"YAAAAAAY!"

...is what Stella said when she saw her Crystal's Hot Sauce and bottles of kombucha :)

3am

I could barely keep my eyes open at 11p and thought, "My body has already adjusted to the natural light cues. I'm a modern miracle." I zombied into bed excited to be so freaking tired and fantasized about getting a decent amount of sleep. 

Now I'm up. Up, up. Up like it's 6am but it's 3am. No yawns, no fog, I'm Wide Awake. Poop, I'm not a modern miracle. I promised myself I would read instead of play on my phone, but blogging isn't playing, so to catch up:

I got to Stella's sweaty and cranky. She's texting me and I'm trying to conserve texts bc the International plan I bought from Verizon is pretty shitty. I'm a huge fan of Verizon but I hate the Int'l Calling Plan and having to think about what number text this is is making me petulant. I'm ignoring my phone, though I'm dying to text back.

Once I let myself in Stella's flat and see the flights of stairs I have to scale with The Motherfucker, I have to take some deep breaths and Have a Talk with myself. It goes like this: "Calm down. This isn't a conspiracy. It's not Stella's fault you can't text mindlessly and even if you knew how many stairs you'd have to climb with that heavy Motherfucker, you still would have packed fifteen lbs of kombucha. Only you are ruining your trip right now, nothing and no one else. So chill the fuck out and let's reset, yeah?" I make an excellent pseudo mom. 

I cross the finish line of getting all my crap upstairs before I let myself even look around so I can really enjoy the moment. AND I DO BECAUSE STELLA'S FLAT IS WONDERFUL. I run around gasping and greeting my favorite parts in a bad British accent I use all the time, not just when I'm speaking to British things. 

my beautiful bedroom

"'Ehllo pretty pictchah! 'Ehllo behdrooom!! 'EHLOOOO LOVELY ROOFTOHP DECK! You awe GOHJUSS!!!"

Stella's lovely living room

I scope out the kitchen and decide to go to Whole Foods to grocery shop because it's right down the street. I can be annoyingly purist when I travel and only want to shop at the "real places", meaning places I don't associate with America, but right now I'm tired, I'm on a health kick, and it's not like I'm in a quaint little village, I'm in London. 

As I walk to Whole Foods, my head on a swivel when I cross the streets because the direction of traffic thing, I wonder HOW America and Great Britain got so opposite. When the founding fathers settled the thirteen colonies were they like, "We're gonna be so different, that we're going to do everything backwards and opposite! Screw you, Mum!"?

When I get home from the store and rip into my rotisserie chicken (weirdly HALF the price of an American Whole Foods rotisserie chicken- have I mentioned how much I love grocery shopping? This is how I geek out.), my marginal disappointment at shopping in a familiar chain completely vanishes. My chicken looks waaaay more chicken-y than any American chicken. It's little legs aren't docked at the default chicken leg place, they're much longer! And the body isn't perfect- in fact, his body looks like it lived a real life, and I can kind of see what my chicken looked like when he was living on the farm! (Shut up, this is my fantasy, and in my fantasy my chicken had a long, lovely life on a family farm before he was slaughtered and plucked so I could get my protein.) This chicken would never fly in an American supermarket. And with that thought, I happily eat my little friend. 

Keys in the door... 

"HIIIIIIIIIIII!", "HAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!", we chorus. Stella's finally home! We laugh and hug and laugh and catch up until she has to go to bed. I'm so happy to be with my friend. 

And now everything is all caught up! And its 8pm LA time so I'm due to be sleepy in about two hours when it'll be 6am here. Man, being a modern miracle would have been so cool...