Things that make me happy

Beautiful, beautiful day! Days, actually! Yesterday was warm and gorgeous, so I decided to run some errands and check out the steam fair that was going on in Hammersmith. It was a little tiny carnival with antique (but refurbished) rides all run by steam engines. They were really beautifully painted. There was a "Wall of Death" that totally took me back to Jinja, Uganda, where we attended a carnival and climbed high onto a very rickety structure to gaze down on an elderly Indian man riding a motorcycle horizontally around the circular wooden structure we were standing on. I was sure the whole thing was gonna collapse and we were all gonna die, motorcycles or not. The one in Hammersmith looked much safer. They also had a little arcade with antique penny-slot games that was so so cool! I paid £1 for 8 tokens and won more tokens a couple times, so got to play quite a few of them. I paid one token to learn about future events in my life, and another for a creepy fortune teller lady in a box to tell my fortune (which was not a fortune at all, but just a description of my personality...and not even really my personality.) It was awesome. Annoyingly, I forgot my camera so you'll just have to take my word for it.



Today was another beautiful day, and I got to spend it with Tanya and Carina! I wagered on it being warm (definitely hit 70 degrees!) so decided it was high time for my legs to reacquaint themselves with Mr. Sunshine. Skin really doesn't get much paler than this.

We had breakfast behind Borough Market, then headed over to Shakespeare's Globe for the Bard's birthday celebrations. It was mostly activities for children, but don't you think that would stop we three grown-up ladies, no sirree! Carina took a crack at Anne Bowling (ha ha! Get it? Anne Boleyn?) which she did horribly at, so I'm curious how any child was expected to win. Then we took a picture with a bear and tried to guess its name (no, it was not Lady Macbear). Then we added our ingredients to a witch's brew, which involved writing nasty-sounding things on post-it notes and sticking it to a wall. I put "ogre's earwax." Carina, ignoring my vehement protests, put "syphilitic pus." She was supported in this decision by Tanya, who is usually the prudish, responsible, innocent one in the group (yes, even compared to me!) She supported it on the grounds that it would be educational for the young kiddies to learn about STDs. Usually, I love that all my friends are crazy about infectious diseases and we can have ridiculous conversations about pertussis and herpes in public places, but there has to be a line somewhere.



Anyhoo, we watched some volunteers of all ages makes fools of themselves acting out lines from the Scottish play on stage. We tapped our fingers against our palms to simulate rain and cackled like witches when directed to do so. When we left, we dropped pennies into the Globe support bucket and were offered cheery red flags. Carina, possibly because she'd spent too much time around small children, decided to act like a petulant child and refused the flag, instead demanding a poster and a gold star. Luckily, the man handing them out was a good sport and unpeeled the large gold star sticker, asking, "And where would you like it?" As it was quite big, the only practical place for it to go was her chest, so this was a bit of a PG-13 question. Then we sat out in the sun for ages drinking Pimms (first Pimms of the year! woot woot!) and pear cider. A friend of Carina's, named James joined us (Tanya: "What is with all the Jameses? I feel like people should know there are other names out there!") and we pretty much spent the entire day drinking and sunning, with a bit of pie eating and book browsing thrown in for good measure. Tanya gave me a pink and blue rhino from Tanzania, and we all decided he should be named Winston.

It was pretty much the best day ever.