I'm not inclined to resign to maturity

I got most of my presents already. The only one I am still missing is for my older sister Mel and her husband (still weird calling him that ;) and my little nephew who's birthday is three days after Christmas. So I always need two presents. I already have a Puzzle-ball globe and maybe some legos (my mom has a huge Lego police station for him and I could probably get a small car from it or something). I've been looking for a present online and I came across an experiment kit about mechanics.
I think it's pretty cool. 30 different experiments, one of them building a little car.
My little nephew loves mechanics. When he was a baby he always tried to throw himself of your arm when he saw anything with wheels. „Wheels!“ was one of his first words and since he knows what they are he is obsessed with trains and how they work. How everything works really. Try explaining a combustion engine to a three year old. So in theory? I think he would like it.
On the other hand I really don't want to be the aunt who gives all the horribly educational presents.
I am already giving him a globe after all.

And my other sister? Wants to give my niece twilight for Christmas. D:

The Spellchecker kept wanting to change peoples tribune C. Flaminius into Flamingo and Thukydides into Thunderbird in my homework for my ancient history lecture. :) (which I sent in vie email 3 minutes before midnight and the deadline because I seem to have spent the last three days sleeping whenever I am at home... okay and also because I am lazy and didn't really see the point in doing it.)

And I made a big mistake and watched the (relatively) new Star Trek movie. Grr. Now I've started watching the original series. As if I wasn't enough of a geek already without being into star trek. ;)

Warm vanilla pudding-soup (warm vanilla pudding, only made with more milk) and peppermint tea. Also huddling under a lot of blankets of the sofa and watching all my favorite movies and sleeping a lot.

Kind of...The dog of some friends of my parents hated me from our first meeting on. He only hated me and one of their neighbors, otherwise he was a (relatively) nice dog.
In general I like dogs and they tend to like me so i was pretty confused about what I had done and tried to get him to like me. He always went completely crazy when he saw me. And after he tried to bite me in the face one time I was actually a bit wary of dogs for a while.
Maybe I did something terrible to him in a past life or something? ;)

My first word was Mama like probably most peoples. And my second was Meli, a shortening of my sisters name which I used to say all the time from there on. We have home videos where I walk next to my sister on the street as a toddler and just say her name all the time for no apparent reason other then that I could. I still call her that.

So it was either a cat or a really frighteningly big ferret. And I still think some kind of bird was involved. The thing was screaming like nuts in the tree and didn't even stop when I came to investigate with the flashlight. At my mothers suggestion I started throwing some fir cones at the trees but the ferret/cat thing didn't care.
Then all of a sudden it was quite and after a few minutes something was climbing down the tree, jumped to the ground and took of in a mad dash to the back of the garden and the hedge. I couldn't get a good look at it but it was pretty big and not really ferret shaped. So it might just have been a cat. Maybe it was stuck in the tree and really really angry about it?
Well, my nights mystery is over.

Tonight there was something in our backyard I've never heard before. I am used to cats howling and screaming in out back garden, owl calls.... all kind of stuff but this sounded completely different. My mom thinks it was a ferret, I think it was some kind of bird. Maybe an owl trying to snatch up a ferret? Whatever it was screamed and huffed and growled for about twenty minutes. Really, Really loudly. It was somewhere in our backyard in the trees or below it. Really weird.
Hey! There it is again! (runs to investigate)

I am fluent in German and I like to think in English and I know some Latin and very little French. I can also curse in Russian because I went to school with lots of Russian kids.
And I don't know if it counts because they aren't separated languages but I can read/understand and speak a little of “Hommersch” our local dialect and understand Plattdeutsch (Low German).
I really have to work on my French and Latin. I'd love to learn danish at some point. :)

My elbow and my thumb are killing me and I can't sleep. I am waiting for the painkillers to start working. I am just thankfully tomorrow is Sunday and I can sleep all day if I want to.

I did choose my project for my history lecture very carefully. It was a project I could do ALONE. I know thats kind of antisocial but I don't life in town and i didn't want all the hassle of planning, meeting and splitting the work with a stranger.
But this week our Tutor (who made a Buffy reverences today which made me grin) assigned me a partner. Yay... :( And I don't even have his email address or his name yet.

And today was the first day in weeks during which I was pain free! Yesterday my knee was still a bit weird (it hurt and kept giving out which was really kind of embarrassing) but today nothing hurts! I hope it stays that way. I'd just grudgingly admitted defeat and agreed to see my rheumatologist as soon as I have time (which with all the projects would have been in a few weeks). But maybe I don't have to!

And my friends called and want to take me out for dinner on Saturday to celebrate my birthday. I am not that enthusiastic. For one thing i hate to go out when i don't know where we are going and i have the slight suspicion we might end up in my friends favorite restaurant which is to fancy for my taste and also has about three meals to choose from for non-vegetarians. Can't we just go out for pizza or something? Maybe watch a movie? That had been my original plan for my birthday.
Okay, I know I am being ungrateful. :(

But theres the annual medieval market at the castle during the weekend. My sister and I will go, which is cool. We also wanted to take my nephew egg singing this weekend so he can meet the kids from the village and make some friends (since he moved here he doesn't have anyone to play with after kindergarten) but Egg singing has been canceled! How could they cancel egg singing?! There has always been egg singing on the last of April! It's a bit like they canceled easter.

And lastly: Please let there be another season of Chuck. Please! I think if chuck is not renewed I would actually take it harder than that time when they canceled Atlantis. I only started watching the show two weeks ago and I already bought the first season on DVD.

On Easter we had a big family barbecue. My niece and nephew did egg hunt even though they both don't believe in the easter bunny anymore. (I said the easter bunny had hidden the eggs and my six year old nephew gave me a „Yeah. Ri~ght.“ look.) I'd hidden the eggs and some chocolate around midday but my sister was late and by the time we went outside with the kids some of the chocolate had melted already. There were some very disfigured chocolate bunnies found. The weather was great and my sisters, my sisters fiancée and i played Frisbee all afternoon. It was a really niece day. I think even my grandfather had fun even though I accidental hit him with a football.

And I also got my computer back and even have all my stuff! My sisters fiancée is awesome!(after watching chuck the last week I am actually tempted to call him Captain Awesome ;) My killing streak with electronics continues though. My TV stopped working but it was thankfully just a cable.

And my family has been nagging me to go see my rheumatologist. I am being stubborn though. So far the pain in the joints is bearable (though the throbbing pain in my right wrist wants to prove me different right now.) and I still have hope that it's just some odd couple of weeks and then it will stop on its own.
I think this whole stubbornness thing is a family trait. My dad hit his finger with an ax on Saturday and stubbornly refused when i wanted to take him to the emergency room to get stitches.

University starts again tomorrow... This semester break went by so fast it seems like it started yesterday. First learning for my exams then helping my sister pack and move into her new flat and watching the kids all the time … Can I have a few more weeks please?
Latin first thing tomorrow :( *shudder*

... does that mean your doomed to become a crazy cat lady?
My neighbors have a very cute tabby cat that shows up at our door at least once every day and sometimes sticks around for over an hour. My sister accused me of feeding it but all I did was pet it occasionally when I took out the trash or something. Now it even comes running when it sees my car and my neighbors are starting to look at me funny. I am not trying to steal their cat! Really!

( Our cat stalker )

My parents got me a new hard-drive for my birthday because mine is broken. My sisters fiance assured me I would still be able to get my data from the old one... I really really hope so. And today our network switch also died. Yay! Bring me your electronics and I will kill them. *evillaugh*
My moms computer and I are becoming great friends though. It freezes every five minutes or so (I've taken to waving my hands at the screen like I am a magician... it doesn't help but I get bored) and for reasons I've already forgotten but which i am pretty sure boil down to that the computer is 12 years old my internet connection is terrible slow. I miss you DSL!(even though your not really gone).

I don't have a spell check right now so any spelling mistakes are totally intended and an expression of my creativity! (my teachers never bought that either.)

My computer broke today. I tried everything i know to fix it but my book of computer repairs basically consists of cleaning up some space on the hard-drive and trying to restore it to the last working configuration (and yelling at and threatening it of course) so it's no surprise it didn't work. I think it has to do with Windows. Now I hope my sisters fiance will have some time to help me out this week.

And to make the day even more awesome my car broke down, too. It actually broke down yesterday but I thought it would all be okay if I just recharged the battery. No such luck. My dad took a look at it this evening and he thinks the battery might not be broken and something just went wrong with the charging last night. I hope he is right. I really don't want to spent money on a new battery.

I nicked my moms computer (or my former computer)for now so I can at least go online but without all my bookmarks I spent most of the evening compiling a family-tree on a new german website I discovered. Mostly it's of my grandmothers site of the family just now because that's the only part I have detailed information about. Some of it is a little odd though. My great-grandfather for example wrote down he was born in "Sallerup, Flensburg" but the only Sallerup I could find on googlemaps is in denmark. I played around with the letters a little because a lot of the birthplaces I have are spelled different today but there is nothing close to Flensburg even remotely similar. There is also no place called Tastarf anymore where my great-great-grandfather was born in 1829.

But I was able to find most of the other birthplaces and because I am a geek I made a map. (I wanted to see how close the places were to each other and I was very bored.)

Since my sister is living separated from her husband the kids stay with us a lot. My niece is almost eleven and already a teenager with all the passive aggressive door slamming and drama that entails. But the thing that she finds most objective right now is that my mother is too strict. There have been a lot of fights between my mom and my niece and today there was apparently (I was at university) the biggest fight yet in which my niece proclaimed no child could be like my mom expected her to be. So I remember being a teen but…asking her not to kick her little brother and expecting her to take her plate into the kitchen when she is done don’t seem like such horrible acts of suppression to me. *sigh*
How long does puppetry last? 5-6 years? Maybe I could leave the country until the whole thing is over… (On the other hand I was a terrible teen myself and probably deserve this.)

I also retook my archaeology exam today. This time I actually studied but I still don’t have much hope. I just fail at geography.
I am debating singing up as a volunteer to help clean the papers from the collapsed historical archive in cologne… Though they seem to have more volunteers right now than they can handle.

Yesterday I wrote the last exam for this semester. I don’t think it went very well but I was happy the whole stuff was over and I could forget most of the random Dates I memorized the last few weeks.
I was happy. I intended to sleep most of today… maybe borrow my sisters dog to go for a walk later…
Around 10 am this morning the phone rang and a very stern secretary asked me (pretty much ordered me to, really) to come by my professors office today. She didn’t tell me why just that it had to do with the exam. This really freaked me out.
I worried all day and drove everyone nuts and by the time I had to be at his office I was minutes away from a nervous breakdown.
There was a bunch of people lurking around in front of his office already but when he showed up he said he wanted to start with the “curious case”. Me.

One part of the exam was drawing in regions and rivers on a map. He asked after a lot of German rivers and regions and I am pretty bad at German geography (it’s boring and confusing). But I did know some of the European ones so I drew them in even though he didn’t ask after them. Couldn’t hurt, right? At least it would show I am not a complete moron even if I am a bit fussy on the exact location of the Hundsrück. I really didn’t think much of it.
But apparently he did. He made his secretary call me up, made me agonize all day, had me drive to cologne, wait for half an hour… and all that because I doodled on a map.
Prof: “So I should just ignore it?”
Me: “Yeah. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Prof: “Oh well. Okay.”
I had to drive to university for that! *shakeshead* Is this some new form of hazing that the professors take part in?!


And the pope has no clue what is going on in the world and accepted a holocaust denying priest (and his equally crazy buddies) back into the church… and everyone seems surprised. A lot of German Catholics are threatening to leave the church now. I guess they had no objections to the pope’s call to save mankind from homosexuals and transsexuals and him advertising chastity instead of condoms to fight HIV a while ago though?

That this mad old prejudiced man is associated with Germany always makes me cringe.

Usually my sister Mel and I go to see the new Harry Potter movie together before Christmas. It’s a ritual but seeing as WB is being cruel we went to see inkheart instead.

Inkheart was awesome. My sister who has already read the book was a bit miffed about the changed ending (And all the wizard of Oz reverences in the movie) but seeing as I haven’t read the book I didn’t mind that much. Now I want a horned marten, too. I hate to admit it but somehow the shadow was really scary. I think I haven’t seen such a creepy movie monster since watching the last unicorn as a kid (The Red Bull terrified me!). And Paul Bettany is in this movie! I knew about Brendan Fraser and Helen Mirren of course, but Paul Bettany as Dustfinger made me very happy.

I am now totally reading the books so I can obsess about them ;)

And today I bought a T-shirt with yellow bugs on it saying “Bugs need love too”. I think it’s funny. (My sister just kept pointedly repeating “There are bugs on it” at me but I still bought it.)

Christmas is in a little over a week. I got most presents, except the ones for my parents but my sisters and I always buy them a present together and we already have some ideas. I wanted to buy a specific game for my older sister Mel though that Amazon had on offer three days ago and now hasn’t anymore. So I got to go and look for it next week between lectures at some point. The shopping district in cologne is insane at the moment; I am really not looking forward to it.

And my oldest sister S. is going to move into a flat just across the brick from us next February. It’s just five minutes walking distance (If the old bridge was still there it would be even less. Ah, the good old times when I was young! ;). And I am not only happy about it because then I can lend my sisters dog to go for a walk more often.

(While we were in cologne today we kept noticing the full moon which seemed very bright. Turns out the moon is actually closest to the earth tonight and therefore appears 15 % bigger and 30 % brighter.)

This week my professor wanted to kick me out of my prehistoric archaeology seminar because he was sure I had missed three lessons. That one time when he took attendance I kind of had the feeling he hadn’t seen me even though he looked right at me. I was able to get him to accept that I had only missed two lessons. And even though I really just missed two I felt like I had lied and pressured him into letting me stay in the lecture because he looked so unconvinced. But I cannot take this lecture a fourth time because then the only way I could stay awake during it would be if I made up a drinking game or something and start taking shots of vodka whenever one of the professors tells the same story as the years before and that wouldn’t be good for my liver, I think.

Especially since I am sure Archaeobotany (Palynology?) is the most boring subject on earth (No offence to any Archaeobotany-people!). I don’t mean the results you get from it, knowing about food and the vegetation is interesting but just getting there seems to require an inhuman amount of patience. Counting thousands of spores and pollen under a microscope for months? After a week I would just start making stuff up.
”Yes, there were 3000 spores of “insert complicated Latin plant name here”. Yes, I am sure! Of course! I counted them! And you can’t prove I didn’t!”
I can’t wait for the Christmas holidays. I am constantly exhausted lately and most of my seminars piss me of. Either because I have taken them before and am bored, or because they are entirely held in a foreign language I don’t understand and I am confused, or because they really weren’t that interesting to begin with.

Tomorrow my sister Mel and I will go see Tintenherz (Inkheart). I actually wanted to read the book this week before seeing the movie but I only made it to page ten because I kept falling asleep.

We baked Christmas cookies today. It took almost six hours. I kept trying the finished cookies and snacking cookie dough (Except the Lebkuchen dough because it was gross.) until I was really really nauseous and couldn’t even look at the cookies anymore. I am never going to eat cookies again!
*eatscookie*

I also managed to knock myself to the floor with the backing board. It really hurt and guessing from my moms and my sister’s reaction also looked really stupid. I was lying on the floor whimpering in pain and they were rolling with laughter. *grumbles*

And my brother in law visited us today. Awkward. Well it wasn’t awkward at first but then my dad came home and started discussing the divorce and it got a bit weird. *sigh* I hope at some point it’s all going to be less complicated because I really like my brother in law and don’t want him to vanish from my life.

*pointsaticon* That’s pretty much how it looks outside and it still makes me happy. It’s also pretty cold.

I found a way to evade French tomorrow. Yay! My sister’s car broke down on Saturday (less yay) and I am lending her my car tomorrow so she can pick up her car from the garage and drive my nephew to kindergarten and stuff like this. So besides looking like I am being an awesome sister I also found a way to get out of the horrible torture for a week without looking like a slacker!

I am just happy I don’t have to drive my sister around tomorrow like the last few days. My sister is a horrible co-driver. She flinches, clings to the door, points out speed limits and tries to calm you by soothingly talking to you when you curse at other drivers (Seriously, You don’t slow down before a green streetlight until it turns red again. That’s insane and people who do that deserve a few insults!)My sister is also a hypocrite because I don’t drive that much different from her.

And the professor moved the exam in my history lecture forward a week which means I’ll pretty much be writing all my exams in one week. I am so going to fail. He went on and on about how he is not one of those professors that asks after dates and miniscule details because he wants us to get the big pictures. Riiight. From what I have heard he is exactly the kind of prof’ to ask you about some random date or makes you list the last 20 Spanish kings or something like that during exams.


And I seem to have to go to the Czech Republic soon so I will have been all over central Europe:


visited 13 states (5.77%)
Create your own visited map of The World or try another Douwe Osinga project

So okay maybe when you are 22 you shouldn’t still run to the door as soon as you saw the first flakes but I don’t care. Snow!!!
It’s almost a snow storm out there.