Why Trains Are My Favourite Means of Transportation…

One part of the assignment for the “Enviromental Education” course, which I completed last week, was to point out in which way children and teenager are raised as destined (car) drivers. I don’t want to bore you with my scholarly thoughts on that, but working on it made me once again realize that my upbringing in that regard was obviously rather unusual. My parents weren’t environmental activists who condemned all kinds of motorized transportation or anything. But as long as I can remember, in our family the car was just an ordinary means of transportation. Not some status symbol, not some sanctuary, not something to spend a lot of thought about. Just a means to get from A to B. My mom for instance never had a driver’s license. My dad would never have considered “cleaning and polishing the car” a overly important weekend activity.

Miscellaneous on October 25th, 2009

I actually wanted to post that entry even yesterday, but I somehow never got around to do it. When I got home Friday night I realized that I hadn’t posted that my mom was discharged already on Friday and back home again. I should have posted that right away, but I was so busy throughout the day. She was supposed to be discharged on Saturday (or even later), so on Friday morning it took some phonecalls and organization to have one of my brothers pick her up, but it worked and she was home before 11 AM.
I spent most of the day over at her place to catch up and be there if she needed me to take care of some stuff. It was also Bro3’s birthday, so there was cake :-) The rest of the day I spent working on my termpaper for a while and writing my Grey’s review, before I had to get ready for the very low-key birthday celebrations at Bro3’s favourite pub. We had a great time and I drank much more alcohol than usual, because Bro3 was paying. It’s true that it’s really risky, if you don’t have to pay for your own drinks, because you loose count. At least I did and even though I didn’t really drink that much or anything stronger than a “Radler” (a traditional German beer/soda mix), I was kind of drunk when I left. And we had a really great time. I just hated that my clothes and my hair smelled like I had spent the night sleeping in an ashtray. Why do I have to live in the only country without a effective smoking ban ?

All is well so far…

My mom is doing fine again. Tests have shown that it’s not a cardiac problem (like arrhythmias or blocked arteries again), but that her blood pressure sometimes is too high and sometimes too low and that it either spikes or drops without much warning or without obvious reason. She most probably has to change some of the meds she is already taking and the right medication and dosage still has to be determined. Nothing much is happening in a hospital on the weekend, so she most probably has to stay there for a couple of days. But all in all, she is doing fine. Thank God.

And once again…

I was just starting to read about Hai_di’s new “firebolt” :-), when my mom called me on the phone. She wasn’t feeling well (nausea, cardiac arrhythmia) and didn’t know what to do and asked me  to come over. Oh well… I went over there, talked to her, called the ambulance, all things my brothers who still (or momentarily again) live in the same house could have done. If she had let them, which she didn’t, because she wasn’t sure and…

On the phone with the emergency hotline the I was told not to be alarmed, if the ambulance came with siren and flashing beacons, because that’s just what they are supposed to. When I told that to my mom, she was slightly panicky, not because she was feeling worse, but because someone would make such a fuss about her. ARGH! Sometimes I really want to shake some sense into her.

Anyway, the doctors came, did some exams and her heart was still beaten irregularily, her blood pressure was up, so there wasn’t much else they could do then to get her admitted to a hospital to check things out. Unfortunately as a patient (or family of a patient) in an emergency you can’t choose which hospital you are taken to. Well, we could choose between the two nearest, but the one where my mom already had been before (heart attack, bypass) was not an option, because it’s farther away.

Bro2 and I drove to the hopsital later to get her some clothes and all and to see how she was doing. At the hospital she was doing fine again. Just like she did when she was admitted as an emergency in July. But she obviously was not doing well at home, I saw the state she was in, so it was a good thing she got to the hospital and they can do some more tests. It doesn’t seem to be anything serious, it might be something off with her elektrolytes, maybe some meds have to be changed a bit… So I don’t worry too much right now. I’ll still won’t turn off my cell phone at night. Just in case… Ugh, that’s the thing I hate most about this kind of medical emergencies. I don’t want to worry and I don’t really worry, but subconsiously of course I DO worry. At least a tiny bit

The Art of Procrastination

Probably everybody does it every once in a while. Spend time with all kinds of activities instead of doing the one thing that should be done. Like working on termpaper, which is due at the beginning of November. And/or work on other school stuff, which has to be done sooner or later. The funny thing is, once I actually can get myself to work on this termpaper, I actually enjoy doing so. Well, as much as you can “enjoy” working on school stuff :-) If it just weren’t so difficult to actually get started. There are just too many much more entertaining and distracting ways to spend my time before or even during I work on the paper.

Things like…

Can’t think of a decent headline for this…

I had the most relaxing vacation last week. And now just a couple of days after I got back home to my ordinary life I’m wanting to leave again, because my life is so boring and… well, unexciting. So was my vacation, but at least I relocated for that and I spend time in other surroundings and all that. One of the reasons I will take a break from the project365 for a while is that I feel that my every day life is restricted to this small and restricted part of the world, which is the same every day. The same places, the same roads, the same shops, the same just everything. I know it’s up to me to change that. To change my routine at least during my spare time. To go and visit different places. To just go and DO stuff. With all the election campaigning going on for the last few months and keeping me insanely busy I obviously forgot how to do other stuff. But there are so many things to do and places to visit, if just for an afternoon. I really should get off my lazy bum and do just that. I hopefully will on the weekend.  At least I’m planning to.

I still have to pick up working on my termpaper again. I got a good start during my vacation, but then there was the campaign and the election and having a hard time to come to terms with the outcome. And of course there also was work. And some other stuff like music and books and… :-)

2nd (and last) post from Norderney

I just blinked and my vacation is already almost over. Well, I still got until the ferry back to the mainland leaves at 3.30 PM tomorrow afternoon. I have to leave my room until 11 AM, which means I could still have the laptop plugged to the outletand charged, so I might be able to use it at one of the cafés around here. There even is one with a t-mobile hotspot. Yes, I did use the simple internet functions of my phone to look for that, when I couldn’t get online at the hotel and none of the staff felt inclined to feel responsible for at least trying to find out what might be the problem. I didn’t really expected them to fix it, but at least it would have been polite to offer to look into it. And not a “I don’t use the t-mobile hotspot to go online, so I don’t know what might be the problem” answer. There were a few other tiny details why this hotel and it’s staff wouldn’t get glowing reviews from me, but as it is not too expensive and really ok for the small amount I’m only paying per night, I shouldn’t complain. And I won’t. Not anymore, now that the WLAN is working again *g* It’s terrifying how easily I let myself get sucked back into the online world, once there is the possibility. Because I really really didn’t bring the laptop to be able to go online. I needed it to write my termpaper. And I did use it for that mostly. I can and did go online with my phone even though that’s basically restricted to view sites and not even all of them. It’s an old phone :-)
Anyway, I wasn’t really online that much during this vacation. A couple of minutes at the public internet terminal and 70 minutes so far via WLAN. Which sounds like a lot, but trust me it’s not. I only checked my replies at twitter, quickly browsed through some blogs and journals, checked the weather forecast, and the train schedules for my departure. And saved the updates on some of my favourite Grey’s fanfics, so I could read them offline. I only checked my yahoo mails, because that’s basically all the fandom and blogosphere related stuff and not once checked my offical or even work-related mails. Because I am officially on vacation :-)

Miscellaneous, 2009/09/14

I’m seriously considering to turn on the heating, which I am reluctant to do every September, because it means summer is finally over. I’ll be leaving my apartment in 45 minutes, so I’ll refrain from turning the heating on, but I already now I will turn it on tomorrow afternoon, because that’s the first weekday afternoon / evening in a while, which I will be spending at home. Cleaning and (probably most of all) just relaxing. I have to take my DVR back to the shop to have it send back to Panasonic and I hope they still can fix what’s broken with the DVD player unit for a reasonable price. I don’t want to imagine the future weeks without my DVR. Maybe one of my brothers has got a spare DVD player so I can finally start to watch West Wing again. Not to talk about all the other stuff I prefer to watch on the TV and not on my computer screen. It’s just not the same…

° ° ° ° ° ° ° °

There is not really much to write about at the moment (well, has there ever been during the last few months *sigh*)? I had a busy week last week, but part of that was a wonderful meeting with some old friends on Saturday and going to my first regular game of the Cologne Sharks this season. I had some trouble getting there (stupid train company. And stupid me for not checking in advance if there were some delays / interruptions). The game was ok, but they played against the weakest team of the whole league, so they actually should have won it easily. But they didn’t. They had to have a shoot out in the end. Which they won at least. Anyway, it was great to be back at the arena, watching the guys play and they did so much better than last season, which was the worst season I have experienced since I became a fan 10 years ago.

Miscellaneous, 2009/09/09

I guess complaining about my busy life would be old news by now. At least today is a free evening for me and I should really use that to write a hopefully decent blog post. I feel kind of bad for not writing, even though there isn’t so much interesting stuff to write about. But still… it feels weird to fill the blog with a weekly project365 post only. Maybe doing Miscellaneous posts every once in a while will get my writing muse return :-)

° ° ° ° ° ° ° °

The Game On Diet is working out great for me so far even though last week was kind of a letdown. I lived by the rules more diligent than in the first week and got a lot more points than in the first week. I lost 3.5 lb in the first week, and almost another 2 lb in the beginning of the second week. But than I had Quesadillas Queso + a white caffe moccha for my “meal off” and gained some weight again. And I took the day off for a wedding and gained some more, even though I didn’t indulge at all. *sigh* At the end of the second week I weighed just as much as at the end of the first, which meant that I lost my alcohol privilege (the permission to drink alcohol on your day off or during your meal off). I don’t really mind that alcohol prohibition much, but of course I also didn’t get any bonus points (for 1% weight loss) last week and that really sucked. I felt so bad for my teammate, because she had a great score and than I had to mess it up :-(
But at least I’m doing great this week so far and once again lost some more. I’m already in the stage where the feeling of wearing certain clothes changes :-) I had a couple of jeans which did not fit perfectly anymore, but were a bit too tight. They fit wonderfully now. I really noticed the change when I put on my sweatpants and t-shirt in the gym this afternoon, because those pants definitely fit more loosely than before. It felt good :-)

Life’s Like A Jump Rope

For almost a week I’m planning to write this blog post and never got around to do it. I was either too busy or too tired to actually write it. I hate being too busy or too tired to blog. Not that I have a lot to write about at the moment except moping about how stressful my life is, but I’d still like to be able to at least write about that. I hope that part of the stress will be over tomorrow, even though I already thought the stress would lighten on several occasions before now and that never happened. But I don’t want to give up hope anyway :-)
The past weeks have kept me busy with our Green election campaign, but the local elections are finally going to take place in my federal state tomorrow, so all of this work is done. Hopefully with a good result for us, but I really can’t make any prediction yet. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow evening to know how it all turned out for us. We only get a short break, well no break actually, because we have to keep campaigning for the federal elections at the end of September. But that’s not going to be such a workload than the local campaign. All of it will still keep me busy at work as well, but I’m still confident hopeful that the stress will lighten a bit after tomorrow. It just has to.