Exeter central library

Yesterday Ian and I joined the library. Apart from university libraries I haven't been a member of one since I lived in Formby. This of course is terrible, considering my parentage, but the truth is that I've always owned more books than I had time to read. This of course is still the case, and will only be exacerbated by my reading library books, but I am no longer concerned about that.

Our trip to the library was very exciting. Several of the sections quickly caught our attention, including history, natural history and a wonderful languages section. Exeter central library has language courses for over a hundred languages, admittedly most are accompanied by cassettes and not cds, but we do have a cassette player as part of a stereo in the study. I think it will not be long before we borrow some Russian and German and I was very pleased to see the Japanese 'teach yourself' course. Dad was kind enough to get me the book for this, but to listen to the cassette as well would be very helpful.

We came away with a varied selection of books, from a history of Jerusalem to a book on treehouses (not that we own a tree big enough to put a treehouse in, but the pictures are incredible).

I can honestly say that I would never have joined the library had I not resigned from my job. Although I would have found time to borrow the odd book or two the whole idea would have left me more frustrated at my lack of reading time than those couple of books would have been worth.

Pepper and orange soup

I have started a list of all the things I want to do in my time off. This includes finally learning to drive and learning to cook. Not that I can't cook, but I've never really played around with recipes or new foods. This is partly because I don't like handling meat and until this year have never owned a vegetarian cookbook.

Whilst Dad was down in Exeter we went to Otter Nurseries and I bought a book of soup recipes. Yesterday I made pepper soup. At least it was called pepper soup and it had 4 peppers in, but really it tasted of orange, despite the juice of a single orange making up such a small proportion of the liquid. The soup had the right consistency and definitely didn't taste bad, but I just wasn't sure about the orange flavour. Ian (having more of a sweet tooth), thankfully was more impressed so he will finish it off tonight!

A new era, a new blog

For once in my life I have made a bold decision and have resigned from my job at Exeter University. I'm going to take a few months off to do all the things I've been wanting to do since long before I started my phd and to decide what kind of job I would like to do.

I have decided not to restrict what I'm blogging about here. I suspect it will become a jumble of all the sorts of things that I get up to in my time off.