Shelves

I just dragged around two shelves through the doors (which are not shelf-sized), creating super-shelf-space. I can hardly breathe and damn, that was awesome. Even though I can hardly breathe. 

Shit I Read 001 - got (most) of my library back!!!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.

/me sighs happily

There is a certain kind of... calm inherent in being surrounded by your very own library again after almost three years of deprivation. Although, at least one box of books is missing* - but for the moment, I am trying not to think too much about that and instead wallow in the beauty of being able to read whatever I want to read whenever I want to read it.

This, naturally, interferes with my PhD productivity; but since I managed to caught my first flu in quite a while with the advent of THE FLU PANDEMIC over here, I've been mostly lying in bed**, soaking in my own sweat and trying to get better as soon as possible. This is prime time for reading!

So, in the last 14 days I devoured the following:

Michael Moorcock - Earl Aubec and other Stories
Michael Moorcock - Silverheart
Michael Moorcock - The Dreamthief's Daughter
Michael Moorcock et al. - Elric: Tales of the White Wolf
Michael Moorcock - Nomads on the Time Stream 
Thomas Bernhard - Auslöschung
Thomas Bernhard - Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung
Thomas Bernhard - Der Keller
Thomas Bernhard - Der Atem. Eine Entscheidung
Gustav Schwab - Sagen des klassischen Altertums 
Michael Moorcock - The Eternal Champion 
Franz Kafka - Der Prozeß 
Berni Maier - Black Mandel
Akif Pirincci - Felidae
Akif Pirincci - Cave Canem
Michael Moorcock - The Roads Between the Worlds
Michael Moorcock - The Book Corum
Michael Moorcock - 2/3 of the second part of the Corum saga because THE COLLECTED CORUM STORIES BOOK IS MISSING *growls*


Not as much as I could do, due to having to get boxes with books from elsewhere to my flat, but still.

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* I have a very good memory when it comes to my books, PARTICULARLY when it comes to my academic stuff and my Michael Moorcock books, and there's stuff missing from both categories. Will have to find out where they have disappeared to.

** Or rather, the bed-like contraption I made.

Back home & stuff.

I AM BACK HOME! 

Yeah, it's been a while - even though the four people who read this already know that. I'm back in the best city when it comes to life quality (according to polls), and dayum, I am FUCKING HAPPY. 

After dwelling in an empty flat which was gracefully handed over to me for, well, dwelling in it, which also lacked gas and electricity (joy of joys, but hey, after the ordeal of the UK I am not complaining), and then moving into the storage room of a good friend's band colleague, I finally found a flat. One that is overlooking a train station. Which is awesome. 

To elaborate: I grew up next to a train station, and trains have a soothing effect on my psyche. I love the sound, I love the smell, I love the sight of railroads and trains. It calms me. So that is fucking brilliant. 

It's HUGE. Now I can afford it (after all, yours truly is now an official stipendiate of a superawesome science thing and gets shitloads of money for just sitting at home and working on its PhD), and the cats and myself are thoroughly enjoying the change. 

It's still empty as fuck though. It'll take until the end of February until I know whether I get a cheap bed and sofa of good quality. At the moment, I'm sleeping on all the blankets I could get, plus the mad lycan's sleeping bag, plus a new awesome friend's air mattress.... which has been clawed by my girlcat, so the bed is way flatter now than it should be, but hell. I'm away from the UK. That's what counts. 

I was taken out to IKEA yesterday by aforementioned mad lycan (big hugs to you, when you read this), and we did a roundabout trip through the fucking store after cleaning out the filth of my best female friend's mother's flat. More on that in a later posting, because it was an experience that deserves to be immortalised on the internet. 

Anyways. IKEA. We got 10 big Billy shelves, blankets, pillows (I need to sit *somewhere*), some other basic shit, a plush kitty, and then realised we would have to carry the crap up to my 4th floor flat. Luckily we could abuse the elevator, which is generally not for transporting shit that isn't people. It still took us a fucking ridiculous amount of time to get everything up, with me almost collapsing towards the end. There's definitely a need for red there... but alas. 

I also bought a chair. It's a wonderchair. It keeps my spine straight, my hips in the correct position, has about 7000 different functions, and was ridiculously expensive. But considering the fact that I basically live at my workspace, I thought that spending a ridiculous amount of money on such a wonderchair was a good idea (I still think that, and will continue to do so - my bones, sinews and flesh melt into how a human body is supposed to sit when I am in this chair, and boy, it feels good. Most of my physical issues come from having spent way too much time cramped on shitty chairs in front of shitty tables, so now I'm going all out to make sure that I will not have to suffer through that again for the next 15 years at least). Yay for the chair! 

Me and the cats are quite comfortable. At this very moment, I am cooking up 6 liters of soup with beef, lamb hearts, veggies and six thick, fat bones full of marrow, which will make my body happy once again. In the same vein (heh) I was informed that I'll be able to get red again. Things are looking up already - and no, this is not anything that the wiccans did (/me looks at Dr Mabuse). 

Home. 

Where can I start? 

Our food is so much more suited to my body than the one in the UK. Granted, both meat and fish are way more expensive here, but the quality is so much fucking better. We have actual bread - real bread! Not sandwich bread with shitloads of sugar, but REAL bread. I was binging on bread for two weeks after my arrival. 

Our beer is so much more better. In the UK, you drink 5 pints of whatever, and you wake up with a hangover that destroys your brain and remains of your physis. Here, you can down 12, and still wake up refreshed the day after. I guess it's because we have a Reinheitsgebot and no fucking sulphites in our alcohol. We take our alcohol way more serious. And fuck me, it's much cheaper. For one UK beer I get three beers here, which are actually wonderful beers. Aaaaaaah. 

Our public transport. I used to whine about it when I was still living here before the UK, but after the experience of having to pay 400 quid a month for public transport I will never ever again complain about ours. For that money (less, actually) I get a full year pass.

And I've got friends here. Kudos to the few of you who read this, you know who you are. 

So now I am chillaxxing here in my wonderchair, watching an accident happen on the street below, with purring cats, wonderful beer, cheap cigarettes that I can get anytime I want, listening to Mörk Gryning's first album from '95 (one of my favourites) and reading Eternal Champion comics (Corum, at the moment). 

I am fucking happy. 

Granted, it turned out that my formerly best male friend is a disgusting bastard whom I never want to see again as he was using the same ridiculous techniques of "control" on me than my UK-ex and the horrifying exes before that one, but hey. I got to know so many new and awesome people that the loss of that one creep really doesn't hurt. Life goes on, as the saying goes. 

Happy, happy, happy. 

And I was just given links to needleful things by my best internet-friend. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh. 

Life is good.

gymnastics in the early morning rain

It's 4:44 now, and I spent almost 1.5hrs outside in the playground not far away from my flat. It's been raining for several hours, but rain never ever managed to keep me from being happy outside. On the contrary - the more it rains, the more happy I get, the more time I spend outside.

Usually, there's people out there. People. Kids and children are playing there during the days, and I have never ever even gotten closer to this mysterious playground-of-children than just carefully crossing the street, glancing at it. Until now - well, not "now" specifically. Earlier.

Dark, night, nobody around. And if there had been anyone around - wouldn't have cared. What followed were almost two hours of me happily playing around with the available stuff, mostly focusing on the arm-and-leg-things. I have no idea what these things are called, and I am drunk enough to not know what they are called in German either and not care. But I had lots of fun, if "doing things with your legs and arms" can be considered 'fun'. Climbing up and down the ladder with only my legs, same thing with only arms (way more difficult!), trying a combination thereof, falling down onto the ground, singing whilst doing the leg-stuff, hanging onto the metal things with one leg wrapped around the top bit and waving around the rest of my limbs rhythmically to a song mocking the place I grew up and learned these things at. 

There's only two people around who know me and have been to the place where I grew up in  - Max (TimTimmäääh!), Martin, this is for you, because you are the only people I know who can actually understand -- remember M-Hofen-ov-Doom: 

Almost two hours in the rain. With me singing along to this, because I AM NOT IN THE PLACE OF HORROR! Incredibly enjoyable. Hooking myself into children's playground thingies with my legs and realising that I am actually able to keep myself up with just that. Making me into a proper adult figure hanging onto this playground thing by her legs and wobbling around a bit. I could be more scary if I wanted to, but this was not a night to do that. 
So I spent the rainy time outside, with the phone music blaring Alligatoah and K.I.Z. into the darkness. Five people moved past the area in these two hours, and none of them appeared to actively notice that there was a) awesome music, b) me doing awesome things and c) being almost naked at times around the torso due to hanging down, legs wrapped around the metal bars and my (slightly soggy) Dissection shirt tendentially hanging down into my face. 

It's been fucking years since I did something like that. I am going to do it again tomorrow - night, calm, happy, plus autumn time. I am still excited from this little exercise! Maybe I could take the cats outside as well, I suspect that would be a lot of fun. Well. "fun". My idea of fun sometimes doesn't really correspond to that of 'normal' people. Or so they say. Heh. *hides the evil chuckle of doom*

I did ponder whether I should try and break the window of fucking GFdtR, but I have decided that that would be a ...not-good idea. For I am sane. *nods*

 Let's see how I'm going to deal with this over the next remaining month. I am definitely going to go out at night and enjoy myself and the felines at this playground though, because it's fucking awesome, makes me oddly happy, and I enjoy spending time there without kids, adults or related humans around. Yay for the beautiful solitude of an adult in a playground at night doing the hanging-down-equivalent of sit-ups, hopefully accompanied by two crazy cats. And I haven't been doing anything there for the entire time I've been living here now. So now that I know that I'm leaving I need to use this shit. Otherwise I'll be pissed off at myself.

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Edit:
Besides for repeating myself over and over and over again - Asqui just threw up a shitload of food, and I'm a bit worried. I did feed the felines an additional third time today, to celebrate, but obviously this was a bad idea. I do have to say that he is very artistic with where he deposits the vomit though - it's a path winding from one part of the flat to the opposite side, including a small circle in the middle. Just because he's a cat.