something to look forward to

I'm not usually in the habit of reading horoscopes. Who is anyway, at least officially? Recently though, in keeping with my ever more fatalistic self, I have to admit to have occasionally read one or the other if I happened to come across it in a newspaper or magazine. Yesterday, I bought a magazine which came with a little "Your horoscope for 2007" booklet silicone-glued to the cover. Eagerly I leafed through it until I came to the page for my sign, Aquarius. Blablablablabla, WHAT!?! I'm not meant to experience anything remotely nice or positive until November 2007. What have I done to deserve this, I wonder?

Then again, the astrologer who wrote it usually works for the crappiest (and sadly, most popular and widely read) of all Austrian tabloids so I better not mind her predictions. Right?

And now for a little entertainment break: check out this song in what is probably the bestest [sic!] English ever.

Outlet

Yesterday I left Coma HQ at 12:30 and zoomed my flu-ridden body to the Mc Arthur Glenn Designer Outlet Parndorf, yes the one I'd more or less raided in January. This time, I didn't buy much (underwear, a bikini, stuff from the Body Shop, a bag for my Mum) apart from chocolate. Yep, they have a Lindt outlet there. Can you imagine spending € 49 on chocolate in one go? Well, I can. And did...

Spending 4 hours running from one shop to the next did provide some temporary reprieve from my killer cold (another one, I seem to have a subscription this year) but today it's back with a vengeance. Haaaaaptchhhhhhhhhhu!

come all ye trousers

Last week, I bought 4 pairs of trousers. I don't feel too guilty, though as a) they were all from H&M, hence cheap, b) recent emotional turmoil had resulted in noticeable weight-loss and I therefore needed new clothes and c) the above 2 pairs were 2-for-the-price-of-one, an offer I found too hard to resist. Now I have 3 new pairs of cords (black, grey and off-white) and one pair of stretchy skinny-fit black cotton trousers to fit into boots, which were obviously a *must* for this season.

In order to create some space in my wardrobe and ease my conscience I've decided to try and sell off 3 old and too loose-fitting pairs on EBay. Wish me luck. Or bid, if you feel so inclined.

BritBags

Introducing the Mancunian bag booty:

Exhibit a) evening bag bought from the tackiest shop out there, Primark, for a staggering £2,50. I had to pay Primark a visit for nostalgic reasons as, under its Irish "Penneys"-guise, it used to be the shop to accommodate a meagre student budget when I lived in Dublin in 1993/94.

Exhibits b) and c) were freebies with Happy and Glamour magazines.

My Big Fat Coptic Wedding

So. Some wedding trivia at long last. By the way, the friend who got married is the bearer of salt and vinegar crisps who visited last December. I realise, I haven't even given her a blog-name. Well, let's see...what about Cleo(patra), as she is of Egyptian descent and looks every bit as beautiful and "oriental" as the eponymous queen regnant. Unlike the majority of Egyptians, her family are Copts, i.e. Orthodox Christians. To Cleo, religion is a very important part of her life and therefore her future husband (a native Brit) had to convert. I'm glad he obliged as otherwise I'd have missed out on a truly fascinating ceremony. In a nutshell: there were several priests (one was busy taking photos all throughout the ceremony...) and chanting deacons (?), the bride and groom got to wear robes and crowns (!) fit for royalty and got kissed and hugged by the priest(s) a lot.

B., Cleo's other friend from Vienna and I were the usherettes which meant we got to wear hired "fascinators" (see bottom picuture) in our hair and to hand out the (32 pages thick, with bookmark!) orders of service at the church entrance. Altogether not too demanding a task and we fell in love with our feathery hair-decoration, not taking them off until we went to bed.

After the ceremony, some 200 members of the congregation convened in the church hall for snacks, wedding cake and small talk with the newlyweds. A very impressive gospel choir performed, too.

Afterwards, the bride got rid of her veil and the detachable straps of her dress and we all (well, not the whole congregation, but a party of 40) headed for the venue of the formal dinner, the picturesque East Lodge in the Peak District, about one hour from Manchester by car. B. and I shared a room on the ground floor which obviously was one of the lodge's handicapped-friendly chambers. The toilet was mounted so high you barely had to bend your knees. A rather novel experience I must say.

It was all very nice, the food was good (we got served beef as a main course so if you notice anything even MORE mad about me in the near future, you know where that came from), the bride was stunningly beautiful and conversation at my table very enjoyable indeed. The only thing unusual for anyone who's ever been to an Austrian wedding was the total absence of music and dance as the place wasn't "licensed for music" as it turned out. We were all safely tucked in our beds by midnight.

The next day, the couple's immediate family plus us usherettes and the (American) Maid of Honour all visited Chatsworth, where Pride and Prejudice was filmed. I got on B.'s nerves by wailing "Why did my camera have to desert me yesterday of all days?" in 2-minute intervals. It WAS pure torture for a photo-junkie like me not to be able to take picures of the beautiful house and gardens. Ah, well.

Wedding and sight-seeing inside, I managed to squeeze a bit of shopping in (surprise), buying mainly souvenirs of the calorific kind for the office, tonnes of magazines, Christmas cards and little bits and pieces. More about recent acquisitions on the bag-front coming up.

on her last legs

Not me, thankfully, but my trusty Casio camera is. She decided to get seriously temperamental just as I was about to enter the church where the wedding took place. Need I mention that she's past her warranty? More on the wedding tomorrow as things are rather hectic @ Coma HQ today for a change and people have been running past my desk all day, which means that my usual level of blogging pricacy is not really ensured. Commiserate with me, please! I feel positively naked without my camera. You may take away my mobile phone, my IPod, my handbag whatever...but not my camera, you know. I do have my old Samsung Digimax and FMC's old Canon Powershot to help me through until I buy a substitute, but they're HUGE. For the tech-geeks among you, I've pretty much decided to get one of these two babes, probably the Casio, hoping it won't desert me as soon as the present one.

bene...ficial

I'm back. In fact, I have been since very late on Monday night, but yesterday I was too zombified to write coherently (as if I ever do...). More on the "Big Fat Coptic Wedding" I attended in Manchester coming up, I promise. For now, I just wanted to share my latest purchase with you. It's something truly magic: benetint by benefit, which professes to be "the sexiest flush you can get from a bottle". From sheer want of other sources of sexy flushes right now, I thought I better rely on those man-made bottled ones and decided to buy what I had been too stingy to fork out 22 Pounds for on my last visit to London. What can I say - it's very subtle and comes pretty close to the flushes that don't come in a little bottle.

What was that OTHER word with "C" again?

Early (no, make that very early) tomorrow morning I am flying to Manchester. The occasion is a good friend's wedding on Saturday.

Sigh.

Don't get me wrong - I absolutely love weddings and am more than happy to see that most of my friends have found a person with whom they know they want to spend the rest of their lives and have children with. Given my own pitiful marital status I have to admit that I did however find solace in the fact that everyone around me already seemed to have got that marriage and childbearing business sorted and I was safe until - God forbid! - the first wave of divorces/second marriages was bound to hit these shores. Until! Until some ot the least likely candidates (at least in my naive and obviously completely unfounded assessment of the situation) decided to send out wedding invitations. And! What's more! *Everyone* became pregnant (again).

In...uhm...very occasional fits of self-pity and attacks of the old what-have-you-got-to-show-for-your-old-age I tell myself it's a CONSPIRACY. Then I remind myself that the cumulative occurrence of weddings and babies is a coincidence or more likely an inevitable side-effect of being the wrong side of thirty.

Back on blogging duty on Tuesday!

looks can be mercifully deceiving

Under the benevolent glow of street lights even the Gürtel looks rather exciting and impressively urban from the vantage point of the café on top of the main library building where I met Novala* last night:

Speaking of lights: On my daily lunch-break prowls I've been watching the progress of the mounting of this year's Christmas decoration in the pedestrian zones. By the looks of it, we're going to have a revival of last year's chandeliers and fairy light curtains.

* sporting a most covetable laptop bag she got through work. Envy!

isn't it ironic

...what with all those jokes about Polish car-thieves that a Polish coach was stolen in Vienna last weekend. Der Standard has the story:

Polnischer Autobus in Wien gestohlen
Reiseunternehmer lobte 15.000 Euro Belohnung für Hinweise aus.

Ein polnisches Reiseunternehmen vermisst seit dem Wochenende einen seiner Reisebusse:
Das Fahrzeug war laut Bundeskriminalamt in der Nacht auf vergangenen Samstag vor einem Hotel in der
Wagramer Straße im Bezirk Donaustadt abgestellt und wurde gestohlen. Der Besitzer lobt für Hinweise eine
Belohnung in Höhe von 15.000 Euro aus.
Bei dem Bus handelt es sich um einen silberfarbenen Mercedes Benz Tourismo mit dem polnischen
Kennzeichen WN-56438 und der Aufschrift "RAF Trans". Das
Bundeskriminalamt ersucht unter der Telefonnummer
0664/83-44-334 (Gruppe Kattner) um Hinweise. (APA)

autumn cleaning

As I was transferring photo files from TD's computer to SONYa last night, I stumbled upon this old picture I'd been meaning to post for ages. It's a road-sign for a little village we always pass en route to my relatives in Styria. Admittedly, it's not halfway as funny as this Upper Austrian village's name, but I like it anyway.

Oh, is that the time already?

A year ago today I wrote my first post. The fact that November 11 is the first day of the carnival season was a coincidence. No, really.

I can vividly remember the frame of mind I was in when I decided to start blogging. Not exactly the chirpiest one, but looking back now I must say that the *things* that were bugging me back then feel small and insignificant in comparison to what is choking me these days. Ah well. You live and learn. Or maybe not.

black boots and black dahlias

After I'd picked up the tickets from the cinema, there was just enough time to pop into a shoe store too trashy to be mentioned publicly in order to purchase a pair of black suede boots for -believe it or not - € 22,99 before I had to return to the cinema to meet up with Prefab Babe (hereinafter to be referred to as PB). Well, actually, she's a fab babe, but as she and her hubby have just had a prefab home built, I had the brainwave to assign this pseudonym to her for the purpose of this blog. PB and I go back a looong way, in fact until the very first week of university back in 1990 and still indulge in occasional reminiscing about the good (?) old days in the English Department of Vienna University.

The film we'd picked was The Black Dahlia. Don't ask me why we did because it turned out be somewhat, well, beyond us. The plot was overladen with too many characters and it all seemed a bit contrived and hard to follow. We soon gave up our post-mortem in the adjacent café as neither of us cared enough to swap elusive details in the vain hope of completing the jigsaw. I can't remember the last time I'd felt I didn't quite get the plot, but what with my congenital arrogance I chose to blame it on the director/scriptwriter rather than on myself.

borderline case

Lo and behold the latest victim of my clothes-recycling itch: Ingredients: an H&M skirt, some borders and lace.

The book. The film. The cake

Demel does Marie Antoinette:

knickerbocker glory

You could say that Marie Antoinette inspired me (all those men in breeches) but I'd got it into my head weeks ago that I was going to recycle a pair of trousers of unfashionable length into the kind of cropped legwear which you don't need to forecfully shoehorn into your boots.

I found the perfect victim in my wardrobe in KLU, the hopelessly congested interim storage for clothes that *might* come in fashion again. Like, in the next millennium. Anyway, I took a pair of burgundy Blaumax corduroy trousers back to Vienna and - having checked the ideal lenght with a pair of boots the same colour - castrated them. Snip, snip. I'm wearing them today and so far, nobody has run off screaming after seeing me. Always a sign of an arts-and-crafts project gone not entirely wrong.

pretty in pink (frills)

Last night, Frida and I went to see Marie Antoinette. None of the reviews I'd read had been particularly favourable, but I have to say I really liked it. As did Frida. It was an explosion of colours and oh so wonderfully decadent. Admittedly, all the dialogue M.A. aka Kirsten Dunst had would fit on a (small) Post-it note, but her outrageous hairdos, costumes and shoes more than made up for the lack in meaningful conversation. Thankfully, the opulence wasn't spoilt by any nasty chopping-off-heads-scenes or the like.

Kirsten Dunst is one of those cute actresses women love. I do anyway. I've never interviewed men on her fanciability, but I have a hunch it might be a case of acute KateWinsletitis. To the puzzlement of the male species, most women seem to adore Kate Winslet (or Kate Kate Winselt as I like to call her since she made her debut as a singer) because she made bingo wings acceptable on the big screen. Hallelujah! We bingo-sisters just wanted to hug her. Other women's darlings: Drew Barrymore, who radiates "I could be your best friend in real life, you know" who and like Scarlett Johansson is one of the very few Hollywood actresses who seem to eat (gasp!) actual f.o.o.d. German actress Alexandra Maria Lara, who does not fit into the cute category, but is in a league of her own. Perhaps because she's supernaturally beautiful and completely natural at the same time, we don't even begin to question and berate this divine injustice but marvel at her God-given good looks.

In male actors, I seem to have rather non-mainstream taste. I mean, I could be stranded on a lonely island with Brad Pitt, George Clooney et al. and humanity would die out. Yeah, I know, they could probably restrain themselves just as easily as I could, but that's beside the point! I like actors who either have that kind of psycho look like Jonathan Rhys Meyers or who are pretty ordinary, like Andrew Lincoln, the guy who played the lovesick best man in Love Actually, which, by the way is one of my favourite films ever.

...or maybe not

It's snowing like mad right now and in the ten minutes since I took the above picture, the sky has darkened to an apocalyptic gloom and snow has accumulated on cars' bonnets.

shortlived

Yesterday afternoon, it snowed in Vienna's first district for about 5 minutes before the weather gods seemed to pinch themselves and remember that it was, after all, only November 2.

Honey, I shrunk the house

After an extensive session of clearing-away-the-summer-bags and unearthing-the-scarves-and-gloves-from-their-summer-hideaway, I decided to venture out into the cold All Saints' air. I'd seen pictures of the Erwin Wurm exhibition Keep a Cool Head at MUMOK and if the temporary installation of an upended house on top of the museum was anything to go by, I knew I was in for an art-experience of the entertaining kind. It really was a good exhibition (as was the Franz Gertsch retrospective) and afterwards I roamed the various museum shops, leaving with a postcard saying "I shop therefore I am". Too true.

This morning, I woke up to the sight of cars covered with frost. Just as well I had the gloves and scarves on standby!