Sunday night chit-chat

When at the market yesterday I caught sight of these coconut macaroons.  I usually try to just block out the fact that the people who sell dairy also run a bakery at their farm but this week I saw these and couldn't resist.  I didn't look properly though because look at the size of it!  It could easily have been shared by four, it was nearly the size of my fist (and I don't have dainty hands!).  Not having three people around to share it with I gamefully managed it on my own.  It took me nearly four hours, two cups of tea and a glass of water to do it, though.

So anyway, on to some Sunday night chit-chat.  If you care to join in, just head over to Half-Dozen Daily to link up.

What are you:

Reading

Mostly blogs.  Have been catching up on the archives of two fairly new-to-me blogs, Absolutely Sweet Chaos and Head over Heels in Debt.  I did finish The Master and Margarita though and next up is finishing Die grosse Liebe for German book club and reading Atonement for English book club.

Watching

I watched the pilot for Beauty and the Beast yesterday which had me searching for and watching the pilot for the 80's series it is loosely based on.  I used to enjoy that but had never seen the beginning of it.  Am going to watch another couple of episodes of the new one shortly.

Listening to

Not much at the moment, just the clock ticking, the sound of the keyboard and the occasional car outside.  While I was reading blogs today I had a couple of albums running on my MP3 player, including the newest on from the Battenkill Ramblers, which I somehow missed the release of in January.  I've actually had one of their songs as my resident earworm this week but have consistently been too lazy to get up and dig out the CD it's on to listen to (thereby guaranteeing driving myself mad because of not being able to remember all the lyrics) so it was nice to just have this album a click away.  How sad is that!

Baking/cooking

Nothing much.  I heated up the second last portion of turkey and orange hotpot from the freezer, topped with cubes of bread, also from the freezer, earlier but apart from that, my ginourmous coconut macaroon meant absolutely no need to bake anything at all.

Happy you accomplished this week

I ordered and received a new SIM card for my phone.  For some inexplicable reason, I got a text message a few months ago saying that my SIM card would be invalid after 1 April.  I had been putting off getting a smartphone because I didn't want the bother of switching numbers so thought I should use this as an opportunity to finally make the move to a smartphone.  If you sign up for a two-year contract, you can usually just pay a small fee (about 20 euro) and then the rest of the cost of the phone is built into your monthly plan.  I actually did do some research, trying to figure out web use on a phone and all that kind of thing.  And in the end I bought a pre-pay card to put into my existing basic phone.  But, I did make sure before buying it that I can simply add on a data-plan at any stage and therefore switch it into a smartphone without having to switch numbers again.  It cost me 9.95 to get the card which give me 10 euro of credit to start with.  Except that it came with 20.  Not sure how that happened and am happy to pay another 10 if they come looking for it.  I also got an additional 5 euro credit as an online acquaintance uses the same provider and had an offer to "win" new customers, getting 5 euro for each of us.  So far I am very happy.  I had a response to my email questions within a couple of hours and the card was delivered within two days of my ordering it.  It's a card from one of the local supermarkets (Edeka) and runs on one of the better networks and the data plan that I can add for a flatrate 10 euro per month offers 500MB of data, which is more than most of the others I looked at.  And, even better, I don't even have to go to the supermarket to top-up, I can do it online.

Oh, and I added fancy percentage bars to my blog to track my savings.

Looking forward to next week

The weekend!  I know that seems like wishing my life away but it's quarter-end billing next week and because of tomorrow being a holiday, we'll be on another cycle that's a day shorter than normal.  I expect mega-stress this week.  Actually, because I've been out sick and then trying to catch up so much over the last few months, I still have a small amount of filing to do from last quarter end so I'm going to get up early tomorrow and go in (despite the bank holiday) and do that so that Tuesday is at least not spent trying to explain to the manager why she doesn't have last quarter's information on file.

Thankful for today

That the cold which started on Thursday seems to not be getting worse.  I have done almost nothing for the past three days and although that means I'm sitting looking at a filthy and messy house, I really couldn't handle getting badly sick again.  And who knows, getting up early to go to work for a couple of hours tomorrow might be just the spur I need to have a slightly active afternoon.  I may even get the ironing done.

Bonus question: Do you wear slippers around the house?
Yes.  In summer I have very light ones which have micro-fibre soles that dust your floors as you go.  They're quite fun but just not warm enough to wear in winter so I switch to nice wooly ones then.  My current ones are not going to last another winter but I have my eye on some nice felt ones for next winter.