Snowflake Storms

Hey there, I'm back! Mostly. I'm way too addicted to LJ and fandom to ever stop reading my friendslist but I've rediscovered the joys of being a lurker. Radio silence is really relaxing but it's also really boring so I think I'm done with it for now.

My thesis is handed in and all that's left to do is the colloquium to defend it on tuesday. I'm taking turns between being completely cool about it and being utterly terrified. Hopefully tuesday morning will fall into one of the completely cool phases.

What's keeping me in good spirits regardless is that I WILL BE IN ROME IN ONLY SIX MORE DAYS :DDD
And so far there haven't been any freak-outs about the flights, not even when I printed out my boarding passes today. I'm counting that as a major win!

( And now meet the newest member of my family )

My mom found out one of our neighbours had a litter of six jack russel puppies and there were two of them still without a home and they're one of her favorite breed of dogs. Needless to say, my brother and I encouraged her even though she barely needed encouraging and now we finally have a dog again :D

I'm a little sad we didn't get to name him, but he and his sibling were so old the neighbour had gotten tired of calling them "dog" all the time and he already kind of listens to his name. And he is completely adorable, loves to play and also loves napping on my lap after he tires himself out playing around ♥

I've started to get my shit together and did some actual work and I feel so much better about it already. Still vaguely terrified that I'll mess up somehow, but at least the sense of certain, inevitable doom is gone.

Also, apparently nothing makes me feel even better than spending lots of money in one go, so I ORDERED PLANE TICKETS AND I'M GOING TO ROME AND HANG OUT AND FINGERPAINT DRUNKENLY WITH nasssty_slyth IN OCTOBER :DDDDDDDD
JSYK, everyone better be prepared for two billion posts in which I freak out about flying. The last time I knew I had to step on a plane a couple of months in advance wasn't pretty /o\

In celebration, here's my favorite new pesto recipe, inspired by that roasted carrot salad from Smitten Kitchen.

( Roasted carrot and hazelnut pesto )

I arrived at my parents place yesterday and my mom and I got talking and then I had a chat with my dad and we decided that I'm going to move back in with them as soon as possible, for as long as it takes me to graduate and find a job. All my classes and exams are done, I was planning to stay mostly with them while I'm working on my thesis anyway and I'm almost certain that whatever job I eventually end up with won't be in Heidelberg so it makes sense to give up my apartment and save the rent.

I'm pretty excited to live closer to my friends again, even if it's just for a couple of months. And I'm so ridiculously relieved that I have at least the beginnings of a plan for the next few months. Thinking more than a few weeks ahead had been starting to freak me out and turn me into an anxious mess. I hate feeling like a failure because everyone else I know seems to have their future already planned out and everything ready to go.

Now I just have to hope that I'll manage to get out of my lease and find a new tenant for my apartment, preferably one that could be ready to move in by the beginning of august.

I'm back home from my field trip and I'm so tempted to just fall into bed now! The visit to SDL itself wasn't even that tiring, but the car trip involved was kinda exhausting. The entire autobahn between Heidelberg and Stuttgart seemed to be riddled with construction sites and then there was an accident somewhere as well and it took forever to get there.

In addition to that, our professor was riding with me, since I have the biggest car and could fit the taller people in our group more comfortably than the others. He's a really nice guy, and definitely my favorite out of all my professors, but I'm already bad at casual conversation and particularly not very talkative when I'm driving so it was a bit awkward to have him in the passenger seat for almost three hours!

I dropped all my passengers off at the parking lot right next to the turkish grocery store and took the chance to have a look around. They always have different interesting produce on sale. Since the vegetable compartment of my fridge is already bursting at the seams I restricted myself to a fresh artichoke. The last time I tried one was so long ago I couldn't remember anything about it at all.

The artichoke ended up in my thermomix and got steamed with some lemon and garlic in the water. I wasn't very impressed with the results though. The meat from the leaves was very bitter. I had a dip made from yogurt and vinaigrette that didn't go well with it at all. Just the plain meat tasted fairly bad too. It turned out to be ok salted and with a bit of my radish pesto though. The one part that was super tasty was the bottom of the artichoke, but if I ever want to have that again I think I'll go for the canned version instead of bothering with the rest.

Now, I feel like I haven't said a single fannish thing in weeks and that's just not on. Time for a couple of recs I think! Here's the last three things I saved to my delicious:

Weekend Wars by icyanahita Bandom, ensemble with various pairings, AU, ~25,000 words

For the Public Good by blamebrampton Harry Potter, Harry/Draco, 23,500 words

And Maybe by reni_days Bandom, Brendon/Spencer, 6,500 words

One more thing...splitting commenting between LJ and DW is annoying me more than I thought it would, so I'm switching to disabling comments on LJ and redirecting everything to DW for now. I figure pretty much everyone I talk to regularly has a DW account by now so it shouldn't be a problem.

I'M AN IDIOT OF EPIC PROPORTIONS D:D:D:

The Good: I did not have to write my law final today!

The Bad: I had to write my building automation final instead! Which I hadn't studied for AT ALL, not even for a second, because I though it was on monday /o\

The Okay-ish: I might have a chance of barely scraping by anyway on partial credit because the building automation prof did a lot of reviewing at the beginning of each class, so I wasn't 100% clueless and could answer at least parts of most questions. Time will tell :/

Also on the plus side, I now have two full extra days to study for law. Oh joy.

I just installed Moveable Type and Wordpress for my thesis blog \o/

I was embarrassed into finally starting today when a classmate asked how my blog was coming along and I had to admit I hadn't even installed the damn software. But now I have!

On first glance I already hate Moveable Type. The interface makes me want to punch things and I'm already running into problems just trying to view the first blog entry that's automatically generated during the installation. That is some serious fail right there, and I don't even have a clue if it's my fault or MT's.

Today was also my last day of class in Heidelberg before break. I can't believe how few classes we had between christmas break and now! It feels like I just got back after christmas yesterday. Now I only have two more days of class in Mannheim and finals in Mannheim left.

In other news: I have no will power at all. Not even a little bit. When I read the announcement that Pretty.Odd. is up for pre-order on vinyl I told myself I wouldn't need a copy because then my collection of vinyls would still only be up to 2, and that's not enough to justify cluttering my apartment up even more with a giant record player. Hahahahaha, as if I could resist! It was only 13$ too, OF COURSE I ORDERED IT /o\

On the other hand, I never did end up buying an actual CD copy of the album so at least I won't have to admit to owning it in triplicate or something equally lame.

So I had a meeting with my advisor today. I think I have a topic for my thesis?! And it's something I hadn't thought of before at all!?

Unless I change my mind within the next two weeks, I'll be developing a blog for the SUED's upcoming alumni platform.

Right now I'm poking around wordpress and moveable type and freaking out just a little bit. I don't even know what I got myself into yet and how I ended up there. But it's certainly going to be interesting!

And tomorrow I am finally going home for the holidays \o/
I really should have been cleaning my apartment and packing this afternoon. Instead I spent almost two hours on the phone with friends. Maybe someday I'll learn how to get my shit ready early instead of at the last possible second, but I fear it's not gonna be today. There's long fic waiting instead that sounds so much better than doing the dishes :)

Sometimes I think I need a nanny. It is so way past my bedtime, but I have dishes to wash and a bag to pack and a computer networking final at 8AM tomorrow.

Mostly I spend the entire day in a Panic at the disco haze. How did I ever manage to procrastinate so effectively before I had Youtube? I have no idea.

I did manage to drag myself to the university computer pool to finish some group project for monday. And I found out from my partner that the results of last friday's final were in and I PASSED! WHOOOOOOO :D
I did have the worst score (3,3 or about a C-) out of the entire class, but I find I can't really find it in me to care because I'm just so relieved to be DONE.

Ok, one more interview clip and then I'm finishing the dishes. Really!

ETA: Has lj been eating comments like crazy for anyone else today?

ALL DONE!

*crawls into bed*

Urgh, the gods of uni have not been smiling down on me this week and it's only monday.

( cut for excessive whining )