You could say this is another story about macaroni and cheese...and you'd probably be right. What can I say? I love mac and cheese.

Once upon a time, I moved to Scotland.¹ Among the many new things to explore and investigate was the everyday use of an electric kettle.²

When ybunny came to visit me for the first time in the US, he bought and had sent ahead an electric kettle in order to fuel his tea habit. So, I'd had a kettle previously, but it was only ever used for making tea. We had a microwave, and old habits die hard.

One of ybunny's ingenious uses for a kettle was making pasta. He's boil a full kettle of water, pour it over the pasta, turn on the burner, and voila, faster pasta.

Since I have a love of all things noodle-y, I thought this was a smashing idea.

In order to make sense of this story, you have to know that I spend most of my time without trousers. Somehow, trousers and socks attracted my scorn in my younger years, so my general lounge wear in the house is pants/underwear and a T-shirt.

One evening, we decided on pasta as the dinner option. I went into the kitchen, put on the kettle, and then started looking to see what sort of shapes we had to choose from.
There were two: spaghetti and conchiglie.

Conchiglie, for anyone not familiar, are in the shape of shells, but due to some fluting, they tend to lie in spoon-like shape. This is unlike the pasta marked 'shells' that tend to be curled up.

The kettle boiled, and I picked up the vessel, full of boiling water, and poured it over the conchiglie.

So, what happens when you pour water over a spoon from any sort of height?

Yep, it splashes out.

In this case, it splashed out directly onto my bare outer thigh.

After discontinuing pouring, I went directly into the shower to put cold water over my poor, scalded leg.

Ah, what a welcome to my new kitchen.³

I went back to the regular way of boiling water for pasta immediately.

Any cooking accidents? I can't be the only unlucky one. :)

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¹- Once upon a time, otherwise known as 2 years and 2 months ago.
²- Shock, horror, I know...but electric kettles are not readily available in the US. For instance, even at the bigger kitchen supply places, you'll only see two models...if that.
³- About 7 months later, just before exams, I burned three of my fingers extremely badly on the grill. Jyll vs. the Kitchen - 0 for 2

Today as one of our to-dos we'd decided to buy gifts for various events coming up in the year.

The first was easy: a stripy blue, red, green, and cream fleece jumper for the new baby Christian Alexander to go with the onesie I'd bought him while I was stateside last. (Onesie says 'Nothing's wrong. Just testing you.')

For the second, we went round to John Lewis to buy a wedding gift for T and L-A. We went up to the Gift List office on the 3rd floor. They printed us out the list and off we went.

We knew what we wanted, so we headed to a till point to pay. The closest was in electronics.
No, they can't help us.

Down we go to ground floor, to garden supplies. What we were buying would give away the surprise, but as you guessed...
No, they can't help us.

Back up to floor 2, to kitchenwares. Except they really weren't kitchenwares as that's separate from Cutlery and China. We stand in line for ages to find out...
No, they can't help us.

Where next? Back up to the Gift List Office. If we know what we want, we pay there.
*facepalm*

Ah, well. Got our exercise for the day. :)

Luckily, the gift list for miriammiriam and darkcryst was much easier to navigate.

I always feel bad asking 'dumb questions', but from now on in those circumstances, I'm going to ask, 'Can't we just take care of $ACTIVITY here?'

I ransacked the house this morning looking for my wallet.

Where had I left it? In C's car, out in the wilds of Aberdeenshire.

Well, my adrenaline supply is at the ready today. :)

So, I'm advised to make my request for approval to marry ybunny early enough to prevent snafus.

So, exactly four months before the wedding, I submit our paperwork. I am assured that with the normal backload of work that the Immigration office has to do that it can take up to 8 weeks for processing.

Apparently, this is the one time that they decide to be quick. (That is, after they send back the paperwork to be rewritten on blue paper instead of white. *rolleyes*)

I just got back out approval to marry.

Valid until? 27 September.

Our wedding? 6 October

Brilliant. *facepalm*

EDIT: The man at the other end of the contact number for my paperwork says that it will be okay because the approval certificate only needs to be valid until we go to the Registry Office. This is not what I was told before. I'll go down to St. Nicholas House and make sure. I wish that all the Immigration people would get on the SAME PAGE. It would save my poor heart from these adrenaline rushes.