Zimena

1. I went to Denmark for the day yesterday. Nice trip - perhaps the nicest Denmark-daytrip in a while. The past few such trips have been so exhausting, and I've practically felt like I needed extra sleep for a week afterwards, but yesterday it was quite okay. I wasn't even that tired during the day, except for being tired early in the morning - which I usually am, so that's normal enough.

2. I have a new handbag! It's quite small, but still with two main compartments, plus two small pockets. It also has a clip-on shoulder strap. This is one of my main requirements for a handbag, because it means that I can also wear it around my waist, as it will clip easily on and off as needed.. My plan is to use this as my main everyday handbag - as in, that thing I need for carrying money, keys, phone and perhaps some other small items when I go out to do random stuff. I have a couple of bigger handbags that I also like, but they're less practical for everyday use, really.

3. My desk needs tidying. I have all sorts of papers and magazines and random junk lying about right now, but I'm not sure I feel like sorting through it all today. Might have to, though. Soon.

4. There are lots of news and pics about Johannes, even though it's summer and he's been missing a couple of training camps due to illness. I want to make a picspam/fanpost about everything, though, so I won't ramble that much here. I don't know when I can do that, though - it feels like I'm online much less than I would prefer these days. I don't always know why that happens, though.

5. Also, related to the point above: Ola Klæbo liked a couple of my comments on IG, and even replied to me once, a few days ago! I'm probably more excited about this than I should be. It's just very nice and cool, okay?

6. I started a large-ish project to sort through all my digital photos. Back in the old iPhoto days, I had some kind of system where I would sort photos by event/category every time I imported new ones, but when iPhoto became Photos, I sort of hated it and therefore fell out of the habit of keeping things organized. Time to make a proper try now. Also, I used to save only own photos in this/these apps, but with the amount of screencaps and pic saves I make from the mobile phone nowadays, I guess it makes sense to make some categories for these as well.

7. Yes, I caved in: There is now a "personal:fangirling" tag. Next project: add old posts that belong there to it. I have a feeling that it's going to be a huge job.

I have a feeling that there were more things on my mind when I started writing this post, but it has escaped me by now. Therefore, I'll stop here. Have a nice evening, okay?

Good news first: I feel better today. I was still headache-y and dizzy during the night, so I'm still a bit tired and such, but other than that I'm okay. That's a good thing at least.

In other news, we have - wait for it - 33 degrees centigrade outside my window right now. It's also sunny and the sky is completely blue, without a single cloud in sight. It's actually too hot to be outside for very long, but I'm going to find a nice shade spot on the veranda soon, and hopefully I can sit there for a little while.

Also, I haven't been online all day. Now that I finally have some computer time, I'm not really doing anything useful with it. All those nice things I planned to do while I wasn't here? Just escaped my mind now that I can do them. Instead, I've been playing around with Avatar Maker (for now, this is me). I also tried to clean up an old and mostly unused Gmail account. It's full of junk, except for some stuff on the Google Drive, so I guess I can try to download that, and then just get rid of the account.

... That's a task for tomorrow, though. Mom is off to Denmark with Mrs Neighbour then, so that should mean a nice evening by the computer for me. Yes, I'm looking forward to that. If all goes well, I might actually write something then, too. Or do some more Swift lessons? Let's see what will happen - it should be fun, either way.

Okay, so it'll be past 2am before I finish typing up this note. I just got home from another day-trip to Denmark about an hour ago. To be honest I wasn't too keen on going there today, because I still don't feel fully rested after last week's traveling. We had some things to do, though, so I guess I would have had to make this trip soon anyway, even if I hadn't made it today.

It was a good day, though. Better than I feared, anyway, especially after a few hours when I wasn't so painfully tired anymore. Can you tell I dislike getting up early, even if it's needed for some reason? It always leaves me feeling too tired for too much of the day. Let's just say I had a good time mostly, but I'm also glad this trip is over and done with for now.

Tomorrow my plan is to plant some more flowers, so that there's something in every flower box we own before Thursday (Ascension Day, which is a holiday here). This should be possible, I think.

After that, I plan to Not Make Any Big Plans for a week or so. Just sleep, read, rest, be on the computer, write and sit on the veranda a little bit. Let's see how that goes. ;)

Now it's night for me, though. Good night!

I've been a good and productive girl today. I have:

* Managed to send a letter that I would have liked to send a few days ago already.
* Been to town to pick up two pairs of support stockings that I ordered a couple of weeks ago. (I need to wear those things quite often, and they're on sale this month, so now was a good time to get new ones!)
* Changed the living room curtains.
* Done some minor tidying and cleaning.

In less productive news, I also slept for about an hour - or maybe an hour and a half - in the middle of the day.

I don't really understand how the day passed so fast, though. It feels like I got up, went out for a bit, went home and slept, changed the curtains... and then what? It was practically evening already! How did that even happen? Where did the day go?

Tomorrow is Eurovision Final Day! And guess what? Norway made it through from the semifinal! I still don't like the song much, but it's still nice that they made it to the final. Estonia didn't, though, which was sad as I like that song a lot. At least my other favourite, Belarus, also made it through, so I guess I couldn't get three wishes fulfilled on one night. Two is good, too.

I slept for much of the day today. In fact, it feels like I've been doing something like this: sleep - eat - sleep - eat - try to go shopping (and failing, because the parking lot was very full, and I didn't feel like going into an overcrowded store after all) - go home - try to watch a bit of snooker - sleep - eat.

... and I still wouldn't mind sleeping some more, or at least go and lie down in bed and maybe read a bit. For now I'm sitting by the computer for a little while, though. I'm always happy doing that, so maybe it'll make me a bit less meh, too.

I started writing a small ficlet yesterday. Well, it's supposed to be just something small; something easy before I go back to the slightly more complex idea that I'm also working on. I didn't get very far, though, and I don't know why, because the idea works fine in my head. I can even see/feel certain scenes exactly in my head... but write them? Nah, not easy. I even meant to write JUST those scenes, without much surrounding plot or backstory... but guess what happened? Yeah, I started writing, and the plot/backstory got added immediately and more or less automatically, so now I have to work with that to get to what I really wanted to write. What I have in my head and what comes out in writing seems to be two different things, sometimes. Why? How? What? Argh.

What else? Well, I'm starting to see that I'll probably fail my poetry challenge for April. Maybe I'll keep it as a monthly thing, though, because at least it keeps me writing something, even if I might not do 10 in a month. Could be interesting to make a poetry master post at the end of the year, and look back on what I wrote each month. It's an interesting idea - I just need to make a separate tag for it. I'm maybe not so happy with writing being under the "creativity" category anyway, because it feels like it just adds an extra, unnecessary level of tagging.

In general, I'm not that happy with my current tag system anymore. I have 2000+ posts and more than 10 years of LJ'ing/DW'ing, though, so I don't know how to change it without making a mess of it. I tried to reorganize things when I moved to DW, and then I ended up merging some categories that I probably shouldn't have merged.... but also, having hundreds of tags sort of defeats the purpose of trying to have an organized system, because it's too huge by now.

I don't feel like trying to write a coherent post today, so I'll just mention a couple of things in bullet-point form:

* Ronnie won his match and is in the quarterfinal. Guess whom he will play next? Ding Junhui! That? Is both awesome and painful at the same time, because that means my two favourite players will meet in a Crucible quarterfinal. Not final, but quarterfinal. One piece of my snooker heart will break after that match, regardless of the result. Strange how I spend the whole season hoping for matches between the two of them, because they are both wonderful. Then I get that matchup now - in the one tournament where I don't want to lose any of them too early!

* I saw a super-cute cat on the street today. Apparently it must have had its humans in a nearby house, because it was so friendly and curious and came over to me wanting to get petted. So nice!

* Writing isn't working at the moment. I have a fic to work on, an idea for a short ficlet, and I still want to see if I can complete my poetry challenge. Number of things I thought of writing today: 3. Number of things I actually worked on: 0. That is a problem, obviously.

* Also, related to the above, there is a scene in my mind that I'd say physically hurts to think about. It's so cruel and painful and emotionally hard-hitting, and I don't understand why I'm even thinking of it. But at the same time, I can't stop thinking of it and wanting to write it. My mind is a weird place.

So, the first full day in my 39th year on this planet has not been the best so far. I'm in a somewhat depressive mood, it's snowing outside (yes, snowing, on the 17th of April!), I'm in that annoying mood where I don't feel like I'm "good enough" for/at anything, yet I'm not really motivated to do anything to fix that or learn new things...

This day is just sad so far, really.

I went to have some hot chocolate with whipped cream just now, though. That made me feel at least slightly better for a time.

In other news, my birthday yesterday was fairly quiet. I got chocolate cake and gifts (Spotify card, iTunes card, birthday card, pink archive folder - and the Apple TV box that I got around two weeks ago as an early and main birthday gift counts as well!). Other than that I didn't do anything that special, though. Some of you here were definitely important in giving me a special day, though - thank you for your lovely birthday posts and messages! It means so much more than you probably realise. THANK YOU!

What else? Yeah, I'm still dreaming of going to The Gathering some time - especially now that I've seen some more photos from there this year. Another dream, perhaps slightly triggered by looking up TG photos, is learning to program. I started trying to learn C++ some time ago, but somehow I fell out of that after just a few lessons. It might be time to make another try now - perhaps with XCode, as I already have that installed from the last time I was thinking of trying to learn at least something about programming.

Oh, and while I dream on and wait for some updates, I also have another fangirl post to write. That is, of course, a reason to put a smile back on my face.

First of all - YAY, I'm done with the paperwork related to the Stavanger trip/meeting from a few weeks ago. I got the last two forms I needed yesterday, so today I've been to the post office to send everything in. I know this is not much stress to most people, but I still wasn't that happy about having to fill out these forms. Now my part is done, though, so let's wait and see what happens from here.

As for other things, I see a lot of new people are coming to DW now. Does anyone know of a friending meme somewhere? It's always fun to get to know some new people...

On that note, I updated my profile ever so slightly. It's still not great, but there's slightly more info on it than before. When I browse around random journals, I always get a little disappointed if their profile isn't really giving me a "feel" for who they are, so I guess the least I can do is try to have something at least half-informative up about myself.

Somehow I didn't find a way to include "fangirling excessively" on there, though... but I guess that's obvious from my journal already. I'll try to not do it in this post, though.

What else? Yes, I have a lot of new music to listen to, as I recently got about five albums by Nena. You might remember the 80s hit single "99 Luftballons" ("99 Red Balloons" when it was recorded in English). I've had one compilation album of hers/theirs (From what I know, the name Nena refers to both the female singer and the band around her from the 80s) since forever. When I randomly mentioned this to a friend, he immediately got wildly excited, because it turned out that he had a lot of other materials. Now I'm kind of excited about this, too, so I just need to make some time to listen to everything. At least I have everything in my iTunes now.

I also have some things I want to read. chelsealady has been writing novel-length fanfiction that I'm behind on reading, so I have practically three full "books" of fiction to read from her. It's a little bit challenging to read fic in Spanish, because my vocabulary is just not good enough at times... but I'm also learning from doing this, so I should stop putting it off because it's challenging. Unless I end up falling asleep the second my head hits the pillow tonight, I might finish one "book" tonight, and also start the next one. That's the plan, at least.

As for other books, I still have Bruce Springsteen's biography to read. I started it, and I enjoyed what I've read so far, but somehow I'm not reading very fast. Much of the time, I end up lying in bed clicking randomly around the Internet instead of spending that time reading... which is annoying, because I like reading and want to do it more than I do.

Well, I'm off to find something to eat soon... and I wrote this post instead of working on fic today. My mind is still on that fic I started a couple of days ago, though, so I hope to make some progress with it soon. Tomorrow, maybe? Let's see about that...!

I managed to make up for much of yesterday's unproductiveness today. Well, to some extent, at least. Even though I slept until about 10am, I also got a lot of housework done - changing bedsheets, vacuuming, laundry, picking up dry leaves from the veranda... this type of stuff. I even managed to put much of the laundry outside to dry... at least until it started raining anyway, and I had to take it back inside, blah. I guess it still counts as the first attempt at drying clothes outside this year, though.

In other not-very-new news... I hate dealing with people sometimes. Some time ago I had to call to that place I was at in Stavanger for the meeting a couple of weeks back, because they had forgotten to give me a couple of papers that I need to send in along with another official form. Fine, they promised to send me the needed papers immediately. Of course, their version of "doing something immediately" also included forgetting it once, so that I had to call them about it again the other day. Then, today the letter finally arrived... and it included only one out of three needed papers. SERIOUSLY, FOLKS, CAN YOU PLEASE DO THIS CORRECTLY, without me having to call you up 3-4 times about the same thing?

Luckily it seems I could get the other two papers from elsewhere as well, so I'm going to try to see if that works first. I'm not too keen on yet another phone call to the Stavanger people. It's not that they're not friendly enough on the phone.... but... yeah, I'm sure you can understand my frustration.

My headache from yesterday has faded today... but these people might just give me a new one before they know it.

Okay, enough pointless whining about this, because there are many nicer topics to talk about instead. For example, the fact that the cross-country season isn't quite over yet. Well, it's over as far as important races go, but there are still races in various places. From what I know, Johannes is going to be in Sweden for something called "Fjälltopploppet" ("the mountaintop race") from tomorrow until Sunday, and he's competing in all four races that make up the program for the weekend. A sprint race tomorrow, a 100m supersprint on Friday, the so-called mountaintop race on Saturday... and some type of cross-country-ski-cross-showrace-thingy on Sunday.

The latter is something I have never even heard of, but it's apparently a competition where kids and teens compete in both downhill skiing and technical cross-country skiing. From there, they can qualify for a final round, where they get to race against someone famous. Apparently the kids will get a head start, to even out the difference in strength and skills, and give them a fair chance of "beating" one of their idols.

Can I just say that I love that Johannes is going to be there for something like this? It will mean so much to those kids, I'm sure... and it's also nice to think that he's one of the stars at such an event now.

Oh, and because I have a hard time stopping myself once I've started talking about him, I can also mention that he posted another vlog post. Mostly about the national championship races last weekend, but also with some very nice clips of him lying in bed talking about random randomness from that day or next day. There is especially one clip where he's quite obviously stretching in such a way that he's using both sides of the bed... and smiling while doing so! I think you can imagine me wondering who he was rooming with this time... ;)

Also, I've been meaning to screencap both that and one other moment since I saw the video, but it doesn't seem like I'm getting around to it today. Therefore, I also need to tell you about this as well.

Maybe you remember my surprise at him competing at the 50km during the weekend? It was his first competitive race over such a long distance and in this format, so he has quite a bit to say about it on his vlog... and he's... wait for it... standing shirtless in the snow talking about how he is so tired and hurting after that race! He also says that he needs a couple of things now - namely these: "candy, candy, candy, candy, candy... and painkillers!"

I love him so much, okay?

So, I'm back from Stavanger. I've known about having to go there for a couple of weeks already, and I must admit that I kind of dreaded it ever since I learned about having to make this trip. There are a couple of reasons for that. Most importantly, I wasn't too keen on going there because it also meant going to an unpleasant official meeting of sorts. It's not that important what the meeting was about, as I don't feel like talking about it in detail on here, but let's just say it was something unpleasant to me because it meant that I had to talk about rather personal topics with total strangers, and do so in a way that would convince them of my viewpoint.

As it turned out, it was just one "total stranger", though. Which helped a lot. Last time I had a similar meeting, about 12 years ago, I had to sit in front of a whole group of people and talk about these same topics. That was much worse. As far as I can tell, the meeting was a total success, though, so I'm happy about that. But, I must admit, I might be just as happy just because this thing is now over and done with, and I don't have to dread it anymore.

Sorry that this doesn't make much sense, by the way. I can see how I'm "telling without really telling anything" above. I just feel like having something about this here, even though I don't want to think about it more than necessary and spend time talking about all the details.

Anyway, the other reason I dreaded the Stavanger trip was the fact that it's a very long drive to get there. 230km might not sound like much if you're used to the highways of mainland Europe, but the roads from here to Stavanger are nothing like that. Most of the time there are a lot of curves and narrow roads passing areas where landslides are fairly common, so just getting there is much more unpleasant than what the distance would suggest.

...so it's probably not surprising that we didn't want to make the trip by road twice? In the end, we decided to take the ferry from Stavanger to Hirtshals, Denmark, and then catch our more "usual" ferry from there and back home. More expensive than just driving back and forth, obviously, but it also meant that I got to travel for more pleasant reasons during this trip. Especially the ferry trip from Stavanger was interesting, because I had never travelled on that ferry before. I had a nice evening on it, though - nice food, sitting in a bar listening to some half-okay piano player/singer for a couple of hours - this was fun especially because it also meant watching a group of guys (probably around 20 years old or so) singing along to every song and being generally in a very lively mood, but never obnoxious or anything. For me it's kind of cool when someone so young are familiar with and are clearly enjoying the songs on offer in such a place - usually songs that are "old" even by my standards, or possibly from my childhood, too.

Anyway, I got home today afternoon, and I'm still a bit tired after the trip, so I'll stop here. Hope to be back online in the evening, though, because I have more things to post about, and some very beautiful comments to answer.