The 2009 Puddly Awards, because it’s good every year and you should go and vote. Like now. I already did.

Visual Subtleties, because it’s by me. That’s more or less the only reason and I’m still working on it, so be patient. Besides, comments are in German, mostly because I felt like it.

That’s all. Now you can go back to whatever it was you were doing before.

In the first five days of the year I watched „Dogville“, which after initial doubt turned out to be much, much better than I actually expected, the 1959 movie version of „Die Buddenbrooks“, which also was really good and has Liselotte Pulver, who – I admit – I just love, love, love watching and patiently sat through six hours of Wagner opera.

All in all I think that I’ve done my share of high quality culture for this year and can happily watch guilty pleasure shows and read whatever pleases me for the rest of the year.

I guess, living in the city with the largest Japanese community in Germany, you shouldn’t be too surprised when some of the opera choir singers look very much like Hiro and Ando from Heroes.

But it is so damn confusing.

Unless I manage to read six books by the end of today I failed my yearly goal to read one book a week. On the other side, 46 is still a lot of books and when I scanned the list just a moment ago, I realized that I might not have read as much this year, but there were some pretty darn good books among those I’ve read and I won’t have any problems coming up with my yearly top ten this time.

And just a couple of minutes ago, right before I jumped out of bed to get dressed and do the last grocery shopping of the year I finished The End of Mr. Y which, unless I really missed something, you’ll be likely to find somewhere on the aforementioned top ten list.

This year was also the year when I started parallel reading. I still mostly do that when books differ in genre so much that I couldn’t ever confuse them, but I did it a lot more often than I used to.

For the complete top ten books I read in 2008 you’ll have at least to wait a couple of days more. And who knows, maybe I’ll make it to 47 books if I do nothing else but curl up in bed and read all day today. But to be honest, I highly doubt that, so The End of Mr. Y will probably be the last book I read this year and it’s a good book to end with, just as The Stolen Child was a good choice to start the year with.

The bad thing about not losing your glasses in a hotel in Estonia is that there’s no story to tell. Just because „and then I found my glasses when I unpacked the suitcase back home“ isn’t as good and slightly melancholy an ending as „and now my glasses are forever lost in a hotel in Estonia“.
The other bad thing is that now once again I’m not forced to go and get new glasses, one of the things I always want to do, but never do mostly because I know it’s going to cost a lot of money („I know it’s going to cost a lot of money“ doesn’t keep me from eating at top-notch restaurants though… my priorities need some serious straightening).

The good thing however is that I have my glasses. And God knows how I ended up cramming them into that suitcase. I guess I was just too tired to be allowed to pack a suitcase.

It’s cold, it’s windy and I already love it. Plus, they have a garlic restaurant. Awesome.

…this is coming from my latest toy. Guess what.

The day you really planned on learning for your certification is the day you start ironing shirts.

Last night I dreamed that I was flying to Chicago, because of some developer’s conference. I though that while I was in the area I could pay a visit to Srah. Never mind that Chicago isn’t exactly close to Ohio, because in my dream, it was…

However I then realized that the conference was actually in Memphis and I never cared to rent a car or something, so suddenly I had to deal with renting a car and driving to Memphis all in one day. I also had planned to do a little road trip while I was at it (mostly because the conference only was scheduled for one day and I was in the US for a whole week) and I tried to tell Srah’s dad that I planned to see Memphis and then that other city, but I couldn’t remember that other city’s name.

– The one with the arc!
– The arc? What arc?
– Well, I think they just call it The Arc?

Turns out that even with appropriate arc hand gestures I couldn’t quite get anyone to understand where I wanted to go.

I now know that I mean St. Louis and I just looked at a map and am a bit proud, because Dream-Me’s geography knowledge turns out to be good enough to plan a decent enough road-trip based on the all-in-all time I had.

So, hello Srah and say hi to your parents. And be prepared because the next time I’m flying to Chicago to attend a one-day conference in Memphis (i.e. never) I might just stop by because it’s kind-of-not-really-but-still-who-cares on the way.

Just in case you tried to reach this blog today. Yeah. Didn’t work. It was no biggie and had all to do with moving a few domains around, therefore having to set up the database and files with a different account and… right… yep… you really don’t want to know the details.

Luckily everything worked just fine, thanks to WordPress who didn’t once complain about anything and was very kind when I tried to run the latest version of WordPress with a database that wasn’t up to date at all. Sorry, WP and thanks for the upgrade.

But now it’s back and running on the latest WP as well, so two birds. One stone. Very happy me and now I’m going to bed to read.