Abundance

 

If I have one New Year's resolution it is to use up things I have (if that is even possible) before I buy new sh**. This applies particularly to cosmetics and makeup where my stock could easily supply the cosmetics department of a small town department store. Pictured above is about 40% of my nailpolish collection...and I have pretty much as many eyeshadows, eyeliners, blushes etc. Somehow good bargains always seem to find me and %%% off sale promises by retailers are often hard to resist. This year will be the year of not ordering things I don't really need (20 almost identical versions of). I am a rather organised person and do sort out things, giving clothes I have "grown out of" or don't like anymore and don't see vintage potential in pretty easily and unsentimentally, but still I am sometimes a little disgusted by all the STUFF I own even though I used to be much worse when worked in the city centre and did a lot of casual shopping in my lunch-break. Let's see how it will go with the good intentions.

Say Cheeze

Highflyer has many qualities. Being organised and tidy is not quite on the top of the list and so I sometimes make, um, helpful suggestions on how he could organise things. Recently I encouraged him to put Christmas and birthday cards he wanted to keep into a nice box one of his Christmas presents came in. As the cards in questions were mainly from me, he spent some time on a trip down memory lane by reading them all before he put them into the box. He passed some to me to read and to be honest I had forgotten some of the (nice) things I had written in the early days in particular. Well, it's not as if we've known one another for decades, but time flies, as they say and so I was surprised by the degree of cheesiness of some of the things I had written. In a good way. All those BIG words still hold true even if I have toned it down a little since then as can be expected with an OLD MARRIED COUPLE. I still feel all the cheesy feelings and still count myself so incredibly lucky that we crossed paths that late in life when we both knew (to a good part thanks to trial and error in the past) exactly what we wanted and what not in a relationship and had matured enough to appreciate a drama-free straightforward good thing when it presented itself...

Passion

 

While some passions of mine have been short-lived and are testament to my impatient nature and short attention span, bread-making (as is baking in general) is something I really enjoy. It's a skill I have perfected in the past almost four years to the point where no bread is like the previous one and I love experimenting with different types of flours and various add-ins. I know my standard recipe by heart and feel really confident in the magic of my sourdough that has been going strong since 2020.  It really is incredibly satisfying to create something with your hands, possibly even more so for people like me who earn their money in an office-job, doing a lot of abstract work. Highflyer is my best "customer", screaming with delight at the sight of fresh bread, which does not hurt either.

Temporary Family Person

I spent the second half of my Christmas break in Innsbruck as I have done the past 4 years. Before, I never wanted to "waste" my precious annual leave on the typically very slow first week of the new year when many people are still off and business has not really jumped into gear. After meeting my favourite Tyrolean aka Highflyer things changed and I now spend New Years Eve and the days following it with him and his teenage sons and it has become a fun tradition. A few months ago, a friend told me she "admired" me for managing this temporary "stepmum" situation so well, but it really could not be easier and his sons (as is his daughter who lives in Vienna) are lovely and easy to get along with so it really is a win-win-situation for me and I see myself as a kind of cool (hopefully) aunt rather than a mother figure in their lives anyway. The three men are all way sportier than I am and so I chose which activities to participate in with them and when to do my own thing like spend half a day downtown on my own while they are on the slopes or in a swimming pool with crazy slides all day. One of his sons is as messy and forgetful as his father and I'd lie if I said I didn't look forward to my comparatively clean and tidy everyday existence with Highflyer in suburbia or on my own in my flat in Vienna once we go our separate ways again, but I do enjoy family life in small doses.

Now and Then

When I graduated from university in the 1990s, I did not envisage enrolling in another degree programme some 25 years later. Well, as I am gradually moving from the procrastination stage (that I am incredibly good at, btw) to the thesis-writing-for-real-now-stage, let me reflect on some things I have noticed that are different second time round. While several people have asked me if learning new things is more difficult "in old age" I really would not say so due to the fact that you can "slot in" and connect newly acquired knowledge with past ones in your brain's filing cabinet and also better prioritise what is even worth remembering in the first place, so nope. What has definitely become easier is researching and getting hold of secondary literature. I have literally not once set foot in a library, nor ever been to the university that my programme is affiliated with, because all my lectures took place elsewhere and I always filter for "online only" sources, which has served me well, so far. Also, being able to search for relevant paragraphs by a simple "control" + "F" keyboard combination rather than having to leaf through pages upon pages is a great timesaver. Once you have found something worth referring to or quoting, just take a screenshot and paste that one to your master file of literature snippets. Easy cheesy. This digital blessing is also a curse, though as distractions are so much easier than back in the "dark ages" when you didn't have a smartphone, nor any other phone than your landline and the internet was a new phenomenon that you only accessed from SPECIAL computers in SPECIAL designated rooms at SPECIAL times, basically. Now, distractions are only a browser tab or phone notification away unless you are incredibly disciplined, which I am definitely not. It takes longer for me to get into the zone and to really focus on working than I remember. All in all, I still really enjoy (pseudo-) scientific writing and it's so much easier now that you can insert footnotes within seconds and MS Word is not this expensive programme with rudimentary functionality that is still a mystery to you, but a tool that you have become familiar with in the past decades. Also, I probably type with double the speed I did when I was a student, so years as an office-worker and .pptx b**** have paid off at least.