organising

Ant and I have been doing paperwork today for our upcoming flat purchase. Yes, it looks as though we might soon be moving out of rental accommodation and into our first real home. We have been trawling through 105 pages of information on the title deed of the flat and compiling a long list of questions for our lawyer to help us with. We are hoping that it will all be sorted out by Christmas or at the beginning of January. Watch this space!

visiting the south bank

Today it was a wet and grey London day. But I had a lovely wander around the South Bank anyway. One of my favourite places to while away time in London is at the used book market nestled under a railway bridge near Waterloo station.


The tables are groaning with books and your can browse there for as long as you want while the sellers perch on their stools next to the Thames and read. I don't always buy books, sometimes I just walk up and down and enjoy looking at them!

Also at the South Bank this weekend is a slow food market. Many stalls were selling hot food that smelled delicious: steaming sausage rolls, lentil soups, and hot mulled wine. I bought a couple of cheese straws (to take home for Ant) and some hummus for Pari and I. I mused over clotted cream butter--what an idea!


I stopped by at Pari's new flat on the way home to give her hummus, and convince her to come home with me for roast chicken, roast potatoes, and cabbage cooked with Worcestershire sauce. (Thanks to Geary for lending me the Jamie Oliver cookbook that taught me this cabbage recipe.) Ant whisked up some gravy and we ended the night with tiramisu that Pari brought. What a great weekend.

maths and vegetables

My two favourite topics come together again! Look at this gorgeous romanesco cauliflower. Its florets make a fractal pattern. Fractals are self-similar, which means that as you zoom in on any section, you see the same repeating pattern as in the larger view. Fractals are quite common in nature. For example, pine cones and ferns both have fractal growth patterns. Also, on a map of the coast you can see a lot of wiggly ins-and-outs, and when you look closer and closer at stretches of the coastline you see the same wiggling line.