West London - zOMG DOCTOR WHO!!

It's too bad there really wasn't an apocalypse yesterday, because I would've died completely happy.

EXTERMINATE! - A Dalek

I, unlike The Doctor, pulled to open the TARDIS

Wanky Word Cloud

As lame and overused as they are, I thought a word cloud would look nice up there on my bloggy space. I told you I was going to take this thing seriously! Once a month I'm going to update the word cloud, and hopefully words other than my love for cheesecake and cassata cakes will dominate the cloud.

But who knows, strawberries are smelling pretty.darn.good. in London this time of year which puts me in baking mode. I'm not even much of a baker, but when I do, it's delicious.

Speaking of delicious, apparently I can still have my delicious account, says Yahoo! So if you're interested in what I've been cooking and want to try, here are some recipes: http://www.delicious.com/osusmermaid05

UPDATED 29MAY2011: I decided the word cloud was never going to look the way I wanted it to, so I spent about an hour using wordle and changing the frequency to get the words that I think best describe my new vision for the bloggy space. I'm pretty proud of it!

White Magic = Milk?

I'm not sure why, but every time I see this T-sign ad on a double decker I feel like it's telling me something racist.

Am I the only one that finds this ad awkwardly racist?

A bit of structure for the ramblings

I think the first rule of writing, as cliche as it sounds, is to write about what you know. Unfortunately, I have learning schizophrenia so it's pretty hard to pick one thing to write about. I'm still going to write about things that I love; politics, music, gigs, food/cooking, festivals, dancing etc. - but the things that I know right now are pretty precise.

To do this, I now have a trusty gear of writing items:

MacBook, iPhone 3GS and blank paged book from Paperchase

And photo taking thing:

HP R742

I'm hoping this helps me to track all of the things that I want to write about more (so long as I have it on me at all times). I have to get in the habit of using them, and that can be pretty hard when you haven't been doing or caring about it on a regular basis for a while.

Anyhow, structure is the name of the game, so I've had to decide what it is exactly that I know about and feel comfortable writing.  I love and know social media, I am pretty much the poster child for all things on the interwebs, so it shouldn't be too hard for me to write about that when it comes up. I love living in London, and I've always wanted to live abroad. Granted, I wanted to be on a beach in warm weather but I suppose the British Isles is as close as I will get to that. I also love people, in particular people watching and I tell you some of the best people to judge watch are those that live around where I do in North London.  So, I've decided I'm going to focus on the people, places and things in the area where I live - because it's what I know best.

I can go on for ages about why I love this bit of North London, but to be honest it all comes down to one thing: it reminds me of home. And by home I mean the place where I spent 8 years of my adult life on my own without my family, not the city where I just went to kindergarten - high school.  Even more, North London reminds me a lot of The Short North but bigger, and well, in London, England rather than Columbus, Ohio - which makes this a glorious place.

Since moving to Upper Holloway and out of bumfuck-nearly-Essex-Leytonstone I've been able to take the bus home which is a nice 20-ish minute ride rather than the 40 minute Tube ride.  On the bus I pass through some of my favourite places which will be the bits that I'll discover while living here and hopefully inspire me to write on the bloggy space.  Things you can expect, or at least the places that have caught my eye on the bus ride home: 

Camden Town

• The Camden Head
• World's End
• Camden Rock and figuring out that giant Sainsbury's next to it!

The Camden Town/Kentish Town bridge

Kentish Town

• Jews for Jesus - yes, this is a place and a real thing
• Abbey Tavern
• The Oxford
• The Kentish Town bridge over the tracks
• This place that calls itself Delicious
• Junction Tavern and all things 'Junction Road'-ish (I want to know the history of this bit)

Tufnell Park to Archway - once you get here everything looks a lot more local, i.e. there's the butcher, there's the guy that fixes your bike, there's the baker, etc

• Tea Pot House
• Rustique literary cafe
• Shaolin Temple
• Junction Cafe

Hornsey Road

I'm really interested in learning more about this area and seeing what it was like 50 years ago. It reminds me a bit of Lorain Avenue back in Cleveland. I also like how church steeples seem to depict the separation of the old villages.  Looking at the layout of cities/towns here, it's interesting to think how they could have been.  Today, everyone's rocking their Arsenal kit as they walk around North London, but you can see the history of the town beneath the modernity of its residents.  I've always liked the idea of local shops and cafes over chains so I'm really excited to learn more!!

Plus heaps more locations of course, as there are plenty of other places to discover in these areas as well as the walk from Upper Holloway through Islington to Angel! I love it, I love it, I love it so much over here and I want to make the most of it while I can.

And so, I leave you with a few cool photos from my daily scenery of Upper Holloway

The church at the end of my road

The view towards Archway

More of the church at the end of my road

Bridge over the tracks to my close

Artwork on the bridge

Artwork on the bridge, i suppose inspired by the train below the bridge

Watch this space

Radio silence for some time now. Planning for a theme on the blog. It will still be a lot of rambling of many thoughts - I am a jack of all trades after all, but I want to get one thing that I can talk regularly about. Some ideas are in the works and I should have them started up no later than start of June.