Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.0
Is there something wrong with me?
It's not even October, and I am already sleeping under double duvets. This morning, even Tim woke up cold and had to switch on the heating. Tonight I see English women walk around town in sleeveless dresses and flip flops. I am shopping for woolly sweaters. There is something wrong with this picture...
A new pet?
Morning conversation:
Tim - I woke up in the middle of the night by the weirdest noise. I was convinced there was a parrot in the bedroom!
Me - Oh?
Tim - Yeah, so I held my breath to listen for him, but couldn't hear anything strange. But then I started breathing again, and realised that it was just something in my nose that made the noise.
And he wonders why I complain about his snoring?
The black box
Posh, middle aged, female friend of ours:
- I have an emergency box in case there is a nuclear explosion.
- Oh, what's in it?
- Mineral water and foie gras.
Not that I knew that there is an immediate nuclear threat, but I guess anything goes in an emergency.
A runner
We are having friends of mine visiting this weekend, so there is an obvious need for cleaning the flat. I was sorting papers on the floor (horrible, horrible carpet!), when I saw something strange.
- Tiiiiim, is this a spider or a flower? [Please, God, let it be some funky kind of plant! I'll swear I'll go to church more often.]
- Eh, you want me to say flower, right?
- Yes!
- Eh, yeah, it's a, eh, flower.
- Nooo, it's a dead spider.
- Oh no, it's just the skin of a spider. But don't worry. It is from the running kind, so he won't be in here any more.
Wrong answer! And not comforting! Especially not since I store all my underwear in a bag under the bed...
Storage
After spending three days in bed with a super cold, Tim and I got serioudly bored of doing absolutely nothing in front of the telly. So we, or Tim rather, started a major project - doing something about 'the book situation'.
Both of us have many, many books, and together, well, it's a fairly impressive collection. (I, admittedly, owning more fictional literature, Tim having more on the ancient Greeks and Romans.) Problem, of course, being storage. (And let's not get into how to organize them - my books, his books, mutual books? Who uses one more? By theme? By size? By author?) We only have three bookcases. One being our own (which works partly as a glass cabinet for fancy chrystal glasses), the other two are the cheapest piece of crap imaginable - a basic wooden structure with no back and no sides. They are in fact so unstable that Tim has had to use his belt to tie them together, in order for them not to fall over. Additionally, we have a damp problem in that room, so nothing is allowed to touch the walls!
As we have started to acquire more and more - gifts, purchases, extra copies of our publications, the situation has become quite chaotic, to say the least. Come new solution! We have now moved a small half hight bookcase from the bedroom to a previously unused corner of the living room. (Where we had the Christmas tree last year, and which has until now been used to dump mostly crap in, since we shut off the door in that corner of the room.) It actually created quite a little nice reading corner (minus good reading lamp), and looks quite nice. We are still double stacking all of our books, but at least we're down to only one pile of the floor, rather than piles everywhere. The only problem now, is what to do with the clothes that used to be kept in that bookcase? We have basically moved the issue of storage from one type of object to another - we now store our clothes in piles on the bedroom floor. I fear we might not make it to an IKEA any time soon...
Who's who?
I know I have blogged about it once before, but at the moment I just cannot emphasize enough how much a love the fact that people share their itunes libraries freely with others. (Mine, of course, is strictly personal.) Today I spent the day listening to someone’s ‘Arabic groove’ (their words, not mine). Brilliant! Firstly, it is actually very groovy (can one still say that, without being stuck in the 60s?) and very easy to listen to. Secondly, there’s no way I can sing along (highly embarrassing if done aloud) and I can’t even sit and listen to the words, as they mean absolutely nothing to me. Perfect for working!
Normally you can group people’s libraries into one of three categories: the senior academic (listens to classical and occasionally some jazz, the most modern stuff they have is ABBA), the fresh BA student (listens mainly to pop/rock, usually pretty mainstream) and then the ‘alternative’ phd student (who is trying to be a bit more ‘deep’ and ‘difficult’ than the average person – he or she is, after all, doing some serious research – and thus won’t have anything from the hit lists in the library). Of course these can also be divided into subgroups, and a good bit of gender and queer theory could be applied to it, but I am trying to keep it simple here.
I was thus very surprised when I the other day came across someone’s library, which mostly consisted of Disney music! I looked around. Who is this person? I came up with four possible explanations: 1) a stressed parent (most likely the mother) is sharing a laptop with the kids, 2) someone is doing a major research project on the importance of music in Disney stories (I was, after all, sitting in the Rare books and music reading room), 3) someone in my alternative group has gone way too alternative, or 4) Disney music has suddenly become retro cool (I definitely wouldn’t know) and someone from the young student group is like the hippest person around. Go figure!
Daily wonderings
On the tube they just announced that: "Due to necessary engineering work, there are severe delays on the circle line". I am of course grateful for the information (although I, due to the afore mentioned more or less constant engineering work normally try and stay away from that line), but still cannot help but think that it must mean that there is also unnecessary work?
You know it is going to be a good day...
...when you arrive late to the BL, but manage to find the only empty locker. And then discover that someone has already put a coin in it. Yes, jackpot! (Should I be brave enough to buy a lottery ticket? Or maybe that is pushing your luck?!)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)