Blog 4.0

As mentioned in my last post , we stayed at a friend's place for the past week, up in Wales. And honestly, it was one of the nicest holidays I've had in a while. It's rare that I get to switch off so completely - when I visit my mother I still have to think about her wants and needs as a priority, and when I just have time off at home, I still have all the usual everyday considerations to keep track of - how much food is in the fridge, whether it's time to do laundry etc. This past week I truly didn't have to think about any of that; we just did the bare minimum of planning (e.g. when going to a shop together, we'd talk about what food we'd want to buy) and I went for hours without even looking at the clock. It was so nice. We weren't completely lazy either - though most days were quite chill, we went to the beach more than once, visited Cardiff Castle and watched the solar eclipse together. Our friend had thoughtfully ordered a bunch of special eclips...

I've been washing my dishes by hand for more than sixteen years now. At first I didn't mind it too much, but as the years have gone by I've increasingly soured on this particular chore. Part of it was that whenever we visited someone else, everyone and their mother seemed to have a dishwasher, reminding me of what I'd left behind. However, the bigger part of my frustration was probably that my husband developed chronic back pain and (justifiably) noped out of doing the dishes ever again, leaving it to me at all times, even when he was on holiday and I was working - meaning I still had to also do the dishes at the end of a tiring work day, and I hated it. I started talking about getting a dishwasher and was always shot down with the argument that "the landlords would never agree to getting the plumbing for that in", which was probably true, but I couldn't help being wistful about it. The other day I was watching a Technology Connections video about dishwas...

I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

 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...

It was good to visit my Mum for a week. After the whole scare with the cardiac arrhythmia (which is still not resolved, just temporarily on hold), I was worried that I'd find her much worse than when I had last seen her in April, but she didn't seem that different. She had just developed a sudden fear of stairs and hills, as she said that any sort of climb made her feel incredibly exhausted and unwell. Though we did go up one steep road together eventually, and she realised it wasn't actually that bad when it wasn't 30+ degrees out (no duh). I also got to visit the garden one more time and it was very bittersweet. I picked up a couple of keepsakes, but it was weird to think that I likely won't see the place again. I could definitely understand why my mother made her decision though, because seeing her and seeing even the comparatively tiny amount of work that was still to do in late September, such as picking up fallen pears, raking leaves etc., it was still clear...

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...