Monday, November 14, 2011

Disorienting Seasons

I don’t like October. When I was at school, it was a long way since the Summer holidays, and a long way until Christmas. At work, it’s a long way between bank holidays, and near the end of the leave year, so you have no spare time to take off. Back in the UK the weather is just meh. By that I mean that it is not a nice Autumn generally, and nor do you get the advantages of Winter, those being the nice crisp mornings, with frost or snow, and a very pretty scene out of the window. Generally, October is grey, in the UK, literally, in more southern places metaphorically.

 Ambivalent grey weather is not something that is a problem here. There is no doubt what the weather is feeling over here. Take the last two days – both started nicely, but by mid-Afternoon there were the most epic thunderstorms, combined with biblical rain. By the evening, it was back to the clear skies and balmy evenings.

Of course, now it isn’t actually October anymore. And the shops over here are somewhat similar to those in the UK. Now that Halloween is over, they fill the space vacated by the witches outfits, by Christmas stuff.

Now this is really quite disorienting for me. So, in the UK, I would feel a little Christmasy by dint of being cold. Having been cold we can warm up by doing Christmasy things, like drinking mulled wine, sitting by open fires, eating roasted meats. Over here, I’m still wearing shorts whenever I can.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Tired......

You’ll have to forgive the tardiness of this post. The reason is primarily due to work – and the manicness of the past few weeks. Take last week – I was on a training course Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday I had a full day quality management review, which continued into Thursday morning, then I had three meetings and a presentation on Thursday afternoon and Friday. I also prepared a tender in overtime. In the past month I have worked on two projects in Vietnam, three in Singapore, and one in Jakarta, and worked on proposals in Nepal, Oman and the rest of Indonesia. I think we can all agree that I’ve been busy. The Dodgess, has equally been busy, if not more so trying to cram a lot of music administration support into what time exists around what is a rather full time job. 

The result is that I have almost nothing of real excitement to talk about. Or perhaps I’m just too tired to think about writing anything much.

We are still in the process of sorting out our flat. We have made some progress – we have a bit more furniture after this afternoon, including some seats, and some more countertop in the kitchen. We still have one disgraceful room that I daresay we will try and sort out before the family arrive in a couple of months time. We may even have somewhere for them to sleep!

One of the things that needs to be sorted in the disgrace room are CDs. Friends of mine have recently spoke lovingly about combining her CD collection with her husband’s – about how fun it was to see what had become a joint collection get built from the individual versions.

Whilst it is exciting to think about a joint collection, organising and sorting it, is not such a prospect. Yes - we have loads of CDs. But they are in a mess. Mine have no boxes (ok – they do, but they are in the UK). The Dodgess’ have boxes, well some of them do. Other boxes exist without the CD. A result of trailing the box-free around the world as a student. I have already spent a few hours sorting them, with only some success, and I guess a few more hours is required. This is before I perhaps think about getting the boxes for my CD over, and reuniting some of them.

We have a few days in Hong Kong coming up – hopefully that we re-charge our batteries. We decided that we should go there because although I’ve been twice, I’ve never really been outside of hotels. I think I ought to get out!