blayka

Just finished reading "A short history of tractors in Ukrainian".

Loved it. Laughed a lot and cried a bit in the end. But in a good way.

Now I'm all out of books and leaving for our annual skiing trip tomorrow. Will have to see if there is anything left to read in the house or face a week of holidays bookless. Horror of horrors!

The skiing should be nice, though. We are going to the Dolomites in Italy and there is snow all over. White Christmas ahead!

x x x

I went to the town centre yesterday. Which is a miracle in itself.

I usually am too lazy don't have the time to do it. I found an hour or two yesterday afternoon. I wanted to check the Christmas decorations and the old holiday spirit. All I can say is: it was there and plenty of it!

Blaykatown has this tradition of putting up wooden stands next to the river, where you can get warm wine with cinnamon and other yummy alcoholic drinkies. Lots and lots of people stand around those stands and sample the merchandise long into the night. Yesterday was no exception.

The decorations are up, like every year. They look lovely, but they're probably no different than what you can find in any town in this time of year. I did, nevertheless, find something that moved me.

On the pictures below you can see an uninhabited house in the historic centre. During the rest of the year t is, literally, forgotten. But for the duration of this year's holidays, a local artist decorated it and lit the windows from the inside, put up some objects so that it looks like someone is home and added some nice music around it. The house just drives people to it. They stand around it and peek inside. The windows on the ground floor are purposely boarded-up. They have little holes through which you can see inside. I'm not telling you what you can see, because it's a secret. A lovely, lovely secret.

I do apologise for the quality of the pics - took them with my phone.

Yesterday was.... interesting.

It went by in a haze of excruciating headache, stomach on spin-cycle, several toilet-hugging episodes and the dizzyness of a world-record character.

I have managed to persuade my family that I have caught a virus. I was allowed to lounge about and suffer in peace and also reap lots and lots of sympathy.

Genious!

Today, the bells in my head are still loud and clear and everthing anyone says is repeated three times in a metallic sounding echo. And my ears hurt.

I am forever off gin.

Had our office Christmass party yesterday. Did not go overboard with the gin and tonics. At all. Had exactly between two and seventeen. Precisely, I am certain, I did count very carefully.

Today, the world spins. The close encounter with the toiled (head first) was had this morning. There might be more to come, it seems.

Please, talk gently.

Thank you.

First presents out of the way!

Dog - check
Son - almost check (had to order a Star Wars Imperial Destroyer from the great States of America - nowhere to be had around here! It is now safely packed in a UPS parcel, on its way across the ocean. Father Christmas is mighty powerful!!)
Husband - check

Mother - no idea
Father - no idea
Sister - no idea
Nephew - no idea
The in-laws - of course, even less idea.

I tell myself there is still time... There are still lots of lovely shops CRAMMED with people on the verge of a breakdown, a lot like myself. So, lots and lots of nice christmas spirit to be enjoyed during the next week.

I just hate the present-hunting period of the year.

Yes, I am just about ready to start my Christmas holiday now. Alas, two more weeks.

Only two weeks??!? I have not bought ANY presents yet.

Any spare gift ideas would be much appreciated!

We have had enough of the snow and poop on this blog, thank you very much. Time for a little rant and a bit of a sulk.

I was at a seminar last week and I also gave a lecture there. The "hip" feature that the organisers introduced was twittering about the seminar. Well, the nicely-behaved participants would not have anything to do with that. It was the IT punks that could not have enough of it.

Why am I mega-sulking? They were twittering me during my lecture. Most of the comments were ok, but some were just plain nasty. I made a little grammatical mistake and - of effing course - two of them had to make fun of it immediately.

Wait till I get my hands on those two... I will make them wish that all I did was twitter them.

But I suspect I should get used to that sort of thing. It is the age of transparency after all. No more gossiping behind other people's backs. Everything is nice and public now. I'm not sure I like that.

No more pretty whiteness all around.

No more happy times, waiting for Father Christmas to come and spread joy.

No more Snowmen on every other lawn.

Rain, dust, greyness all around.

And there's more. Our office has been having a bit of a smell problem as our sewers were not closed smell-tight. Now the workers are here to make it go away. But before they make it better, they will make it worse. They will open the sewer up completely.

Prepare to be smell-launched out of the building!

Such a pretty post gone so disgusting. I have got to reconsider my blogging practices...