I was walking around in my area last weekend when I came across this spider (I looked it up and it has the not very exciting name of "European Garden Spider", much less attractive than the German "Kreuzspinne"). It was just wrapping up a victim. Trying to zoom close to get a picture was a nightmare, but it worked in the end... with lots of patience...
This is my first post after a long hibernation (can you hibernate in the summer?) - I was travelling a lot and between travelling or going places I was mainly working, getting things sorted and trying to catch up with the work I wasn't doing on holidays.
A conversation with my flatmate last night:
Me: So should I go get a bottle of wine then?
Her: We should really start getting wine on offer as reserve, it's cheaper.
Me: Threshers have a three for two offer.
Her: Great! Let's get three bottles then.
Me: OK! It's always good to have a reserve.
Her: Although it's dangerous because we'll drink them.
Me: True, although we don't drink as much as we used to...
Her: That's true! We really don't.
Me: In fact I don't even like drinking more than one glass anymore.
Her: Yes, I'm not drinking much anymore either.
Me: OK, so three bottles of wine then...
I had a very surreal experience last night. While I was speaking on the phone to my mother, I suddenly heard commotion and loud shouting from the street outside my house. When I looked out of the window, I saw 10-15 policemen with machine guns dragging a couple of guys out of their cars while pointing their guns at the suspects. For a few seconds I did wonder if I had been transported into a bad German TV cop show or a Matt Damon movie.
Unfortunately I missed the first part of the operation which must have been a Hollywood-like maneuvre to get the cars to stop in the first place!
But the best reaction came from my mother. The conversation I had with her went as follows:
Mum: “So the plan for next week is…”
Me: “Oh my god, there are policemen with machine guns dragging people out of their cars”
Mum: “Guns? Go away from the window! Anyway, as I was saying, the plan for next week is…”
My parents, easily ruffled? Not them!
I have started signing up for all the Timeout preview screenings - mainly because I am stingy, love the cinema and love a free film even more, no matter what the film is like. The problem is that the preview screening thing is based on a bit of a lottery service, so most of the time you get a polite email back telling you that you haven't succeeded this time but that urges you to keep trying.
Now, for the first time I actually won one of the free tickets, to the preview of Caramel - I read up on the film and thought (shamefully) "oh god, a Lebanese film about women". All the people I tried to ask along with me thought the same thing (because I ended up going on my own). I wasn't about to miss out on the first free ticket I finally won though, so I went to the cinema with absolutely no expectations but a massive bucket of popcorn.
Oh my god was I wrong with my initial reaction. It is probably the law that if you expect something to be long and dreary you end up having the best time, and thus of course this ended up one of the most enjoyable films I have seen this year. The film follows the lives of a group of female friends who all work in the same run-down beauty parlour. One has a doomed affair with a married man, one discovers feelings for a female visitor to the shop, one is about to get married and terrified that her husband-to-be will discover that she is no longer a virgin, and one is a menopausal actress terrified of getting older.
This set-up doesn't sound very humourous, and there is a great feeling of bitter-sweetness throughout the movie, so it is even more surprising that the comedy elements are so frequent and so thoroughly funny. Beirut is shown as a normal, exotic (rather than war-torn) city where its citizens lead everyday lives, although undercurrents of the conflict between women's liberation on one side and a male-dominated society on the other side can be seen throughout the film. Another great thing is the soundtrack which suits the whole feel of the story from start to finish. It doesn't happen often that I walk out of the cinema at the end thinking "wow", but it definitely happened this time!
So I can thoroughly recommend this movie (although people who really don't want to watch films about women's issues should probably stay clear). I guess I also got a lesson in being a bit more open-minded with regards to non-mainstream movies!
Ouch, it's been ages since I last posted anything. It's not even that I haven't had anything to write about - it's probably more like that I have done more things that equate to "having a life", I went to Norfolk for a long weekend which was brilliant, and work has been insanely busy, so I have been too lazy to write blog postings. But now I'm back because the novelty of "having a life" has worn off (I'm not actually that sad, honest :-) and I have to have an outlet for my new hobby: my brand new camera.
Yes, I have taken the big step, raided my savings account and finally upgraded my camera to something a little more modern (although my old camera was only 4-5 years old, that would make it an antique in digital camera terms, and I've been looking with envy at what everyone else's cameras were able to do for quite a while). So I bought a brand new camera this week. Since the two things that most annoyed me about my old camera were the frustrating (lack of) zoom and (equally lack of) wideangle lens, I went all the way and bought one of those super-super-zoom hybrid cameras: the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.
It is absolutely brilliant actually. On my daily walk through Hampstead Heath (I walk 5 miles to work everyday now, very healthy - and relaxing) I tried to take pictures of the local wildlife before, but what you could see was usually *random landscape* with black dot in the middle where you tried to zoom in on some animal. This time you actually could see the animal in the picture. A novelty! I was 20 mins late for work and got mistaken for a birdwatcher, but hey.
Anyway, here are some of the photos. I actually feel quite lucky that I get to walk past all this on the way to work everyday, despite living in the Big Smoke!
I finally got my tickets to the Sonata Arctica concert in a week. Yay! I already saw them in November (they must like the UK) and it was probably the most thoroughly enjoyable concert I've ever been to. It probably helps that the songs are so easily "singable". The friend I went with was singing along after 20 minutes even though he'd never heard any of their songs before. This time I'm bringing three friends. They should start giving me a referral bonus or something, haha...
And on even more concert related stuff... I found out that my trip to Sweden in the summer happens to co-incide with a Europe-gig at a town festival in a city called Skellefteå, which is very close to where I am planning to go. Now, Europe probably aren't the trendiest choice of band to watch, but in music terms they were "my first love" in the 80s. I had all the posters on the wall, knew all the records by heart, watched the video recordings over and over, started pestering my poor mother to let me go to their concert a whole half year before they even came on tour to Vienna (in the end I was allowed to go - with my dad. My dad now claims that he really enjoyed it, though this is in contrast to his behaviour at the actual concert which he spent mostly poking fun at the rest of the audience and waving a pretend lighter. Classic "embarrassing dad" moments.) I even bought a Swedish book out of my eternal loyalty to the band when I was 15, and to this day I can still speak the language.
The funniest thing was that many many years later, as a grown up (as grown-up as I'm ever going to be anyway), with my Europe-enthusiasm long faded, I flew back to London from a trip to Stockholm, walked off the plane (faintly noting that one of the other passengers looked vaguely familiar), and... found myself standing next to Joey Tempest (Europe's singer and the sole object of my teenage affection during the 80s) at baggage claim. My grown-up reaction? I nearly had a heart attack, walked into the arrival hall (instead of attempting to say a few words to him like most people would have done in a similar situation) and shouted "guess who was on my plane" towards my waiting then-boyfriend with such a volume that half the arrival hall turned around to look at me. Not a very dignified story, but I still enjoy telling it whenever the conversation subject comes to teen idols. How many people can say that they randomly bumped (sort of) into theirs?
So, it has got to be done. I am obviously destined to stalk the band to near the Arctic Circle, just so I can sing "Ca-ha-har-rieee" on top of my voice in the midnight sun and jump along to "The Final Countdown". And I will be going to a festival in a foreign country, on my own. This should be interesting to say the least: either I will drink some beer and meet random people, or I will have an interesting, but character building, billy no mates experience!
Have you ever read Dilbert, the comic strip? I'm not sure Dilbert has much relevance for people who do not work in a corporate software environment, but for those that do, it actually is scarily close to real life.
I work in an internet start-up, and if that isn't enough I work in an internet advertising start-up, which combines the chaos of a regular start-up and the commercial egoes of an advertising company. I generally love my job. Despite my glaring lack of experience when starting this role (I now call myself a product manager), I have been able to experiment, improve by trial and error, pick up skills that I would never have had in my job description before (such as writing website copy), so I cannot really complain (well, don't bite the hand that feeds you, as they say).
However, one of the less fun characteristics of my job is that I sometimes feel like I am working in a kindergarten where kids pull each others' hair, throw their toys out of the sandbox, throw stomping tantrums, threaten to "tell mommy"... and I have been able to experience a wonderful example of office politics weirdness first hand in the last 24 hours.
Last night, just before "end of play" as the lingo goes, I had a meeting with one of the owners of my company about some outsourcing work that I was compiling a specification for. The company owner informed me, "don't worry, your job is not in jeopardy, but..." and that my line manager had criticized my specifications as not being technical enough. Hmm. The line manager sits two desks away from me and has only ever given me positive feedback. Naturally I was pretty taken aback that somebody would complain about my work to the management instead of relaying a few pieces of feedback the two metres to the left to where I am sitting. So after mulling about it overnight (read: seething and feeling sorry for myself) I decided to go about it what I saw as the grown up way and confront my line manager.
Hence, today I called my line manager into a meeting.
Me (still annoyed): "I hear that you have been criticising my specifications to the management, and it would help if you could give feedback to me personally. Maybe you can give me some tips on what you would like me to change."
Line manager: "What???"
The rest of the conversation consisted of my line manager swearing to God that he had never gone behind my back, insisting that the company owner either didn't know what he was talking about or made everything up.
I went back to my desk (now slightly confused as to what was going on) and continued to work, while my line manager was clearly extremely annoyed (to say the least), which suggested to me that he was speaking the truth. Maybe intimidation tactics are the new secret to effective management as proposed in the "Handbook of successful company ownership" these days.
Office politics are truly bizarre. Something tells me that the whole story is not over yet either. My line manager will have a go at the company owner, who doubtlessly will then have a go at me for my part in the quarrel. And round we go. More hair is pulled, more toys are thrown out of prams, and the total sum of constructive solutions will be zero. I guess the only constructive solution is to avoid office politics at all costs by keeping your head down, taking everything you hear with a pinch of salt, giggling at the accuracy of the Dilbert comics and watching the playground fights from a distance.
I'm a lot poorer now, because the travel company I booked my wilderness adventure this summer with confirmed that the tour was definitely going ahead - so I sent them the rest of the money. Which was a lot. Oh well, living on beans on toast isn't so bad either!
I'm really excited though! This trip falls into the category of "something I have always wanted to do but never plucked up the determination to actually go for it". Basically, I will fly to Stockholm and then have to find a way to venture the 900km north to the Arctic Circle. Apparently this isn't as easy as it sounds, as the faster trains (or trains at all, for that matter) stop about halfway from Stockholm to Sorsele, and then it's a choice of taking local buses that run once or twice a day, or a (great sounding) trip on a little wilderness railway route that takes regular stops to chase assorted wildlife off the tracks.
On arrival in the nature reserve in Lapland there will be a three day horse riding tour through the mountains (an all time dream of mine), a wildlife safari, canoeing and other activities. And the midnight sun! And then the same or a similar route down to Stockholm again, and back to England, at which point I will probably look and feel like a truck has run me over. All very exciting though.
So this also means that I now have exactly 12 weeks in which to get off my butt and get fit!! I doubt I will need arctic explorer levels of fitness, but getting fit is something I have been planning (and failing at) for... erm... years (I have lost count how often I have "started a gym routine on Monday"), and this trip will maybe give me an actual goalpost to work towards. Now, if my flatmate didn't keep bringing in those lovely bottles of red wine...
