grade, and I am sore.  I know that sounds like a completely idiotic thing to do right before midterm exams, but I slept so incredibly well last night that, if this is anything to go by, it might actually help my grades in the next couple weeks.  This school doesn't technically have any sports teams, so for things like football soccer we just play with the local school, with which we share the academic building, but for some reason we can't do that for the swim team.  So I and the only other MSSM girl have cajoled two other girls from our school into swimming, so that we have a relay team.  Otherwise we couldn't compete.  I used to hate swim meets and I am sure they're no different now, but we have a nice pool here and being on the team exempts me from fitness classes - which would conflict with the practice schedule anyway!  So, I'm quite well-satisfied with that and hope to fulfill one of the boys' predictions that I'll have six-pack by the end of the season. 

That's really all that's going on... I have to finish the rough draft of my midterm English essay - about satire in Huck Finn - and study like hell for a chem test that looks about as friendly as my sister after she gets caught taking other peoples' Christmas presents out of my room and decides that the best course of action is to scream, slam doors and cry loudly enough to render us all deaf for several hours....but that's another story.

I got a few lovely birthday presents.  The primary one was, of course, a contribution to my new lens, but I also got a couple lovely books and some beautiful new tights.

Okay.  Sites That Are Blocked At School (Mostly For "Pornography") That Shouldn't Be:
Some of Smitten Kitchen.  Like, this one.  This is a food blog!  What the hell, people?!
Stockings HQ
UK Tights
My Favourite Underwear Blog   (However, this is absolutely fine for us to look at, apparently!  Jesus, people, find some real porn to block)
And loads more, but I don't want to incriminate myself by going on all these sites to get the links in one day.


Okay, so here are those recipes I said I'd post.  In both cases, I used yoghurt and milk instead of buttermilk.

Chocolate cake   (in this one I used Green&Black's ginger chocolate)

Ginger-apple-upside-down cake

Night!  I'm high on Fawlty Towers.