A theme seems to be emerging from this blog: “how to make total mundanities a tiny bit more interesting to appease that feeble spark of life within you”. What’s fun is walking home from the bus stop in really loud heels while listening to music on your iPod that has exactly a walking tempo. I was totes the percussion section!

When I wasn’t being intellectually stimulated by my shoes, today I learned the lesson of “don’t buy stuff online if you don’t have to”. I ordered one of the brand new iMacs on Tuesday from the Apple online store. 24-hour shipping blah blah. The reason I did it online was that I also wanted something cheapish from Apple that I couldn’t find in real shops, and if I bought it at the same time as an iMac I could save $9 shipping. I am tight!

Anyway I am very excited for my computer. Patience is a virtue I lack. I was so tempted to stay home from uni on Thursday in case it came, although guilt won out, and quite luckily because it didn’t come until today anyway. BUT TRAGICALLY, I had to be at work all day today and even though there were only about two hours when there was no one home, that was when it came :( DAMN YOUR POOR TIMING, TNT!! So now, I cannot get my iMac until Monday because it is locked up in a storeroom at Adelaide airport :’( And even then they don’t do deliveries until Tuesday so I have to drive over and get it myself. Sigh?

The moral of the story is: parking in town may be hard, but just go to freaking NextByte, Claire, geez.

Also today, I had a fairly solid panic attack over what to cook for dinner. I… think I have too many assignments :(

I baked cookies last night. It always feels like such a good idea, and then I eat a stack of them and… regret. REGRET.

Cannot sit up straight.

Ever since I was in Italy, I am a bit obsessed with pizza. So far, none that I’ve tried in Adelaide lives up to the best pizza I had over there (for reals, it can blow your mind), although some of it has been pretty decent. I am still on a search for the holy grail and one day, I shall find it!

For tonight, I took matters into my own hands and made some pizza from scratch. This was how:

1. 7g dry yeast + 1/4 teaspoon castor sugar + 3 tablespoons warm water: mixed in a bowl and left to sit at room temperature until it’s frothy.
2. 1 3/4 cups of plain flour + 1/2 cup warm milk: stirred into mixture.
3. KNEAD!!
4. KNEAD SOME MORE!! We’re talking… 10 mins of kneading.
5. Leave dough to sit at room temperature (or a bit warmer) for 40 mins.
6. Roll the dough out into a big flat circle on an oven tray.
7. Put stuff on it, then cook it!

It was so much better than supermarket pizza crust omg. I think my next mission is to get a hold of some fresh mozzarella, instead of using the low-fat cheddar out of the freezer, pre-grated for your laziness.

Did you know that in Italy, as part of dinner, people are known to eat an entire block of mozzarella (the size of a fist) with a knife and fork? That was one aspect of Italian cuisine I did not embrace. Because it’s insane.

The Wikipedia article on pizza, incidentally, just gets visually grosser and grosser the further you scroll down :( Why? :(

Over the last four and a half months, I’ve been in the process of applying for a job in Japan. I had to write an essay and send in an application about a million pages thick, and then I had an interview in February, and now I am waiting for the results. Which should come pretty soon! Wish me luck; I am 100% not sure if I will or won’t get it.

Anyway. Not everything about Japan is awesome. But some things about Japan are awesome! For example, bento! Bento is basically a way for really boring people (like me) with really boring lives (like mine) to make their day a tiny bit more interesting without actually having to, I don’t know, take any risks or try anything new. It is a packed lunch! But an aesthetically pleasing packed lunch. For me, the rationale is that if I am too poor to buy food in town, and am going to eat my lunch staring at the off-white wall of the office kitchen, then damnit my lunch is going to look pretty.

The other part, I think, is that I eat fairly carefully at the moment so I think it’s important to eke every possible bit of pleasure out of the food I do get.

So here is a picture of my first bento!

I think that traditionally it is meant to be rice, fish and vegetables? But I’m not the biggest fan of rice unless it’s fried or in sushi, and even then I balk at the carby-ness. So, so far, I have gone for salad and fish or a meat substitute. Here, we see tofu, salad, and also chocolate cake. Which didn’t taste very good at home, but like magic tasted freaking awesome at uni.

And this is my second bento!

Still pretty salad heavy, but with salmon! Definitely needed more chocolate cake.

Speaking of chocolate cake-like things! Maybe nothing is as good as Krispy Kreme, except for the Byron Bay Organic Donuts at Womad, but I had a chocolate cream bavarian donut at Gourmet Glaze in town last week and it was heavenly. The world needs to know!!