Friday, July 16, 2010

Bond has destroyed the laser

It is a sad fact that supervillains are never safe from heroes. Heroes (and heroines) come and blow up the stuff we lovingly build, expensive stuff, I might add, and things that might be useful or fun. Then they come, destroy it all and then the world wonders why we hold it to ransom for a million billion dollars.

My laptop's harddrive has given up the ghost in this wretched heat and decided to contract a case of surface and reader head damage. Thankfully I listened to the internets and did not attempt to save it with the help of my computer wiz friend, but delivered it to a data recovery service the next day and the day after that they had already been able to save all the data. All that remains is a very expensive lesson about backing up your data - if I had made a backup of the thesis and the most important other data (like my pictures from Scotland), I would have simply bought a new computer, but as the half-written thesis was on it and only some parts of it at my professor's, I had to save it all.

Why not simply write it again? Because I am working two jobs at the same time and trying to finish the thesis, too. I only have time to do dishes on the weekends. The red nailpolish on my toenails is growing out naturally, because I don't have time to remove it. My fingernails need to be cut. And even though the main job will be finished by the end of July - which I'm rather sad about, because it's basically paid fun - that's when the thesis should also be finished. So I just don't have time to write 20 pages again (my professor has about 30).

A few things have gone well, though. The university has accepted all the paperwork I could give to it before actually handing in my thesis, so now I am just waiting for the mills to spit it out again. My internship at the library is the best ever and today I shushed a patron - for the first time I had the right and the duty to do so :D I'm CRAZY with the power (as befits a villainness).

In the meantime, I haven't given up on Operation Sonnenstrahl. Currently I'm working on the beginning of it all, which is fun, because it doesn't need as many citations and I can just let the words flow freely and I'm writing on paper, because my mother's mac has the world's worst keyboard and I dislike macs. AKA, I still have the plans for the laser and I am making sure that it's being rebuilt, while I hold the world to ransom for a million billion dollars and chocolate pudding.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

if i seem to have left the building, it's because ...

I'm insanely busy. From 8 to 4 I work at a library, catalogueing and making sure that patrons have someone attending to them during the lunch hours and then I head over to my second job, which is proofreading data entries for a medical catalogue. Then I get home, eat something that I prepared the evening before and half of which I already ate for lunch, do the most necessary housework and then work on my thesis. In between, I take naps. I take naps at lunch, I take naps in the streetcar on my way to the second job and I take a nap after I eat, before I do chores and thesis.

Which leaves me with about zero time for knitting. I'm lucky if I get a page done a day, yesterday, I even got to 50 pages, so I could start warming up the generator for the laser ... but I still don't know what I want to write on the moon. I'm sure everything will come back once July is over and the thesis is done :)

I did get good news today, apparently they're already done with the silly piece of paper I had to submit, but I can only pick it up between 10 and 12 in the morning, so I'll have to do that and stay at work longer, which means staying at my second job longer, which means getting home later, which means ... and so on. But I shall persevere! I found a postcard in one of the books I've been catalogueing and it said: "Work and don't despair!" and since these books are from my father, my grandfather, my grandmother and their parents, I'm taking it as a message from beyond :D

Sunday, July 4, 2010

six flavours of icecream and three pairs of earrings

The heat of summer has arrived in Vienna. If you have nothing to do, it's great. If you have to work or think, it's torture. It only gets a little cooler in the evening and if there's a wind, it might be a bit better, but it can also be like a giant hairdryer. But I need to make the page number rise, after all, I'm starting an internship on Monday and I'll be insanely busy all July. The perks of that internship are great, however. I'll get to do something I really, really like - work in a library, putter around in their stacks, help out customers - and they have a terrace, air conditioning and I can dress normally and not too office-like.

However, I'll have to take a shawl to work. The highest stack room has a temperature of 18° Celsius, the lowest floor is colder than that and there is a constant draft. So a shawl and a scarf! I think I'm going to take Anna's Scarf (the grey one I showed a couple posts ago), because it clings to itself so nicely. But which scarf? Should it be Pink Champagne?


This was my first try of a Finnish scarf pattern. I just looked at the pictures of the original pattern and then made up my own numbers, since it's a really easy pattern. I actually made six more of it, all with different trims. Five of those I gave to friends. The sixth I kept. It's not a giveaway item. It's my Raincaller Scarf and noone except me gets to wear it.


Have I actually worn it, you ask? No ... not yet. But I will! Just like I'll wear my Summer Stream in the Shade scarf, it just needs to be blocked first ...


It's made from Lana Grossa Asia, which is 50% bamboo, 50% cotton and feels very nice. Even nicer is this one, though, the Asphodelus Aestivus. I have yarn to make a woolen version of this, but I haven't gotten to it, yet. I really love the blue color and the fringe, but it's so easy to pull a little sling of yarn out of it and then it's hard getting it back into the scarf.


On July 14th, I should probably wear my Lace Ribbon Scarf, which I've christened Vive la France! It's made with silk yarn (the blue and red) and silk and linen yarn (the tan) that my dad brought me from Japan. This one was a pain to knit, it never seemed to grow and I couldn't pick up dropped stitches like I usually can and had to unravel rows more than a few times. The first part I knit was super-tight, so I had to pay attention to keep the tension that way and it didn't always work out. And I added the crochet trim, because fringe wouldn't have looked good at all. The blocking turned it from something very scrunched up into a beautiful scarf, though.


The last one is a crocheted scarf again. I bought the yarn to make a birthday present for a friend (one of the stringy scarves like Pink Champagne) and managed to have enough left over to make myself a little Crocus scarf, since the color is just like those pale white-purple crocuses.


This one still needs to be blocked, too. I guess if I had proper blocking tools, I'd do it more often, but I have no immediate access to proper blocking pins or blocking wires and the most important thing I lack is space. I used to have about 4 beds on which to block at my disposal, but now, I only have the one and my couch is perpetually occupied with layers of paper, clothes, yarn and many other bits and pieces. Maybe I'll be able to block more this summer.

And to finally get to the tantalizing promise of six icecream flavours and three pairs of earrings. I met up with one of my very best friends today, who I love very much and first we had some iced drinks and sandwiches, then we headed over to my favorite icecream place, Bortolotti. There's three Bortolottis on the Mariahilfer Straße, which is the most popular shopping street in Vienna. I live closest to the uppermost one and that's where we got our icecream. Here in Vienna, you don't get a ball or two or three of icecream on a cone, you get a spatula full of icecream and the basic cone has three of those, so, I had a cone with nocciolone (chocolate-hazelnut icecream with bits of hazelnut), maroni (sweet chestnut icecream with bits of candied chestnut) and a new flavour, cola-fizz (coke icecream with coke poprocks). I just wanted to try the last flavour, it's definitely something for the kids.

Then we went earring shopping by chance. We came across a new store and all those earrings called out to me. I finally settled on some that looked like buttons, six of them, in all the colors of the rainbow except dark blue (the one opposite the yellow button is purple) - always wanted to have some like those.


Then I found the perfect earrings for my serious look - fake pearl earrrings, fake diamond earrings and larger fake pearl earrings with a flower design on them. Heh. I'm really looking forward to wearing those.


And to top it off, I finally found the perfect disc-with-design earrings. I'd been seeing them with flowers and other patterns, but nothing had called out to me. These are perfect, with the sparrow and the flowers ... love them!


And after I had said goodbye to my friend, who went and sang opera in this wretched heat, brave her, I had more icecream. Because we had just hit the middle Bortolotti and they had new flavours, too. Mojito (lime and mint and a vague alcoholic taste) and caramel, which was quite good as well. To go with those, I had raspberry as the third.

Now for washing my hair and then work ...