The lyf so short

The old furnace is now gone. Upstairs bathroom (where it used to be) looks horrible because our asstard predecessors naturally didn't bother to renovate parts of the house that are hidden by furnace anyway, so the walls there are paper-thin, covered liberally with old wallpaper and fugly early-19th-century tiles and all that. Oh well. Bathroom is due to be renovated at some point next year or so anyway. Until then I suppose we'll just have to put styrofoam or some such against the outside wall.

More importantly, new furnace is up and running!

So that's good.

Not so good is that they'll have to continue working on the connections between our part and the tenants' part and whatnot, so I have to stay at home again. I'm being paid for being there, so I won't be paid if I'm not there. (Kinda makes sense, no?) Yes, I know it's "only" € 80 before taxes, but still. Gnah. If nothing else, I'm kind of feeling bad about not going to work for a whole week when I only meant to take a day off on Monday.

On the other hand, work is boring and being at home will enable me to do Christmas preparations and now I have a good excuse to miss work, so there's that.

Focus on the positive.

On Tuesday I actually managed to get into Prof N. (this is beginning to be confusing, isn't it?)'s office hour. Even better, she agreed that she'd examine me. Better yet: She'll even examine me about Medieval Literature, which is not among her foci (her foci start at Renaissance Theater), so I'll mostly just have to do a lot of re-reading and not find my way into some topic I never attended seminars to, like 20th century literature (well, there was that one "Journey and Identity" reading course, but that's no seminar as such) or some such. Will probably have to find out what kind of secondary sources she's into, but that's ok. The alternative - apparently the standard approach for those who took their classes with Colin who isn't licensed to examine in Cologne - would have been asking Prof A., and after a friend is currently making very very bad experiences as pertains to the reliability* of Prof A., I'd really rather not write my essay for him.

So now I just have to get a signature from Prof B. of Cultural Anthropology and I'll actually be set to register for the exams. (They want a CV "that particularly clarifies my educational career". They already have a curriculum of my educational career up to my matriculation because it was necessary for my matriculation - and everything that came after that is in their bloody records. Why do they need a separate CV for stuff they already have the documentation for? This is probably one of those rules that were made back in the 1850s and never revised because datt hannewer immer esuh jemaht ("It's always been done like that"). Absurd.) Which is not good because I am terrified, but it is good because I'm in my 15th semester and this is getting ridiculous. >_>

Today I did my presentation on my thesis topic and concept and it went pretty well on the whole. Prof K. interrupted for questions a few times, but there were only two questions I couldn't answer, and one was because I didn't know the necessary mathematical terms in English. Sue me. I've never had to einen Mittelwert ermitteln in English before, and for some weird reason they never taught us mathematical terms in high school. :p For another I just didn't understand the question and thus gave the answer to the question I'd understood, not the question he'd asked. And he noted that I hadn't formulated my hypothesis clearly enough. Since I am officially not allowed to do too much work on the thesis before I have officially registered and received the official topic, I think it's quite all right when it's officially visible that I am still in the preparation phase. So that's ok.
I'll need some snaggy tag line for magistra thesis talk here on LJ though.

I had a great! brilliant! fantastic! idea concerning small but impressive presents for all those relatives that "don't want a gift for Christmas" but are deadly offended when they don't get one. CHOCOLATE BENTÔ. You know you want it. All those chocolates I made last week and this must be useful for something after all. I mean, aside from eating. There's only so much concentrated chocolate even I can stomach...
As I seem to be grounded tomorrow, it's probably safe to assume that there will be picspam.

And that's five things again!

- - -
*I've been reading a lot of Early Modern English stuff this week; does it show?

I’m jumping on the bandwagon of “5 things that made me happy today this week”. Because even though that means leaving out “10 things that annoyed me/ made me unhappy today/this week”, it’s still keeping track of things. And focussing on the positive, what’s more! Since memory tends to be selective and only keeps a vague sense of “not good” but a detailed sense of “awesome”, I suppose I’m just cutting out the middle man anyway.

So!

1. I got an incredibly kind offer of help that made me (and Jörg, too) feel all mushy and gooey inside. You know who you guys are. I’ll reply to the e-mail as soon as I can get any planning-like things done, I promise.

2. A new (well, old) Anglo-Saxon hoard has been discovered in Staffordshire and it is even bigger than Sutton Hoo and I can’t stop looking at the pretty and squeeing and adoring those crazy Anglo-Saxons and all the time they must have put into crafting these artefacts and look how beautiful they are, more than 1300 freaking years later. (I cannot even put into words how much I want to be able to create stuff like that. Alas to be born with the dreams of a jeweller and the hands of a clutz.) Thank you fileg for the heads-up.

3. It’s my favourite time of the year (late summer/early fall) and it is currently as beautiful and sunny as anyone could wish for. I’m a little scared of winter because this hasn’t been such an awesome year on the whole so I’m not sure I’ll manage to pull through the long dark teatime of the soul without falling into the good old emo trap, but just now it’s fairly early in the morning and I’m at work already so feeling all diligent & accomplished and the day is golden.

4. I had a great weekend at this year’s autumn LARP although it was quite different from usual: I was very lazy this time and missed half the important stuff because I was too exhausted to stress myself, so I used it as a relaxing short trip rather than a proper LARP. Felt kind of strange and just occasionally like I was wasting chances, but two mornings of sleeping in and two days of non-working are not to be sneered at either way.
I took the amazing number of a whole 20 pictures, like in the old days before digital photography.

5. The pipes and shafts for water and electricity have been delivered so maybe, just maybe, we can start building things up this weekend instead of tearing things down, won’t that be nice.

6. (because I can and I think 5 is a minimum, not a maximum)
I’ve almost finished a sewing project that’s been on my desk for weeks and in my head for years. It’s not perfect, but it’s still turned out all right, yay. I am not getting more patient, but I am getting better at forcing myself to do it properly. \o/

7. Friday! Which only really makes a difference between work!work and house!work, but at least house!work has more purpose.