Friday letters

Good morning! I am sooo pleased it’s nearly the weekend. This week has gone both really fast and really slow… I was surprised when it was Wednesday already, but then Wednesday and Thursday felt like they lasted at least 2 days each! Jan has choir stuff tonight and tomorrow, so I plan to use the time to relax and sleeeeeep! But right now I shall give you my Friday letters.

Dear Britain. I still can’t believe you actually went through with the “Brexit” thing. Even though we have two years, I’m already in mourning for my freedom of movement in Europe and a home country that didn’t hate foreigners. R.I.P GREAT Britain… there’s nothing “great” about isolationism and xenophobia 😦

Dear hair. I will never understand how you can be fine with a shampoo for weeks and then suddenly decide to become immune to it or something and feel sticky/greasy while I am washing you. I can’t keep switching shampoos halfway through a bottle so please sort yourself out!

Dear self. If you stay up two hours past the time you were planning to go to sleep because you can’t put a book down  you then forfeit your right to complain you’re tired the next day. You can be well rested or well read, not both!

Dear trees. You are looking very pretty right now all dressed in your spring colours. (Well, most of you… some are still looking a bit bare!).

Dear sparrows. You are cute and always a welcome visitor to the balcony but how can something so small be so loud?! I would very much appreciate it if you wouldn’t sit out the bedroom side of the building chirping on and on and on for half an hour at half five in the morning!

I can’t think of anything else. have a great Friday and an even better weekend everyone!

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Friday letters

Hello everyone! This week has confused me again. I had to go into work on Tuesday and I spent half the day convinced it was Friday (not as weird as it sounds – I alternate between going on a Tuesday and a Friday, and Monday was incredibly busy this week!). Today really is Friday though, and that means time for letters!

Dear birds. We don’t really need to feed you as much now it’s getting warmer but if we keep the lard balls until next winter they will only go mouldy so enjoy!

Dear tree by the balcony. I see your little buds! Soon you will have leaves again 🙂

Dear spring flowers. You are so pretty! Hoorah for you 🙂

Dear online sellers. How is it possible that two items coming from the UK can both be marked “sent” on the same day but one arrives within days and the other takes 2 weeks. Me thinks one  of you is telling porkies about when the “sending” actually happened…

Dear St. Patrick’s Day. Apparently you are today? I had entirely forgotten about you this year!

Dear cheese. You are so tasty, but so many calories! I couldn’t believe how much of my daily allowance a sandwich with you took up the other day!

Dear scales. I have been really good recently and finally you have decided to agree with me. 1kg down this week (probably a lot of that is water weight, but whatever. At least the number is going down!)

Okay, that’s all for today. Must eat lunch (leftovers from last night) and get back to work. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

Thank god for this beautiful view

As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to work from home yesterday to give my colleagues a break from my coughing and myself a chance to recover.

At work, I regularly share a room with one colleague (there is also a spare computer in our room, which is occasionally used by interns and the like, but usually there are two of us). My colleague has the window seat, while I sit by the door. Occasionally I will look away from whatever translation I’m working on to try to give my eyes a break from the computer screen. Naturally, my gaze tends to be drawn towards the window on these occasions but, being so far away, I can’t really see much – just the top of the building next door. Not that I would anything more interesting if my desk was closer to the window. Our office looks out on a concrete courtyard which is usually full of cars. And because our room is almost the last one in our corridor, we tend not to get much sun in either. In fact, at this time of year we need the light on pretty much all day. So, while working from home, it was quite nice to have something else to look at than the various postcards I’ve stuck above my desk at work. Here is what I currently see outside the window when I look over to it from the computer desk in our spare room:

At that point in time, the sky was completely white with clouds, although there had been some blue sky early in the day. But despite the clouds, there is some sun coming from a place I can’t see, causing the trees to light up in all their autumn glory. The desk in our spare room is also at the opposite side of the room from the window, but the trees are tall enough to be seen from over there. And actually, if I was to go over to the window, the view would consist of a road and tram tracks (plus some grass a little further away), so it may, in fact, be a good thing that the desk is so far away from the window. This way, I only get the nice view (plus, if I am working from home, I’m less likely to be distracted by people watching opportunities. Unless someone starts walking along the roof of the building opposite there aren’t really any people to watch!). Despite the fact that my cough was annoying me a lot, I actually managed to gain some pleasure from gazing out at the pretty coloured trees (during my lunch break, obviously. I did get some work done as well 😉 ).

Have I mentioned recently that I love my flat? 🙂

By the way, the title of this blog is a line from possibly my favourite Tina Dico song, A Room With A View. Here’s the YouTube link for you:

Friday letters

Yes, it’s that time of the week again…
When I wrote my first Friday Letters post, I honestly thought it was going to be a one off. But I actually find it a good way to get at least one post in a week without having to put too much thought into it (I may only write my blog for me, but I still hate to neglect it!). And it means I have a sort of record of what I’ve been up to each week. Here are my Friday letters for this week.

Dear cough. I appreciate you allowing my to sleep for a whole five hours in a row last night, but it would be great if, tonight, you could let me fall asleep faster. A whole hour of having to cough every time I was close to drifting off was not fun!

Dear quiz team (who will not actually read this, because they have no idea this blog even exists). I almost didn’t attend on Tuesday thanks to my cold, but I’m glad I did in the end. First place! We rock 🙂

Dear whoever invented remote access and stuff like that. It’s thanks to you that I was able to stay at home today and not annoy all my colleagues by constantly coughing at them, yet was still able to do work (a bonus seeing as a) I didn’t feel ill enough to stay in bed and b) lying down actually made the coughing worse! Being able to work saved me from being bored rigid after the first few hours of being home alone). I am also very grateful to my employer for allowing us to actually use such technology. I know plenty of people who couldn’t work from home simply because they would have no way of accessing their company’s system from there!

Dear Germany. Why do you not sell Lemsip? I only have three sachets left and my next trip home won’t be til March! If anyone in Germany has managed to find a Lemsip/Beecham’s powder equivalent please tell me what it’s called! And all those hot lemon etc. powders from DM and the like don’t count! While they do temporarily sooth my throat, they contain nothing even vaguely medicinal. Is a hot drink containing paracetamol and decongestant really too much to ask, Germany?

Dear trees. You looked so pretty today with the sun shining on. Do you think you could stay like that for another week or two, at least until the Christmas markets arrive to bring some colour into the winter. And while I’m at it, perhaps you could also show your face a little more often, Mr Sun? All the rain this week really hasn’t done anything for my mood (or my cold for that matter!).

OK, that’s it. Sorry most of these are about illness, but coughing, sneezing and copious amounts of tea/hot drinks is pretty much what my entire week has been about…

For more Friday letters (hopefully slightly more cheerful ones than mine!) check out:

The dangers of Autumn

Until today I hadn’t realised how fast Autumn is progressing. I had noticed that the leaves on the trees outside my building have changed colour but a lot of them are still green and most of them are still on the trees, so it came as a bit of a shock to me this morning to find one of the paths I walk along to get to work absolutely covered in leaves. I swear they were all still on the trees on Friday! It looked very pretty, all red and yellow and orange, with the occasional crispy brown leaf thrown in for good measure. One of the things I really love about Autumn is the colours – especially when it’s a nice day and the sun shines off them making them glow. But pretty or not, those red and yellow and orange leaves are bloody slippy! I managed to get to the end of the leaf covered path without losing my footing, but later I wasn’t so lucky. Crossing the (luckily not very busy) road outside a school my boot landed on a stray leaf causing me to go skidding across the zebra crossing, almost crashing into a small girl. Somehow I managed to stay on my feet and walk the rest of the way across the road in a semi-dignified way (almost falling in front of a bunch of school kids is sooo embarrassing!). I must have done something to my ankle in the process though cos now it bloody hurts.

Beware of Autumn leaves people – they may look pretty but really they’re just danger in disguise!

Little Bev in big woods

I’m so tired I can barely even summon up the energy to blog. The only reason I am blogging is because I’m hoping it will stop me from falling asleep. I need to stay awake because my dad is supposed to be ringing me this evening. I hope he hurries up. I need to make myself some food, but can’t because it’s impossible to hear my phone ringing from the kitchen, seeing as it’s at the other side of the building through two thick doors.

I went for a walk this afternoon. I’d just finished a particularly difficult translation so the bosses wife suggested I go and get some air for a bit, so I walked down to the next tram stop along from the one I get off at in the mornings.
The office I work in is technically in Ettlingen, but only just. You only have to take about eight steps before you come to a sign informing you that you’re now in Waldbronn. But even for those who don’t know how close we are to not actually being in Ettlingen it’s pretty obvious that we’re not exactly in town either. The office is on a kind of industrial estate, but it’s not an industrial estate in the sense that we know them from England. Actually, here they call them industrial parks, and this particular one is surrounded by greenery. Seriously there are trees everywhere. And the buildings are all set down in a little dip, below the main road and the tram tracks, and waaay below the trees. As I was walking along I glanced up at the trees on the opposite side of the road. I was down in the dip and the trees were way up on a hill. Suddenly I had a sensation of being very, very small. It’s amazing how insignificant nature can make you feel.
No wonder so many humans seem to spend half their time thinking of new ways to destroy it…