Lasagna is ready to be baked. House is tidy. Snacks are ready. Just need guests to arrive to play Rockband.

Ongoing ~ma for your mom, Hil.

I am in Canterbury at a wedding where The Girl is the maid of honour. I left the house (in London) at 10am, arrived at 1pm (sat in traffic for twice as long as I should have done), the wedding was 2 til 3, the drinking started at 3.30 and it's now 9.30. For convenience sake I've been on crutches most of the day and left the wheelchair in the car. Unsurprisingly, I am exhausted. We had, fortunately, already got ourselves a room in the hotel where the reception's taking place. I am pleading chronic illness and going to bed. If all the people in my life don't know by now that I can't handle more than seven hours of partying in one go, they really should learn...!

Wedding was kinda fun. I was expecting it to be horrific, as I'd heard it was going to be very traditional. And it was indeed cookie-cutter British Anglican wedding style, right down to the reading about love from I Corinthians and the precise wording of various blessings from the Book of Common Prayer and so on. But I was less unimpressed by this than I thought I'd be, since it was what the bride and groom wanted, and that was nice.

Still, TG and I made up codes for "this is OK" and "we are IN NO WAY having this at our wedding", and since the reception started we've mostly used the latter. It's good to get a sense of what you don't want to do.

Glad to hear your mom is doing better, Hil.

Happy Birthday, Polter-Cow!!

Thanks, Tom!

I went to Bakesale Betty for the first time—I'd had some of their food before but never actually gone myself—and asked if they did anything for birthdays. The woman said they didn't. I said, "Oh. Well, it's my birthday." And ordered the chicken sandwich.

When she handed me my food, she said, "Happy birthday," and smiled at me. My bag was strangely heavy. When I got home, I discovered, as I had suspected, that she had thrown in a strawberry shortcake. Yay!

Nice! Now I want strawberry shortcake.

That's one seriously monochromatic protest.

Seriously. I just looked through the NY Times photos, and found exactly two people who looked like they might be POC.

VegFest was clearly the better option in this neighborhood today. Diverse crowd, good food, cute dogs, little kids with pictures of vegetables painted on their faces, and people offering positive solutions for things, rather than just screaming about how they don't like the way things are now. Also, donuts. And free marshmallows.

Your VegFest post made me totally envious. We need something like that around here. (Or more to the point, I need to figure out if we have something like that around here.)

ION, how have I lost my bank card again for at least the second time this week, when I have to go out of town at 5 am tomorrow morning? Sometimes I just can't believe my suck. (I also lost my CTA card this week, which is way worse, really, since I have fewer workarounds.)

Hrm. I have basil, olive oil, garlic, nutritional yeastand a mini food processor. Can i made a decent vegan pesto without nuts or do i really need to haul my butt back out in the midday sun for nuts?

I'd think you'd need nuts. Seems like it would be more like a salad dressing texture than a pesto texture without them.

Happy birthday, P-C!