Long time, no blog
Alas, my poor blog has been somewhat neglected of late! It’s not been intentional, I just seem to have been rather busy for the past few months, and have got out of the habit of updating it.
The last posts I wrote were about the IJK in Liberec, and an awful lot of things have happened since then. We had a truly hideous time at the UK in Bialystok which I still intend to blog about at some point in the future because I still feel bitter about wasting a week of my holiday (and a not inconsiderable amount of money) going somewhere so ugly and pointless. Fortunately the pain of the experience is burned onto my brain so deeply that I suspect that this time next year, I will still be able to blog about it as if it were yesterday!
When I got back from Bialystok I had a week of commuting to London, during which I accomplished very little except to catch a cold, and then I headed off on holiday again, this time to the little village of Sankt Johann in Tirol. SJIT, as I shall call it for the sake of brevity, is a very picturesque sort of place and indeed the nicest Austrian resort I have ever stayed in, far surpassing my previous experiences in Seefeld and Mayrhofen. It was a holiday not entirely without incident (we missed the last connecting bus of the day on a trip back from Salzburg and had to take a taxi for about 30 miles!), but pleasant nonetheless.
Once back in Birmingham things got really crazy, as Babel and I struggled to complete our house purchase. Things which I could never even have imagined might go wrong did go wrong, with the result that right up until the day before we got the keys, we weren’t entirely sure whether the transaction was going to go through or not. Ultimately it did, and just when Tim had got the keys in his hand and it seemed like there could be no more setbacks, I spent over an hour stuck on a train a few miles outside Nuneaton, due to a series of points and signal failures 
Owning a house seemed rather overwhelming at first and I couldn’t quite take it all in. We ended up moving in sooner than I anticipated, which felt strange at first but was ultimately probably a Good Thing. We had a few weekends of frantic trips to IKEA to get the place furnished, but we were fortunate that relatives donated or bought a multitude of useful items, and two months later there are really very few things which we are lacking. There was a surprisingly long wait for the sofas we had ordered to be delivered, but they arrived on Wednesday and were successfully installed in the living room.
You can see pictures of the house on my Facebook page, or on Tim’s website if you prefer 
What else have we been up to? Last weekend was spent in London because (for some reason!) we had volunteered to help man the EAB stall at the Language Show. It would be nice to say that this was an enjoyable experience but in all honesty it was anything but, and I’m heartily glad it’s over! It sounds silly to say this, but standing up all day is actually incredibly tiring. My shoes are normally quite comfortable shoes but by the end of each day, they’d somehow become quite the opposite. We had positive responses about Esperanto from a surprising number of people and no one quite as weird as the fascist I met last year.
The weekend before that we were at Esperanto House in Barlaston for the October Drondo (diskutrondo). That was a much more enjoyable weekend, not least because we spent it sitting down We’re already looking forward to going back to Barlaston for the next Drondo in January.
I had two weeks off work at the end of September which was very pleasant, although now I feel like I could do with another two weeks. I was able to buy some essential things like bedding for the house and a new suit for work, and had some much needed time to unpack all my hastily packed belongings, ruthlessly discarding things which I haven’t used in years.
Meanwhile work continues to be…. well, work. Some weeks haven’t been so bad, some weeks have been very bad indeed. Next week looks set to be truly appalling and I anticipate drinking quite a lot of wine in the evenings to get through it.
In terms of books, Babel and I have watched the entire collection of Sharpe DVDs since we moved in, and I have now started reading the novels too. They’re surprisingly exciting, although I don’t have Babel’s memory for names of characters and battles!
So far living together seems to be going remarkably smoothly, and we haven’t had any serious fallings out. Or at least if we have, I don’t remember them, which is probably a good sign
I shall try to update my blog more regularly from now on!
Tags: new house