Cross stitch woes and Friday letters

Hiiii!

Posting on my blog has been a bit sporadic recently. I do apologise! Cross stitching like mad was the main culprit. I really needed to get the finished article in the postbox before the first collection this morning to be in with even a slight chance of it being delivered on time (the wedding is tomorrow), but despite staying up until midnight last night, this is as far as I got:

Unfinished…

I will still complete it tonight and get it sent off first thing tomorrow morning, but the earliest it will arrive now is Monday. Most disappointing! I suppose more cross stitching and less going to the Irish Pub for the Champion’s League final would have helped…

Anyway… it is Friday again, and that means it’s time for some letters.

Snail Mail Terminal (Photo credit: Vicki & Chuck Rogers)

Dear Dublin. This time next Friday I will be boarding a flight to you! So exciting.

Dear weather Gods. I very much appreciate you sending the sun out to play yesterday for the fourth (and final) holiday of May, but was it really necessary to follow up be chucking buckets of rain at us today? Sitting at work with wet legs was not fun!

Dear waist measurement. Why aren’t you getting any smaller? I know I haven’t exercised quite as much as I was intending to, but it’s definitely an improvement on before!

Dear boyfriend. Thank you for taking pity on me on Monday (when I ended up working for an extra hour and  half after arriving home) and suggesting we order pizza so I wouldn’t have to cook. Love you.

Dear self. Pizza (and brownies and other treats) are probably the explanation for the waist measurement thing. Just saying….

OK, that’s all. I need to go and have a cup of tea then decide what on Earth I’m going to cook tonight. Happy weekend folks!

Friday letters

It’s the final day of the working week, which means it must be time for another exciting edition of Friday letters.

(Photo credit: Leo Reynolds)

Dear new necklace. I probably shouldn’t have bought you, but you were just too pretty to resist. I shall wear you lots to make sure I get my money’s worth!

Dear Amazon. Please stop tempting me with your oh-so-perfect recommendations. I cannot afford to buy all the things I want from you!

Dear quiz team. Next month, we shall be better. OK?

Dear boyfriend. Thank you for my anniversary flowers. Very pretty

Dear self. No, chocolate is not a healthy, balanced breakfast. Also, remember your exercise DVD? Do it!!

Dear bed. I’ve been neglecting you this week. Don’t worry, I intend to make up for it over the weekend!

Dear readers. Happy Friday! have a great weekend.

Still here

Well, it seems the world hasn’t ended, so it looks like I will have to turn 30 after all. Thanks a lot universe – I thought you were at least going to help me avoid that one!

After six years, I still find it difficult to speak German on the phone. Jan’s mum called last night, on the landline, so of course I answered. When his dad calls the conversation usually goes “Is Jan there?” “Yes, I’ll just get him for you”, but his mum tends to converse with me before I hand over the phone.

The Red Phone (Photo credit: Eric Kilby)

My German is good, but I tend to forget words occasionally and it’s so much easier to get my point across when I can use hand gestures as well.

After assuring me that “he felt fine, it was just his nose that was blocked” when I left for work yesterday, by the time I came home, Jan was in bed complaining of a sore ear and a headache. He still refused my offers of Lemsip and Ibuprofen though – apparantly you only need medicine if you actually plan on getting out of bed? (Is this a German thing, a man thing or is my boyfriend just weird?). I made us some nice tea containing lots of vegetables and some extra hot chilli flakes (I defy any blocked nose to withstand them!) then spent the evening doing cross stitch with a couple of glasses of wine (I bought myself a mini bottle). After about half an hour, Jan actually came out to join me and started reading out questions from the quiz book he had in his advent calendar today. If the world had ended it wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, although it would have been a shame not to actually finish the cross stitch – I still have lots to do.

Right now I’m waiting to find out whether we’re going to Jan’s dad’s place tomorrow or staying here for Christmas. If it’s the latter, I need to go and buy food for Christmas today. I’m planning on doing roast chicken for Christmas day if we’re here (cooking one turkey a year is more than enough for me!).

FINALLY Friday (time for some Friday letters!)

Letter to Santa (Photo: Great Beyond)

It’s Friday again, and this week I am unbelievably glad that it’s finally arrived. Work has been slow for past few days (which I actually find worse than when it’s stupidly busy and I have to do overtime – although the up side is that I got to leave at 3 p.m. today becasue there was just no point in me staying for another 2 hours) and it feels like everyone has just been waiting for the week to end. I am now on holiday for two whole weeks!! The thing I am looking forward to the most? Sleeping for more than 6 hours at a time! Anyway, here are my final Friday letters before Christmas.

Dear Thoughts Appear. You mentioning Gremlins on your blog made me realise just how long it is since I’ve seen that film. I didn’t have it in my collection, so naturally I had to order it, and it arrived the other day (in time for Christmas!). I’m sooo looking forward to watching it. Thank you for the inspiration!

Dear boyfriend. We’ve had our ups and downs, but overall I think this year’s been good. Thank you for making such an effort recently. I love you!!

Dear Christmas. I have finally written and posted all my cards, finished wrapping gifts and got all my parcels sent off (some of which probably won’t actually arrive on time…). I think I’m almost ready for you to come now.

Dear magic housework fairy. My flat currently looks like a bomb’s hit it, and I really want to get it cleaned up in time for Christmas. If you’re not too busy, a little help would be very much appreciated!

Dear friends. PLEASE could you stop having babies/getting married for a while? I now have three cross stitch samplers to do, for April, May and June and I have no idea how I’m going to manage!

Thank you (Photo credit: Avard Woolaver)

Dear readers. Thank you for all your lovely comments on the state of my relationship. All of your opinions and advice are very much appreciated. As is the fact that you read my drivel at all. You are amazing – every single one of you!

Dear rest of the year. Do you think you could maybe go a little slower than the months leading up to you have? I need some time to sleep, and I also need to work on various cross stitch samplers (at this point, I feel the need to reiterate that I have three events to stucth for!), spend time with my boyfriend and we are going to Luxembourg for New Year. Of course, if the world ends tonight this won’t be necessary

Dear world. If you’re actually going to end could you please get on with it. I’m sick of hearing about Mayan calendars now…

Dear boyfriend (again). Didn’t anyone ever tell you ebing ill on Christmas is not allowed?! You need to hurry up and recover from your cold. And don’t go giving it to me either – I don’t have time to be ill this close to Christmas!

That’s all from me. I now have to go back out in the pouring rain to purchase some vegetables for tonight’s tea. And after that I have a date with some dirty dishes. Housework fairy, I’m waiting!

The state of my relationship

Those of you who have been reading for a while are probably wondering what’s going on with my relationship since I made this decision earlier in the year. Or I could be flattering myself and you’re not actually interested . For those who don’t know what I’m talking about and don’t want to go and read my previous long (and – I see now  error-filled) post, in a nutshell I told my boyfriend of nearly 9 years that if he couldn’t decide what he wants from our relationship by the end of the year I would move out. To quote myself in the post I wrote at the time if, by that time, “he still doesn’t know what he wants, then I don’t think he ever will“.

Well, it turns out I am weak. Jan has been trying really hard recently to show that he does appreciate me and what we have. He has been calling to let me know when he’s on his way home, letting me know when he’s going to be late and I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve actually eaten together in the evenings!! If you’ve been reading for a while you will know actually getting to eat a meal with my boyfriend is a major deal!! He has also said he enjoys living with me and wants me to stay. He is still unable to tell me what he wants and if there is any chance of our relationship going anywhere. Despite this I’ve decided to stay – because I’m not ready to be single (once we break up, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll want to find someone new). Because I love him. Because we have argued so little over the past few months and life has just felt good. Because I am too weak to do what is best in the long run

…Hope… (Photo: ĐāżŦ {mostly absent})

knowing it’s going to hurt me right now. And because, deep down, I still have hope – that he will eventually want to settle down with me, that “eventually” will turn out to be sooner, that we can somehow find a way to compromise and make things work. Hope is  a bitch!

I am aware that, by making this decision, I have basically given him free rein too do what he likes. Obviously I don’t follow through on my consequences, so what reason does he have to believe me in future? I am also aware that I’ve basically forfeited my chances of ever getting married or having children. Please don’t rub that in – I’m having enough trouble coming to terms with it anyway! But even if I decided to leave, I’m not sure I would even want to be a mother any more. I’m 30 in less than a year and the last thing I ever wanted was to be an old mother. Having my first child when I’m already past 30 is just not for me. A second or third child after 30, okay. But the first? How old would I then be then by the time any more came along? And while it’s fine when they’re babies, the only reasons I was in any way able to get along with my parents as a teenager was because they were young enough that I felt they could understand (I wouldn’t have wanted to have kids as young as they did though – my mum was only just 20 when I was born!). 25 was the perfect age for the first child, I thought. Upon reaching 25 I realised there was no way it would be happening any time soon and changed to the very vague “before I turn 30″. Now that I’m coming up to 30, I’m becoming less and less certain that I am even cut out to be a mother. New borns terrify me (they look so fragile!) and if I never have any children I can’t mess them up for life, right? If I were to get pregnant by accident then that would be nice, but since that is highly unlikely I would rather be in a childless relationship with someone I love and genuinely enjoy being with than live alone with neither children nor a boyfriend.

As Tina Dico says, not much is so much more than nothing. And despite how this post sounds, I am happy right now! So even if failing to stick to my decision is weak and I may be making a rod for my own back in the long run, right now I choose being happy with my non-comittal boyfriend over being miserable and alone. I’ll have plenty of time to do that for the rest of my life.

Heart Candle (Photo credit: Bob.Fornal)

Friday letters

I spotted this over on Moose Noose and thought I would join in this week.

Dear senders of packages. PLEASE do not use Hermes! They don’t turn up when they say they’re going to, regularly fail to ring the doorbell when they do turn up and the opening hours of their so-called “packet shop” (in a dry cleaners) are even worse than the post office!

Dear Friday. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you! It’s been a looong week. But on the plus side, I have managed to amass some more overtime, which means a day off is definitely in my future.

Dear weather. I’m loving the fact that you’ve decided to warm up again. Now if you could manage to stay like that all weekend that would be amazing!

Dear boyfriend. Thank you sooo much for suggestiong we order pizza for tea rather than me cooking something. Junk food is exactly what I need after this week.

Dear Tina Dico. It’s been almost a year now since I read that you were coming back to Karlsruhe in 2012 and around 5 months since I bought our tickets. Tomorrow it’s time for the concert. I can’t wait! And I really hope you sing One, because I love that song.

That’s it from me. You can read more letters here:

Celebrate good times… or not

I returned home last night expecting to find my flat dark and empty, so I was slightly worried when I found my front door unlocked (you still can’t get in without a key, but still…) Fortunately nobody had broken in, but the boyfriend was here. He should have been at his choir practice and not been home til at least midnight  – no, they don’t practice for that long but always stick around and drink a bottle of wine thogether before going home. Instead he was lying in bed having come home at noon feeling sick. He didn’t go to work today either, and apparantly has barely left the bed all day. So instead of getting ready to go out and celebrate my success I’m cooking the food that I chose based on its suitability for putting in a stomach that’s only just settled and debating whether to work on my dissertation now or leave it til morning. I just hope Jan’s better by Monday… it’s his 30th birthday and I’m determined to take him out for a nice meal to celebrate. Send healing vibes this way everyone…

Apparantly it’s the end of the weekend…

I’m having a little trouble distinguishing between weekdays and weekends lately. When you’re home all day anyway the days tend to blend into each other, and when you have a boyfriend who goes into work on Saturdays anyway (although he did stay home for the holiday on Thursday) it gets really confusing. I knew today was Sunday though, because everything was closed.

So yesterday the boyfriend gave me 30 euros to buy a pair of shoes for Rome. I had to throw out my old flip-flops cos the straw bit at the bottom was coming unweaved and bits of it were stabbing the bottoms of my feet. Ouch! I also bought myself a new sun hat becuse I still had money left over and it was on sale for only €2.75. Bargain! Last night the two of us stayed at his place so we could stick some clothes in his washing machine this morning. Now everything I need for Rome is clean and by tomorrow it should be dry as well. Excellent.
On the way back to mine this evening we kept running into people from my ex student residence. First someone who used to live on 5th floor… he’s just started working and is now living close to where Jan lives. Next came a couple who used to live on my floor. They had their baby daughter with them. She’s almost seven months old now and getting so big… she’s even grown since I last saw her, in May. And she still has the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. Then, while we were talking to those two, another girl from my floor came along. She’s still living in the residence and wanted to know if we would be at Parkplatzfest, the big outdoor residence party at the end of this month. We will be back from Rome by then so I told her we probably would. And apparantly before we ran into anyone Jan saw someone from 6th floor sitting outside a Cafe. All those student residence people in one little street. Clearly there are just too many of us!

So, that was my weekend. Tell me about yours

Why I get on better with people I’ve never actually met

*Note* I am not writing this post because I want people to feel sorry for me. As with most things on this blog I am writing it for me. Because it’s something I’ve been thinking about and getting it down on paper (figuratively speaking) is the best way for me to a) make sense of it and b) get it out of my brain so I don’t have to lie awake all night wondering why I can’t just be normal. End of note. Now on to the blog post.

I don’t deal well with social situations. Never have actually. I’m stupidly shy and just not a people person. Plus I lack social skills. I have no idea what to say to people I either don’t know or only know slightly, so when I’m placed in a situation where I’m supposed to socialise with them I tend to go really, really quiet and wait for someone to start a conversatiton with me. This usually leads to people thinking I’m either antisocial or miserable… not the kind of person you really want to start a conversation with. So they don’t and I don’t and once again I go home having had a really boring night and feeling like a complete failure.

That’s one scenario. Then there are the times I try too hard. I talk too much, laugh too loudly and for too long and say inappropriate things. The problem is I don’t even realise I’m going to say something inappropriate until it’s already out of my mouth and people appear uncomfortable, embarassed or start looking at me like I’m some kind of alien. Funnily enough this doesn’t exactly endear people to me either. In fact, I think they probably prefer the me who doesn’t talk. After all, antisocial is better than embarassing and weird.

Another factor is that I have low emotional intelligence. That doesn’t mean I don’t have any emotions… of course I have emotions. I’m not a robot! Although sometimes I wish I was… then someone could just reprogram me and I wouldn’t be here now boring the internet with my problems. No, not having emotional intelligence has nothing to do with lacking emotions… it just means I don’t understand my emotions or have trouble dealing with them. It also means I have trouble recognising and understanding other people’s emotions… so I can upset/offend/annoy someone without even realising it. Or, more often, I will notice that something’s wrong but I have no idea why. In my mind whatever it is I said was perfectly normal and nothing to get upset about. I have to really think about what I’ve said before I can work out what was wrong with it… and even then I can’t always see why it was that bad. Add to that the fact that I practically can’t manage to say three sentences without adding a major dose of sarcasm and you’ll see why I have trouble making friends. And the reason I can get on with bloggy people and penpals? Because it’s so much easier for me to realise how things are going to come across when I see them written down.

As I’m sure you can guess, this lack of emotional intelligence also makes its contribution to the not-so-good side of my relationship. Obviously it’s not our only problem, and not everything that’s wrong is my fault, but it is a major factor, which is actually part of the reason I’m writing this post. You see, yesterday the boyfriend and I made a deal. He will tell me his problems, rather than bottling them up and pulling away from me, and I will try to be nicer.  So this blog is part of my attempt to figure out how to be nice, because honestly… I’m not sure I have it in me…

The perils of living alone

The observant among you may have noticed that it’s been a whole week since I last blogged. That’s because this is the first day since then that I’ve actually felt up to posting anything. You see, last Saturday, while tidying the flat, I gave myself concussion – which just goes to show housework is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. There I was sweeping up underneath the boiler, went to stand up and *BANG* went my head against the boiler. Which is made of metal, as boilers tend to be. It hurt… a lot. Six hours later I still had a headache. And three hours after that. In fact, I had a headache until Thursday when I finally, finally started feeling almost normal again. The NHS direct website told me if it was just a headache and no other symptoms I should be fine, but the first night I should have someone wake me up every 2 hours and ask me simple question, like my name or address. Yeah… easier said than done when you live alone and your boyfriend is in LA. So I set my phone to wake me up every two hours, just to see if I would wake up. Not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t mind, but you have to remember I wasn’t thinking straight…. Anywaaay, by Monday I still had a headache and Jan was home, so I got him to make me a doctor’s appointment for after work, which is where I was told I probably had mild concussion and prescribed some painkillers which tasted awful (apparantly they contain raspberry and cream flavouring… I will never look at a raspberry the same way again!), but they worked. For the most part anyway. Sitting in front of a computer all day trying to translate did nothing for my poor head (which is why I didn’t really feel up to blogging either) but as the boss and his wife were off last week I couldn’t really take time off as my colleague would have been alone. But never mind, I am better now and today Jan took me to a furniture shop and I finally bought lights for my ceilings. Can you believe the Germans actually take the lights away with them when they move out of a place? Up to now I’ve been surviving with lamps!

Anyway, I am off to spend some quality time with the boyfriend. I promise to come and catch up on all your blogs tomorrow though. Don’t worry, the flat is tidy at the moment so I won’t be giving myself concussion again any time soon…