Category Archives: Uni

Real Life begins again

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The semester has started yesterday. Not that it has much of an impact this time, since I finished all my classes and now have time until mid-January to decide on a topic for my thesis, the writing of which will take up the first half of 2006.

Therefore I have only signed up for one class at uni. I’ve also decided to use the time I have now to brush up my French, so this morning I went to Riehen (takes me about 50 minutes, one way) for a 15 weeks course at the community college, focussing mainly on conversation, which is my big trouble area. It’s hard for me to have to grope for words – but I’m just tired to be embarrassed of how bad my French is after all the years of classes in school…

Other than that, I’ve taken out my beloved sheepskin (birthday gift from several of my friends) and my comfy blanket and am spending some quality time with some favorite movies (finally got ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and ‘Romeo & Juliet’ on DVD when I was in Singapore, after years of only owning the videos) and lots (probably a bit too much *g*) of yummy Swiss chocolate. Aren’t you envious? 🙂

Not feeling the SAD yet, but I’ve started drinking my St. John’s Wort tea just in case – I want to be able to enjoy my ‘free’ months and get things done, both on- and offline.

So that was a full week

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Märrie came for a visit, for the first time in over a year. She came by car, so we made excursions every day, in Switzerland but also across the borders into Germany and France. But we’d have had a great time even staying home all the time, because we always have lots of fun when we’re together.

The trips we took:
– Monday: A Magritte exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler.
– Tuesday: Bern, the Swiss capital, where we saw the floods from up close. Not that we’d planned on being catastrophe tourists, but it was fascinating in a scary kind of way.
– Wednesday: Along the Rhine to the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz), seeing the Rhine falls, visiting the old monastery island of Reichenau and spending some time in Konstanz.
– Thursday: Schloss Hallwyl, a beautifully restored castle that’s been owned by von Hallwyl family since the Middle Ages and houses a great museum.
– Friday: The Ecomusée in the Alsace, the biggest open-air museum in Europe, with about 70 rebuilt houses from all over the region.
– Saturday: The Roman festival in nearby Roman town Augusta Raurica.

On Sunday Märrie was supposed to drive home – but on her way down the stairs to put her luggage into the car, she slipped and hurt her ankle so badly that my mom had to take her to the emergency room, because unfortunately I had to go to work. The poor thing won’t be able to drive for a while – so yesterday, I drove her home and then took the train back. It was exhausting, to say the least, as I’ve never in my life driven such a long stretch (about 470km), mostly over German highways.

Now I’m back home and really have to work on my paper. I’m leaving for Singapore and Japan in 10 days, after all. Not that it’s going well at the moment. But I have to. If only I wasn’t so scatterbrained still…

Btw, the Firefly podcast I mentioned in my last post read an email I wrote to them (using my online nickname ‘Shirasade’) in last week’s show. That pleased my geeky heart quite a bit! *g*

Discovering Podcasts

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Currently I’m procrastinating badly on my paper. Not because I don’t want to write it — it’s definitely the most interesting (and close-to-my-heart) topic — but because I’m overwhelmed at how much information I want to include, which doesn’t get along with the 25 page limit I have. I mean, I’m already over 1/4 done, although I’ve not even started the main chapters. That just kind of paralysis me, I’m afraid.

But while I’m letting myself be distracted, I discovered a new fun plaything – podcasts. I came across it because of my love for the short-lived sci-fi show Firefly (created by Buffy‘s Joss Whedon), which has now been turned into a movie called Serenity. Some fans created a podcast for it, called The Signal, and out of curiosity I downloaded it using iTunes and started listening to it while working on my paper.

In the meantime I have discovered that there are podcasts about all sorts of things. Basically it’s like radio shows — although I rarely listen to music podcasts (seeing that I already have several thousands mp3s on my external harddrive) — but you can simply download and listen to them at your own leisure, on your iPod (which is where the name comes from) or your computer. And by subscribing to a podcast you’ll automatically get the new episodes as they are published. Now I have to be careful not to get hooked on too many podcasts, because they just please my geeky little heart… *g*

Anyway, some links I’m using:
Resources
– iTunes Music Store: Podcast Directory
– PodcastPickle
– Podcast Alley

Podcasts
– The Signal (by Firefly fans, with interviews, etc.)
– Doctor Who: Podshock (by Dr. Who fans)
– Battlestar Galactica: DVD commentary (by Ron Moore, producer of BSG)
– Bored-Again Christian (Christian indie music)
– Lord of the Rings Radio (by LotR fans)

And just because I’m being so geeky, I feel I have to mention that we now have wireless internet access in our flat. That led to me sitting on the balcony working on my paper and looking up words in my favorite German-English dictionary. Geek heaven, indeed! 🙂

Big yawn

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All of a sudden I am dead tired. It’s not that I did a lot of exhausting stuff today – I worked a bit on my next paper and went to the hairdresser’s, but just now all I’m up for is lying on the couch, trying not to fall asleep… Might also be the weather, because it’s cool and grey and doesn’t really feel like summer.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about my next paper – it’ll be a kind of continuation of the Medias paper I wrote two years ago, about identity and the internet (in German), but it’ll focus on online communities. Again I’ll do a questionnaire to collect my own data as well as using already existing literature. The only thing that can go wrong is that the books that I already got from the library a while ago might be recalled before I had time to go through them. Hopefully that won’t happen, though. *crosses fingers*

Because this is a topic that I’m very interested in and that I chose myself, I really want to do a good job. So this will probably take quite a bit longer than the zombie paper – but that’s okay, since luckily I have almost two months until I leave for Japan in September.

Loveliness

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Just some lovely things, in list form because I feel like listing things… 🙂

– I finished my paper! It’s being proof-read by a native speaker now, so hopefully I can turn it in tomorrow. That means it took me three weeks from start to finish for the whole thing – a record!

– This morning I managed to secure the permits for the flea market on Saturday. It cost a bit more than I’d thought it would, but hopefully I can make up for it by selling books and some other random stuff I found in my room.

– I’m home alone at the moment, something I really enjoy. I made myself spaghetti bolognese for lunch (one of my favorite dishes ever – and so fast and easy) and am planning on eating the first local raspberries of the year for dessert.

– On viewing my Gilmore Girls DVDs for the umpteenth time, I have just reached my favorite episode again – Love and War and Snow. And for some reason watching this winter episode while it’s really nice weather outside suits me perfectly. *smile*

– Yesterday I drove our neighbours’ car to Bern, to visit my friend Cindy. The longest I’ve ever driven by myself, and it went quite well, despite spending about 50 minutes driving around Bern, trying to find someone to tell me how to get back on the right track. It was just a lovely day and I enjoyed myself a lot.

– Have I mentioned that raspberries make me happy?

Busy Sunday

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It’s my brother’s birthday today. I really can’t wrap my head around the fact that he’s 23 now… I think he’ll always be 16 to me! 🙂 Anyway, that’s why I’m not around much, because we’re having family time and we’ll probably spend the evening playing boardgames and watching movies.

I’ve also created a new category here in the blog, especially for uni-centered posts like this. Seeing that my thesis year is slowly but surely approaching, this seemed like a good idea.

And talking uni: I managed to finish going through the literature for my paper and to fine-tune my table of contents. Now I just have to get over my hesitation to actually start writing the actual paper – that always makes me nervous for some reason. This time even more so because I’m writing under time pressure, in English, for a native speaker (the prof is South African). But I know that once I get into the groove of things, everything should be fine…

In case you’re interested in what exactly I’m always whining about:

Working title: Dead Men Working: A historical-anthropological look at the modern zombie phenomenon in Africa.
Required length: 25 pages
Deadline: around July 15 (prof leaves July 19 and would like it before then)

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