Thursday

...didn't start well.

In theory Thursday is a busy morning having pilates and then a German lesson almost straight after (with just enough time in between to squeeze in a shower & turning on the coffee machine - having a German lesson without coffee is rather like driving a car with no oil in it) which means the dog has to walked as soon as the house is emptied of children (I could leave before they do but that seems a tad unmotherly and as the last one to go is only 8, could I really rely on her not to still be glued to Hannah Montana when I got back 1 hour later?)

It turned out to be a good thing that I did walk the dog then, and along that specific route as I bumped into the lady who manages the building where my pilates is held, Frau Qual was krank she told me, she'd tried to ring me but my house phone wasn't working....

So annoyance no. 1 (lack of 90 minutes pilates, because I do enjoy it despite whinging about it - which, if the teacher is a sadist makes me a masochist right?) led to annoyance no. 2, no telephone. The internet had dropped out earlier so hearing that the phone had also gone AWOL was no biggie, the internet decided to play again but there was still no sign of the phone at lunchtime so I had to deal with T-com (the German version of BT, except maybe a little bit more efficient - they are German afterall!)

You know how awful automated phone systems are? Imagine one in a foreign language...with speech recognition - no pressing of buttons for the Germans, oh no! Annoyance no. 3. Although I guess I was the customer service guy's annoyance of the day when I finally got a human bean to speak to, you could almost hear him silently cussing when he realised I was....English...anyway, he got over his annoyance and arranged that someone would come and fix the problem between 8-10 am on Friday, not brilliant as it would cock up my Friday plans but at least it would get fixed.

Annoyance 4. Ben came home in the middle of my German lesson and disappeared immediately upstairs to his pit...odd, even Muna commented on it, normally he hangs around like one of Logan's farts, making rude comments about my sentence structure. He reappeared when Muna had left and I discovered what was wrong. He'd got his maths test back...a 4 (1 being top mark, 3 being average & 4, in my book, being crap) he can do the maths (and had done a lot of work for it) but his German comprehension is letting him down because the maths questions are so wordy, not just a list of sums you see, but practical situations...

The cloudy day did have a sheeny shiny silver lining though...expats at Lulu's!
Bliss.
And this month we had someone new, Julie who's French but speaks excellent English after living in China, Australia and England. Last night we were 7, a smallish group but still loud enough to dominate the small bar (especially after a couple of Martinis - last night I had a Ruskatini Red and a Lemontini - yum) and conversation covered the forthcoming F1 season (surprised the boys by being knowledgeable about the sport) the pointlessness of non-alcoholic cocktails, why good books don't make good films, how leaving a mobile phone in your jeans and then washing them will result in a nonfunctioning phone, and Ian confessed to be a royal stalker who is quite possibly now on an 'alert' list that the police keep at all airports...