Okay, so Zamenhof Day 2009, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the creator of Esperanto, was technically yesterday. But yesterday I was rather busy and didn’t have time to blog about it, so what I thought would be cool would be to blog about it today, now that all the excitement is over, with links to all various pieces of Esperanto publicity surrounding the event

Tim got things off to a good start at the JEBsite, with an excellent post about who Zamenhof was and why he created Esperanto. As mentioned in Tim’s post, the most exciting part of the day was that, following a letter campaign from Esperantists who probably didn’t really believe this would ever happen, Google used the Esperanto flag as their themed doodle on a significant number of their national sites. Sadly the UK page wasn’t one of those which sported it, but others, including the German, French and Chinese, proudly displayed it for 24 hours, and you can see a collage of the different pages here (more…)

I still feel absolutely exhausted today after a rather crazy weekend. It seemed like such a good idea to book it, back in May, when I hadn’t even started looking at houses never mind decided to buy one in Nuneaton, and when I was blissfully unaware that I would be spending the following week working away from home in Oswestry.

It seemed like less of a good idea at 3.45am on Saturday, when my alarm went off Well, strictly speaking it was Tim’s alarm, because in a moment of madness, Tim had volunteered to get up and drive me to Birmingham airport. I had no idea how long this would take from Nuneaton, and there’s always the potential for us to get lost when I’m in charge of the navigating, so in all honesty we could probably have had an extra half hour in bed and I would still have got to the airport for 5.30 as required.

I feel rather guilty for having abandoned Tim for the entire weekend in order to go on holiday without him… especially because it was the weekend before his birthday… and in particular because today is his birthday and I’m not at home because of work He claimed he didn’t mind though, and he would have been thoroughly miserable if I’d brought him with me, because I was going to visit the Christmas markets in Nuremberg, and Tim is not exactly a big Christmas market fan!

We flew from Birmingham to Munich with Lufthansa, which would have been quite a pleasant experience were it not for the fact that Lufthansa have switched from hard cheese to soft cheese in their regulation cheese sandwich, and soft cheese is a rather revolting thing to try and eat at 7am in the morning. Especially when it’s a Saturday morning, because the best sort of Saturdays are those which don’t start until midday (more…)