Midweek joys

It's Wednesday already! So far this week...

Buying DVDs from Yes Asia / Watching property prices go down on Property Snake as we prepare to buy / Realising cupcakes are actually the iced fairy cakes of my childhood / My husband surprising me by getting out of work at 7 pm and meeting me at my office so we can buy pak choi in Chinatown together / Black bursts of thunder, rippling flashes of lightning, large plops of rain / Having a good work week so far / My husband cooking Vietnamese beef with pak choi from Into The Vietnamese Kitchen - beef strips marinated in fish sauce, soy sauce, a little sugar and red chilli flakes, black pepper and a little cornstarch / Me cooking Bengali mixed vegetable curry - baby aubergines, tindori, shim, sweet potato and red lentils spiced with whole panch phoron, turmeric, cumin, coriander and red chilli flakes / The London rain making me nostalgic for the Indian monsoon where all the colours of the earth come alive and kids play footie in the slippery mud / Shrimp flavoured crackers / Settling in to watch the enjoyable Brothers & Sisters on Channel 4.

Super

The things that have been thrilling and soothing me this week / My smooth as silk Nicole Farhi ti-shirt / Super sweet Alfonso mangoes / Super sexy and soulful Leonard Cohen's Various Positions album / Cucumber and houmous pitta sandwiches for lunch / My husband's smothering kisses and all-enveloping hugs / The sunshine when it finally decides to peek through the black clouds / The cold rain on my bare arms catching me unaware / The hearty juiciness of a 1996 bottle of Tempranillo / Super fattening homemade chicken and cheese fajita and guacamole / Super fattening spaghetti with bacon and butter beans / Reading lyrical evocations of Bengali life in India and in the US and reflecting on my own experiences of growing up Asian in Britain / A yummy chocolate mousse cake for a colleague's birthday / Indian School on BBC 4 reminding me of my own days living and teaching at a boarding school in Dehra Dun / A new pair of wedge heel shoes from Dune / Walking through the din of central London and still being fully at peace within my own space / Butter soft Turkish delight and gooey nougat from a colleague / Watching sloth bears eat watermelons and grapes in London Zoo at my husband's department party / The fact that today's Thursday and the weekend is just two days away!

Snow

Just one inch of snow fell on London today and all hell broke loose: hi-tech systems designed to protect trains from the effects of ice on power rails left trains stuck and rail passengers stranded and even six lines of the London Underground were crippled. My Tube train on the Victoria line got stuck at each station to Oxford Circus for five minutes at a time this morning. When I lived in South Dakota, we suffered through frozen temperatures, lashing blizzards and horrendous snow storms and still life went on. My colleagues at work from the Northeastern states of America were laughing at our inability to cope with a piddly amount of snow.

Mind you, I like this photo on the BBC website of a couple enjoying the snow down on Brighton beach:

Brrrr, it's cold

Siberian, arctic, biting, bitter, chilled, cutting, frigid, frosty, gelid, glacial, icy, nippy, numbing, polar, raw, shivery, snappy, wintry, bleak, blighting, crisp, fierce, freezing, severe, sore, stinging, hiemal, frore, refrigerated...