(Late) St. Andrew's Day and The Weather Strikes Back: Part Deux

Ok, so there was no Parte Une -- I imagined writing it several weeks ago when it rained for the first time since I've been back in LA. But it rained again yesterday, so I decided it was time for Part Deux. Yes, it has only rained twice in Los Angeles since September. What a depressing town.

However, the rain was right on schedule for St. Andrew's Day, a day to celebrate Scotland. By myself. In the rain and in my own head. I'll get to a recap of my day in a minute but let's just say it culminated in me, drunk, in a friend's kitchen, serving up sticky toffee pudding to my team of ruggers around midnight. I can hardly think of a better way to mark the occasion, (excepting for the lack of pubs in LA).

Hm, so now that I think of it, yesterday didn't have that much of a story to tell. I had class, then spent the afternoon frantically cooking up a double batch of sticky toffee pudding for the rugby team and script for my radio show, interspersed with a planning meeting about our rugby tour this spring (Hong Kong, here we come! We only need.... about $34,000. Ouch.). After that was Rookie Night for the rugby team which (for legal reasons) I can only tell you involved a lot of group activities, lots of fun, and culminated in the revelation of Rookie-Vet assignments (Hi, Andi!).

And speaking of "legal reasons"... there are too many prohibitive ones in America. Almost every fundraising idea I had for Hong Kong (ones that worked well in Edinburgh) was found to be fraught with too many legal liabilities or prohibited by silly regulations from UCLA, UCLA club sports, etc. Bah. Rules are made to be broken, laws are open to interpretation. This is what I've learned from rugby.

At any rate, where all this leaves me is huddled inside against the cold Los Angeles winter (oooh, long sleeve shirt AND a sweater? NO!) with my never-ending cups of tea (wahey, Tetley's British Blend!) and a seemingly never-ending list of things to accomplish very soon. As in, before finals. As in, in addition to finals. Ouch, my valley-girl-vocab muscle is hurting. Time to head over to FreeRice.com and improve that vocabulary. Grammar, however, shall still be set loose to the wind and creativity cut off and distributed amongst the poor.

Oh, sorry, did I mention my radio show earlier? WELL, let me tell you about it! Or, actually, in the context of today's episode, which was quite interesting, I felt. I have 2 hours on the radio, so what do I do? I cook! Well, you cook, actually, and I talk you through it, all whilst playing some sweet tunes. As I said earlier, today's recipe was Sticky Toffee Pudding (much of which is left over and delights my roomates), and in honor of the recipe and post-St. Andrew's Day hangovers and twisted-ceilidh-ankles worldwide I devoted my whole slot to purely Scottish bands. And lo, it was awesome. It's all so perfectly offset by a book I was recently given, Sound Bites by Alex Kapranos, which is about eating all over the world while on tour with -- with? -- as Franz Ferdinand. Magnificent. It makes me want to write and travel and play in a rockband and do little else with my life. Then again, if it means I'm going to be broke until I get my break at thirty... hello university degree?

Speaking of which, I've swung back around from any screw-Marine-Bio-I'm-switching-to-Anthro feelings I've had in the interest of getting out of school ASAP. It's all for a worthy cause -- being done with class faster. Mmm, can't wait to hit that several month skid of entry-level job searching while desperately wanting and yet being unable to move away from home! I can hardly wait -- I can almost smell the desperation. Whoopdie-effing-do.

Hope you've enjoyed my unusually long rambling tonight -- I was browsing through my old Scots-Julia blog from last year and felt the need to portray my life as exciting, interesting, thoughtful, literate or at least verbose.