Dublin time lapse video

Here's a really cool video that shows some of the better side of my home town. 

Dublin time lapse in black and white

Food

Still not weight-watchering but trying to make more of an effort to eat properly again.  I cooked the chickpeas on Sunday so that I could make this chickpea salad, forgetting that I had no parsley or lemons and then realising that the few tomatoes I had were nearly too far gone to be very appetising.  So I cooked the tomatoes with some onions on Monday evening, threw in a small tin of duck rillettes (that I bought at a christmas market in France in December) to be fancy and had that with some pasta instead.  Heated up most of the rest of it for dinner on Tuesday as well and then yesterday took a slightly longer lunch so that I could make it to the market and back.  So with tomatoes and parsley now on board, I finally did get to have my chickpea salad yesterday evening for dinner.  And today for lunch.  With just enough left over for a good lunch tomorrow too.  I really love this recipe.  The first few times I made it I wasn't fussy about adding parsley, which I think tends to be over-used and over-rated but it actually does make a nice difference in this dish.

So today, I had a nice bowl of porridge for breakfast (the summer has disappeared again and we're back to mid-teen temperatures).  Then chickpea salad for lunch.  I've taken some beef out of the freezer to cook in a tomato sauce when I get back home and I will have some of that with a bread roll for dinner.  And some salad if I decide I feel like washing it.

I have had an unplanned Snickers bar in the internet cafe but all in all I'm not unhappy with how the day has gone.  How much easier these things are when you don't have to fit work in around them.  It's a bank holiday here today.  I've gotten just enough housework done to make me feel like I may make some progress at the weekend.  I bought five punnets of strawberries (€8) at the market as well and want to make some fruit leathers.  I have some things to take care of outside the house on Saturday morning but once I'm home all I need to do is hoover the floors and I will be free to spend some time in the kitchen.

Sunday

I really didn't want to do anything at all today.  Could have quite happily spent the entire day in bed.  I had a full day choir rehearsal in a nearby town yesterday which was quite exhausting but I felt okay.  This morning I felt like I was starting to come down with a cold again.  I will be very, very annoyed if that happens.  It probably didn't help that after a lovely sunny day yesterday (most of which I spent inside looking out at), today is grey, drizzly and cold enough to require going back to heavier trousers, socks and a jacket.  I did finally manage to drag myself out of bed, did some washing up, put the chickpeas on to cook (so happy that I remembered to leave them soaking last night) and spent some time on the phone to my sister in Oz. 

A friend had a stall for her clothes shop (lovely stuff, anyone in Dusseldorf and with money to spend on clothes, I highly recommend checking out Bittersüß) at a larger event today and I had promised to make an appearance at some stage.  That forced me to drag myself out and it was probably good that I did, even though I really didn't want to.  Before I left though I cleaned the grill from my barbeque, which we used for our annual barbeque last weekend.  All the people from my building were invited to an evening barbeque in the inner courtyard - unfortunately only three people who actually live there turned up but with the ten or so people working in or otherwise connected to the three businesses that are in the ground floor of the building, it was a nice group and a fun evening.  But although I did manage to schlep the barbeque back down to the cellar the following day, the grill had been hanging around my bathroom waiting to be cleaned (kitchen sink isn't big enough so it has to be done in the bath.  So pleased to have done it now.  And I even brought it straight back down to the cellar as well as two boxes I needed to get out of the sitting room as well.  It's not much in terms of what I should have gotten done today but it's a couple of niggly things that could easily have taken me months more to get to so it's all good.

Rhabarberbarbara

Found this great little video on youtube.  Apologies to those of you who don't speak German, just posting it so I can come back and find it later. :)

What can I say?  I'm easily amused.

How to make Worcestershire sauce

Mark and Bruce posted a recipe for Worcestershire sauce recently and I, true to form, am taking a few weeks to get around to trying it out at home.  I have choir rehearsal all day next Saturday so it's likely that I won't be able to get to the spice shop until the week after.  I have a few days off towards the end of June so I am putting it in my diary for then.  Anyone care to join in on a cook-along?

Let's get started again so

I miss blogging.  I miss writing stuff out of myself.  Need to get started with it again, not least in an effort to regain a bit of sanity in my life.  Still struggling a bit with a lot of emotion and trying not to let it pull me under.

I had something of an epiphany with regard to my impulses over the last few months to buy, buy, buy more and more stuff - most of which I have resisted, but it was puzzling me a bit where it was all coming from.  I know part of it was the prospect of being potentially debt-free soon and therefore having more disposable income available.  But that's not the whole story.

I've come to realise that most of the stuff I want to buy is househould related which eventually led me to the realisation that actually, I just don't feel at home where I live.  This has nothing to do with not liking the place I'm living in and everything to do with the fact that I haven't made it into a home.  I feel like I don't know how to and that is what I am going to have to work on now.

Part of the issue stems from having lived in rented places for so long.  In Ireland, unlike Germany, the vast majority of places are rented furnished, with rarely even enough space to fit in a bookshelf of your own.  So you just live with what someone else has chosen.  In Germany, of course, you quite literally have to bring the kitchen sink with you.  When you move in somewhere you get bathroom fittings (sink, toilet and bath/shower) and that is it.  You bring your own lights with you, your own furniture, your own kitchen.  Partly because I didn't have a lot of money and partly because I like the idea of re-using when possible, I bought mostly second-hand furniture as and when I had the money and whenever I saw something that looked vaguely suitable and so I am again living in the kind of place that is just like any rented place in Ireland - a mish-mash of different stuff, practical but not necessarily aesthetically pleasing or well thought out.  And yet I don't think I have one piece of furniture that I would like to get rid of.

Essentially the problem is that I do want to live in a place that expresses my personality.  And something more than the chaos that has been much of my personality the last few years.  The real core of myself, I suppose (although putting it like that seems a bit of a tall order for furniture to fulfil).  Of course, figuring out what that is and what it looks like when translated into furnishings and decorations isn't all that easy to do.  Hence the temptation to just buy more and more stuff - completely buying into the "look how great your life would be if only your home looked like this" mindset.

It's going to take me a while to get there but understanding where it is I sort of want to get to and why is a good start.  So after all that I did make a purchase - 20 frameless  photo frames.  I started to do this when I lived in a house in Ireland where, unusually, we were allowed to hang some of our own paintings and photos.  I put up about ten of my favourite photos.  After moving here I added a few to that number and hung them on the wall above where I put my desk.  And there I stopped.   But the idea was to cover a large part of the wall with photos.  So while I was laid up sick with a cold a couple of weeks ago, I spent some time looking through the big box of photographs I have that have never made it into albums and took out some more that I would actually like to be looking at on a regular basis.  It's a small start but that's how every journey begins I suppose.

Just a quick one

There are six minutes and ten seconds left on the clock of this outrageously expensive web kiosk yoke in the hotel so this will just be a quick one, summing up some of the events since my last post.  Which will partly explain why I haven't posted much since then.  On Paddy's day I went out with some friends to celebrate.  First up was watching the rugby, then dinner, then back to the Irish pub for music.  Just before midnight I realised that someone had stolen my purse out of my handbag so the next two hours were spent sitting in the police station and phoning banks, etc. to cancel cards.  The fact that it happened in an Irish pub seems to have added insult to injury somehow.

Then I heard my uncle (also my godfather) was sick and the prognosis was for weeks rather than months left.  Three days later, still trying to decide whether to try and get home to see him (which would have meant putting flight on credit card) came the news that he had died.  So no more questions and I flew home for the funeral that weekend.  Back to Germany on Monday, straight into work from the airport and a hectic couple of days of quarter-end work to get through.  All done by Wednesday afternoon and feeling pretty good about how things had gone overall.  And then on Thursday morning got a text to tell me that my brother-in-law had died suddenly.  He was being treated for cancer but it was actually stroke as a side effect of one of the medications he was on that done him in (as Eliza Doolittle would say).  So I was back in Ireland on Saturday and the funeral was today.  I feel completely drained and have a morass of emotions inside me that I'm not entirely able to deal with at the moment.  Have just checked into the airport hotel as I have another seven o'clock flight in the morning before heading into work.  Since it's not quarter-end anymore though, I may just ring my boss and ask for the day off.  I had no funeral details when I saw her last so couldn't arrange anything.  It was a long time to wait for a funeral too but apparently you're not allowed have funerals on holy Thursday, good Friday, easter Saturday or easter Sunday.   Who knew.

So that's my life at the moment.  All of the flights and other expenses have obviously, given my lack of an emergency fund, gone straight onto the credit card, which add a whole other level of something or other to the whole thing.  But I wouldn't, couldn't have done it any other way and am glad that I live close enough that I can get back if I need to.  So am reconciled to probably not being debt free until the end of the year and will just have to work on dealing with all the rest of the emotion now. 

If anyone has been meaning to phone or visit someone and keeps putting it off, go and do it today!  You just don't know if there'll be a tomorrow.