(The) Good and The God-awful

(Yeah, I know I cheated a little bit there with the title. Oh well!)

Two things happened yesterday when I got home from work, one good and one bad. Let me start with the bad. And by bad, I mean Aaaarghh!

So I get home and I’m all exhausted and trudging up the stairs, almost tripping over a package on the stairs (my landlady kindly leaves my post on the stairs), and I enter my dark room and drop my bag and the parcel on the bed before turning around to turn on the light and Aaaarghh! There was a GIANT spider in my room!

It was as HUGE!!! I am not exaggerating. It was about an inch long, half an inch wide, disgusting black colour with long twitchy legs… *shudder*

I stood there staring at IT for five minutes, panicking, wondering how to get rid of it, contemplating grabbing some clothes and finding an alternative location to spend the night, cuz did I mention? I have a deathly fear of those dreaded beings known as insects. Deathly! I actually prefer autumn and winter to spring and summer because of all the bees. But apparently there are giant spiders in autumn… *shudder again*

I finally decided I had to do something to get rid of IT, because unless I throw it out the window or kill it dead, I knew I would never be able to sleep again, at least not it that house. I went to get a broom, but as soon as I re-entered the room, the THING apparently finally registered the presence of a human in the vicinity and it scuttled sideways into the bathroom. (I hate things that scuttle. In fact, I hate the word ‘scuttle’. Almost as much as I hate the word ‘scurry’.)

I was certain it was going to disappear in there somewhere so that I can then wonder and worry and forever live with the sensation of things crawling up my leg. But thankfully, it stopped at the outside edge of the shower cubicle and stayed put. I then stood there staring at it for another five minutes, because getting rid of it would involve closing the six foot distance I was maintaining and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage that without a couple years of therapy first.

I ran downstairs to my landlord’s place (with the broom – causing a lot of hilarity, especially after I explained the situation) and my landlord’s daughter (who’s my friend) and her younger brother came back up with me. I thought the boy would be able to sweep IT into a piece of paper and throw it out the window, no problem, because boys are good at stuff like that right? But no, the boy was almost as nervous as I was and he managed to prod the THING so that it scuttled again and disappeared! And then he ran away.

(Boy, I have lost my respect for you.)

My friend and I squealed (hey, that’s what girls are supposed to do, and we got our part right) and jumped up and down convinced it was crawling up our legs. And then my friend’s Big Brother bounded up the stairs. We were still squealing while he calmly located the THING nestled in my bath mat, squashed it with his slippers, tipped it into the toilet and flushed it off.

(Bless your heart Big Brother! You are a true knight in… er, sweatpants, and may you live a hundred happy years with your princess and the little princess.)

After all that, I shakily sank to my bed and noticed the package I had dropped there earlier. And this is the good thing that happened yesterday. And by good I mean AWESOME!

A couple of weeks ago, the fun Minxes of Romance blog did an ‘author spotlight’ on the really cool Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents author India Grey. Now I read a lot of M&B, but I only have a handful (okay, two hands full) of favourite romance writers whose books I will actually spend my meagre funds on. India Grey is definitely one of them.

(I remember the first book of hers that I read – ‘Taken for Revenge, Bedded for Pleasure’ – and there was this one scene in it involving a glass window in a skyscraper/penthouse place. Oh. My. God. If I have ever read a more intense scene I cannot remember it anymore.)

It was a fun interview, where India talks about her writing process in that witty, self-depreciating way that authors do that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy toward them. My obsession with author blogs/websites started fairly recently (after I joined twitter and started stalk–uh, following all of them) and I am still quite amazed at how down-to-earth they all are. I mean, they have husbands, children, pets, some have other day-jobs, they have kids falling ill, kids breaking limbs, and all manner of distractions going on. It’s quite amazing they manage to write any books at all, much less write good books.

So anyway, the Minxes blog post also involved a giveaway – and like any broke bibliophile I do love a good giveaway – and I WON!

The package that had arrived in the post contained the following:

There are three reasons I am thrilled about this: 

1.  India Grey Books! Two of them! And her first set of connecting M&B’s no less!!

2. With American covers! I used to get those a lot back home, but of course I haven’t seen any since coming to the UK.

3. Chocolate!!!

I cannot wait for the weekend to read these. I plan on doing a marathon, one after the other on the same day. That should be a fun five hours!

Chocolate: Nature’s way of making up for Mondays...

or just a really bad day.

I didn’t forget that yesterday was my blog day. I even wrote 400+ words of meaningless crap. But then I couldn’t find the time to edit and publish it and today, re-reading revealed a whole new degree of crappiness. So I decided to start over.

I’m not in a good mood. I’m sick and tired and if I could find the strength for it I would crawl to the Co-op across the street and buy two armloads of chocolate. Normally, the mere thought of it would give me a surge of energy just adequate to attempt the feat. The fact that it does not today is an indication of just how awful I feel.

Okay, just opened my desk drawer hoping to find some left-over dark chocolate from last week. Only bits of silver foil here of course, the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘left-over’ rarely feature in the same sentence for me.

London is in a bad mood too. Unfortunately, this can’t be fixed with a giant slab of chocolate.

I have been in a state of disbelief since yesterday morning. The riots started on Friday and I read the news online over the weekend (I don’t have a TV) but it wasn’t until yesterday morning that I watched the videos on the news websites and saw the fire, the stoning, and the looting. Streets of London – the civilized capital of a developed nation – the site of what looked like open warfare.

‘Lawless’ is a word I associate with the Wild West, and that era was a long time ago, to see the word tossed about in the news articles is frightening. This might make me sound naive, or ignorant, or like I’ve been living under a rock, but I honestly never imagined something like this could happen in this day and age.

Protests happen, so do riots, I’ve seen it on the news before. Buses set on fire, broken shop windows, and then the police descend with their protective gear and batons. Tear gas, some folks beaten up, a ton of arrests, and then it’s done. Violence is always meaningless, but usually, there is at least a reason for the madness.

There was a reason for this – an event that isn’t even clear yet to the average Londoner, an event whose details are still sketchy and varying depending on who reports them. That reason doesn’t matter anymore. Those looters on the streets with their hooded jackets? Seventy-five percent of them – probably more – don’t even know that ‘reason’ ever existed. They are simply opportunists taking full advantage of a ‘situation’ – making it worse, driving it out of control. Sad that that many disgusting opportunists exist in the city.

There is a video on the news websites: an injured boy sits on the side of the street. Another guy goes to help him up. And then a second guy goes from behind and opens the bleeding boy’s backpack. A few more join him, like vultures they pick through his stuff while he weakly tries to shrug them off. Grabbing something out of the backpack one guy walks off. The rest of them wander off too, the hurt boy is forgotten.

That incident pretty much sums up the situation. Pretend to care about a wronged man and his family, stir up trouble, and take full advantage of the ensuing chaos with no regard for the law and no thought to the innocent.

I have only lived in London for five months, but I’ve come to love the city. What’s not to love? Beautiful, vibrant, bursting with history. Loads and loads of libraries, the best shopping. Lovely people, funny people, crazy people. Right now, where I am, it is still all of those things. Hard to believe, just a little way off, a few tube stops over, where all the sirens are headed, is a London I hadn’t imagined would ever come to exist.

This post was meant to be about chocolate.