Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to meeeeee
Happy birthday to me
Am having a deliciously lazy day, & as a mother of 2 children normally with stuff to do and who then tends to feel guilty when sitting around reading or aimlessly internet browsing, it's just blissful to think to myself;
'it's my birthday, I refuse to clean the hamsters out (they can wait till tomorrow), I shan't change the beds (they can wait till tomorrow too) and the children, I'm afraid will have to have fishfingers, chips & peas for tea and like it!'
I admit that tomorrow I am going to be a tad busy (what with cleaning out the rodents and changing the beds on top of doing my German, and all the normal household shit that has to be dealt with) but do I care?
Hah!
I shall continue with my slothful ways until bedtime, I get one day a year to use as MINE and only MINE, so if I want to:
- go out for lunch I shall (tick)
- have a relaxing walk with the dog I shall (tick)
- read a book until I swear my eyes are going square I shall (tick)
Back in the day, when I earnt money for working (afterall I still work, it's just I'm at home, caring for 2 children & keeping a house functioning 24/7, not out at an office for 7.4 hours/day x5 - bitter & twisted? moi?) I always made a point of not being at work on my birthday, I took great care to book the day as holiday so that no-one could be bossing me around on my day, I would take myself off shopping or lunch with a friend or to a spa, anything to mark my day in a little, special way. So, although now I can't actually book the day off I try to make it as much mine as possible!
My alarm went off as usual (6.25am is an ungodly hour of the day) and I lay there, savouring the fact that for once I didn't have to jump up and wake B&J. Simon already had that in hand & very soon a cup of tea arrived, along with children and presents. I do enjoy a cup of tea in bed, it's not a common occurrence, so whenever it's offered I jump at it, and this morning I even got a refill! Heaven!
My darling husband had paid thorough attention to my present suggestion list (he likes to be provided with one (it makes his life so much easier & then he doesn't have to spend valuable time shopping) so I always try to oblige, I have sometimes even given website details & article numbers...I'm very thorough!) so my presents included the beautiful fountain pen I asked for -I love writing in ink and have 2 fountain pens, but both are very old.
My lacquered Parker pen I've had since before we were married and it's slowly falling apart and I feel it needs retiring. The Waterman is one I bought myself in Bayeux, so it's probably 16-18 years old but is more of a functional pen and not especially stylish - whereas my new pen, is beautiful! It's a Mont Blanc but it's not a full size fountain pen but a lady's size, gorgeous & delicate, I just hope we get on, as a left hander I do struggle with some ink pens. But I'm sure we'll be fine!
Other presents were a new perfume 'Magnolia Nobile' by Acqua di Palma, I had a sample of it from Harrods when we were buying an aftershave there for Simon back in August and thought it was lovely. Also some dvd's I'd requested and the latest Mika cd, which I've been playing on a loop this afternoon. My friend Alison bought me a lovely bead for my bracelet & Rebecca a voucher for a Thai massage place here in Kettwig, had a scarf from my mom and some chopsticks(!) from my sister in law.
My brother is erratic to say the least about presents but that's ok (I guess) he's busy in Barcelona trying to drink a beer for each of my years at the moment! Crazy fool that he is!
And my friend Mareike, who is away from the Kettwig area for these 2 weeks rang me to wish me happy birthday and to invite me to go to an art museum when she's back - which is dead spooky, because just this morning I went online to find out the details for that same exhibition...spooky!
My mom also rang me to wish me happy birthday, I received the card and present from her yesterday - she wrote the loveliest thing in the card 'we're so proud of you' - that really touched me! I love my mommy! And best news is that they're coming over for Christmas - YEAH! They can bring the Christmas pudding! (Can't get such a thing here of course & can't be bothered to make it either, although I will make a cake).
Simon is going to make tea for me tonight - I bought all the ingredients yesterday, stuff he can do and has done well in previous years - steak, mushrooms, green beans - nothing flashy, just nice to sit and watch someone else do it all!! Oh, and I bought a bottle of pink German fizz, so I'm looking forward to a relaxing evening!
I don't feel 44...but it sounds so old...I really should have stuck to my guns at 40 and gone with the counting backwards - then I'd be 36 today...but it confused the children dreadfully so I had to give in, ho hum!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
le weekend
Appologies for the lapse into French, I'm helping my son learn his vocab for his French test tomorrow. I learnt French at school from the age of 11 (I think, or maybe 10...) it was pretty basic French in the early days, le pomme and so on, however after 7 years of French at school my langauge skills were sufficient to cope with holidays in France until we were faced with coming to Germany anyway!
About a year before relocating to Germany we all started having German lessons so that we wouldn't be completely lost with the language when we arrived. Simon and I had already done 3 years each of school German and so had the basics buried deep in our brains somewhere - that's the theory anyway and although I can chant the 'der/die/das' tables off in my sleep my knowledge of whether nouns are der, die or das is vague...Anyway, the moment I started improving/learning German I seemd to lose my grasp of French, which is annoying, especially as one my friends here is a French expat who's in the same boat as me - having to learn German (she's marginally better off in that her husband is half German, half French and speaks French, German & English - swine!) although she also used to know English and has had it pushed out of her brain by the learning of German!
The Germans take the learning of languages seriously (what a surprise, I have yet to discover something they don't take seriously) at Ben's school they offer a bilingual stream and these clever kids get extra English lessons for the first 2 years before in year 7 studying geography &/or history in English (easy for Ben, whose mother tongue is English) in year 6 they start a 2nd language of French or Latin (it surprises me how many children have opted to take Latin - although I think it's mainly due to parental pressure & the fact that a lot of the university courses want students with Latin, still haven't worked out the logic behind that one) and then in year 8 they can choose to study Spanish. They currently start learning English when they start school at the age of 6!
It's amazing that children here can finish school being able to speak 3 foreign languages, in England there's very little scope for that. But then the English have a very 'island' mentality when it comes to languages & the learning of, and it's only when you've 'escaped' from the island that you can look back and recognise that. The English as a whole see no reason for learning other languages, why should they when the rest of the world learns English?!
So, le weekend...
Was quiet for 2 reasons:
1. bank holiday on Saturday, nowhere was open (as anticipated)
2. I was still suffering with the cold from hell (today is the beginning of week 3) and so was still needing to take life slowly and gently.
Anyway, I think I've broken the back of this horrible cold now, and with it being my birthday tomorrow life can only get better...can't it?
About a year before relocating to Germany we all started having German lessons so that we wouldn't be completely lost with the language when we arrived. Simon and I had already done 3 years each of school German and so had the basics buried deep in our brains somewhere - that's the theory anyway and although I can chant the 'der/die/das' tables off in my sleep my knowledge of whether nouns are der, die or das is vague...Anyway, the moment I started improving/learning German I seemd to lose my grasp of French, which is annoying, especially as one my friends here is a French expat who's in the same boat as me - having to learn German (she's marginally better off in that her husband is half German, half French and speaks French, German & English - swine!) although she also used to know English and has had it pushed out of her brain by the learning of German!
The Germans take the learning of languages seriously (what a surprise, I have yet to discover something they don't take seriously) at Ben's school they offer a bilingual stream and these clever kids get extra English lessons for the first 2 years before in year 7 studying geography &/or history in English (easy for Ben, whose mother tongue is English) in year 6 they start a 2nd language of French or Latin (it surprises me how many children have opted to take Latin - although I think it's mainly due to parental pressure & the fact that a lot of the university courses want students with Latin, still haven't worked out the logic behind that one) and then in year 8 they can choose to study Spanish. They currently start learning English when they start school at the age of 6!
It's amazing that children here can finish school being able to speak 3 foreign languages, in England there's very little scope for that. But then the English have a very 'island' mentality when it comes to languages & the learning of, and it's only when you've 'escaped' from the island that you can look back and recognise that. The English as a whole see no reason for learning other languages, why should they when the rest of the world learns English?!
So, le weekend...
Was quiet for 2 reasons:
1. bank holiday on Saturday, nowhere was open (as anticipated)
2. I was still suffering with the cold from hell (today is the beginning of week 3) and so was still needing to take life slowly and gently.
Anyway, I think I've broken the back of this horrible cold now, and with it being my birthday tomorrow life can only get better...can't it?
Friday, October 2, 2009
feiertag - bank holidays
I've just discovered that tomorrow (Saturday) is a bank holiday here, and while part of me likes the fact that in Germany they don't move the holiday days around if they fall on a weekend (in Britain afterall you'd get Monday off if the bank holiday fell at the weekend) what I'd forgotten (until reminded by another expat) is that the shops will be shut tomorrow.
They do take their holidays seriously here!
So that means that apart from the bakers which will open first thing (Germans cannot function without their daily dose of fresh bread) and then shut as soon as their stocks are depleted, there is nowhere to buy supplies from for the weekend, I'd kind of thought of popping to the supermarket tomorrow for what I need for tomorrow's tea & sunday's but now it has to be done today, how irritating!
In Germany there seem to be a lot of bank holidays, although not spread out in a very efficient manner, but I guess that's down to the church. Between New Year (which is bizarrely known as Silvester here, due to Saint Silvester who died on that date in 813) and Easter which can be quite late, there are no bank holidays here (although that doesn't bother me as much as it would if I were in paid work, I remember distinctly the 'free' days of holiday that were bank holidays) although living in the part of Germany that we do where the tradition of Karneval is still alive and kicking we get Rosenmontag as a bank holiday (42 days before Easter) first.
The bank holidays after Easter come in quick succession, May 1 (tag der arbeit) Christihimmelfahrt (my favourit name which translates perfectly - christ,heaven,travel = ascension day of course!) Pfingsten (Whitsun) Fronleichnam (another neat translation, happy,dead,day = corpus christi!) then we come to tomorrow's more recent addition to the bank holiday calender, Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German reunification day).
They mighn't move the bank holidays around here but what they do like to do is tag extra days onto them, 'bridging days' as they're known. So if a bank holiday falls on a Thursday or a Tuesday you tend to get the day between it and the weekend off too, gratis, which is neat, especially as on bridging days offices & schools and the like are shut but shops and the normal stuff of life continues.
However this is not the case tomorrow, when everything will be shut up and it will be pretty much like Sunday is here (but I'm sure I shall want to talk about the German institution of Sunday in another blog...)
This year is 20 years since the Berlin wall came down, 20 years since reunification started, so there's bound to be lots going on...shall have to listen out for the fireworks on Saturday evening!
They do take their holidays seriously here!
So that means that apart from the bakers which will open first thing (Germans cannot function without their daily dose of fresh bread) and then shut as soon as their stocks are depleted, there is nowhere to buy supplies from for the weekend, I'd kind of thought of popping to the supermarket tomorrow for what I need for tomorrow's tea & sunday's but now it has to be done today, how irritating!
In Germany there seem to be a lot of bank holidays, although not spread out in a very efficient manner, but I guess that's down to the church. Between New Year (which is bizarrely known as Silvester here, due to Saint Silvester who died on that date in 813) and Easter which can be quite late, there are no bank holidays here (although that doesn't bother me as much as it would if I were in paid work, I remember distinctly the 'free' days of holiday that were bank holidays) although living in the part of Germany that we do where the tradition of Karneval is still alive and kicking we get Rosenmontag as a bank holiday (42 days before Easter) first.
The bank holidays after Easter come in quick succession, May 1 (tag der arbeit) Christihimmelfahrt (my favourit name which translates perfectly - christ,heaven,travel = ascension day of course!) Pfingsten (Whitsun) Fronleichnam (another neat translation, happy,dead,day = corpus christi!) then we come to tomorrow's more recent addition to the bank holiday calender, Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German reunification day).
They mighn't move the bank holidays around here but what they do like to do is tag extra days onto them, 'bridging days' as they're known. So if a bank holiday falls on a Thursday or a Tuesday you tend to get the day between it and the weekend off too, gratis, which is neat, especially as on bridging days offices & schools and the like are shut but shops and the normal stuff of life continues.
However this is not the case tomorrow, when everything will be shut up and it will be pretty much like Sunday is here (but I'm sure I shall want to talk about the German institution of Sunday in another blog...)
This year is 20 years since the Berlin wall came down, 20 years since reunification started, so there's bound to be lots going on...shall have to listen out for the fireworks on Saturday evening!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
alles auto
Today is the first of October and so very soon I have to have the winter tyres put on my car, they're supposed to be on the car O to O (Oktober to Ostern = easter) they're for a reason, clearly, giving a bit more grip on roads made slippery by wet leaves, rain, ice, snow etc. but I do hate them! Although last winter, when a particularly heavy snow fall hung around for a week and our local roads resembled an ice rink, I did feel a lot safer in the knowledge that my car was grippier than it would have been in similar conditions in the UK.
I love nice cars and currently have to drive an eminently practical, black Toyota Corolla Verso, which in summer with its alloys on and when clean & polished (i.e fresh from Mr Wash - do you seriously think I'd do that myself?) it looks ok, not head turningly wow, but ok...
It's by no means the car of my dreams (that would have to have a soft top at least, which I personally have never owned (although Simon did have a Lotus Elise for a couple of years) my favourite cars that I've owned would include a Tigra and an old style Mini Cooper) but the Toyota does the job that it needs to.
It has the space for a family of 4 plus a large dog, and the ability to pop 2 extra seats up out of nowhere on the many times in the year that we have visitors (who clearly have to be taken to & from the airport and entertained during their stay). All the rear seats can even be folded completely flat so that you have a big space to transport rubbish to the tip.
So, a hugely practical but very dull car!
Soon to be even duller for 6 months....and winter tyres aren't even something you can opt out of (although you can do them with alloys but then apparently the salt on the roads knackers them) if you were to have an accident during O to O and the Police deem it to be your fault and you didn't have winter tyres on then your insurance wont pay up...
So winter tyres and a boring as f*** car for 6 months it is then!
Mind you I get my revenge - I refuse to wash it, why bother when it looks so ugly and anyway what's a bit of dirt (although if it's the nasty salty road dirt then I guess I should get it washed off to protect the paintwork)? This probably winds up my neighbours dreadfully (Germans are terribly opinionated about EVERYTHING so they're bound to see the state of my car and to mind) because you see, Germans (generally) keep their cars spotlessly clean, every weekend they wash them, and this is no easy on the drive job, oh no, you're not supposed to do that here, because of the detergent being nonbiodegradable or something, so everyone troops off to the carwash at the weekends (great long queues).
Germany is often considered to be the birthplace of the car industry (which as a Brit, who grew being educated about Stephenson's Rocket & Rolls Royce, living just down the road from Longbridge and Landrover is quite galling) but I guess with Benz & Daimler both born in southern Germany only 1 year apart and going on to produce such historic vehicles I should allow that birthright.
In Germany the car industry is one of the largest employers producing up to 10 million cars/year over half of which are exported, so cars are important to Germans for financial reasons as well as aesthetic ones, because while it is often said that an Englishman's home is his castle, I believe that a German's car is his castle!
I love nice cars and currently have to drive an eminently practical, black Toyota Corolla Verso, which in summer with its alloys on and when clean & polished (i.e fresh from Mr Wash - do you seriously think I'd do that myself?) it looks ok, not head turningly wow, but ok...
It's by no means the car of my dreams (that would have to have a soft top at least, which I personally have never owned (although Simon did have a Lotus Elise for a couple of years) my favourite cars that I've owned would include a Tigra and an old style Mini Cooper) but the Toyota does the job that it needs to.
It has the space for a family of 4 plus a large dog, and the ability to pop 2 extra seats up out of nowhere on the many times in the year that we have visitors (who clearly have to be taken to & from the airport and entertained during their stay). All the rear seats can even be folded completely flat so that you have a big space to transport rubbish to the tip.
So, a hugely practical but very dull car!
Soon to be even duller for 6 months....and winter tyres aren't even something you can opt out of (although you can do them with alloys but then apparently the salt on the roads knackers them) if you were to have an accident during O to O and the Police deem it to be your fault and you didn't have winter tyres on then your insurance wont pay up...
So winter tyres and a boring as f*** car for 6 months it is then!
Mind you I get my revenge - I refuse to wash it, why bother when it looks so ugly and anyway what's a bit of dirt (although if it's the nasty salty road dirt then I guess I should get it washed off to protect the paintwork)? This probably winds up my neighbours dreadfully (Germans are terribly opinionated about EVERYTHING so they're bound to see the state of my car and to mind) because you see, Germans (generally) keep their cars spotlessly clean, every weekend they wash them, and this is no easy on the drive job, oh no, you're not supposed to do that here, because of the detergent being nonbiodegradable or something, so everyone troops off to the carwash at the weekends (great long queues).
Germany is often considered to be the birthplace of the car industry (which as a Brit, who grew being educated about Stephenson's Rocket & Rolls Royce, living just down the road from Longbridge and Landrover is quite galling) but I guess with Benz & Daimler both born in southern Germany only 1 year apart and going on to produce such historic vehicles I should allow that birthright.
In Germany the car industry is one of the largest employers producing up to 10 million cars/year over half of which are exported, so cars are important to Germans for financial reasons as well as aesthetic ones, because while it is often said that an Englishman's home is his castle, I believe that a German's car is his castle!
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