of fridges and christmas trees

Tags

Advent, advents kranz, christmas, christmas tree, first christmas gift, fridge, german christmas stollen, holidays, miscellaneous, random, seasonal, snow, winter

I love Christmas, it’s my favourite time of year. And although I am dieing to listen to Christmas carols, cut into my German Christmas Stollen and get the mulled wine bubbling I always wait till the 1st of December.

But because my christmassy anticipation is too much to bear I decided to order my Christmas tree yesterday, making my heart do some “drummer boy” impersonation. Of course I will now have to wait till the week before the big day to put it up and decorate it with all my favourite decorations, I just hope I don’t combust is a blaze of holly, ivy and mistletoe.

However it’s nearly time to light the first candle on my “Advents Kranz” (well this year I don’t have a wreath but a pretty row of candles to light the way up to Christmas) which will fill the need for piney goodness for a few weeks.

And knowing tomorrow I’ll be putting up decorations around the house while listening to crooners corning Christmas carols makes me all giddy with excitement. I even get to open up the first door on my Marzipan Advents-kalandar, a daily treat to count down the days.

And somehow I even feel as if I just got my first Christmas gift, a new fridge was delivered and installed yesterday night, a wish granted and a clean new home for cookie dough waiting to be baked.

So tomorrow I will spend the day at home, decorating, baking, singing and dancing my very own “jingle bells rock”. I can’t wait and all I need now for a perfect Christmas is snow and a kiss under some mistletoe. And neither are looking great at the moment, even Paddy Power has pushed the odds for a white Christmas up to 4/1 and I really don’t want to know the prediction for meeting a man is. However with the temperatures dropping I live in hope, for snow at the very least.

I used fresh green and a little bit of sparkle to decorate my “Advents Tray”

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monday morning feeling

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Dusty Springfield, miscellaneous, monday morning feeling, psychology, random

It’s Thursday and for some reason I can’t shake this Monday morning feeling. It feels like I have a full week looming ahead of me and not a weekend to sit back and savour a few precious moments of free time.

Maybe it has to do with the work load still on my desk, the knowledge that although the weekend may only be just two sleeps away the work will still be there stealing away my time.

With Wednesday being a hump-day it should mean that me-time is nearly there, but somehow my Thursday has turned into this weeks hump-day, making Sunday the only day to recharge my batteries.

However to combat this Monday morning feeling lurking around I think I will just decide to forget about time, live in the now, enjoy the brisk cold air and listen to some Dusty Springfield.  And maybe I can just decide to enjoy what I have already done instead of dreading what still needs to be ticked off my to-do-list, enjoy my successes no matter how small.

With that in mind I will make myself  a hot cup of tea, treat myself to a bit of Toblerone and dance to “I only wanna laugh”, shimmy and shake that Monday morning feeling away.

 

no milk today

Tags

Anatole France, dreams, hopes, hopes and dreams, miscellaneous, music, quotes, random, songs

No milk today, which means no porridge and that means not a very happy start to this cold morning. It may not be the end of all my hopes and dreams as in that famous Herman Hermits song but it doesn’t make the day look too promising either.

As I rummaged around for something to eat and then stood waiting for a slightly stale bagel to pop out of my toaster my mind pondered what hopes and dreams I do have for the day. Nothing as big as saving the world, finding the cure for cancer or campaigning for world peace seem to be on the top of my list, but the hope that I will find the time to buy milk does seem to outrank everything else, closely followed by the dream of a little more sleep.

Of course I hope that my students will learn something today, that what I have to say sticks and that maybe, just maybe it may change their future, get them that job them hope for, spark an idea for a future they dream about or even just help them pass the course, the year, their degree.

My bigger hopes and dreams seem to be on the back burner for the day, patiently waiting for me to find a little bit more time to pursue them, but constantly reminding me with fleeting ideas and nagging thoughts that they are there and won’t be forgotten. After all what would we be without dreams that make us aspire and hopes that drive us on? As the Parisian noble prize winner, journalist and poet Anatole France once said so well:

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream: not only plan but also believe

So I will plan to go to the shops and believe I will find the time and tomorrow my day will start with hot porridge again, a dream I know I can achieve today, making everything else seem  little bit more possible.

 

partially porridge

Tags

comfort food, food, good food, health, magical possibilities, porridge, seasonal joy, winter

One thing I love about this time of year is the cold, the way little puffs of “smoke” float out of your mouth and mingle with with the wintery air. Wearing legwarmers and warm cuddly clothes, holding hot tea in your freezing hands, the crackling fire and mulled wine add to my favourite season.

But I have to admit that a big part of my seasonal joy comes from eating porridge in the morning. I know many people have issues with the hot, mushy, oaty breakfast but I wouldn’t want to miss it as it is more than just some good healthy nourishment, it is comfort food … a big hot hug from within!

We all know that food does more than give us vitamins, protein and minerals, it nourishes us emotionally too. And recently when the hurricane hit the east coast of the USA the United States Coast Guard acknowledged this by advising people to stock up on comfort/stress foods. Due to the lack of electricity they did only list “cookies, hard candy, sweetened cereals, lollipops and even instant coffee, and tea bag” but a recent poll showed that the list could have included apple pie, baked beans, beef stew, chicken soup, fried chicken, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, pot roast, pudding, pumpkin pie, tomato soup, and tuna casserole.

These are all food that tend to remind us of our childhood, reawaken memories of happy times and moments spent in joy. To me porridge reminds me of those cold wintery mornings as a little girl, longing for Christmas and living in a world filled with magical possibilities.

So my love of this time of year is partially down to porridge, the hot, slightly sweeten kind (I use raisins) mind you as there are few things worse than cold stodgy porridge.

A (dvent), B(erlin) and C(hristmas)

Tags

Advent, Berlin, christmas, photography, photos, travel

Advent is just a few days away, my trip to Berlin is a past memory and Christmas is arriving with jingling Bells. But somehow between all these events life keeps happening and the mundaneness of every day life takes over.  So while we carry on with our ABCs  and before my trip to Germany disappears into the oblivion of time I thought I would take a few minutes out of my busy morning and share a couple of impressions.

The nostalgic “Ampel-Maennchen” from the DDR

Kaufhaus des Westens, where the rich would buy west products, now the home of all the big (very expensive) brands

Inside in the atrium you can sit, eat and enjoy spectacular views and design

Outside some “Sozialistische Kunst” looks on

Potsdammer Platz, a stroll away from the Brandenburger Tor

pink pipes

A little bit of the Wall left standing

A dusky day in Berlin, Autumn in the Tiergarten

Die Siegessaeule, or the Gold Else in the middle of the Tiergarten

A muse sitting at Goethes feet

A lamp at the Brandenburger Tor

a demonstration against racism, and how to utilize umbrellas on a wet day

The Reichstag

a detail on the roof

Inside the Dome

Time to go

ich bin ein berliner

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Berlin, berliner, homemade jam, jam, jam donut, miscellaneous, photography, random, travel

Well I am off to Germany tomorrow, to Berlin to be exact. Of course nothing is going as planned and I still have a mountain of work to do before I go and only 4 hours til my taxi arrives …  at least I am nearly packed and showered

I was meant to meet my lovely Godmother and spend some time with her and promenading around the great German city, but sadly she is in hospital and I am left to my own devices. I am sure I will find something to do and I have packed my camera so hopefully I’ll have a few shots to prove that yes I too was “a Berliner”, or at the very least I will eat one and savour the sticky sweet jam inside.

But for now I better get the towel off my head and my butt into gear or else the plane will lift off without me. And even though I have lots of homemade jam I think I’d much rather eat a Berliner in Berlin while pretending I am one.

Berliner … no not a jam doughnut

never too old

Tags

beef wellington, Duke of Wellington, miscellaneous, never too old to elarn, random, teacher, up and at'em, Waterloo, wellies, wellington

As a part-time lecturer I spend most of my time during the winter months preparing, researching and giving lectures. I impart my knowledge and hope that my students will remember a few things, not just about the topic I am teaching but maybe even gain a little bit of general knowledge.

I know quite a lot, being an avid reader helps, but every now and then I have to giggle at my own stupidity. Yesterday I had such a moment: for years I have always thought that the phase used to get people (mostly children) out of bed early in the morning was “up and Adam”. Now I had never seen the phrase written and did often wonder at this peculiar phrasing and what it meant , even where it came from. I had my own little theory that it meant that you get up and like “the first” man start the day a fresh.

Oh, how silly did I feel when, while browsing the shelves in a bookstore, my eyes flitted across the covers and landed on a  book called “up and at’em”. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had it wrong all along. Wanting to rectify my error I looked the saying up and low and behold I found out that my fellow Irish man the Duke of Wellington not only won the Battle of Waterloo, invented  my beloved wellies and gave his name to the popular English beef-dish, but most likely coined “up and at’em”, the phrase I had oh so wrong.

So while still grinning to myself and reveling in my new found knowledge I had a thought – I had just proven another saying: “you’re never too old to learn!”

timing issues

Tags

miscellaneous, quotes, random, timing

As I have an early class today (and tomorrow) this morning everything is down to the perfect timing. After all I didn’t want to sacrifice those precious extra minutes of snoozing in my warm cozy bed.

So yesterday as I set the alarm I worked out how many minutes I needed for the different morning activities: getting dressed, brushing my teeth, breakfast, packing my school-bag (I’ve owned a lovely leather satchel since my first year in secondary school), make tea and walk to the bus-stop.

But when I woke up this morning I realized that perfect timing is something you really just can’t work out. Life is not an egg, that you can let boil till it is exactly the way you like it, in my case the white hard the yoke soft and creamy, but life is a little bit trickier than that. After all we can’t calculate the trips and bumps that we encounter on a day-to-day basis.

But while I was contemplating the matter of timing while sipping my tea I realized that it is exactly those minutes we can’t plan that make life exciting and interesting. Bumping into that cute guy on the bus could mean meeting your future partner, well wasted minutes, or sitting in traffic may end up with you having a life-changing idea,  meeting an old friend could give you that little bit of “friendly  gossip” that makes you smile or send a much needed compliment our way, and reading “just one more blog” may just make you happy, think or even give you exactly the information you were looking for.

So with all that said time is running out for me this morning and I need to get going and hope that timing is with me today. But as you can’t set the timer on timing, and you never know what the day will bring I will follow some unknown thinkers advice:

We cannot always wait for perfect time. Sometimes, we must dare to jump

comfortable skin

Tags

american academy of dermatology, chronic eczema, cronic disorder, eczema, health, itchy, mental health issues, mental-health, mis, psychology, random, skin

Today I am having a bit of a rough time, my skin is inflamed and the itchiness is driving me up the walls. As a life long sufferer of quite bad eczema this is not a new thing, I am quite use to outbursts of dermatitis every now and then, but this doesn’t makes it easier nor does it lessen my suffering.

But while I  was scratching my neck and rubbing my face I started wondering about the saying “being comfortable in your own skin”. Of course I know that doesn’t only mean that you are happy in your own body, but also means to be content with your mind and soul, but whoever came up with that saying didn’t know what eczema really feels like. And on days like today I’d rather be in anyone else’s skin but my own, sacrificing my mind for the joy of relief from itchiness.

I have always said (and stand by it) that I believe that itching can drive you mad, literally insane. And while I have no data to back up this statement,  just a little bit of research does show that the American Academy of Dermatology agrees on some level. The findings of studies they have done proves that people with chronic skin disorders are more likely to suffer from depression, think about suicide more often than non-sufferers and can also be more withdrawn from society, suffer from anger and lack confidence. And about 26% of people with chronic eczema can’t take part in many every-day activities, isolating them, sometimes even causing long-term unemployment.

A child growing up with the condition can develop low self-esteem and mental health issues, which is not surprising when you consider that more than one quarter of our self-esteem is built on our outer appearance. Call it vanity if you like, but our society does spend more on appearances than on health and education combined. So if you are carrying a blemish for all to see, your self-confidence takes a hit, which in turn effects your mental health.

So while the eczema may only be skin-deep the effects of it go beyond our outer walls,  not only is our skin scarred for life but our souls are too. And sadly our sallow society doesn’t do much to help in that matter either, if you don’t appear perfect you sadly seem to be worth less. And since I know the feeling I just hope all my fellow sufferers out there can believe that even when we feel anything put beautiful, we still are loved and beauty can truly be in the eye of the beholder. And I hope I can believe it too!

rained in

Tags

Dublin, Howth, Ireland, miscellaneous, nature, photography, quote, random, sunset, walk, william faulkner

I should really know better than to plan, but since I have my friend’s car (yes the one I broke  two weeks ago) I wanted to drive out into the countryside and spend the day frolicking and taking photos.

Sadly the weather has decided that rain is the flavour of the day, so I am stuck indoors listening to the pitter-patter of raindrops playing drums on my window panes. But then maybe it’s a good thing that I get to stay home today, after all I’ve had a busy week and a bit of ‘staying-in-time”. Time to sit back, relax, watch a movie and just be.

But since I did go out for an evening stroll yesterday I think I will just share the photos in the fading daylight I took of Howth, my favorite place in Dublin, possibly the world. So while I put on the kettle I leave you with my photos and this beautiful quote by the great Pulitzer prize and Noble prize winner William Faulkner:

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day sunset dies

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