I don’t seem to be doing too well at this blogging lark recently Too much work, not enough free time to do anything interesting worth blogging about! This weekend Babel and I went to have lunch with my aunt and her family, which was rather pleasant, but poor Babel was feeling rather ill so after we left he had to go home to bed. That theoretically gave me this afternoon free to do some much-needed auditing, but I’m rebelling and can’t be bothered. I will do it tomorrow, but today I just feel a bit tired and grey and depressed.

I’ve been working in Banbury for the past week, one out of three which I am spending there in total. It would be a really easy place to get to if I drove, but not driving makes it more troublesome. This week I have been getting a lift off a colleague most days, but it was taking me over an hour to get to the place which she needed to pick me up from, so it wasn’t much of a treat. And often I actually prefer taking the train to getting lifts from people because I’m a bit antisocial, and anyway, the train is an opportunity to do more work. Let’s just say this job is very time-pressured (more…)

On Sunday I did something I should have done a long time ago and tidied my bedroom. I’ve never had a messy bedroom, even as a small child, but this year it kinda started to get out of control, chiefly as a result of the wondrous number of books which Babel bought me for Christmas and my birthday. I had originally started piling these up on the desk in my room in a neat sort of heap, but the pile grew and grew and spread onto my chair and the surrounding floor space too at such an alarming rate that the whole lot was soon in serious danger of collapsing on top of me in the middle of the night, rather like a coal tip. It took a good few hours of dusting and rearranging, but finally I found a solution which involved disposing of some pointless shoeboxes and putting the majority of the clutter on my desk under one of my chairs. This might not sound like much of an improvement but my room looks substantially better for it and the advantage is that I can now keep my computer and our congratulations cards on my desk rather than on the floor. The wireless still isn’t working properly, but it’s still nice to have a computer (more…)

I’m on audit in Wigan this week which is rather horrible. In fact there are an awful lot of work-related things to be depressed about right now, not least the severe hassle involved in trying to book off a single day as holiday, but nevertheless I am still incredibly happy about getting engaged The news is just about starting to sink in now and I’m getting a bit more used to wearing my ring as well. On Sunday I was absolutely paranoid that I was going to lose it somewhere, but the only time it’s fallen off over the last couple of days was when I was deliberately experimenting with shaking my hand as hard as possible to see at what point it might fall off I have told almost everyone I can think of to tell now, and everybody (who hasn’t met him!) thinks that I have a very romantic boyfriend (more…)

Yesterday was without doubt not only the best Valentine’s Day I have ever had, but simply one of the best days I have ever had, and this smiley face looks nowhere near happy enough to represent how I feel now It all got off to a rather exciting start when Babel arrived at my house with a beautiful bunch of flowers for me. That was certainly rather unexpected, as he isn’t exactly the romantic type, and if that had been my only present of the day I would have been more than content! I’ve just been downstairs admiring them and trying to take a decent photo, because the very tragic thing is that I’m going to Wigan tomorrow and much as I would like to take them with me, I don’t think I can By the time I come home they’ll almost certainly be dead, so I needed a pictures to commemorate them!

Babel and I headed off to our favourite Harvester to have a spot of lunch. It was actually rather busy, but the time we had to wait for a table was hardly enough time for me to open all my presents! Babel had not only got me a very pretty card, but a whole bag full of gifts. I started to feel a bit bad that I had been completely unable to think of anything to get for him, instead having to rely on the assistance of his Amazon wishlist I was too busy unwrapping to feel guilty for long though! I was rather perplexed when one of my first presents was a book by John Steinbeck, but it all became clear when I opened my next present and found a copy of the same book.. but in Czech Methinks it will be a very long time indeed before I’m anywhere near good enough to be able to read it, but it will certainly help to give me motivation and I thought it was a really excellent idea. Babel’s right that when I was learning German, one of the things which helped me most reading novels (more…)

Since it is now February and I am no longer in Wantage, I have been trying to make some progress with my New Year Resolutions. Some of these have been going better than others. Buying a laptop was achieved before the new year even began, because Babel did a rather wondrous thing and bought one for me I love my new present so much that I occasionally just want to stroke it – perhaps the reason that it is now covered in finger prints. My aim this week was to buy a duster to clean it with, but I have failed most spectacularly. Does anyone have any ideas where I could buy a nice sort of duster? I’ve looked in all the homeware departments I can think of, and no one seems to be selling them (more…)

1. I have already answered this meme once on Facebook, but in Esperanto. You never know who might be reading in English, and I thought my answers would be more interesting if I didn’t have to worry about not saying things I didn’t want colleagues/relatives/school friends to hear. I’m answering it now in English because I’m at work and bored, but the answers won’t be as exciting. And I’m not going to tag another 25 people!

2. I am very frequently at work and bored, though you may already know that. I hate my job, with a vengeance. My aim for this year was to find a better job, but the recruitment consultant rang me last week to apologise and say that there are no jobs

3. I spend a lot of my time in hotels. So far this year I’ve spent one week in Oswestry and three weeks in Wantage. Between now and May, I have one week in Wigan, three weeks in Banbury, three weeks in London and two weeks in Swindon. This makes me wonder whether it is even worth me moving in with Babel, because I won’t see him any more frequently than I do now (more…)

On Sunday my family and I had been planning to visit a local National Trust property to look at snowdrops. Unfortunately, the presence of real and actual snow meant it was too dangerous for us to drive all the way to Shropshire on country roads, and so we all stayed at home instead. Feeling at a bit of a loose end, I decided to start one of the books which my sister had bought for me for my birthday: ‘Unvollendete Geschichte’, by Volker Braun.

I chose this one, being honest, because it was the shortest. It’s a long time since I last read something in German – probably at least six months – and I feel like I’m getting a bit rusty. Plus I actually enjoyed the relative novelty of reading in English with my Akunin book (as opposed to months of stuggling through ‘La Lada Tambureto’ in Esperanto), so I felt a bit luke-warm about more foreign language reading. Happily, once I got into it however, German came flooding back to me and I started to enjoy it (more…)

Yesterday, in the absence of ideas of anything better to do, Tim and I went to the cinema again, this time to see the film Valkyrie. We have admittedly been to the cinema rather a lot recently, but it’s not expensive if you go before 6pm, and there’s not a lot else to do when it’s cold and dark outside. I did suggest we went bowling, but that’s a lot more expensive and Babel was scared he was going to lose

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the film, as I hadn’t actually heard anyone say it was any good. I heard a lot about it while they were filming it, mainly because of the controversy which was caused in Germany. There’s some sort of German law which says that Scientology is a dangerous cult, and because of that many people were very unhappy about the inclusion of Tom Cruise in the cast. There were refusals to let the crew film at certain locations within Berlin, and the family of Von Stauffenberg were said to be suspicious about the idea of a film in general. Since it’s been released, however, I’d scarcely heard anyone mention it on the tv, which perhaps isn’t a terribly good omen. (more…)

Whilst I have been busy not posting, Babel and I have managed to have a couple of very pleasant weekends. Two weeks ago we went into Birmingham city centre, and as retribution for the fact that I had made him watch The Reader some weeks previously, Babel subjected me to a whole two hours of The Wrestler. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it might have been – in fact I’d go so far as to say that I enjoyed it in parts, but there were bits of it which were far, far too brutal and violent for my liking, and I don’t think that I would want to watch it again! (more…)

Every Christmas for the past few years, I have been fortunate enough to receive a novel by the Russian author Boris Akunin as a present from my parents. If you have never heard of him, Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of a gentleman whose real name I should not like to hazard a guess at spelling, but who nevertheless writes detective stories so excellent that they have not only been an enormous hit in the Russian-speaking world, but have also been translated into a whole host of other languages, including English. From rather obscure beginnings, Akunin’s popularity now seems to have blossomed in the UK, and you should be able to find an entire row of his novels in any decent branch of Waterstones (more…)