Friday letters and links

Good morning! I’m working from home again this morning as I have an appointment with the gastroentologist at 12:30 so it wasn’t worth going in to the office. I’m getting a gastroscopy, which involves the doctor sticking a tube down my throat and having a look inside my stomach, so I was told not to eat at all today and I’ve now had my last drink as well – at least I was allowed to have some water this morning! Hopefully they’ll discover there’s something very simple wrong with me, give me some tablets and within a few days I’ll be eating normally again. Fingers crossed! Now lets have some letters.

Dear Deutsche Bahn. I hope Wednesday was your last strike for a while. If you mess up my trip to Paris at the end of the month I shall be very annoyed!

Dear pumpkin. I am really enjoying cooking with you! I just wish you weren’t so annoying to cut up.

Dear stomach problems. I hope you turn out to be nothing serious. Although if the doctor’s fail to find any explanation that would kind of suck.

Dear work. I am so lucky to have a flexible employer who allows me to work from home when trains aren’t running and leave early for appointments, and also to have a job I love I will forever be grateful to you for the past few weeks!

Dear future. Things are so up in the air at the moment, but I’m really hoping a decision will be made soon so I can start to plan!

Now here are some links to things I’ve come across on the Internet lately and want to share with everyone:

• This real-time map of births and deaths throughout the world is fascinating!
• Somebody used their dogs’s fur to make a mini-version of said pet. It’s actually kind of cute, but also kind of disturbing. Like a voodoo puppy or something.
• Speaking of pumpkins (well I was earlier), Kiki made pumpkin rolls and they look divine! Now to figure out how to do this without canned pumpkin…
• It’s nearly Christmas market time and I can’t wait to get my Glühwein on! Here’s a Telegraph article on the best Christmas markets in Europe for 2014.

That’s all for today. Have a great weekend everyone!

 

 

 

 

Friday letters (working from home)

Today is a special Friday because I’m working from home. We’re getting new windows put in at work, and that means I can’t be in my office because 1) It will be cold and 2) It will be loud. The good thing about working from home is I get to have a lie in but still start work at my normal time. Also, I can have as many cups of tea as I want! Actually, I can do that at work as well, but I only drink fruit tea there (which isn’t really tea at all!) because the milk we have is UHT milk and tea with that in tatses awful! Anyway, enough rambling… letters!

Photo: Wikipedia

Dear grandpa. I’m so glad to hear your operation went well! I hope things continue to progress positively and you can come home in time for the weekend.

Dear sister. Thank you for keeping me up to date on grandpa’s condition.

Dear boyfriend. I find it very unfair that you get to go to South America for two weeks while I’m stuck here in the cold! Enjoy your conference and (especially) the free week after it. And no getting ill!! There’s been more than enough of that this year!

Dear K (who might even actually read this!). Have fun in Scotland and enjoy Dr Who!

Dear self. I’ve said this before, but seriously… you need to stop eating so much! A whole (large!) bar of chocolate before dinner the other day was neither big nor clever…

Dear New Year. We have finally decided where we’re going for you and booked flights. Madeira it is. I can’t wait!

As always, I wish you all a happy Friday and a fabulous weekend!

An unexpected day at home

Hello! You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged for a few days (or not…). I was far too busy this weekend to get on the computer! Live music, watching England get absolutely stuffed at rugby in an utterly embarassing performance, cocktails, a full Irish breakfast at the pub for St. Patrick’s Day, watching Newcastle undeservedly lose at football, night out for St. Patrick’s Day…

Photo credit: Daniel*1977

This morning, I got up expecting life to return to normal after my unusually full weekend. Before leaving the house, I quickly checked the Internet to see whether my train was on time. “Warning,” said the Deutsche Bahn website. “Due to strikes, trains in Baden-Württemberg may be subject to delays or cancellations.” My train, it transpired, was delayed by 110 minutes (Deutsche Bahn don’t seem to believe in hours…). And the next train I could have taken was cancelled. The regional trains were apparantly running as normal though. So I sat back down for a bit before heading out to catch a regional train.

I arrived on the platform to find that the train was not already there. This is unusual – it leaves 10 minutes after my usual train but is normally already sitting there 5 or 10 minutes before mine even arrives. Today, there was no sign of it although the information board mentioned nothing about I delay. I waited, along with a number of other people, but the train never came. Then we noticed another train with the same destination sitting on a different platform. So off we went to platform 5. The train driver was standing looking out of the window, so we asked him whether his train would be going to where we wanted to be. “Yes, at some point,” he replied. It was 5 minutes to 8 at this point, and he informed us that his train was actually the 6:55 one but he hadn’t been given permission to leave yet, so he’d been sitting there for two hours waiting for something to happen. A few people got into the train anyway, but I chose to head home and spend theday working from there. Luckily I have the option to connect to work remotely!

I later read that the strikes were supposed to be from 6 a.m. til 8 a.m., so if I’d hung around I may still have made it into work at some point. But by that stage all the fast trains were already delayed by two hours or more and the regional train that I would have ended up taking is the slowest of them all, so it would have taken over an hour for me to reach work even once the driver was finally allowed to set off! Working from home definitely still sounds like the better option! Hopefully tomorrow I’ll actually be able to make it into the office…

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:

Why I could never go freelance

My replacement BahnCard arrived on Friday, so yesterday I was actually able to take the train to work as normal instead of working from home, as I had been for most of last week. I was actually quite pleased to get back – despite the advantages of working from my own home (one of them being the opportunity to sleep for a whole extra hour but still start working earlier than I usually would. Lie ins. Bliss!). Sitting at home, all alone, just isn’t the same as being surrounded by colleagues. Admittedly the person I share an ofice with is on holiday this week, but I still have people popping in to ask me for help with a particularly badly written English text, and of course there’s always the tea breaks. A tea break all alone in your own kitchen seems pretty pointless to be perfectly honest. And after spending all of Thursday and most of Friday at home, by the time I signed off from work’s system I was suffering from cabin fever! in fact, I phoned Jan and asked him if he would meet me for food somewhere because I just had to get out of our flat! If I ever did go freelance I would definitely have to rent an office somewhere that I could go to at the beginning of each day and escape from once work was done, otherwise I think I may just find myself going crazy!

At least it’s the weekend…

All week I’ve been wanting to write a nice, positive post to counteract the whines of the two previous ones, but then I came down with this horrible cold thing, which meant I left work early on Wednesday (to be fair I had nothing musch to do anyway) and actually ended up calling in sick yesterday and spending the day in bed. Unheard of for me! The last time I was off work sick was at my previous job, and then I was sent home because I was annoying everyone with my coughing! I stayed home again today as well. I was feeling somewhat better, but not enough to face the journey to work. Luckily we have the option to log on to the server remotely from home, so I sent an email saying I could work, but wasn’t feeling up to coming in. The offer was gratefully accepted… my colleague took yesterday off as well and called in sick again today. Since there are only two of us translating into English you can imagine the chaos that can cause both of us being ill can cause! Luckliy yesterday remained quiet, but the colleague who deals with order management was understandably relieved to have one of us at least able to do a little work from home today!

Jan has been wonderful through this! I was already feeling crappy on Tuesday (but still well enough to go to work) so he got out of bed while I was in the shower and made me an Erkältungstee! That’s tea that’s supposed to help with colds. (Cold tea would be the literal translation but that just sounds weird in English). Usually I have to wake him up to say goodbye when I leave, so him getting up at 6:30 a.m. just to make me a tea was quite frankly amazing! Even more so when he then did the same thing on Wednesday morning! Yes, I do realise how lucky I am (although reading back through my posts you’d probably be hard pushed to believe me). I seem to be on the road to recovery now. I feel less weak and my head’s stopped feeling like it’s been stuffed with cotton wool. Now if only my nose would stop alternating between running and being blocked and I could stop coughing for longer than 5 minutes at a time everything would be perfect! At least it’s the weekend. Two whole days to recover…
And now I’m off to make chilli con carne for tea. Hot food sounds like such a wonderful idea right now!

Furniture and things

First things first… some photographs for those who requested them (or actually just answered my question with a yes, but you know what I mean…).
We’ll start in the bedroom, just because those are the photos that appear first in the folder…
Photo one is the chest of drawers (well, duh! Talk about stating the obvious!). Currently looking very neat and tidy, but I’m sure it won’t be long before the same chaos that reigns on every other sufrace in the flat has made it on to there to. *sigh*. That cardboard box you see to the left of the drawers contains the bedside table. It was only put up yesterday and I was working on my dissertation all day so no photo yet I’m afraid.

Moving on, and the chest of drawers has been joined by a wardrobe. Just a small one for now – we only really needed somehwere to hang stuff up since the drawers will do just fine fo things that can be folded. Eventually we’ll get a bigger (and probably slightly more expensive) wardrobe for our room in the new flat, but that wasn’t the purpose of this weekend’s mission.

And now let’s take a trip to the livign room…
Here you see Detolf, the cabinet. I am so overjoyed to finally have some storage space! Those plates you see at the bottom had been living on on the floor gathering dust up to now. Finally, after a little more than a year, I’ve managed to find them a home…

And that brings us to my final photo.
It’s a lamp! Eventually it’s place will be next to the sofa – which Jan will be bring with him from his flat. I actually can’t wait to have a sofa to snuggle up on! For now, though, the lamp has to be content with standing to one side of my living room, looking slightly lonely and out of place.
And that, my friends, is that. Not bad for an afternoon’s shopping.

And in other news, we had an appointment to look at another flat today. It was at 9:15 this morning, so I arranged to work from home today instaed of taking a half day and not starting til around 12 pm (and before you ask yes I did actually do work!). The flat was nice but would need a fair amount doing to it – like a proper kitchen putting in for one! – which of course would be expensive. Once again it all comes down to the money factor! We’l discuss it tonight though and I’m hoping a decision will have been made by Thursday at the latest. Stay tuned!