Friday, April 27, 2007

Okay, folks,

I will catch up some day. All the Paris entries will come.
I wrote a nice piece of my thesis and now I need to do some laundry and cleaning and stuff because on Monday parents are coming and I do not want them to see some things like half-knitted stuff all over or yarn all over. Books all over are not okay regarding the expected orderliness but what the heck. My place, my ways and I care a damn about what my mother thinks about books' place.
And now I'm off to laundry and cleaning and writing aresearch project for my Ph. D. application.
Should you have some decent books on medieval Scandinavia you can miss, I can exchange them for a sweater or something.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Back home

The Paris stuff will come later.
I'm back in Prague. Juha has done well - no disasters, Tähti looks well, the house didn't burn down. He could have leave a sandwich for me since I arrived at midnight and I wasn't in the best shape to venture to Tesco... but it doesn't matter. i didn't starve to death.
Yesterday I did the laundry and cleaned a bit and lazied around and today I plan more lazying around although I already broke the discipline when sorting out some photographs for some damn textbook on idunnowhat and I found for example this:

Me in La Defense last year. Notice the ugly weather. Complaint if the pic is too dark, my screen shows everything much lighter.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Paris, day 2

First, the net knows that I'm in France and Blogspot has all the instructions and stuff in French. Thanks to all relevant gods for visual memory, my French ain't what it used to be. And, I don't want the net to take care about my whereabouts. It makes me paranoiac and if they want to play smartasses, let them know that I might have had a reason for using blogspot.com and not blogspot.fr etc., people still have their brains even when spending too much time on the internet.
The pics I made suck in general. However, we found (without trying,though) the Czech Centre where the marble plate says something along the lines that in that building the Czechoslovak provisorial government was seated. In the same Rue Napoleon, I found a lovely piece of street art.... there's the Academy des Beaux Arts next door... which explains it.
And we discovered a second-hand bookstore specializing in art books but it was closed. The professor commented it that we know where it is and that we'll be back, though.
St.Germain/des/Pres was lovely weren't it for the awful 19th century overpainting inside. All over, the romanesque capitals included. Awful, awful, awful. Why the hell they at least didn't use the medieval techniques instead of synthetic paint..... Le sigh. I however bought myself a book on Romanesque art publisheed by Zodiaque, a house renowned for visual qualities of their book (not speaking of the content which is good as well) so it felt better. Yeah, and I got a teacup style Marie Antoinette. Another useless piece of crap but cute one.
And, Cafe Duex Magots where Sartre used to spend his daays writing articles for L'Humanite, the commie newspaper, and earning thus for his daily coffee. I however guess that the French Communists are something like the Italian ones. Commies in cafeterias.

I'm tired.....

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Late, late, late!

I should have finished my thesis before Christmas.
I should have studied much more sometime before, now it would be all easier.
I should have written my papers...
I should have finished some stuff for Christmas.
I should clean up, seems to me that this place stinks.
I should dye some yarn, I promised a sweater to Kristina.
I should mail to Firenze to make inquiries about Ph.D. studies.
I should either manage the Riksarkivet's searching engine or go and kill myself. Luckily I don't need those documents absolutely much but it would make nice footnotes...
I should finally learn Swedish, for that matter.
I should add something about Birgitta's thoughts' impact on Bohemian art at the end of the fourteenth century, at least my consultant thinks so. It is a nice idea indeed.... but worth a dissertation in itself.
I should eat less and work out more.
I should..... probably go and kill myself instead of that all.

However, I'm struggling. The place is relatively clean despite the activities of the destruction commando in person of Nora the baby Maine Coon who huntsconstantly. For yarn balls which she steals from the boxes or for the cereal bars I'm throwing at her in vain attempts to persuade her not to hunt my yarn. Now she's sniffing the back of my screen waiting for something funny to happen, I'll probably throw her off the table. When I'll get up, she'll settle on my chair and she will look as if she belongs there. Poika (note that I'm a language minority here. So the nameless cat got a generic name in the majority language, i. e. Finnish. Meaning Boy) uses my bag as a scratchboard and in the morning he puked hairballs all over my jeans. The carpet is coveredin cat hair, the damn furry critters are shedding.
I got up to get more coffee and Nora settled on my chair and looked offended when I put her on the floor. Tähti walks in the midst of this all thrusting bossy looks at me.
Poor me, send me some candies, thanks.
As for Kristina's yarn, it's wool so it can be dyed in balls - no rewinding. I'll do it tonight and let it dry over the weekend when I'll be at parents'. Manageable.
As for learning Swedish, to those who know me I would like to tell that I do not know Swedish, I just use it. Minna sent me a textbook so I'll try to use it. Manageable... somewhat.
I'm writing my ass off.... reminds me that maybe I should stop lying:D, and something is manageable but I'm not sure about what it is.
I stuck a new name tag on the door bell - someone peeled the previous one off and it's not the first time. Linda thinks that it's a way of courting me and that I should already notice. If the guilty one is reading this, then let him know that I'd prefer a bottle of white Burgundy. Or a carton. When I came back to the apartment, my first olfactoric impressions were strawberry marmalade and vinegar so the place smells, not stinks. So far so good.
I prepared the samplers for etsyFAST project (It's a group of fibre artists and I'm not really sure what it is all about but someone invented these sampler bags so I'm contributing my crap, that's it....) and I'll mail them today. One more thing to tick off.
Maybe it's not as bad as it looks.
Cute pics of cats, yarns and the saltimbocca I made yesterday will be here in the evening, maybe.