Because it’s like summer and I’m sitting on the balcony at 11pm. In a skirt and sweater. Barefoot. It’s awesome.
I’m trying very hard to seize as much of these evenings as I can. With my new job I usually don’t get home before 7pm, most of the times it’s past 7:30 pm until I finally open to the door to our apartment. But these days have been so lovely and I try to pack what’s left of them full with stuff I need to do.
Unfortunately one of things I need to do is watch the rest of season 1 of Babylon 5 before Friday. Which means five episodes to watch tomorrow and the day after that. Someone at work lent me the DVDs, but it’s her last day on Friday and so I need to be done with it by Thursday evening. I hate that I have to spend the evenings like that, but then again, once you got into that show you don’t want to pass the chance of watching as much as you want. I had some trouble at first, because the show is so old (in comparison) and it shows, but I’m just starting to love it. So there it goes. Five episodes in two nights. I can do this. I know I can.
The rest of the evening is for reading and hanging out with my nifty new laptop. I love it. I love that I can write blog entries from wherever in the apartment I want. This one’s coming from the bed again. I might declare this my favorite spot for writing blog entries.
The balcony, though, is great, too. We’re having the most lovely spring weather here and I even spend some time this evening reading there with my lovely IKEA dragonfly lights (I think you need some pictures to see what I’m talking about – I’m on that) glowing in the dark. As for reading, I finally decided to force myself to read all those books that have stayed untouched for so long. Something needed to be done about those poor books. Now I decided that I’m not allowed to order new books until I’ve read those four books eagerly waiting for me. Problem was that three of them are in French and one is that ridiculously long Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.
I thought I was brave when I finally grabbed „Vingt milles lieues sous les mers“ by Jules Verne, figuring that I’d have problems with whatever old French words and idioms I’d have to deal with. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to read. Plus, it has neat pictures. I only kind of blank out when it comes to fishes. I think that squale means shark and requin, too. But I stopped looking it up. If there’s a paragraph full of strange words, I figure they’re talking about fish. Nothing more to see, move on. It’s fish. How much more would I need to know?
Anynow, these are the days and with some luck the weekend will be just as nice and then I won’t even have to speed-watch anymore episodes of Babylon 5 and can waste all of the day on the balcony.
—
PS: Don’t get me wrong. I do watch these shows because I want to. It just sucks when you have to hurry through a whole season.
Yeah, so, Ehle, I’m all set for the whole taking over the world thing. You free on Tuesday? If not, we can reschedule and all.
See you then, Jamie.
PS: And what happened to your blog?
I’m writing this from bed. Not because of any particular reason, but because I can. And I can, because I have this awesome shiny new MacBook and now I can do all these things I couldn’t do before. Like brushing up my CSS on the balcony or watching American Idol in the living room and simultaneously reading the recap for the show on Television Without Pity or blogging from bed. I can do all this now. Makes you think very hard about why I even bothered about having a life before. I mean it didn’t seem so bad back then in the days before the MacBook, but it must’ve been, right? Right?
Anyway, there was something else I wanted to write about. It’s about New York. I know that Caitlin wants me to forget all about New York and just move on to loving Chicago already. Which, I do, really. But, I mean, come on, we’re talking about New York here. You cannot forget about it.
I stumbled about someone’s pictures of New York on flickr and immediately got jealous. Because this is my standard reaction to anything concerning New York. You plan on going to New York for vacation. I’m jealous. You just came back from a fabulous trip from New York. I’m jealous. You live in New York. I’m so jealous I want to kill you.
Remember, this is coming from someone who has actually been to New York, so it’s not some fantasy about a place I have only seen in movies. Granted, I didn’t have to work 100 hours a week to be able to pay for a one bedroom apartment like I imagine everybody who lives there does. But still, oh so damn jealous.
Which reminds of another thing. I noticed that nothing triggers spontaneous memories as good as smells. Every now and then it happens that I walk along some street and some smell immediately transports me to this and that moment. I love it when that happens. I love the fact that this is something so mysterious and hard to grasp, like you cannot describe what it is, but it’s still there and it just happens and some times it makes me so very happy. Like I’m walking down a street and suddenly I think it’s summer and I’m in New York.
Want to know the smells that usually do this? Smells of food.
True story.
I just thought this might interest you: Somewhere between some time ago and now I actually learned how to play poker. Well, kind of. I was good enough to not lose rightaway, but not good enough to actually win. Yeah, so I lost five whole Euros gambling.
Then again, that’s about half the price for a ticket to the movies. So I don’t think I have a gambling problem. At least I don’t drool when I see a deck of cards.
Yet.
My original plans for Easter was something like that: Spend the time at home and get things done, like read, watch TV, and work through those books on CSS and AJAX that I treated myself to. I also had planned some cooking, baking and cleaning.
Unfortunately that didn’t quite work out. So the husband had promised his parents, who live all the way down in Konstanz, to come visit them on the Easter weekend. He had kind of done that without even asking me, so all I could do was say yes or no to going with him. We then started a two-day pouting contest, the winner of which would get his way. Now it turns out that though I am an excellent pouter, my husband isn’t that bad as well. In fact he’s really, really good. Add to that the feeling of guilt that I get when I’m reminded of the fact that we hardly see his parents, plus the fact that my mother-in-law adores me (no, it’s true). Bottom line: he won.
Clever girl that I am I made a deal with him, that deal including that I’d get to do some grocery shopping and we would drive home after breakfast on Sunday. The thing is not so much that I wanted to shorten the time with his parents-in-law, but I had an urgent need to lengthen the time here in my own home. Because, let’s be honest, this is the place where I can seriously concentrate on my reading and where if I happen to get sleepy while spending half of the day in bed reading, I can just put the book aside and fall asleep. Heck, I don’t even need to put the book aside if I want to get real crazy. And, though theoretically I could do the same thing at my parents-in-law, it would feel kind of rude.
So we drove there and we spend half of Friday and the whole Saturday there. I met my sister-in-law for the first time and two of what would technically be my nieces, a thought that scares the hell out of me. Me? An aunt? Are you kidding me? And then on Sunday morning we packed our bags and headed home.
It was only then that we kids got really crazy and decided to stop at Heidelberg, which was on our way and supposedly a pretty town. It is indeed a pretty town. We walked around a bit and then had lunch and then we continued our way home and got here around 5 pm on Sunday, which left me with nearly one day and a half to do all the things I planned to do. Naturally it feels like I got nothing done.
Ever since I started my new job I have to ride the train about 40 minutes every day. First I take the train from Opladen to Solingen, which takes between six and ten minutes, depending on the train. At Solingen I change trains and get on the S7 which takes me right to the office building in a little bit more than 30 minutes.
I don’t mind commuting. In fact I found it more tedious to work in the same town I lived in, because it basically meant that I hardly ever left my town. And, although I don’t think this is such a bad town, it surely isn’t a very interesting one. Somehow I felt stuck, which is one of the reasons why I specifically wanted to find a job in a different and preferably bigger town. Cologne didn’t work out, but still, here I am, riding the train for about 80 minutes every day back and forth between Opladen and Düsseldorf.
One of the main reasons why I don’t mind commuting is because I get tons of reading done now. I just realized this when I updated my reading list and noticed that I have already read 21 books this year. I have no way to prove it, but I’m pretty sure that I can thank my train rides for that. I’m a quick reader, the first one to admit that sometimes I’m very impatient with long paragraphs and tend to skip any string of words that doesn’t seem very appealing to me. I’d like to believe that all those years of frantic reading taught me how to recognize a boring sentence by just looking at it. Maybe not. I don’t really care.
The point is, commuting is a blessing for someone like me, who loves to read but is easily distracted by shiny things like computer screens and DVD boxes when at home. It also helps that connections are good and I always get a seat. Otherwise I’d probably be ranting about commuting right now.
However, this doesn’t mean that there are no plans to move here. Because there are. But don’t get too excited, because it’s not going to happen that soon.
So, this is what happens when I buy a traveler’s guide long, loooong before we even will get to know when we are going on vacation. But I browsed through the whole thing this morning and I already have some kind of route planned out.
I want me some Shaker village, and some college towns, some national parks, lots and lots of cute and cozy book shops and an aquarium. I can’t possibly not have an aquarium.
The husband wants the submarine. So we’ll go see a submarine. I can fit it in there.
Ever since out first vacation I get overly excited when thinking about the next one. I will tell you more when I actually know more.
Would anybody object to just making Melinda the next American Idol and be done with it? I mean, I don’t really see why that shouldn’t work.
You should be aware though that we’re about two weeks behind on our Idol, so no spoiling here until we have caught up. At least Antonella is finally out. Phew. ‚Bout damn time.
