Project: Anything Other Than Hamilton II.

Project: Anything Other Than Hamilton is a series I started a few weeks ago as a way of forcing myself to listen to some new music instead of simply listening to the Hamilton OCR over and over and over again. It's kind of working. I have lapsed and listened to Hamilton maybe once or twice since my first post but hey, a habit is a hard thing to break.

I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it - The 1975

Let's just begin by addressing the fact that this is the stupidest album title I have ever heard, okay? Anyway, I actually really like The 1975's first album, The 1975, and I've been looking forward to this one for a while. I like it when you sleep... has more of a chilled out vibe than the first album and a few tracks actually reminded me of Freelance Whales, which is definitely not a bad thing. Predictably, my favourite tracks on this one are the ones that sound most like the first album, but I really enjoyed the whole thing... even if it does have the stupidest title in the history of music.

Favourite songs: Love Me, UGH!, The Sound

Pain Killer - Little Big Town

I know I'm definitely not the first person to say it, but boy do Little Big Town not know what 'girl crush' means. Aside from the fact that I can't take that one song seriously though, I really, really enjoyed this album. I actually kind of love country music (that pinned tweet on my twitter profile? Not a joke.) but I am not familiar with nearly enough country bands and Little Big Town were a totally new one to me but like I said, I loved this album and I actually found it really difficult to only choose three favourite songs! I'll definitely be listening to more of their albums very soon.

Favourite songs: Day Drinking, Tumble & Fall, Faster Gun

Swooner - The Zolas

I actually only heard about The Zolas a few weeks ago when I was watching a vinyl record collection video on youtube (because I'm that person right now) and I chose to listen to this album first because the cover looked the most interesting of all their albums. So there's that. Luckily I really loved this album too! It sounds like the kind of thing that Seth Cohen would love, which is nothing but a positive.

Favourite songs: Swooner, Get Dark, Fell in Love with New York

What have you been listening to recently? If you have any recommendations for me I'd love to hear them!

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The Get To Know Me Tag.

Beth recently tagged me to do The Get To Know Me Tag and this is so throw-back MySpace style that I am psyched to oblige!

Vital Stats
Name: Anastasia.
Nicknames: Stasia.
Birthday: 4th November.
Star sign: Scorpio.
Occupation: Trying to be a writer. Dad prefers to use the term 'bum'.

Appearance
Hair colour: Brown, currently with a sort of ginger ombre.
Hair length: So long. Past my hips.
Eye colour: Green.
Best feature: My nose. It's huge and I hated it when I was a teenager but now I think it makes my whole face.
Braces: Nope.
Piercings: Just one in each ear.
Tattoos: Nope.
Right or left: Right.

Firsts
Best friend: Jess, who you'll have heard plenty about if you've been reading this blog for long! You can see her face in this post and she has a youtube channel (why not throw in a plug?) We've known each other since we were 2.
Award: There might have been other awards before it but we still talk about when I won third place in the egg and spoon race at school. (It was actually a potato and spoon race though because our school didn't trust us with eggs, which is fair enough.) It's the greatest and only sporting achievement I ever managed.
Sport: Swimming. Swimming and badminton are the only sports I have ever been interested in.
Real holiday: Australia when I was ten. We went spent a month in Sydney and Brisbane. It was one heck of a first flight.
Concert: I don't think it's actually the first one I went to but the first one I remember was a sort of day festival thing outdoors.

Favourite
Film: I'm going to say Strictly Ballroom but this is impossible.
TV show: Gavin & Stacey and Please Like Me are probably the top two but I love The OC and Glee and Merlin and so many others! I really like TV...
Colour: Green.
Song: I just do not have an answer to this. Probably something by David Bowie. Or Dolly Parton.
Restaurant: Restaurant? You overestimate how fancy I am, quiz. There is a pub in Plymouth called 'The Bank'. It's right by the theatre and they do a lot of tasty vegetarian stuff so we go there a lot.
Shop: Waterstones or Lush.
Books: I Capture the Castle, the Harry Potter books, Avalon High.
Shoes: I wear Toms classic shoes to death. Literally. I'm on my fourth pair. They're the most comfortable shoes ever but I have weird feet so I have to buy mens sizes in them and I always wear a hole in them in the exact same place so then I just... buy a new pair... They're so comfortable!

Currently
Feeling: Cold. It was spring yesterday. What happened?
Single or taken: Hahahahahaha. Single.
Eating: Nothing.
Thinking about: All those mini eggs in my room...
Watching: The second episode of Shadowhunters. It's not great.
Wearing: Pyjamas. This is probably why dad thinks I'm a bum.

Future
Want children: Not any time soon.
Want to be married: If I ever find someone I want to marry.
Careers in mind: Writer, photographer, duchess in an early twentieth century novel.
Where you want to live: I'd love to live in Paris for a few years but ultimately I'm pretty happy with Cornwall.

Do you believe in...
God: This is way too complex a question for one of these things.
Miracles: I don't know.
Love at first sight: You know that Hozier song 'Someone New'?
Ghosts: I don't know.
Aliens: Not necessarily Star Trek style aliens, but definitely life on other planets.
Soul mates: Kind of? Not just in the romantic way though.
Heaven: These questions are too heavy for eleven on a Friday morning.
Hell: Seriously, I don't know.
Kissing on the first date: If everyone's into it, there's no harm.
Yourself: Sure.

I hope that's told you everything you could ever possibly want to know about me! Now if you don't mind, I have some mini eggs to devour...

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The Quiet Re-readathon wrap up.

Remember last Thursday when I posted my TBR for The Quiet Re-readathon and said that I didn't expect to get to Fangirl? Well I certainly predicted that correctly.

I actually didn't even manage to finish Campari For Breakfast. I know, I know, I had four whole days with nothing to do and I didn't even mange to finish this 300 page book. There's no excuse.

I mean the excuse is actually that my parents and I went out for the day on Friday and then I basically spent the next three days getting caught up with all the TV shows I was behind on. So at least I accomplished that...

Anyway, I may have only managed to read about 200 pages of Campari For Breakfast but I did really enjoy those pages and I'm really glad that this re-readathon finally pushed me to re-read it. If Beth ever chooses to do the re-readathon again I will definitely be on board!

Did you take part in The Quiet Re-readathon? Did you do as badly as I did? Please say yes and make me feel better!

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The Quiet Re-readathon TBR.

Re-reading is something I used to do a lot when I was younger. Now I talk a lot about how I want to do it more but having such a ridiculous amount of unread books hanging around (making me feel guilty for spending so much money on books) tends to turn me away from re-visiting books I've already read.

This is a common problem (especially among book bloggers!) and Beth from The Quiet People has a solution! She's decided to launch The Quiet Re-readathon. The Quiet Re-readathon runs from the 25th - the 28th March, right over Easter weekend so it's nice and easy to remember, and the idea is simply to spend those four days re-reading books you've already read, which sounds like a great idea to me!

The hashtag is #quietrereadathon if you want to get involved too!

Now, I know myself and how much I normally read so while I would like to say I'll be reading a book a day, I'm going to be realistic and keep my TBR super small.

Campari for Breakfast by Sara Crowe

I literally just discovered, while searching for a picture of the cover of Campari for Breakfast, that a sequel called Martini Henry is being released later this year and now I'm super excited! I loved Campari for Breakfast when I first read it for Read Women Month in 2014. (btw, in case you're wondering, yes I will be doing Read Women Month again this year and I'm very excited about it!) I gave it 5 stars, loved every moment of it, and have been wanting to re-read it ever since, so I don't know why it's taken me nearly two years but I will definitely be fixing that this weekend.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

I'm not really expecting that I'll get to Fangirl this weekend but I can certainly try! If I do manage to finish Campari for Breakfast in time then Fangirl will be the next book on my list. Fangirl was one of my favourite books of 2013 (which feels like a horrifyingly long time ago tbh) and, as I said in my initial review of it that year, it's another one that I've been wanting to re-read basically since the second I finished reading it the first time. I don't know why I don't just re-read these books but here we are, Beth's finally got my butt into gear to do it this weekend!

I'll probably be posting updates throughout the weekend, certainly on my Instagram and Twitter if not here, and probably a wrap-up post here on Tuesday. So you have that to look forward to, you lucky lot!

Let me know if you're taking part in The Quiet Re-readathon too. I'd love to know what books make the grade for you to re-read!

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London.

My Instagram posts from the trip.

My friend Kate has been trying to convince me to go and visit her in London since she moved there over a year ago. Before she lived in London she lived in Texas for a while and before that she spent three years trying to convince me to go and visit her at her uni house in Kent. So basically she's just been trying to convince me to go and visit her for a while. Much to her amusement I finally agreed to go up on Monday the 29th February ('an imaginary day' I think were her words) and stay with her until the Friday.

This is Kate. I've known her since she moved to England from Ecuador when we were five and she is still one of my very best friends, even though she used to eat bugs in the playground. (She definitely won't mind me telling the Internet that, I'm sure.)

We didn't end up doing too much on the Tuesday because we were up stupidly late talking on Monday night, because we basically just don't shut up whenever we're together. We did head over to Spitalfields Market for something to eat (I had a very nice veggie burger and lemonade and we shared those delicious fries you can just about see in the above picture) but unfortunately, thanks to our inability to shut up, most of the market stalls were already closed and gone by the time we got there. Still, it's an area of London I've never been to before so it was nice to see somewhere different, even if I did feel supremely uncool walking around in my strawberry hat and trainers among all the cool hipster types!

Wednesday was our proper 'in London' day. In the morning we headed over to Limehouse and grabbed some lunch in Sir Ian McKellen's pub, The Grapes. I'm not sure if you can really tell from the picture above (I didn't take many pictures during my trip, I'm afraid, and I was plagued by bad light for the ones I did take) but it's a really lovely, cosy kind of place, totally my idea of a perfect pub, and the food was delicious. I would highly recommend it! We spent ages in there.

Then we spent quite a long time in the Lush flagship store on Oxford Street... Somehow I managed not to spend too much money but I have no idea how.

In the evening we went to see Guys and Dolls, which is basically how Kate finally convinced me to visit her in the first place. You see, I love The History Boys and around my 21st birthday Kate went to see Samuel Barnett (Posner in The History Boys) in a production at The Globe and she waited at the stage door afterwards to meet him and got him to sign a copy of the play for me for my birthday. So with Jamie Parker (Scripps in The History Boys) being in Guys and Dolls, Kate had the idea that we would go to the show and then afterwards hopefully get him to sign my book too. Which we did!

Guys and Dolls was brilliant. I've seen it once before but a long time ago and I was really impressed with all of the cast at this production, especially Sophie Thompson, who was amazing as Miss Adelaide. Jamie Parker was great too, of course, and very nice after the show when we literally ran after him and stopped him half way up the stairs as he was clearly just trying to get home. He stopped and chatted to us for quite a while and didn't even seem to mind when we left and then immediately ran back because Kate had forgotten to ask for a picture with him. Also he wrote 'happy 21' in my book, which I'm pretty pleased with to be honest.

Now Kate says we need to go to America and get James Corden to sign the book next.

On the Thursday morning we went for a little wander around Covent Garden but in the afternoon we actually got the train away from London and up to Norwich to visit our friend (and Kate's cousin) Holly for the day! I didn't know a thing about this plan until I got to London and it was the loveliest surprise. I've known Holly even longer than I've known Kate and the three of us have always been really good friends but with her living in Norwich now and me still in Cornwall, it's been about two years since I last saw her. Also I've never been to Norwich before, so this was a doubly nice surprise.

I'm afraid I don't know the name of the cathedral in the above picture but Holly tells me there are a lot of them in Norwich. Holly gave us a quick little tour of Norwich but, again, we managed to get there just as most things were closing. We had some delicious macarons and visited The Book Hive, which is a lovely little bookshop that Holly works in. Then we went for a drink and got some dinner (that delicious fish taco in the instagram collage at the top of this post) and then went for another drink, and then Kate and I headed back to London and the next day I headed back home.

It was so nice to spend some time with Kate and Holly again and to be reminded that actually I do really like London. Sometimes it's easy to forget that. Hopefully I'll be going again soon and hopefully I'll remember to take some more pictures next time!

And here's a picture of me standing very awkwardly outside The Grapes. Kate insisted.

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Project: Anything Other Than Hamilton I.

I have a problem and that problem is the Hamilton OCR. I mean, it's not really a problem because it is actually amazing, but it is basically all I've listened to for the past three months, and that might be a problem. Anyway it's something I've decided to fix!

A few weeks ago Jennie announced that she has started listening to a new album every day and as soon as I read about it I thought it might be just the thing to get me out of my Hamilton haze!

I won't be listening to a new album every single day because I like to listen to an album a few times to really decide how I feel about it (unless I immediately realise it's not my thing obvs) but I'm going to try to listen to one or two each week until I either a) get bored of this project b) am capable of listening to the Hamilton OCR in moderation or c) run out of new albums I'm interested in, whichever happens first. (I wouldn't put my money on b tbh.)

Blue Neighbourhood - Troye Sivan

I've been meaning to listen to Troye's album since it came out but, as you know, I've been distracted. I  already knew that I liked his music (I listened to Happy Little Pill on repeat for about a month when it came out) so it was pretty much a given that I would love this album, and I do! Definitely one I'm going to keep listening to.

Favourite songs: WILD, YOUTH, for him.

Badlands - Halsey

I've been putting off listening to Badlands for ages without really knowing why and it did take me two or three listens to really get into it but now I am definitely on board. There's a bit of a similarity to Lorde, which at first made me think that I would rather just listen to Lorde, but once I got past that I really enjoyed it. All in all I'm really pleasantly surprised by how much I like it!

Favourite songs: Hold Me Down, Roman Holiday, Gasoline

Purpose - Justin Bieber

I'm going to level with you, I have enjoyed some of Bieber's songs in the past, but this new album is something completely different. It's a lot more mature than his past stuff and I've been having a great time listening to it. In fact I've listened to it a lot, particularly my three favourite songs, which I would absolutely recommend to anyone who enjoys pop music. (Even my dad likes Love Yourself. In his own words: 'I'm annoyed by how much I like this song'.)

Favourite songs: What Do You Mean?, Sorry, Love Yourself

I'll be keeping a Spotify playlist of all of the albums that I listen to as part of this little project too (which you can check out below!) in case any of you want to check any of them out yourselves!

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My personality venn diagram.

Did you ever do that thing with your friends where you all sit around and decide which characters you each are from a certain TV show? (Friends is the classic example. I'm Chandler.) I recently re-watched the entire of Miranda, followed by some new episodes of New Girl, and realised that my personality basically boils down to this diagram:

(Yes, I made the diagram.)

I've been told in the past that I could be the child of Chuck and Ned from Pushing Daisies and yes, that is the biggest compliment I have ever received and I will absolutely take it, but if I am completely honest with myself, that would not be the most accurate diagram. The most accurate diagram is the one above, that I lovingly made especially to illustrate this point: my entire personality is basically just a strange mixture of Miranda from Miranda and Nick from New Girl. In my heart I know this to be true. Also, I have proof. 

Exhibit A: How I tend to (not) deal with my problems.

I lived with my friend Jess for three years and she will attest to the amount of times I seem to think that lying on the floor will fix things. It rarely does.

Exhibit B: My idea of a good time.

I literally went to a club once and decided that was quite enough of that for me. I'll take a quiet night in every time.

Exhibit C: How I feel about getting older.

Being a teenager always felt so ridiculous to me and for years now I've been saying that I think I'll probably hit my stride somewhere in my 50s.

Exhibit D: My approach to writing.

Again, just ask Jess how many times I have literally compared myself to Hemingway. She bought me a hip flask for my 21st birthday so that I could continue the theme. And, just like Nick, I have still yet to write The Sun Also Rises.

I have made use of the hip flask though.

If you've never thought about your personality as a venn diagram of fictional characters then I highly recommend you do it right now and let me know which characters you would use for your diagram in the comments!

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