Boats, bread and drink
by Pippa on April 29, 2012
Life is getting increasingly chaotic while Tim works on multiple projects with exploding computers, I learn German and try to build up my application portfolio with you know, pictures of plants and stuff. At some point we’re also meant to rescue Subak from her current mooring and take her up to Belgium to travel along canals and be presented in an exhibition in early June. And then in July comes a second wedding celebration which we don’t yet have a venue for. Yikes.
Oh, and did I mention that we’re renovating an actual proper boat of our own?
In late October last year Tim surprised me with a spontaneous early wedding present he’d found on Ebay.
We’ve been daydreaming about a small sailing boat that we could take for more extended trips than Tim’s old GRP (fibreglass) sailing dinghy Bumst (Shag in German). Something low keel, trailerable and suitable for a gaff rig. Cheap enough for the budgets of two creative types and with just a little bit of work we could do to bring the boat to a useful state.
Or so we thought. The Lisa-Marie who will eventually be renamed the Runcible Spoon is in many ways perfect and was purchased for a song, or at least the price of her trailer. A German trailer that needs to be tidied up for registration in Austria. A boat in need of a new cabin top, painting all over, pushpits (the metal bit at the front – think of the film Titanic), the installation of a mast Tim had built on a workshop the year earlier…
And we got started with patching and painting the hull, only to find bits of rotten wood where water had collected, and even worse, rotten bits of the deck…
Luckily the weather has now warmed up and we’ve been able to take her outside at Time’s Up where we have more space to work. Needless to say the boat is taking up a lot of free time and is very dirty work.
But otherwise… Things go on.
Bread and Fire
Yesterday was made memorable when I met two women from Antalya, Turkey who were making flatbreads over a coal fired oven in a tent by their family’s vegetable garden. This garden is one of my favourite in Linz as it’s maintained in a liminal space on the grounds of a concrete silo. I ride past it regularly and love seeing the growth in spring and summer on what would otherwise be unused ground.
It was even better to meet this family using this space in ways more than just tilling the earth. The women I met weren’t happy to have their photo taken and my mobile’s battery ran out so I couldn’t even photograph their stove: a coal oven with a domed lid specific for making flat bread and a very long chimney. We spoke together in foreigners’ German and I left with a gift of Peyniri Borek (cheese wrapped up in the bread) to chew on as I walked my bike home.
Yeast and Ginger
I ended up throwing away the Kombucha experiment as after two weeks, despite smelling good, there were no Scoby life forms visible present. I’ll probably order a proper Kombucha starter in August after the wedding has taken place and I’ll have the attention to maintain the growth of the next Mrs Rochester.
The desire to home brew interesting drinks is still ongoing and this morning besides roasting peppers, I brewed a ginger syrup to which I added lemon juice, coriander seeds, some cloves and a juniper berry. Tim and I are both fans of rum and the ginger syrup will be used to make a ginger ale substitute for both virgin and alcoholic summer cocktails.
Delicious. Now to give it a label and to buy some rhubarb for syrup making before elderflower season hits.
zum sprechen mit Fremden – to speak with strangers
by Pippa on April 26, 2012
Maybe its something to do with spring, but I can finally speak in German with strangers on the street. 2012-04-09 17.51.04 (Photo credit: Fighting Tiger)
Until I moved to a foreign country, I didn’t really have a clear understanding of even the most basic of challenges that migrants experience and the loneliness and sense of frustration that can bring. Whether student or refugee, traveller or economic migrant it can be incredibly isolating to not understand a language and to not know how to connect yourself to a new culture, how to make others around acknowledge you as a human being.
For those of you who’ve not lived in a country other than that of your birth, think instead of similar challenges. Remember the trepidation of being the new kid at school, or the struggle to fit into a new workplace. Learning a language, whether it be dialect, work terminology or slang is a major step to becoming accepted. What happens when other challenges such as mental illness, self confidence, institutional access, poverty or cultural circumstances prevent you from learning a language? What happens when these situations increase the feeling of shame that making mistakes and drawing negative attention to yourself can bring?
…
When I first moved to Berlin I fairly regularly made my way to German class for about 3 months. I eventually met my old flatmate Glenn amongst other lovely people in class and learnt enough German to survive. I could go to the shops and give appropriate amounts of money in exchange for goods. After several weeks I was able to very accurately describe to myself what I was doing in the present.
Ich esse. Ich schlafe. Ich sehe fern.
I eat. I sleep. I watch TV.
I began to discover the more challenging aspects of German, things like cases which confused gendered nouns even more. And I could think in the past tense!
Ich bin aufgestanden. Ich habe mein Rad gefahren. Ich habe einen Kuchen gebacken.
I woke up. I rode my bike. I’ve baked a cake.
It was a cold winter in 2009/2010 and the darkness plus the challenge of moving to a new country meant that many mornings, my warm bed (a mattress on the floor of various sublet rooms) was very comfortable. Given the choice of freezing my way across Berlin or lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, I chose the warm option.
Then, surprise of all surprises I was lucky enough to begin a proper job in Berlin and met a lovely man in Austria. Life got busy enough that committing to 4 mornings a week of German class was difficult.
So, officially learning German was put on the back burner until the beginning of this year. Now, over the intervening 2 years my vocabulary, particularly my passive vocabulary has increased. I spent more time in Austria with Tim and eventually moved here, expanding my knowledge in order to accommodate both dialect and strange accents. I could talk a little bit more in German with friends and listen to many of their conversations with general understanding. I stockpiled German language kids books (for later) and started writing shopping lists in German. Ask me however, to write a short email or describe a situation in German and I’d have politely avoided the request.
Aufweidersehen! Gibst mir ein bisserl.
See you later! Give me a little.
But in the last months things have changed. I’ve been back in German class 4 mornings a week for the last 2 months, and have only missed one lesson. While I’m regularly late to class, I’m still clamouring to learn more sentence structures and to speak in the conditional and future tenses with more confidence.
Most important is that in the last week a major breakthrough has happened. I’ve been having longer conversations out of English, but it’s only now that I’ve started writing emails, only of a couple of lines, but all in German to both friends and relative strangers. And, maybe this has to do with the advent of spring, but I’m finally feeling confident enough to start up conversations with strangers on the street and in shops.
This change is significant and it’s affecting more than just my German skills. I’m learning to be less scared of making mistakes and failure.
Speaking to strangers and complimenting their umbrella or asking the name of their dog may seem like a small step, but it opens up so much more possibility and joy. Of course, I could continue to write emails in English, or presume that
the young woman in a green jacket will understand what I’m saying. How
long would it be though before I could speak to my elderly neighbour, or learn that the fat chihuahua is just visiting with the lady who’s taking it for a walk?
When I’m in Australia and other English-speaking countries, and finally now, here in Austria, I am reminded of how much delight it brings me and hopefully other people, to connect with them and acknowledge their presence. It is I believe, one of those actions that makes a place neighbourly and a community and which makes one feel more comfortable and at home.
Little Dreams
by Pippa on April 12, 2012
And what of the world traveller, the woman who’s now lived in 5 different countries?
I am so very glad to regularly lay myself down in this, our most beautiful bed. It’s comfortably soft and firm at the same time and layered with a bedspread I bought from a tiny old lady in Sapa, Vietnam several years ago.
The map reminds me of the places I’ll be and the places I’ll go – but most days I’m very happy to be at home. I really like the small city feel of Linz and I’m beginning to reach out tendrils of personal growth into the opportunity of this place.
I’m slowly documenting my making and doing a little more, primarily to make myself feel more productive but also to prepare a portfolio. It’s strange, but in these days of craft and cooking blogs it can often feel like you’ve done nothing until it’s been documented publicly.
For example:
Cloning a Kombucha Scoby
I’m not much of a soft drink consumer, though I do love carbonated spring water and “gespritzte” juices. I have enjoyed Kombucha, but spending 3€ per bottle on fermented tea seems like a waste when I can follow a tutorial and make it myself.
I’m hoping that the Scoby mother will grow – so far there’s a pleasant cider vinegarish smell which is meant to be a good sign. Apparently it’s also good to anthropomorphise your scoby “mother” and give it a name. Since I used Yorkshire Tea and raw Demerara sugar in the mix it seems that Mrs Rochester will be appropriate.
There’s something about cloning a mass of microbes (yeast and bacteria) which is strangely compelling. I’m hoping that we’ll have a batch of Kombucha ready for the public mushroom growing workshop of Time’s Up‘s Non-Green Gardening residency.
Picking Wild Foods
Living in Berlin put a bit of a dampener on picking wild foods, something which I’d done in Finland, Adelaide and during my short time in Sheffield. Despite collecting some blackberries in Gorlitzer Park, the ubiquity of dogs and their waste meant I was reluctant to pick nettles.
So the presence of wild and urban food sources around Linz is quite lovely. There are more backyards for fruit trees to escape from and there’s a healthy continuing tradition of collecting wild foods. Many of my urban finds are being tracked in Boskoi and I’ve got a lovely book that I’m slowly learning to understand.
Bärlauch / wild garlic (Allium ursinum) is in season now and Vicy, Theresa, Lisa and I went picking a couple of weeks ago after a quick tutorial on how to recognised the leaves. If nothing else the smell of garlic helps you identify the bärlauch from its poisonous and perfumed doppelgänger Maiglöckchen / lily of the valley.
I’ve frozen some chopped leaves and have several jars of pesto (with almonds and sunflower seeds) that are awaiting consumption. Unfortunately the stored pesto coincides with me trying to manage my carbohydrate intake, so I’ve not been eating nearly as much pasta as I’d like. Nor are bärlauchsemmelknödel (wild garlic bread dumplings) especially low on the GI scale… Oh but they’re delicious!
Travelling on Handbuilt Boats
Recognising bärlauch came in handy just before Easter when we started the second journey* of the Control of the Commons (CoC) project and began travelling down the Danube on a Frankenboat. In short we only managed to camp for one night before our trip was halted due to being an unidentifiable watercraft.
We made our camp near Wallsee on an old section of the Danube that was bypassed when a hydroelectric weir was installed. The highlight was being camped next to a forest of bärlauch and young nettles, both of which made it into that evening’s risotto.
As much as I love the CoC project, camping in Austria in early April is not such a good idea for the ill-prepared. We almost reached hypothermia as a result of being too tired to layer up properly in our sleeping bags on a -2°C night, so our camping experience was not amazing.
Yet another reason to be grateful to return to our lovely bed.
*See, I really should be blogging more – not only have I not mentioned our wedding at all I also neglected to talk about travelling down the Murray River for 3 weeks on another weird boat. Another time… I promise.
Facets
by Pippa on October 26, 2011
I feel frustrated that when I do write on battlecat these days it’s to share the darker side of life. My last posts were on anxiety and of past weeks, while luckily I’ve been less anxious I find myself more depressed than anything. I tend to hide at home and feel like there’s not much point to a lot of the things that make up life.
It’s not that I’m like this all the time, and luckily it’s not scary depression. However it is the kind of depression that stops me from easily doing [new] things or finding much joy in anything. When you’re relatively freshly moved to a place and in the search for work, most things are new. Glory, it does seem easier to sleep and hide at home and knit rather than push through this layer of bleurgh to be more me than I’m letting myself be.
Rationally I can tell that there’s a layer of depression weighing down on me and it’s clouding my interpretation of the world and my relationship with the world. The world, I know, is weird, but generally fantastic and there are many good things in my life.
Tim for example is more than good and supports me in so many ways. I’m seeing a therapist who is interesting and helpful. I’m really glad to be finally living in Linz, and I enjoy the size of a smaller city (200,000) after the last years in Berlin. I’m meeting lovely new people here and take my knitting out to the local Stitch and Bitch. And luckily on those hide at home days, there is knitting while watching Six Feet Under. And at least if I’m knitting I’m still doing something while I hide at home and Six Feet Under is a fitting accompaniment to both knitting and the blues.
In a couple of months Tim and I will be in Australia getting married and enjoying the summer and building boats. There is so much to be happy and joyful about, but it’s so incredibly frustrating that a forcefield of inertia is preventing me from actively engaging with my life to the full extent possible.
Anyway. More than writing about depression I wanted to share a detail photo of my grandmother’s wedding dress.
I think that modifying this dress will be the most intimidating thing about getting married to Tim – he’s great just the way he is and I’m so happy to have him in my life.
The dress is almost 80 years old and feels very vulnerable – I’m a little afraid to take it from being my grandmother’s wedding dress to mine and am thinking about having a second dress available to change into after the more formal bits of the ceremony. I’m slowly working up the courage to tidy up the hem and shorten the sleeves in preparation for an Australian January wedding. Wish me luck!
Shadow Boxing
by Pippa on July 28, 2011
Starting to be more public about the anxiety that plagues me and moving out of the known confines of the last year’s work have acted as catalysts on some strange emotional and mental reactions.
I’ve outed this dark monster, this bully. Decided that I can’t enter a new, long-term work situation while everyday life is so overshadowed. And so this thing, this process, seems to have doubled its intensity as it screams at me.
“You think that was worry? That was fear? You think it was hard to write an email, to share an idea, to show what you were capable of? You know nothing small Pippa! I am going to make my grip on your arms tighter, make it even harder for you to breathe and any idea you have about your new path I will criticise and demolish with a force ten, no a million times stronger than I’ve used before”.
Which makes me even more frustrated and furious: with myself and with this thing that I’ve let take over my life. It feels like it is only now am I in a safer space and have the readiness and commitment to move forward and onward with learning how to minimise this thing’s hold on me. Why wasn’t I ready, why couldn’t I take this step forward before?
***
By identifying this thing, by pointing the bone at it and claiming it will no longer rule my life, my awareness of its hold on me has more clarity.
The other day I was on a call with a good friend who is helping mentor me on my next journey. He suggested that I work on a reflective writing exercise. Not only would it be a useful process for my own practice, he was looking forward to reading what I’d written.
I couldn’t pay attention to my friend. Instead, the voice that was demanding my attention was very firmly pointing out that no, my friend was not to be trusted.
“He’s just doing this to punish you. He wants you to fail. He’s going to read what you’ve written and will then laugh at your effort, tell you you’re worthless and then show other people how hopeless you are!”
Never before have I heard this critic so clearly. But rather than let it shut me down I had to gasp a lungful of air in, laugh and tell my friend about the stupid thing that was going on inside. I will not let this thing ruin my life anymore, and luckily the nature of friendship is that when you tell someone about the voices in your head, they just laugh along with you.
***
I am so grateful that I do have friends who will laugh with me and offer sage advice. I am grateful that I still have these spaces where writing can make its way out, where I know that I can do something well and feel capable of sharing it. I am grateful to know that even though my own experience with anxiety is horrible, it is an experience that I am conscious of and able to make changes about.
And so it goes. Another step forward in this process. Less struggle in the future hopefully.
Fighting Tigers: Being Anxious
by Pippa on July 15, 2011
For a while now I’ve been wanting to write more openly about my struggles with anxiety disorder and its effects: depression, procrastination / perfectionism, feeling like an imposter, the mess it’s helping me make of my professional life and the difficulties it causes my fiance. Basically, I Think Too Much about many things and when it affects how I live, work, love and relate to the future.
It’s a lot to write about, so let me first set the scene.
Copyright: 2009, Florida Center for Instructional Technology.
I’ve been aware of anxiety’s presence in my life since 2005 when I was working in the games industry and suffered my first panic attacks. Panic attacks are often the terrifying first sign that something is not quite right with how you’re thinking and are often triggered by extra stressors and things to worry about.
Looking back before 2005, I can recognise the beginnings of poor thinking habits that make me far more worried than should be normal. That said, working in games (the stress, the late hours etc) definitely provided a good trigger for overthinking and made it much harder to maintain good mental health.
I’d been working the ridiculous hours that somehow add to the glamour of technology jobs, particularly games development. Then I went to hear Greg Bourne deliver the Hawke Lecture and then spent the evening and next days in total terror of climate change. And that weekend I woke up so so sure that my heart and lungs were being squashed by everything that was wrong with myself and the world and that I was going to die.
One of the things to know about anxiety disorders is that you take a normal, healthy amount of concern required to manage a difficult situation, and multiply that by many factors of overthinking and add reactions evolved millions of years ago. Evolutionarily anxiety worked for us like this: see a tiger pacing by, start thinking of places to hide or sticks to use as weapons, then release a bunch of adrenalin as you fought or fled. The problem is that tiger-appropriate adrenal responses – increased blood pressure and heart rate, restlessness and muscle tension are inappropriate for most modern challenges. Today, tigers aren’t an everyday threat, so a difficult situation might just involve applying for a new job or discussing a problem with a friend and normally we don’t need the fight or flight response in those situations.
Work and environmental and social collapse as a result of climate change are two of the main spaces where I see tigers and am always pretty sure things are going terribly, horribly wrong. See, it’s logical that work and enviromental contexts are both very important spaces in which you should be concerned about threats and make appropriate responses. The problem for people like myself is that the thinking gets stuck in the identifying threats mode far too much of the time and makes it harder to actually get anything done.
Luckily for me, panic attacks are relatively few and far between but as with that first panic attack when they do appear, it’s to signal that I really do need to start paying attention to my mental health. Of course, there are other symptoms but despite being really quite serious they are easier to ignore than a feeling of imminent doom: -
-
- holding your breath and grinding your teeth while emailing?
this email had better be perfectly worded and leave no room for misinterpretation. That next email is far too scary to answer. I’d best ignore it.
- holding your breath and grinding your teeth while emailing?
- Feelings of mild paranoia while in face to face and online meetings?
They’re going to realise I know nothing about doing this job, I’ll get fired and no-one will ever employ me again. - Hiding in bed in the morning
It’s not worth getting up, everything I do is worthless and I’m sure something terrible will happen if I even just go to the shops and have to speak German. - Lying awake at night feeling very aware of all the things that could go wrong ever.
I don’t have proper curtains, people will come to visit will see this, tell Tim I’m an unfit fiance and he’ll break up with me and we’ll never live the rest of our lives with the happiness we deserve or the family we were meant to have and our children would have been born with major health issues anyway. Really, it’s all fucked so why even bother with the curtains let alone eating breakfast tomorrow?
In between panic attacks and weeks of feeling generally horrible and exhausted there are times when I feel totally fine: confident and powerful enough to change the world. I’ll be happy and calm, inspired and productive at work, I meet new people without fear, leave the house and confidently speak poorly structured German, face the world and the future full on and trick myself and others into believing that everything is okay and will forever be amazing.
These days exist and they are what I want to have more of. Too much of the time though I’m not okay, I’m not getting things done in the way with the ease or capacity I should.
Sometimes I feel like a mouse being played with by a cat – the type of play where the cat seems to take a vicious delight in playing with the mouse and then seemingly ignores it before pouncing again. I’ll get over a phase of anxiety without much effort on my behalf and feel great. Then, weeks or months later I realise I’m not free of worry and I find myself hopeless, unproductive and tense again and I know that I never really solved the problem.
I’m hoping that by writing more publicly about anxiety I will actively do more to challenge my experience of this disorder and to follow through with the positive behaviours and thinking changes that will help me improve. When I next return to this topic, I will write about how I hope to improve this situation, the tools I’ve used to good effect and the challenges with maintaining and setting good habits and living in the real world.
Bring Me Back
by Pippa on June 12, 2011
I was most recently in Adelaide at the beginning of this year with T as we traveled across the country meeting and greeting family and loved ones. T is possibly a better child to his parents than I am and had visited his family twice over the last 18 months, but I hadn’t returned home to Adelaide in the two years since I moved to Berlin.
Those three weeks earlier this year were exhausting and in many ways I didn’t feel very settled during my time back here. Perhaps it was the excitement of introducing T to my favourite people and things of A-Town or the energy that pervades the city in the lead-up to Fringe and the festival. And the previous visit home was for a frantic month as I packed up, sold my things and rather rudely told Adelaide that things were over between us. Luckily, despite the fact that my Dad is getting older and frailer due to his lung disease, I feel suprisingly relaxed and happy on this return trip.
A lot of my current feelings towards Adelaide have a lot to do with maturity and finally beginning to feel at home in Linz with T. So despite missing T like the blazes and really wanting to have him around to support me as I help my family, it feels good to be back here and to begin to assess my old home with the eyes of someone older (remember, this is the town you settle down and have kids with).
Another big reasons for loving my hometown this time around is that it’s winter. I’m missing the summer in Linz, but in some ways the chill of a hibernating Adelaide is so satisfying. It’s tea and toast time, eating soup and good bread with friends weather rather than all-out party season.
It’s actually been raining here, so for the first time in almost four years I’m seeing Adelaide (and my old garden) with green growth, both good and unwanted. There’s something wonderful about a cool weather garden and the smell of soil and decaying leaves as you pull up weeds. As much as I love being able to container garden and finally have a balcony to fill with plants I have missed the mindfulness that comes from weeding an actual garden bed.
The other day I battled, pulled and dug against one of my favoured old enemies for a half hour while my father rested in the living room. Looking after Dad is a very slow, sometimes sad and frustrating business and I needed some active destruction to balance me out. Besides the stress relief of weeding and the satisfaction of dirt under your nails and a visible change to the space, I love weeding as it lets me observe the techniques that plants use to spread themselves around.
My weeding enemies - the unidentified climbing succulent plant, plus ivy and soursobs (oxalis)
On Friday the plants I attacked were ivy and some weird succulent climbing thing that I don’t know the name of, but would love to identify so I can accurately curse it. The plant is growing up and around an overgrown shrub and despite intermittent and zealous attacks over previous years it persists and spreads around.
This plant just makes me get all awe-full and think about evolution. It is incredibly cleverly constructed and seems to propagate itself as you weed it. The leaves and sections of this plant fall off far too easily and forgetting pieces on the ground gives them a chance to take root and spread themeselves around.
This kind of promiscuous growth demands action and despite only being back in Adelaide temporarily I started down the dangerous path of Significant Garden Plans for the family home. Obviously the leggy shrub would go, but the winter weather calls for replanting the front beds with fruit trees, which leads to reading plant catalogues and considering just where a pizza oven could go.
At some point I looked up and realised that it felt like I’d never gone away from here. Tim, Linz, Berlin, working on School of Webcraft and all of those things seemed light years and lifetimes away.
Oh, it is a weird feeling to be here and to feel so very comfortable and to feel the pull of this place pulling me back. At the same time Tim and the actual everyday life I’ve chosen is in Linz and as I fall asleep I’ll be wanting to wake up back in our bed and go for a run along the Danube.
far / fahren
by Pippa on May 16, 2011
[Don't get confused - it's not a direct translation, but the alliteration fits.]
I’ve lived overseas (on and off) for about 5 years now and it has always been with the knowledge that distance makes it much harder to maintain contact with family and friends. Either you’re here or you’re there, and despite the best intentions and the latest in technology it’s almost impossible to maintain or grow a relationship in the same way that realtime and realspace allows. There’s something about biorhythms, a shared physical environment, eating and drinking together that will always be more valuable than endless Skype conversations and email lists.
It’s one of the reasons why, even today, organisations still spend huge amounts of money and burn fossil fuels to organise face-to-face meetings and why for the last two years Tim and I spent weeks of time on train trips between Berlin and Linz. Luckily of course, I’m finally living in Linz and the tension that resulted from never being quite at home has begun to ease.
Being in a long-distance [romantic] relationship within the confines of Europe has also obscured the many other long-distance relationships that have evolved: all the many across Australia, to those scattered in Finland and Brussels, Newcastle Upon Tyne, the Norwegian bits of the Arctic Circle, Biggleswade, Sheffield, Brighton, Dunedin, London and beyond. Of course, now with the move to Linz, those who made up my community in Berlin are now more people far afield. Within my head when I think of these friends I also think of the people I’ve met briefly, desired as friends but have never had a full chance to become friends with.
So lately, as annoyed emails have begun to arrive from those I’ve neglected I’m trying to work out how to maintain these relationships, how to provide intermittent meaningful connections that transcend Facebook messages and work for those who are far less digitally embedded than I am.
Letters and packages I guess. I managed to send one off to Berlin yesterday.
That’s what’s been bugging me for the last week or so. Today though my tyrannies of distance are familial. My father has finally asked for me to come back home and visit him, sooner rather than later. He turned 76 last week and he’s been ill for ages, so this isn’t such a surprise.
I can remember when he rang up to tell me he’d been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and that slowly, his lungs were scarring and being eaten away by a autoimmune response. I was in Helsinki at the time and even though my memory places me in the flat on Mechelininkatu I lived there in 2006. Somehow that timing feels wrong, maybe it was when I was back in 2008?
So for at least 3 years while I’ve been away there’s always been the knowledge that one day I’d have to go back home to hang out with Dad and not really know how long I’d be back in Adelaide for.
What’s amazing though is that for far longer than was expected, Dad’s lung capacity stayed strong. Based on advice from a doctor friend and responding to data from drug trials on rats, he started to take high levels of anti-oxidants and until recently his lungs were good. But at the end of last year he was hospitalised following a stomach flu and as seems to be the way, suddenly felt, I don’t know what. His age? Breathless?
Putting aside the fact that Dad is ill, I am looking forward to hanging out with him some more. As a child he preferred to teach me maths than play sports, but as I’ve grown older I realise how much he’s influenced me – to love science and to be more of an independent worker than an employee. Without a doubt, one of the reasons why I’m with Tim is that in many good ways he reminds me of my father.
So yeah, I don’t really know how to finish this post. I still need to work out the best tickets and how to fit this around work and how to manage being away from Linz so soon after I arrived here.
Maybe it will give me more motivation to write postcards.
Russian tea tin
by Pippa on May 12, 2011
My friend in Finland, Ninnu had a similar tin that she and her family keeps sugar cubes in. I’ve kept my eye out for something similar for the last couple of years and finally found one.
I got this in a haul of stuff from the Mauerpark flea market in Berlin and the tin still had tea in it.
(How weird am I for continuing to drink the tea? It seems to taste okay and I’ve not been poisoned yet.)
Over at Learning Learning
by Pippa on May 12, 2011
I posted the video of the “shaping the crowd” talk I did for Subnet in Salzburg.
