Blog 4.0

I created an online savings account with the Post Office this morning. Somewhat to my surprise, they didn't even send me any sort of "thanks for signing up with us" confirmation email. My user ID was a randomly generated number, and I found myself getting logged out of my very first session unexpectedly. When I tried to log in again, it became evident that my browser had not saved my login details, and I had no other record of them, meaning that I had to ring up their support hotline a mere ten minutes after account creation to ask them what my user ID was. Also, when I tried to put some money into the new account via my regular provider's banking app, it popped up with something like three different fraud warnings ( Are you sure this person is who they say they are? Well, it's me...), to the point that it made me feel insecure about sending money to myself . Not as smooth a process as I had hoped.

The UK's now had two weeks of unusually nice weather, with lots of sun and the temperature hovering around 24 degrees Celsius during the day. It's super pleasant and I rarely feel like an outsider as much as during times like these, because all the natives do is complain about how it's "too hot", which just feels insane to me at these temperatures. In myself, I noticed that all the warmth and sunshine are making me feel much happier and energetic than usual, and I'm not even a particularly outdoorsy person. It's just nice to not have to wrap myself into three layers at all times to not feel cold, which I get to experience so rarely nowadays. (I've become more sensitive to cold with age, and probably suffer from sort of undiagnosed condition related to circulation, as I often have to wear fingerless gloves indoors to prevent my hands from getting so cold they hurt, even when I can objectively tell with the rest of my body that the temperature is not unr

One of the things that motivated me to finally create this blog (aside from my birthday) was getting news from my elderly mother that she's planning to sell our little garden. This has made me very sad, and I really wanted to vent about it somewhere. Growing up in Vienna in the 80s, my family spent its summers in our "Kleingarten" - this literally translates to "little garden" though I commonly see it translated as "allotment". I'm not sure whether that captures the meaning entirely , because it wasn't just a place to grow plants; it also contained a tiny house with minimal amenities, which essentially served as a lower middle class family's summer retreat. My family never went on holidays abroad - instead we'd spend the two months of Austrian summer holidays in this garden house every year. To be clear, there wasn't anything luxurious about this setup. As I said, the house was very minimal; just a place to sleep at night and take s

I learned to read at age four, and by the time I was officially taught in school how to write at age six, that wasn't entirely new to me either. I took to writing like a fish to water and soon did a lot of it, just for fun. I believe I started my very first diary at age seven or so - I still remember that it was what you might call a "proper" diary, with a hard cover and a little padlock, though I didn't maintain it for long. As a teenager I kept a diary in a bunch of plain notebooks over the course of several years, until I got my own PC and transitioned to digital, first just on my hard drive, then on the internet. My longest-running diary was on Livejournal, where I posted for thirteen consecutive years. That blog still exists, and sometimes I think that reading it back could provide potentially fascinating insights into what past me thought about life in her early twenties, but then I remember all the random drivel I produced for years just to keep my daily postin