Vacation Sleep Schedule

During vacations, especially if I'm living by myself, my sleep schedule tends to spiral out of control and I find myself awake at four in the morning and sleeping at four in the afternoon. This week, I passed through the nocturnal stage of going to sleep at dawn and waking up at dusk and eventually found myself going to sleep in the early evening and waking up in the early morning.

So far, this is the most effective way I've found of getting up before dawn and still feeling rested.

Biscuit Haiku

Densely packed fiber
Crumbling discs of sweetness
Digestive biscuits

Beans on Toast

I enjoy a lot of hot breakfast foods like bacon and eggs and pancakes, but I'm rarely willing to spend the time and effort required to make them. Beans on toast, however, is a whole other ballgame.

To create a fuller British experience I had the beans on toast with tea. The total prep time was around six minutes: boiling water, microwaving tinned beans, and toasting toast all at once. The only dishes needed are a plate, a mug, and a spoon.

The only issue now is actually waking up in time to have a meal called breakfast.

Fun With Knitting

In empty vacation weeks where there's no concrete schedule, I try to find constructive things to do in order to not feel like I'm completely wasting the time. This week's activity was knitting: the strange activity of turning yarn into objects of clothing.

Knitting is a fitting choice for this vacation because I'm in need of hats, scarves, and sweaters, and while these would almost definitely be cheaper to buy from a store, there's a certain rustic appeal to wearing your own handiwork.

I didn't follow the advice of learning with large needles and thick yarn, but in retrospect it would have made things a lot easier. My first project is a monochromatic scarf; the only thing simpler is probably a potholder. One reason I wanted to try knitting was for its great audiobook and podcast potential-- at the moment, I'm happily unencumbered with menial tasks.

I'm already getting the right finger calluses.

College Kitchen Part 2

I've written before about the utensils and dishes I've collected and cooked with for the past couple years, but traveling to a different country meant getting rid of those things and starting again. At the moment, I have:

A saucepan with a lid
Several plastic cups
Several metal spoons
A few ceramic mugs
A pair of chopsticks

The saucepan and the spoons are most versatile; food can be fried or boiled in the pan and eaten straight from it. A good spoon can fill the role of a knife and fork. The mugs are for drinking tea, of course.

Snacking While Working

When snacking while working or typing or shirking,

It's clear that the system's unstable:

While munching on muffins or cornflakes while clerking,

Some crumbs tumble onto the table.

This same surface sits, now so bread-pebble stacked

That all elbow encounters are irksome

The necessity, then, is to, after I've snacked,

Clean things up so I'm able to work some.

Fun with Fonts

For as long as I can remember, Times New Roman has been my go-to font for any typed document, but this confidence has been shaken recently by rumors that using Times New Roman in a CV is a bad sign. In addition to this, Microsoft Word's default font seems to be Calibri now and I have to change it in every document I type. I'm sure there's a better way to do things, but finding a permanent solution isn't a priority at the moment; the font problem for me is still as small as the new 11 pt default.

What is the Word coming to?