Juicing FTW!

There is a special kind of brain fatigue that comes with working on Microsoft Excel. So seldom has a piece of software of surpassing complexity been engineered in subtle ways to be as un-ergonomic, un-intuitive, and generally soul-destroying as this little piece of genius. You think you hate Excel? You haven't even begun, my friend. The levels to which Excel plummets you during A level, or indeed in the generic undergraduate generic-science-based-subject, barely scrapes the icy surface of its hellish frozen underbelly. The brain-bending gymnastics one has to go to to draw a simple graph has sucked out my will to live. It has juiced my creativity flat. It has made me into a brainless automaton, such that completing my new Trust's mandatory training modules for the nth time since I started working in medicine is a relief (what makes fire? do you know what bullying is? Is bullying constructive criticism, or is it malicious denigration of a person? What does the fire safety local area support representative lay manager of security and equality do exactly?) 

Also, really? Box and whisker graphs? Really? Weren't they made up by some bored maths teacher to occupy year 8s on a rainy Thursday? Do they really have a place in SCIENCE?

I have my doubts. But I am just a lowly minion. I heed my supervisor's call, I type =quartile(range, 1), I copy and paste, and I slowly turn into a minced paste of lost hope inside. 

***

In other news, we've bought a juicer, which is amazing. Amazingly expensive. Our consumption of fruit and vegetables - in particular kale and spinach - already high, has now rocketed. We're getting through 3 bags of carrots a week, and 4 bags of spinach. I'm addicted to pineapple. There is no more room for fruit and veg in our kitchen cupboards - it is spilling out onto the floor, and Tim has given up trying to keep track of it (today he was wandering around the house disconsolately, saying to himself, "now where can I source a lime?") According to the tabloids, and my new green smoothie book, this can only lead to two things: bankruptcy, or curing cancer (the book halfheartedly uses the term "controversial" to describe its cancer-curing claims, which I thought was ILLEGAL in the UK. Though I did get it free with the juicer so I guess it's all grist to the free entertainment mill at this point.) 

It's delicious. 

***

Our garden is also delicious. I never thought I'd be one to get into gardening, but here we go, I'm 28 and I've been gardening and I've pulled a muscle in my back putting a rhododendron bush in. This is what it feels to be middle aged, and I LOVE IT.  We have so far made 4 separate trips to the garden centre and every time, no matter how many lists we make or how prepared we attempt to be, we just end up wandering around in a daze of sensory overload, buy an improbable amount of things, come back and the garden just swallows it all and demands more. I love it. Tim loves it. 

And we've bought a BBQ the size of our house. Of course as soon as we've bought it, it's been tipping it down, and now it's bloody freezing, and as soon as it gets warm again Tim's going to be working his most antisocial hours yet (4pm to 1am.) I can't wait till he's off A&E and onto O&G (oh these comic double acts of departments. Mel & Sue. Ant & Dec) and has a semblance of a life again. Can't wait. I'm going to griddle all the vegetables that I physically can't juice (clue: not many, but aubergine juice somehow appals the imagination) and then juice all the ones I can't griddle, and I'm going to have a griddle and juice party with Tim, next to the rhododendron bush. Who even knew that a rhododendron bush looked like that, anyway? Not me, but now I own one. I am a sucker for product placement. 

Mawwige

Happy anniversary my beloved Timothy

Some days late (but better late than never.) Since I spent our actual wedding anniversary sitting the worst exam of my entire life (which I believe may be karmic retribution for my unbearable passing of every previous exam sat.)  Tim came to collect me from Luton airport with a gift of a Belgian bun and a piece of baklava and I told him I was far too grumpy to eat carbs and bewailed my fate generally. Lovely Timothy, whom I am so lucky to have to be grumpy at, it's been an immense pleasure to be married to you for a year, and an immense pleasure to contemplate the many years to come in your company, inshallah. May the years bless you with garish golfing blazers, and telescopic gardening equipment, and a writing bureau with more drawers than you have stationery to put in them. I love you and cherish you. Marrying you was the best thing I've ever done, apart from maybe that poem I wrote when I was 15 that used dinosaur eggs as an extended metaphor about grief. That was a work of fucking genius.