Yes, this is another weather related entry — can’t help it, the weather is pretty much on everyone’s mind at the moment.

Working yesterday sucked, because the weather was gorgeous, absolutely fantastic — the kind of weather that makes a lot of people complain about heat and sweat, so altogether lovely. As long as one can enjoy it outside, that is. Working in it is horrible. But luckily it was still beautiful when I got off at 9pm, so I met up with my best friend Sibylle and we went to the Rhine, had a drink and talked.

It was still 25°C when I rode my bike home after 11pm.

Today started out great, too — I put on my favorite summer dress (which still fits me, after quite a number of years, yay! *g*) and settled down to research for my Salome paper (have I mentioned that I’ll probably write about the ‘femme fatale’ angle?). I wanted to be finished in the morning, so I could go to the open-air pool with a clean conscience.

Problem? At noon it started to rain. Or pour. And just maybe it’s thundering and not looking as if it’s going to stop any time soon. Great, just great!

Because what do you bet that it’ll be beautiful again tomorrow, when I’m stuck at uni? Yeah, thought so, too.

Unrelatedly: Been spending quite a bit of time trying to turn my palm into a reader. Found free programs for .prc and .pdf files — but unfortunately there’s nothing out there for Mac OSX that enables me to convert my own files into one of those formats (that is, I did find a site offering conversion into pdf, but Adobe’s palm reader doesn’t accept those files).

A pity — it would have been lovely to read on my palm during the train ride to Bonn on Thursday. Unfortunately the free reader Neil Gaiman offers on his website (which you should check out, btw!) is too big for my Zire palm. But maybe I’ll find a free e-book at MemoWare — I already d/led Wilde’s Salomé there and they seem to have tons of other stuff, too.

It’s amazing how much time I can waste playing around with techno gadgets like this — especially considering that I’m a complete amateur. As I said to my friend Cindy on Saturday, during our two hour phone call, all I’ll ever be is an amateur geek… *g*

Title thanks to Tori Amos (‘Carbon’), one of my favorite singers.

So it’s Saturday, the long weekend more than half over — and after doing virtually nothing yesterday (except some shopping, playing online and trying to find an alternative to the non-existant MakeDocDD for Mac OSX for my palm), I’ve been a bit more prolific today so far.

Mainly I read Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in the French original — thanks to the wonders of the net without having to pay a cent. Why I did that? Because while on the phone with my friend Sandra (who’s now in Turkey, the lucky girl!) yesterday I decided more or less randomly that if I write a paper for the Salome seminary in German Lit this semester it’s going to be about Wilde’s play. Simply because I adore Wilde and the other authors we’re covering aren’t half as interesting.

I really don’t want to write a paper at all — I have enough to do with preparing my field trip exercise to NZ in July, without fighting my way through a dull paper for a difficult teacher in a subject I could very well live without. But I want to finish my lic (equivalent to MA) in ten semesters, and that means at least one, if not two, papers a semester, in order to have time to write my Master thesis and prepare for the final exams. I don’t know if I’ll make it — most people take about 12 semesters, if not longer — but I want to try. And that means Salome.

My goal is to have at least a foggy idea what to write about next Wednesday, when the next class is. Wish me luck, I have no clue what acceptable subjects might be for the teacher…

It’s a bit strange that for me holidays and weekends often don’t mean r&r, but work. Of course that’s what makes my job ideal for a full-time student – but still, I can’t help but whine and curse when I have to go to work. Like now – it’s Ascension Day, and I’d love to laze about or meet up with friends, specially since the weather is better than yesterday. But no – I have to leave soon and will be at work until 9pm. Day over.

Luckily I can take my laptop with me and, although I don’t have internet access, I can at least write, read, listen to music and play around when things are slow. And they often are – not a lot to do at the reception of an old people’s home, it’s not exactly a hotbed of action. 🙂

And with that I have to get ready.

I haven’t done anything today. I only left the house to get some chocolate and chips, which I then proceeded to eat in front of the TV, while reading National Geographic. Only thing you could call ‘useful’ I did today was fold the laundry and set the table. Yes, seriously.

There are three reasons for that: first of all, I have the time today, nothing on my agenda at all; second of all, the weather was still not very appealing (see yesterday); and third of all, it’s the first day of “that” time of the month. So yeah, lazing about all day felt just about perfect today…

My mom came home from a conference in Croatia last night. She’s with the Swiss Baptist federation and it was a week long women’s conference somewhere on the Adriatic coast. Funny thing is that my dad left for another conference (something theological in Germany) on Monday, so they missed each other.

Mami brought me a pretty turqoise heart from Israel – one of the Palestinian attenders had given it to her. I love it – can’t wait to wear it, it’s light and summery and tells stories of the sea to me…

Why are my parents going to Baptist/theological conferences you might ask. Well, my dad’s a retired Baptist minister, with ‘Baptist’ not necessarily meaning the same thing as in the Southern states of the US, and my mom has become very active in women’s work and the Swiss Baptist council in the last few years.

My parents are pretty liberal and open-minded, specially for people their age (they met when my mom was 40 and my dad 44, so you do the math), and their religious efforts have always felt like something strong, loving and good, not restrictive at all. I feel lucky to have grown up in such an environment and it’s definitely had a big impact on me.

But I’m not going into my upbringing and my religious beliefs right now – too lazy. 🙂

The last couple of days the weather has changed from summery sun back to grey and drizzly and generally November. It makes me notice how much weather affects me, my mood and my general state of being…

I’m at home right now, although I’m supposed to be in my webprogramming class – but looking out I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the house and get on my bike. Everything is so bland and dreary – and while I’m basically in a good mood, I’m feeling strangely lethargic.

All I want to do is curl up in front of the TV and eat chocolate (or whatever junk food is available). The sun hasn’t appeared for days, and that simply feels wrong, as if all my energy is sucked out of me. Luckily this week is easy, so I can pretty much indulge myself.

And inside it’s quite cozy, with warm yellow lights (at five in the afternoon) and hot tea…

The presentation was a nightmare. Or no, not the presentation, but the setting up – because it turns out the beamer doesn’t like my I-book, so we had to find a way to turn my stuff into a powerpoint presentation, burn it unto CD and then use someone else’s laptop… Took me and a friendly woman almost an hour!

Sometimes having a Mac sucks – but I wouldn’t want to miss my cute white tiny little laptop (sometimes also known as Dom-puter, in honor of my favorite hobbit from the LOTR movies), specially not now that I’ve upped the RAM and switched to OSX and everything is running smoothly. Well, except for compatibility with beamers, apparently. But now it’s weekend – not that it feels like it, what with having to work tomorrow morning and Sunday afternoon.

Still – weekend! Presentation over! I managed to make the archives links appear again! And beautiful weather to top it off… Also, there’s the dance tomorrow night, with dressing up and ballroom dancing (been taking classes) – that’ll be fun, I’m sure. Oh, reminds me, have to call my dance partner.

Been joining some blog related webrings and the Pepys Project, also signed up at blogrolling, because that’s much easier than adding every single link by hand. Now, if I find an interesting journal, all I have to do is click a link in my toolbar and it’ll appear in the ‘other people’ section – cool, huh?

Not site related – picked up my ‘Internet and Identity’ paper this morning. The teacher liked it – a good grade, yay! Not that I actually need grades (it’s all pass or fail in my subjects), but still, it’s nice. I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t allowe to write it in English, since most people who filled out my questionnaire won’t be able to read it now. I’ll put it up one of these days, just in case someone who speaks German is interested…

I also picked up a book about structures of everyday life for my field trip – unfortunately the first volume had been stolen, so I had to order it from Berne. Back at home the woman from the travel agency called – Hawaii is a no go if I don’t want to pay quite a bit more, which is a pity. But at least I’m on a cheaper flight now – with Emirates, which is supposed to be a pretty posh airline. I’ll have to spend eight hours at night in Dubai, but supposedly the airport is pretty good for shopping, or I might check into a hotel, if it’s not too expensive.

We’ll see – in any case I’m pretty excited about my four weeks of ‘field trip exercise’ in New Plymouth and my four weeks of traveling in Australia! And now I really need to get working on my presentation for tomorrow – been happily procrastinating the last couple of days, but now I don’t have choice, I have to tackle that strange presentation program that comes with AppleWorks 6… Wish me luck! *g*

Pretty frustrated with the Swiss right now. We had a whole lot of voting going on this weekend here in Switzerland, on several pretty important issues – and basically, everything was denied. Most annoying (and impossible to understand from where I come from) were the ‘no’s to the two anti-nuclear energy initiatives. We had this great chance to get out of the whole dirty business and it was totally missed… At least I can say that I voted for what I think is right. Unfortunately about two thirds of the people didn’t agree with me. Really, having a say in things has BIG drawbacks, namely that you can’t go blaming politicians. It’s all the people’s responsibility. Sometimes it would be much less frustrating to live in a ‘normal’ democratic country. *sigh* In other news – I might get hosted soon, yay! Already started making more pages for the new domain… 🙂