Spring has sprung
Hello friends! Welcome to my post-Easter holiday blog, in which I will mainly enumerate ways in which I have been incompetent and unwilling to accept the bleak realities of life.
I got back to Chemnitz at 1 this morning, which is the first instance of my lax attitude to responsibility. Having booked several weeks ago to come back on Saturday, I somehow convinced myself that I had in fact booked the flight for Sunday, almost certainly because I wanted to believe I had an extra day at home. Despite the fact that Ryanair does not fly to Leipzig on Sundays or Mondays, hence the need to come back on Saturday, this pretence lasted until Sunday afternoon when I checked my boarding pass on the Ryanair app (would recommend, by the way - no more extortionate printing fees from the public library to print out boarding passes), and it said 'flights done'. Ah. Fortunately, this was before we had left to go to the airport, and even more fortunately, I had no lessons on Monday and only one on Tuesday. Sadly it seems the headteacher has not yet forgiven me for missing this lesson, as when I informed him I would not be attending, he replied, 'das ist sehr schade' (that's a real shame), and is now not responding to my offers of coming to Friday's lesson to make up for it. However, I am very used to being given the cold shoulder by him over WhatsApp, and as I have not once done anything useful in any of his lessons, I am struggling to feel guilty. Adding to this struggle is the fact that I got two (well, three really) more full days at home which were lovely.
The holidays themselves were also mostly lovely, apart from a few slip-ups in terms of the quarter-life-crisis I appear to be indulging in at the moment. General wailing about the meaninglessness of life and the impossibility of making anything of yourself have been occurring, and it is frankly a very disappointing performance from myself. However I am aware I am by no means the only person of my age to feel like this, and it is somewhat comforting to know that there is even a Wikipedia page about it. My advice to me would be to literally just stop it.
The rest of the holidays were occupied firstly with Norfolk over Easter weekend, which never fails to be chaotically delightful - the situation is simply nine people and a small dog in one smallish house eating a meal every hour or two and periodically going on enforced bracing walks to the sea. There was also an Easter egg hunt involving more than 200 tiny Easter eggs and two small children belonging to the neighbours whom we always object to including because apparently 'it's mean to shove them out of the way to get to the eggs' and 'they can't run as fast, especially when you kick them to the ground'. Anyway. All's well that ends well, and as everyone got A Lot of chocolate, it was considered a success.
After Norfolk there were a few days at home to see people, do boring things like haircuts and doctor's appointments (I have a brand new inhaler and a professional confirmation of my previously self-diagnosed asthma! Thrilling), and a surprise job interview which I had not heard about, having been in Germany and not receiving post.
For the second weekend we went to Gloucester to see our relatives for, as Father John put it, 'a different dose of insanity'. In the last couple of years Nanny Judy bought the farm she grew up on and she and her various offspring have been painstakingly redoing it ever since. Baby steps include filing important letters from the bank in a drawer and ignoring them for months, pretending that emails don't exist, not buying the desired farm animals and instead having dozens of sheep that everyone hates, and burning everything in sight when it becomes tiresome, including such items as a piano and a presumed-dead-but-was-actually-what-turned-out-to-be-very-alive chicken, which fortunately escaped the inferno intact. However, to quote Arrested Development, family is almost the most important thing, second only to breakfast, and it is always nice to see them; we had dinner with one uncle and his wife, lunch with an aunt, and saw another uncle around the farm where he's currently living. Really quite a good turnout - only two uncles that we missed, out of the six siblings.
Also while we were there, I was led to my sewing machine and held at gunpoint until I finished making the curtains that had been lying there for weeks, untouched. As an astonishingly mediocre sewer this was a challenge at first, as I haven't done any sewing for a year or so, but the joy of it returned to me - Nanny Judy's absolute indifference to the quality of the hemming helped as well - and inspired me to also sew a t-shirt when we got back to Bedford. I'm considering bringing my sewing machine to Manchester next year; although it is absolutely unnecessary weight and it's unlikely I'd use it more than once, I do miss it quite a surprising amount.
Anyway, despite some initial qualms, now that I've returned to Chemnitz I'm in a good mood again. The sun is out, the birds are kind of humming and trilling a bit, and it's nearly summer! With only seven weeks left at school, the manic planning to fill up every single remaining weekend with travel has begun, which I can confirm is a truly terrible idea. While travelling is of course to be recommended, doing it every weekend is remarkably stressful when you include all the organising as well, so once again I must return to my old refrain and just Calm Down. However there is lots to look forward to, and lots more planning to be done for summer, and it's all quite exciting really. This may be the antidote to any life crises - take note, fellow millennials! We are a fragile generation, but it's possible we will get things done nonetheless.
I got back to Chemnitz at 1 this morning, which is the first instance of my lax attitude to responsibility. Having booked several weeks ago to come back on Saturday, I somehow convinced myself that I had in fact booked the flight for Sunday, almost certainly because I wanted to believe I had an extra day at home. Despite the fact that Ryanair does not fly to Leipzig on Sundays or Mondays, hence the need to come back on Saturday, this pretence lasted until Sunday afternoon when I checked my boarding pass on the Ryanair app (would recommend, by the way - no more extortionate printing fees from the public library to print out boarding passes), and it said 'flights done'. Ah. Fortunately, this was before we had left to go to the airport, and even more fortunately, I had no lessons on Monday and only one on Tuesday. Sadly it seems the headteacher has not yet forgiven me for missing this lesson, as when I informed him I would not be attending, he replied, 'das ist sehr schade' (that's a real shame), and is now not responding to my offers of coming to Friday's lesson to make up for it. However, I am very used to being given the cold shoulder by him over WhatsApp, and as I have not once done anything useful in any of his lessons, I am struggling to feel guilty. Adding to this struggle is the fact that I got two (well, three really) more full days at home which were lovely.
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| Have a poor-quality selfie!! |
The rest of the holidays were occupied firstly with Norfolk over Easter weekend, which never fails to be chaotically delightful - the situation is simply nine people and a small dog in one smallish house eating a meal every hour or two and periodically going on enforced bracing walks to the sea. There was also an Easter egg hunt involving more than 200 tiny Easter eggs and two small children belonging to the neighbours whom we always object to including because apparently 'it's mean to shove them out of the way to get to the eggs' and 'they can't run as fast, especially when you kick them to the ground'. Anyway. All's well that ends well, and as everyone got A Lot of chocolate, it was considered a success.
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| Easter decorations - these are everywhere in Germany but normally outside on bushes, not inside on twigs. Hmm. |
For the second weekend we went to Gloucester to see our relatives for, as Father John put it, 'a different dose of insanity'. In the last couple of years Nanny Judy bought the farm she grew up on and she and her various offspring have been painstakingly redoing it ever since. Baby steps include filing important letters from the bank in a drawer and ignoring them for months, pretending that emails don't exist, not buying the desired farm animals and instead having dozens of sheep that everyone hates, and burning everything in sight when it becomes tiresome, including such items as a piano and a presumed-dead-but-was-actually-what-turned-out-to-be-very-alive chicken, which fortunately escaped the inferno intact. However, to quote Arrested Development, family is almost the most important thing, second only to breakfast, and it is always nice to see them; we had dinner with one uncle and his wife, lunch with an aunt, and saw another uncle around the farm where he's currently living. Really quite a good turnout - only two uncles that we missed, out of the six siblings.
Also while we were there, I was led to my sewing machine and held at gunpoint until I finished making the curtains that had been lying there for weeks, untouched. As an astonishingly mediocre sewer this was a challenge at first, as I haven't done any sewing for a year or so, but the joy of it returned to me - Nanny Judy's absolute indifference to the quality of the hemming helped as well - and inspired me to also sew a t-shirt when we got back to Bedford. I'm considering bringing my sewing machine to Manchester next year; although it is absolutely unnecessary weight and it's unlikely I'd use it more than once, I do miss it quite a surprising amount.
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| <3 |
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