Self-cheating

I didn’t get an 86% on my master’s. I got an 89%. How’s that for an undersell…

Graduation and happy unemployement!

Graduation over – my speech went thunderingly well. My party went thunderingly well as well. Swell. Except some people are RSVP-phobic so more than expected showed up and sustainance ran out before I managed to grab a bite. My niece ran for more bread and all was (s)well. In any case, we all had a great time and I received flowers and wine, as I hoped for. I also got an 86% on my master’s degree, which I consider not a small feat in this day and age. Mostly age.

Now I am very happily unemployed, swimming a kilometre almost every day, doing jigsaw puzzles, meeting friends, eBaying a bit, making patchwork and waiting for the ultimate job to show up.

Have decided to stay on my meds for the summer. I am having such a great time and feeling so well. Why spoil it?

PMS and writer’s block…

Ain’t I just BLESSED!
The not-very-well-hidden exhibitionist inside me jumped and cried ME! ME! when someone was asked to make a speech on behalf of the students at the graduation tomorrow. Now I am sitting here with severe PMS and the only thing I can thing of saying is GO FUCK YOURSELVES WITH A POGO STICK! Which has nothing to do with my graduation, my teachers, my fellow students, my studies or the price of tea in China and everything to do with hormones. Huh!

I had all these interesting, mildly funny and thought-provoking ideas sloshing around in my brain earlier this week and I thought I’d let them steep and come up with the very spot-on speech tonight. Instead I am stuck with a lethal potion.

Nothing I can think of, besides expletives, seems appropriate, interesting or worth wasting breath on. Do I really want to talk about a bright future? Uh… in Iceland? Do I really want to talk about the crisis? We’ve got it coming out of our ears – on the radio, TV, on every page of the newspapers… do I have anything to add? And if I did, who’d want to hear about it on a supposedly happy day?

What a conundrum (I really like that word). Pffttt… my very good friend, Kolla, who is staying with me at the moment (lives in Florida), told me to break out the red wine intended for tomorrow’s party and it would get my juices flowing. Except my PMS and alcohol don’t mix terribly well. Aggressiveness in the nth. Son, barricade yourself and hide the knives. Too bad I have access to my husband’s weapon collection…

Alcoholic, PMS-ridden, unemployed, pre-menopausal, hysterical, middle-aged woman slaughters innocent (chronically yapping) neighbour dog on the eve of her graduation as a mature student…

Yin and yang

Dad and mom. Or the other way around (I don’t remember whether yin is the female or the male counterpart to the female/male yang).

In any case. When I am around people who are somewhat disorganised, creative, full of ideas and perhaps a little scatterbrained, I become my mother. Their vagueness gets on my nerves, their ideas are so unpragmatic, and their effusiveness speaks incompetence, even stupidity to me. I am the square who brings them down to earth – the spoilsport. I am not saying that my mother was a boring, mean person – she just always saw the very real obstacles to people’s ideas; I believe she just wanted to point out what they had to overcome to get where they wanted to go. But I think I am just a bit nasty. And sometimes jealous that I didn’t come up with the ideas myself. Or just a plain sourpuss.

When I am around people who think linear thoughts, have everything squared away, never have a hair out of place – know everything worth knowing and seem to balance everything with perfect ease – I become my father. I poke holes in their logic by playing devil’s advocate, I become flippant, I become a free spirit and do my very best to shock them with my attitude, language, clothes, and stories (all true, but perhaps slightly overstated…). I irritate them in exactly the same manner as the people in the paragraph above irritate me.

Hmm…. analyze that!

Silver and sulphur

Like oil and water – they don’t mix well. Iceland has geothermia – which is why we can live here. Piping hot water from every faucet, toasty houses in the middle of winter, jacuzzis in every other garden (well, almost). And all for a truly reasonable price.

But the geothermal water has a lot of extra ingredients - one of which is sulphur. Foreigners smell it when they first take a shower and start their desparate search for a farting intruder. We natives don’t smell it anymore, except when we come back from a long stay elsewhere. Generally, it doesn’t bother us. However, I have now spent hours cleaning silver, which will be back to black within a fortnight. Nice little things which I inherited from my grandmother, but they aren’t nice except when they are, well, silver-coloured… and if I keep them wrapped up in a cupboard, why keep them at all? They are all decorative items, although a couple could be used when we have dinner guests. Strike that. Cleaning the house and cooking a nice meal before dinner guests arrive is enough – I am not about to start cleaning silver for an hour each time I have company. Guess I am not enough of a Bree Van de Camp/Hodge (if you don’t know what I mean, you are an incultural imbecile who doesn’t watch Desparate Housewives…).

eBay for my silver? Mulling it over.

Here we go again (add music)…

Well, my dears. More than a week has passed since I finished my last assignment. In a few days I will officially be a Master of Project Management.

The last ten days have been spent doing a lot of nothing. Sleeping, reading paperbacks, working on my stamp collection, doing jigsaw puzzles… A holiday. Now I am starting to feel ready for action again.

eBay is my action these days. Bits and bobs which surfaced when I was cleaning out my late mothers apartment aroused my curiosity. Am selling said bits and bobs these days and I am very curious to see the outcome. The strangest things can be sold on eBay. But getting good prices depends on a lot of things. Mostly research and then some more research. Which takes a lot of time. So the initial income does nowhere near pay for the time spent on research. But then one learns. Just like with everything else, making money on eBay has to be learnt. Hope I will get there one day. My mission these days is to make enough spending money for my intended trip in July (driving up the US West Coast). I am still far from the mark.

Gotta look for some more bits and bobs in these boxes…