whistle while you work..

a slightly more productive day than yesterday, i'm happy to report! another lazy day off college but i'm very proud to say i managed to get some stuff done with it. i sat down this morning and raked through all the old cds i could find in the house to try and come up with a list of songs to sing for my grade six singing exam in june next year. sounds like complete over-preparation, i know, but these things honestly take months and months to get right! in the end i managed to come up with:

• sinead o'connor - nothing compares 2 u
• eva cassidy - songbird
• the carpenters - rainy days and mondays
• sara bareilles - love song
• duffy - stepping stone
• james morrison - you make it real
• joss stone - L.O.V.E

not really the sort of music i'm into, but examiners aren't really into piano interpretations of indie-rock music, so i generally have to improvise. this is the kind of stuff i have to sing at gigs, it's not really my sort of thing but it has to be audience-friendly. mainstream pop, country and soft rock all seem to go down well with a crowd and sometimes its difficult to look like i enjoy listening to the song i'm singing. i also spent some of the afternoon updating my ipod with some great stuff that i completely forgot to download ages ago: this great new york band called asobi seksu, and an enchanting scandinavian singer called lykke li. check them out on youtube, the music is so ambient and mood-enhancing and definitely worth a listen.

i completely organised and tidied my wardrobe as well - its been in need for ages. there was a whole pile of laundry sat on my bedroom chair, waiting to be hung up in my wardrobe but i just couldn't find the time. this is what it looked like this morning...

and here is the fruits of my labours, drum roll please...

while i was hunting around trying to organise and tidy my room, i managed to reward myself by coming across a skirt i'd forgotten i had. it was given to me when i was about thirteen by a cousin, who'd bought it, meaning to diet to fit into it but never had. it was a little too grown-up and sophisticated for me when i was thirteen and i must have bundled it away in a drawer. but it really is lovely. it's a black bodycon high-waisted skirt from ted baker, with a panel of black sequins on the front. it fits like a glove!!

while i'm on the subject of skirts, i'm utterly in love with the christian lacroix one i found on ebay store persephone vintage. it's beautiful, a vintage cream lace highwaisted skirt with a really beautiful cut and shape to it. but it was slightly out of my budget at over £130!! i know lacroix has all its 'ab fab' connotations but i'm so in love with the skirt!! i wish i could find a lookalike somewhere, i'll be trawling the charity shops trying to find something similar!

after all that this afternoon, i sat down this evening and wrote a letter to my grandmother. it's so hard to contact her on the telephone and i don't like to text her because she gets in such a muddle. so i thought it might be better (and a whole lot more detailed) if i wrote her a nice long letter. and then i curled up on the sofa to read the last of 'memoirs of a geisha' by arthur golden. i highly recommend it anyone - it's a beautiful book and the story is enchanting. even better than the film!! so its been a nice day, now i'm off to choose an outfit for tomorrow and pore over some more of Elle with a big mug of cocoa... :)