It’s mid-July and I’m sitting at home wearing extra warm socks, T-shirt and a fleece jacket. Yes, and pants of course, the point is: It’s the middle of this freaking summer season and I’m freezing. I refuse to turn on the heating though. Thank god the forecast for the end of next week is slightly better, about 25 °C and no rain. I hope this doesn’t change until then, because I don’t want to spend 4 days in a rainy London. Although that would probably would be a typical London experience :)
The London trip wasn’t foremost on my mind for the last few weeks, but then I got my credit card bill for June with all the advance expenses for the London Pass etc and I was in travel mood again. I spent two hours last night to work on my detailed plan and I’m afraid it’s still too ambitious. I might just get too stressed after the first two days and spend the rest of the trip relaxing in one of the many parks and or café. Anyway I’ll probably need another week off work to recover from that trip…
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Besides planning the London trip I was busy with some other stuff as well this weekend. I finally completed the Energy 2 term paper and already mailed it off for grading. I wanted to finish this and the one for the Climate Change class before I leave for London and I’m happy I managed to achieve at least 50% of that goal. There is no way the other paper will be complete within the next four days as I haven’t even started writing it. I looked into some stuff and made some notes but besides that… nothing. Nichts. Niente. Ingenting…
I also was busy cleaning up some of my disk space on my computer, which always takes much more time as expected, doesn’t it? I have to admit that the time consuming task was to complete the Grey’s music collection (or at least find out which songs are still missing), when I found some of the songs in my music download folder. And to complete that collection I had to skim through some Grey’s episodes to find and listen to the songs on the show…
Talking about music: Last.fm has got a new layout. And I really really like it. Very neat and stylish.
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I spent the afternoon at the my parents’ home, playing darts with Bro2, Bro3 and two of his friends. I suck at darts, but I guess that’s just due to the lack of practice. I might have to and actually also want to compete in Bro2’s dart tournament on the August, 23rd, because some of the folks (friends, co-workers) who were there last year can’t make it this year. Every tournament needs a loser, right :-)? But I guess it’s really just a matter of practice and I could get more than enough practice at the parents home with various dartboards on the patio or the computer room. At last year’s tournament I was constantly asked if I play as well and when I said: “I don’t, because I’m not good at it” the reply always was: “But you’ve got a dartplayer’s paradise here, anyone could learn to play darts here!”. Well I guess that might be true… we’ll see where I’ll be in a couple of weeks
The fun with playing with group I played with today is that Bro2 came up with very special darts games of his own. Or they came up with it together, I don’t know. Anyone can play the classic 501 (which will be played during the tournament) or the known “Cricket”, but only we play “Like Yahtzee Darts” or another game which doesn’t even have a name but involves dices as well. Don’t ask… :-)
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AriaAdagio finished “Lightning Strikes Twice” and it was such a wonderful, amazing, incredibly perfect final chapter and definitely worth the wait. I’m seriously thinking about getting all the 56 chapters printed and put it into a folder or even have it bind into something book-like in a copyshop. Because I definitely want to read it again some time soon and it’s so much easier to do so on paper. And with it’s novel quality (not to mention the length of it) it is worth keeping it on the shelves.
The really weird thing was, that this story and AriaAdagio’s beautiful writing reminded me how wonderful and rewarding it can be to just immerse in a novel or any story told with words and not via moving pictures. So today after about two weeks of spending my nights watching DVDs I picked up a book again and decided to start reading Phillip Pulman’s “His Dark Materials” (“Goldener Kompass” in German) series, which I already bought months ago, when the movie (which I haven’t seen) hit the theatres. I really thought I was going to like it, because it has gotten so positive reviews and was such a success. But until now (page 70) there wasn’t anything that could make me interested in or even care about the characters, the storyline or the universe it all takes place in. I will take the book with me on the commute tomorrow and give it one last chance to evoke a different emotion than indifference. Why did I have to buy all the three books at once? I’ll probably just sell them at Ebay soon…
I probably will start re-reading Jonathan Stroud “Bartimäus” next. I read it about 18 months ago and enjoyed it immensely. As much as I love to read in English I guess it was the right decision to buy these ones in German, because fantasy-literature sometimes is not that easy to read in a foreign language. I bought the second part sometime last year but didn’t want to read it until I got the final part, because I tend to forget so much details and it’s just less fun if I have to agonize trying to remember what exactly happened was the story in the first part. So I decided to wait and read all three parts at once and I guess that’s really what I’m going to do starting tomorrow. Do I really want to give Lyra and Lord Asriel a second chance at all :-)?
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But now I will make another visit to Chicago Hope Hospital, because my DVD Player will let me make these visits again. McNeil started gambling again. Stupid, stupid man *sigh*
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I don’t want to go to work tomorrow :-( And that’s just because there is one tiny task waiting, which might be a little difficult to solve. The thing is, it won’t be solved even if I stay home so I have to face it sooner or later. Anyway, it sucks to got to work already knowing that there is trouble waiting for you…