Spring has come

On Wednesday I had some errands - like, find a notary, get a certified copy of my diploma, throw it at some people at school, take pics of the whale skeleton in the National Museum, get a copy of FAZ since it's mentioned in some historic something in my book and the editor expressed a desire to add a pic of Frankfurter Allgemeine there. It's a good paper, if nothing else, and since the kids don't know German and... and anyway, even if it could be interpreted as a subliminal message, it won't do more harm than the idiotic advert made by some advertising idiot, where the Lindt chocolate names are French yet pronounced in English. Well, I was messing around Prague.
I forgot to take my allergy meds. The Prague air is very, erm, strong, so I had my first fit of cough just after getting out from the metro. I usually carry an inhaler somewhere in my bag but just that day I forgot it at home. Meaning that after every fit of cough I had to sit and concentrate on breathing because the body somehow wouldn't want. Like, really, stupidly, inhale-exhale. Inhale-exhale. Try not make that whistling sound. It worked somehow. I hate my allergies.
Although the nights are still frosty, it's sunny and nice. On Wednesday it was even snowing (the third time during this bad excuse for winter). Yet, in general, the weather is rather springy and warm. I didn't feel like wearing my winter jacket, it gives me the trickle of sweat running down my spine which I dearly hate. I fished my sample wardrobe for something warm and I fished out one of the first sweaters I made, with pretty strange design mistakes I had hard time fixing and/or ignoring, I was much less self-confident, I suppose. It's a bulletproof wool, almost, and I've been wearing it third day in a row. And... I love it. It keeps me warm, it has lace pattern so it's well aerated (I sweat a lot), it has a nice shape (will have to start using some design elements again) and it looks good. And... it's cheap superwash wool.
Some more yarn arrived. Of which there were 20 skeins of cashmere/silk/lambswool blend which is stunning to knit (softer than butter) but brown. I tried to call it earthy, hazelnut, whatever.... but it's brown. When knitted in plain stockinette, it looks like cheap sweatpants. I wonder whether I should dare and redye it. I thought I might combine it with some Aurora and Blossom and Surabu in shades of (mostly) green; made a sample and Surabu looks pretty useless as carryalong, it makes the whole thing bulky and scratchy. I'll have to think about it. And the yarn is really brown, not bluegrey as on the pic. The colourful bits is Surabu. I noticed that it has z-twist which is way unusual... and seems to me that the stitches look more symmetrical. I tried some leaves pattern but it doesn't seem the right one. And the yarn is way too beautiful to be wasted.

What's up lately

I started knitting a lovely angora scarf (because I found some angora in one yarn store and wanted to give it a try), I dyed a whole heap of yarn for some sweaters and I'm currently knitting a sock (today's project). No pics, dear children. I borrowed my dad's camera which is a soapbox so sophisticated that it was nearly as expensive as my late SLR and as dad doesn't use it, he didn't give me the USB cable so there's no chance to communicate the pics to you. But there's mom's colleague coming to Prague later in this week so maybe I'll get the thing.
Yesterday I got a letter from the police that they discovered nothing and they don't plan to do so anymore, go home, folks. The writing skills were horrid, this is apparently some sort of police tradition (I imagine a course for the newbies where they learn to intersperse normal texts with ortography horrors, typos so stupid that one is bound to cry and the worst style atrocities one can invent.....)
I couldn't log in to the university system. It claimed that I don't exist. Not only the login thing - there might well be some mistake of mine but also the password recovery form which said that a student of such a name doesn't study there. I was pissed off, I wanted to submit a grant application, I want to do some research and spend thus a nice sophisticated holiday in Italian libraries... but when I don't exist, I cannot apply for university grant. So I went to the relevant office, they decided that I do exist in their computer and generated a new passport to me.
With a certain degree of desperateness I filled in the form - There were fields like What are you going to do with the research results, Where you plan to publish the research results, How are the research results good for the society.... so I put everywhere that I want to use it for my thesis (and my doctoral thesis, maybe, depends on what I find, but I'm not gonna mention it, because the whole grant is for year 2007 and I plan to be gone by June and do my doctoral studies elsewhere, as widely known) and that it might be published in a corpus of foreing manuscripts in local libraries on which the department's students are working and maybe somewhere else. Crap.
The manuscript in question (go here and the shelf mark is IV.H.10, if you feel interested) is one of the early copies of St. Birgitta's Revelaciones, written before the edition of Alfonso de Jaén prepared for the caninozation, meaning that it's helluva early. There's no pics, just initials in red, which doesn't have to be told to the grant people, alnong with not telling them that I'm interested in iconography and that I"m only too happy to leave the textual stuff to Hans Aili of Lund University (and others. I couldn't find the mention of the manuscript and its context, it's somewhere in Imagines Sanctae Birgittae by Aili and Svanberg but I have a lousy copy which is hard to just browse....).
I wanted to submit the thing and The System informed me that my thesis theme isn't registered, meaning that I'm not entitled to grants. I felt like killing someone because I gave in the paper in June. Meaning that someone at the department lost it or that someone somewhere forgot about something and today I have to run around... and I will yell if the thing is not settled immediately.
I also realized that the deadline for the Guggenheim scholarship is not Dec 15 but Dec 1 so I have to get the papers ready now. Luckily I have my Business Italian book around, there's a chapter on writing CV in Italian. Not that I was able to do it in any language. I prefer to write a nice essay about me and my life and achievements, this modern stuff like born: whenever is just lifeless.
And at the end, the police called that today I come to their place, that they caught a bunch of fellow citizens who indulged in robbing places (well, not fellow citizens. Some Romanian gypsies or what, and whoever steals, aint my fellow. It was a figure of speech, clear?)
Today I wanted to sit at home and study until the afternoon and then go to a lecture and study in the evening. I"ll spend the day on errands. Damn life.