Blog 4.0

I'm visiting my mother for a week again, specifically to spend tomorrow's Mother's Day with her in person. She's doing alright and we're getting along. It's also been a really good opportunity for me to recharge though. For several months now, I've felt like my brain is constantly in overdrive, between keeping track of tasks at work, doing chores around the house in a timely manner and ticking boxes in multiple MMOs every day. Here, my only real "responsibility" is to ask my mother whether there's anything she wants to do today and to make myself available if she needs help with anything, but otherwise I pretty much just get to eat, sleep and chill. It almost makes me feel like a different person in a way. I'm more serious, without the cute affectations I share with my husband, and I just feel like I have a lot more time to think. It's a kind of mental cleansing that's good to have every now and then I believe. More than ten years a

Processing my feelings about my co-worker Al's death has turned out to be somewhat strange. He started work at the company about two months before I did, so we worked together for the better part of ten years. However, we didn't work in the same department, and I never got to know him beyond work either. In fact, whenever we interacted it often struck me that we were polar opposites in many ways. He was outgoing, stylish, and apparently an absolute riot at parties, while I'm a mousy introvert who's not great at socialising. While our interactions were always friendly, I never really felt that we "vibed" - which is totally fine, by the way. When we got the news of his passing though, I cried. It was just an awful situation all around, plus my waterworks get going quite easily - you bet they were going to do their thing when something of this magnitude happens! I was sitting next to another co-worker who was pretty much best friends with Al and was naturally hit

I had only been in the office for about ten minutes today when our manager asked me and everyone else who was already in to join him in the nearest meeting room. When a member of HR I came in, I remember thinking "wow, this must be important to actually have a member of HR physically present" - what I didn't expect, what none of us expected, was to be told that the head of another department we work with had passed away over the weekend. He was only 42 years old and perfectly healthy for all anyone knew; his wife just suddenly found him dead in his bed. They have a little daughter as well. It was shocking and upsetting to all of us. The colleague sitting next to me exclaimed "What? We just messaged each other on Friday about how we were going to see each other today!" before bursting into tears. I didn't know him that well personally, but he'd been in the company for as long as I have, so we'd effectively been working together for almost ten years. H

A week ago, my husband and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary... by being sick with a cold together. In sickness and in health and all that, I guess. It feels kind of wild to me that we've already been married for that long. I think the fact that about half of that time was spent at home with restrictions to going out due to the pandemic kind of warped our perception of time a bit. Altogether, we've been a couple for more than ten years now. And I'm pleased to say that I'm still excited to see him in the evenings. I remember in my twenties I was a bit worried for a while that something was wrong with me, because all my romantic relationships, regardless of how earnestly I felt about them, would eventually fizzle out around the three-year mark. I was wondering whether I was just incapable of maintaining interest in a relationship for longer than that. But no, it turns out I just hadn't met the right guy yet... or reached the right age myself. Because I defini

I saw this show get mentioned in a few places and was intrigued by the art style I saw in the screenshots. On investigating a bit more, I learned that it contained a lot of swearing, cartoon violence and was generally very hyper, none of which are usually things I particularly like. But then I heard that it was also a musical , with two proper songs per episode? Finally, I came across a review that basically spoiled the entire plot, but weirdly that only made me want to watch it more, as it sounded really cool and I wanted to see how it all played out in the show. And oh my god, I absolutely loved it! So much that I immediately had to watch it a second time after finishing. Plus I've been listening to a bunch of the songs pretty much on repeat since then, particularly Hell Is Forever , Stayed Gone , Respectless and Hell's Greatest Dad . Seriously, how did I not find out about this any earlier, considering the pilot's been around for years? It also cracks me up that I ended

A new meeting appears on my work calendar, called "short business announcement", hosted by the CEO and with everybody invited. These always make me uneasy, because while the CEO is a nice guy, big business announcements are rarely good news for the little people. They almost always bring change, and change often means redundancies. Then again, it really is a short meeting, only fifteen minutes. If it was something that big, it would be longer. I try to think of what else it could be. There's a certain contradiction in it being short (and therefore seemingly not that important) and yet it also requiring the CEO to speak to the whole business. Maybe someone important is leaving or changing roles and there'll be a little speech about it? Seems unlikely that it would be the CEO himself, announcing his own impending departure. My mind wanders to the next most important and senior person I can think of, our department manager, and I briefly recoil in horror at the thought o

Late in the evening, my husband decides to open a Christmas card we found on our doorstep that day. He suggests that the handwriting looks like that of his best friend, who was best man at our wedding five years ago. As he pulls the card out of its envelope, it reveals a cutesy drawing of a cat and the words "Meowy Christmas" - oh yes, that's definitely from him (he has a cat and is quite a cat lover). When my husband opens the card, it starts playing a song... several slightly out of tune voices singing a Christmas carol, but every word is "meow" . We spend several minutes laughing as it gets louder and louder and more voices join the chorus. Eventually, it finishes and starts over. He folds the card and puts it back down, but... it doesn't stop. Slight panic sets in as we try to figure out what's wrong. Did we not close it properly? Is there a tab you need to pull to make it stop? Is it just broken? As the loud meowing continues, my husband declares th

 I put up a shelf for the first time yesterday and I'm ridiculously proud of myself. I've never been what you'd call a "handy" person, and I wasn't encouraged to be one either as anything to do with power tools and the like was considered "men's work" in my family. When I moved out, I always lived in rented accommodation and wanted to avoid making any permanent modifications to the property. While we're still renting right now, we've also lived in the same flat for almost a decade and the letting agency basically doesn't give a damn, so we figured we shouldn't let that prevent us from doing minor things like putting nails in the walls. The inspiration for the shelf came from a plant that I brought over from Austria as a sapling in April this year and which has been growing like crazy here in England. I used to keep it on the windowsill, but it's just become so big that it was spilling everywhere. A small shelf on the kitchen w

Just taking some notes on a few more shows that I watched on Netflix. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power A friend made me watch the first three seasons of this show a few years ago when I was visiting her. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, but of course I then went back home, which meant no more Netflix. It made sense to now rewatch what I'd seen before and then find out how the story wrapped up. I'd say the animation is only mid-tier, but the music is great and it's a lovely story overall - primarily aimed at a young audience for sure with how cheerful and full of rainbows it is, but still not without depth either. For example it probably has the biggest raising of stakes I've ever seen in a kid's show, going from "just fighting some bad guys here in this fantasy land" to dealing with a galactic emperor looking to wipe out whole civilizations in the space of only a few episodes. Catra's characterisation in particular was surprisingly deep, sho

I got an email this morning, notifying me that the website sms.at will be shutting down at the end of the year. The title stated that it was "the end of an era" (in German) and that certainly seemed apt. My profile on sms.at was one of the very first online accounts I ever created, all the way back in October 2001. That's 22 years ago now, when I had only just turned 18! I used the site both to send free text messages (something that seems very quaint now in the age of many "unlimited texts" plans, but back then it was useful) and for its free webmail. I had my "official" email account provided by my ISP, and the sms.at webmail for more frivolous purposes such as registering for random websites. I can't say I'm surprised that they're shutting down; to be honest I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did, considering they didn't seem to have much of a business model. I also effectively stopped using the site several years ago, as