The holiday season is officially over

The last of the Quality Street have been eaten, making way for healthy eating to resume, I’ve just taken down my Christmas decorations and tomorrow I’m back at work. Now it’s time for my New Year’s resolutions to begin in earnest. My days of sleeping late, lounging around watching DVDs and not seeming to do much of anything while still surprisingly getting a few things done are over for another year. Sure, there will be weekends, but from now on they will be used to try and cram in everything that I didn’t have time for during the week.

 

In theory, if I work for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours, I still have a whole 8 hours of me time every single day. Once you take away the time spent getting ready for work, travelling there and back and the half an hour for my lunch break, the reality is a grand total of four hours. That’s four hours into which I have to cram shopping, doing my exercise DVD, cooking tea, eating tea, housework, blogging and reading other people’s blogs (admittedly I do some of that on my lunch break because I can at least get all the blogs I read to load on the work computer!) and anything else I want to do with my evenings.

 

All work and no play… (Photo credit: tomten)

 

Work-life balance? Does not exist, in my opinion!

 

 

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Back to reality with a bump

After 3 and a half days spent with my boyfriend, during which we drank a bottle of wine while reading out random facts to each other from books of useless information, purchased a new plant (and soil to repot one of the old ones), attended a mini music festival in celebration of a local music shop’s 30th anniversary and watched Chelsea beat Bayern on penalties in the Champions League (allowing me to laugh at Bayern), my four-day weekend is now over, Jan has gone away to a trade fair and the washing machine decided to leak all over the kitchen floor. I think it’s fairly safe to say reality has kicked back in. All I want to do now is sleeep – ready to be up for work at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Which is why I’m keeping this blog post short. Good night world! I’m off to try and sleep in my big empty double bed all by myself. I suppose it’s good practice for January, when it’s looking more and more likely that I will be alone…

Back to reality?

We are more than halfway through the fourth week of the new year and I still seem to be struggling to switch my brain back to reality mode. I have, of course, been going to work and have got every one of the translations that’s been planned in for me done (I have no choice -there are deadlines. And customers are generally not that understanding when it comes to extending them) but my heart is only half in it. My jobs are technically fine – spell checked, proofread and correctly translated. But I know I could put more effort into them, concentrate harder and get more done in less time, if only I could get myself motivated. Instead, half of my mind constantly seems to be somewhere else. I spend the mornings thinking about the book I was reading on the train, and would have liked to read more of before arriving at work (the train ride home seems sooo far away when I’m wondering what’s going to happen next!) or wondering whether a good friend has head her baby yet (she’s not actually due for another week and a half, but it could happen any time now). And by the time afternoon rolls around, I’m starting to get sleepy and find myself picturing my bed after every project I complete. 23 days after returning from my last holiday it seems I could use another one!

So this is the New Year…

We got back from Italy on Sunday and yesterday I was back at work. A little disconcerting going straight from being on holiday back to real life, but it was ok. And tomorrow I’m off again because it’s Three Wise King’s Day (or Epiphany as we English speakers tend to call it) which is a holiday here in Baden-Württemberg.

I actually have pretty high hopes for 2010. I wasn’t dreading going back to work yesterday (which, as some of you will know, is a definite improvement over this time last year) and I’m quietly optimistic that I’ll still have a job once my probation period is over – unless of course I’ve just jinxed myself by mentioning it on my blog. As for other aspects of my life… well, I have plans, but nothing really concrete to tell you yet so we’ll just have to wait and see. I have a notion that things may be looking up though.

So… resolutions… having utterly failed miserable on all of last year’s I’ve decided it to keep it simple this time. So my resolution for 2010 is just to be better. Less selfish, less self-critical, more emotionally intelligent, a better girlfriend… whatever. Just a better me in some way, however small. Surely even I can cope with something as general as that?

I also plan to complete my dissertation this year, but that’s not so much a resolution as something that has to be done whether I like it or not – and which I’ll probably end up doing all in one weekend right before the due date but let’s not talk about that for now…

A very happy New Year to all of you.

Back to reality with a bump

After 6 lovely days of wandering round Rome, having other people pay for stuff for me and not thinking about job hunting, the employment agency or my lack of income at all returning to the real world has been a bit of  a shock. Yesterday I kind of eased my way into it, spending most of the day catching up on people’s blogs,  sorting out photographs of Rome to put on Facebook and blogging about Roman sights. I did check the employment agency website for new vacancies (of which there weren’t any… well, there was one for a German-Russian translator but that’s no good to me really). But today it was back to job hunting in earnest. Back to checking out every vacancies website I’ve ever heard of. Back to Googling every combination of the words “translator” “native speaker” “jobs” “employment” and “Karlsruhe” I could possibly think of. And back to wondering how on Earth people cope with being stuck in the house all day long with nothing to do and no money.

The good news is I had a phone call this morning from a woman inviting me to an interview next Thursday. The interview is with a personnel recruitment service, so not actually for the job itself as such… I suppose an interview with the company that’s actually offering the position will come at some later stage, but it’s a start. Even if I don’t actually know for sure what exactly the job even is – all the advert told me is that I will be coming into contact with customers (gulp!) and need to speak English, enjoy languages and know how to use a PC. Oh, and I should bring with me “unlimited willingness to learn”. Umm, ok then…

Back to reality

I really need to stop eating the sweets I got for Christmas. I had so much chocolate yesterday I’m surprised I wasn’t sick. I also had fruit pastilles, crisps and a twix. I am officially a pig. Maybe I should have put something about getting fit on the list of resolutions, cos at this rate I’m serious danger of becoming as big as a beached whale. Hmmm.

Anyway, I go back to work tomorrow. This shouldn’t really come as a shock to me. It has been pretty much inevitable since the day I finished for Christmas. I think my subconcious must have been shielding me from it or something. Then last night the barrier broke and I lay awake for hours dreading it, despite the fact that I still have today to mentally prepare myself.
In case you hadn’t guessed by now I don’t actually want to go back. I’m afraid that I’m going to have forgotten how to do everything, that I’ll make the same mistakes as last year. I know I should think positive, and I have been trying but the little man inside me head keeps screaming things like “remember when they told you you have no social competence” and “what are you going to do when you run out of work then? You never did figure that one out, did you?”. Ugh, shut up little man! Also, my internship is due to end on 31st January. That’s 18 working days (I just counted on the calendar). Right now I’m still torn between praying they offer me a real job after that so that I know I have a job to go to and hoping they don’t want me to stay because I’m not sure I’d be able to cope with working there for another year or two.  Obviously if they do offer me a job I get to decide whether to take it or not, but I’m not sure I have much choice really. I have to work somewhere and it’s not like I’m drowning in job offers.

Oh well, there’s no point in worrying about it now. My first assessed piece for uni is due in soon and I haven’t even started it yet.
Oh yes, and, for the second day in a row, it’s snowing! It almost never snows in Karlsruhe! Must get out there later and take some photos…