Small Town Girl(s)

The second half of last week I was in Klagenfurt. I didn't do all that much as I also combined it with 2 homeoffice days, but on Thursday after work I met a former team mate from my current job. She is Viennese, born and raised and had moved to Klagenfurt shortly after meeting her (Carinthian-based) partner online last spring. She's now hardly ever in her flat in Vienna that she purchased less than a year before and has become a true local in the Southern provincial capital, knowing way more bars and restaurants than I do. I'm sure that if anyone had asked her at the beginning of her dating journey if she was ready to move to a small town more than 300 kms from Vienna right after closing the deal on her new home she would have denied it...pretty much like I would never have imagined feeling so comfortable in a semi-detached house in the suburbs. Life's script has some surprising and strange chapters in store for you, but that's what's so exciting once you decide to go with the flow and embrace discovering new sides of yourself.

Back to School

 

At the tender age of 50 I am back at university with my inbox full of e-mails informing me about special offers at the canteen and mental health offers for students. The MBA programme I am enrolled in is in co-operation with an Austrian university and I am now on their mailing list, which means that I am getting all their spam information. I have also already downloaded the chapters of the book I am supposed to read before the first module and have realised that my procrastination tendencies have worsened over the years, if anything as my "aw, I'll just wing it" confidence has definitely grown over the years. In other words, I'll probably just skim through those hundreds of pages a few days before, ahem. Whether this is a positive development, or not, remains to be seen...I shall report.

Honeymoon. Or *NOT* the Ultimate Comaptibility Test

 

I am now back from our lovely honeymoon with a nasty cold as a temporary (well, hopefully) souvenir and some more permanent ones like the fridge magnets pictured. It was indeed the longest vacation Highflyer and I have been on together to date and therefore some people asked how we got along, what with being together 24/7. Well, it might have been the first time together for such a long time with none of us having any work or family obligations, but we already passed that compatibility test at the beginning of the Pandemic when I worked from the country house, gradually moving in there while pretending I'd move back to Vienna "once this all will be over" (Ha! Ha!) and Highflyer was grounded for weeks on end. I guess we're just so harmonious it's boring and actually suspicious to some. No arguments, no getting on each other's nerves, just enjoying each other's company. I'm a bit nostalgic that this last chapter in the "wedding play" is finished now and that we don't have anything more to look forward to that's related to our personal Event of the Year. Then again, I have a lot to look forward to with my favourite person now that the knot has finally been tied, we've been on our honeymoon and thank-you cards have been written.

Busy Touristing

We're on the second week of our honeymoon on the Canary Isles and as always I have overpacked. When this post goes live we should already be on a tour bus for a day trip to Mount Teide and it might be the first time I'll get to wear one of the long-sleeved tops I have brought along. 

Aaand with this cliffhanger I'm signing off again ;-)

Stinky Tamagotchi

We left for our honeymoon (yaaay!) on Saturday and in addition to watering the plants and doing all the other pre-vacation chores, I also made sure to "activate" my sourdough and bake bread before we left. Like a tamagotchi (gen x-ers or older millennials will remember those) with a pungent smell my sourdough starter demands to be fed every few weeks. I've had it for over two years now, since when I started baking sourdough bread during lockdown like the rest of the world. It's so perfect now that I experimented by halving my usual recipe (i.e. only using 250g of flour instead of 500) which yields almost the same size bread that I used to get with double the ingredients before. My sourdough starter also travelled to Carinthia with me in August as it did on previous longer holidays. It's like a pet at this stage, but I did stop at taking it along on honeymoon. ;-)