To do To da y.

• Catch the train to Cologne.
• Go to percussion class.
• Grab a practice room for two hours and pretend to be hard-working.
• Find something edible from the faculty cafeteria for lunch.
• Go to Aldi and search for bring-along-to-a-staff-party-buffet-apt food that doesn't need preparing (no time and no stop-by at home for that) ...hm, um... grapes???
• Convince that prof in the 4pm class that really, reeeaaaally I don't need to do an "orientation" teaching pratice, because I've been doing the damn job for 3 1/2 years now, and if I was in any way uncertain about whether teaching really is the thing for me, I probably would have noticed by now...
• Leave the 4pm class early without pissing the prof off...
• ...in order to go to a last minute rehearsal for that girl in whose singing exam tomorrow I have the questionable honour of filling in for her duet partner.
• Drop off my bike, meet two colleagues and go to the staff party.
• Have fun and not fall asleep.
  

Having a memory over for tea.

There's definitely a million other things I should be doing right now, and I will in a minute, but isn't it strange how in the biggest chaos you still find the time to do something completely unmeditated and strange?
I stumbled across a corny, old and almost forgotten French chanson on youtube and the memories came flooding back in giant rolling waves - the school exchange with a French school 15, 16 years ago, all those big emotions, the drama, the heartbreak... Ah, we had a fabulous time...
Somehow I got the idea into my head that by now - all postal addresses long out-of-date - the general networking hype should have made it quite possible that some of these French people are hanging around the internet as well. A friend supplied some of their second names and I spent some happy hours sieving through facebook and even one French facebooky-type site - and I actually managed to unearth two guys. ...And the most amazing part for me was that they actually wrote back!
You see, back then, my French was, ah well, let's say rudimentary (now it's not even that), as was their German, so looking back I've always wondered how we managed to communicate at all. (The answer being, of course, we didn't. ...Well, the non-verbal parts of communication seemed to do the job...) So it was something of a revelation to be able to write and chat fluently now, in English, thank God for that! For the first time we actually understood completely what the other one was saying - why, isn't that something!
Apart from that, the strangeness knows no boundaries. I am well aware that in a sense I might just as well have written to some total stranger and gone "Hey, I like your picture. Tell me what you did those last 15 years!" But in another sense it felt so very natural to hear them talk about their lives, quite familiar, in a way.
In any case it cheered me up big time and I could really use that!

It's calm under the waves.

All is fixed.

My flat, my laptop, my bike lights...

So, in keeping with the folklore that if things around you are clean and orderly, your mind can feel so too, I guess I expected to feel - I don't know, a bit more serene now.
Instead, there's this big wave of so many things (mainly uni/work/music/exam-related) breaking right over me and I'm being pulled under and spluttering and gasping for air. I should have anticipated its course and swum out to meet it further out in the ocean, should have got behind its eventual breaking point before it became too big. But I just wide-eyed watched it come closer and closer and building up higher.
So now it's up to me to tread water like mad and push upwards again to escape the swirls of angry salt water and sand and foam and come back up for air. You know that sensation, right, when you're still so disoriented you wonder which side is up? My own recommendation would always be to swim towards the sunlight glistening through the water, but that's pretty hard to do when the salt burns your eyes and squeezes them shut.

* * *
Thank God there's an appropriate soundtrack for every occasion.
* * *
...and now I better get some work done. Start with something easy, non-terrifying...ehm...

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

And if it is broke, fix it, dammit!!!

...and it is well and truly broken, believe me...

Guess what?! The painter guy didn't put down the new laminate after all. Turns out the sink is still slightly leaking, so he decided he better didn't touch anything lest my landlord decided to put the blame on him later (Good thinking, I grant him that.)...

Then the landlord and a plumber guy came into my flat while I was at uni today and I came home to this:

They had simply uninstalled the sink! What a simple but brilliant feat: If there is no sink, the sink cannot leak. (I bow my head in awe in the face of such masterminding.)

Meanwhile I rescheduled with the painter/laminate guy for tomorrow morning and got the plumber's number off my landlord so that he might come one of these days and put the sink back (and hopefully fix it too, why, wouldn't that be something!) once the laminate finally got laid (bahaha, that lucky bitch! ...ehm, sorry!).

I enjoyed about three minutes of triumph at having managed to organise this whole, god-forsaken circus. Then I realized...

...that that weird carpet underneath the old laminate (kept in place because Scrooge wouldn't cough up for a new floor...) is in fact still soaking wet! Well, maybe not as bad as last summer, but definitely damp. It dried off reasonably well back then. But it's the end of October now, so there's a fat chance that carpet will ever dry at all now and I somehow don't fancy living in a building site for much longer. So let the laminate people come - the worst that'll happen is they remove the old laminate, then disappear again to let the carpet dry some more. It's not as if this place can look any more chaotic...

Or can it???

tbc...

P.S. What's that? You're wondering why neither landlord nor plumber noticed the wet carpet this afternoon when they removed the sink? You think a plumber should recognize a leak when he sees one? Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you?!

Alles ist Sternenstaub.

Morgen früh kommt der Maler (wer sonst?), der mir - nur 3 kurze Monate nach dem Rohrleck-Land-unter-Zwischenfall - das Laminat im Küchendrittel meiner Wohnung neu legen soll. Zu diesem Zweck muss das Küchendrittel geräumt sein. Ähm, nur wohin räumt man den Inhalt einer Küche in einer Einzimmerwohnung? Das war so nicht vorgesehen.

Und darüber hinaus habe ich ein bisschen Angst, weil ich mich zu erinnern meine, dass vor meinem Einzug hier ja güst das Laminat (zurechtgesägt und) verlegt worden war und alles von der Bodenleiste bis zur letzten Heizkörperritze mit einer 5mm dicken Holzstaubschicht bedeckt war. Und das geht ja mal gar nicht!

Da müssten die Männer aber ne Menge Abdeckfolie mitbringen, wenn sie gedenken hier in der Wohnung auch nur ein einziges Brett durchzusägen! Oder wahlweise ein Umzugsunternehmen, einen Lagerraum und für mich einen Hotelgutschein und abschließend eine Putzfee. Denn ich geh morgen früh in die Uni und wehe, hier liegt bei meiner Heimkehr morgen Abend auch nur ein Staubkörnchen mehr als jetzt...

* * *

Aber vielleicht denke ich da auch zu klein:

Vista's a bitch.

Um, just very quickly: Can anyone remind me what I used to do to fill the hours before there was this interwebthingy here? No, not that. I mean obviously I must have done things like reading, playing/singing/writing/listening to music, eating, going out, doing stuff... But I still do all of that so there must be that bit of extra time that came out of thin air for the simple purpose of being filled with emailing, facebooking, blogging, youtubing, blogrolling, sucking you down into the world of dependency... you know... (Well, if you don't, good for you, just be very careful: You are reading a blog as we - well, I - speak!)

See, the reason I ask is that...(trembling lower lip)... my laptop is dying on me! It's been acting up on occasion lately, refusing to start, pretending not to recognize its own battery, then suddenly being fine about it all again, feigning innocence. Yesterday, however, it gave off all the signs of a real nervous breakdown - it took me 13 attempts, one thanks-for-nothing windows-boot-up-repair-programme and a 14th attempt to persuade it to start at all - and those were some scary two hours, I can tell you! It was Friday afternoon and apart from all the usual see-above internet stuff I always do, I had planned on finishing that bloody ancient paper, with a weekend of unwinding in front of a good few BBC miniseries (or something, I'm not fuzzy when it comes to light entertainment) afterwards and in between. Fat chance on all counts.

Well, it decided to work eventually (staring at me with that accusing, you-don't-understand-me, blotchy-faced look - or am I just imagining that?), but what do I do now??? My brother-in-law promised to sedate it sometime next week, kill its evil Vista heart and transplant a good-ol', reliable XP one, but until then? I left it on all through last night, but I intend to leave the house at some stage today and don't feel comfortable doing so with electric equipment still running. (Is this what it's like to have a sick dog/elderly parent to mind??)

So, it's really just a question of overcoming my internet obsession and switching off this thing (or I might have nothing to eat next week, if I don't go shopping).

Go on, press the button, you can do it!

(whimpering slowly fades out...)

Work in Progress 2.

Well, it seems as if I won't be coming up with a more elaborate version anytime soon, so I might as well post the "Damsel in Distress" as she is. You know the deal (crappy sound quality etc.), also the melody is ever so slightly too deep for my voice, I'll have the composer keep that in mind next time round...