"It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake."
The book of the week for Children's Literature is The Secret Garden. I hadn't forgotten how much I identify with Mary Lennox, but it's still good to read.
My housemate is out of town for the whole week (which is totally a good thing to tell the internet at large), so I have the house to myself, and I'm loving it.
Up until this weekend, I spent a lot of time doing dishes or laundry or making grocery lists or other sundry chores and thinking, "When I get back, I have one more year at college, and then I'm going to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life." This was not a cheerful thought.
But having the place to myself really changed that. I'm also not feeling too bad about my inability to meet new people. My decision to be an eccentric spinster was a better one than I realized.
(It just occured to me that some of you aren't my college friends and didn't know that I've decided to be an eccentric spinster. Well, there you have it.)
Saturday I walked down to the Uni, attempted to do some research for an upcoming paper, got distracted, decided to cut my losses and go home, and made it to the nursing building before it started to rain.
The nursing building is this oddly-shaped building built over the stream that runs through campus. The ground floor is all open-air, except for the lecture halls and a room with elevators, which leads (presumably) to the second floor. It's pretty interesting, just odd.
So I waited out the storm in there, alone.
Some birds who were watching me get rained on:
The Nursing building:
I spent Sunday doing food-related experiments. I'm not baking while I'm in Australia, because baking involves buying lots of things that I won't use up before I leave, like vanilla and baking powder and milk (which I don't drink), but I did some fooling around with the stuff I had.
I made chicken soup with real chicken in it, which was easier than I expected, and very delicious indeed.
I also had a lot of left-over rice, so I rolled it into riceballs and fried them... This was successful, so I decided to add some sugar to them while rolling them into balls, then fry them. It's more or less an excuse to use more butter.
The fried riceballs were... more or less what you'd expect. They were pretty good... I'm not entirely convinced that they were worth the trouble, but it was some variety.
Dinner:
I also decided to candy an orange, using a recipe I found on Whisk Kid. I threw in an apple that I don't want to eat and some raisins, just to see what would happen. The apple came out pretty good... not the raisins. Of course, the orange worked best.
Not a very good picture:
(The sweet riceballs and the candied fruit is a good example of what happens when I run out of my Choc Creams- those being the off-brand oreo-esque cookies that I buy and consume by the dozen- and need my sugar.)
So I'm actually quite excited about being almost on my own. I figure that graduating will have several advantages, like being in the same country as my firmly-established friends, and being able to bake, and not waiting for my housemate to leave before I feel bold enough to leave my room.
As promised, a picture of one of my bruises, because we're all five years old and like to compare injuries:
A giant moth, with my hand to show some perspective:
And a pretty flower:
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