Cricket, allergies, mindless panic

I have 7 days left of my #thirdyearabroad.

This is a deeply upsetting fact for two reasons:

1. I don't want to leave. I like it here, despite this ridiculous, furnace-like heat.
2. I have way, waaaaaay too much work to do.

Reason two is the reason I've not been blogging much. Well, reason two and a whole new onset of allergies. My immune system has taken to treating pollen as the opening of hostilities by some unseen enemy and thus flushes my entire nasal cavity every two minutes, with six to seven enormous sneezes as an accompaniment. To round it off, sleeping is for people who are not under savage attack from pollen and being able to see is reserved for those not subject to ambush by flora.

My kinder colleagues tell me I look tired. I don't have any unkind colleagues, which is just as well because I'd go totally bananas if someone actually pointed out what an utterly unpleasant mess I must look right now.

The allergies were particularly bad last night because I played cricket with some friends from work; all interns, all Indian, and all light years better at cricket than me. I was glad England were playing well against Australia because in this little corner of the world I was letting the side down a lot. Still, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon, if a little (a lot) roastingly hot. It is testament to my lack of sleep and wooly-headedness that for four hours today I couldn't work out why my right arm and side were hurting. Not a proud moment for me.

The work, as I said, is endless. Why people wait until just before they go on holiday to give work to the new guy is beyond me; I suppose they see me as the least important thing on a list but it does make it a touch difficult to get clarification on things I need...well, clarified. Still, I shall muddle through to the best of my prodigious abilities.

My final design for the invitations has been approved, and I got to spend several minutes groping paper. Oh, 350gsm gloss. Mm, 300gsm matt. Oh, Bristol, let me touch you with my fingertips. I used to work in a print shop, and some things never go away. And although it sounds odd, handling paper, looking at the different colours of white, comparing the gloss to the matt and imagining how your image would look...it's amazing fun. Never let me design your wedding invitations. You will lose hours of your life to talk about paper.

With that done it's on to the movies, two translations, and a couple of rearrangements. Six days, five projects. No problem.

Now I think about it...I might go in a little early tomorrow.

A stressful day that got better and somehow more stressful

If you don't want to read the entirety of this post, then this image will sum it up nicely.

If you don't get it, I'm afraid you're just going to have to read.

Alright, so yesterday and Friday several of my colleagues mentioned that the annual intern report was coming up, and had I prepared anything.

My reaction: whut?

"Oh wow," they said, "you didn't know? Every year the intern has to prepare an hour-long report and present it to the senior staff."

Oh hey, that sounds amazing fun, like running across coals or jumping out of an aeroplane - the kind of thing I'd love to do with more than two days warning. So the entirety, and I do mean the entirety, of my day has been spent in a frantic, sweaty panic. I read and reread my report speech. I argued everything three different ways, trying to find any criticisms that could be levelled at me and working out how to counter them. I put together a presentation. I sweated through two shirts, and that's a pain because I do not have a lot of shirts right now.

So I turned up at the appointed hour and place and knocked on the door. I heard the voice of the motherfucking Dean of the School on the other side. My knees, which were already doing an excellent approximation of castanets, switched up a gear and knocked out a tempo that might easily be labelled prestissimo, if one were writing a symphony for the body.

I digress. I was nervous. That's the point.

I entered.

"SURPRISE!"

My coworkers had thrown me a surprise party. I had sweated through two shirts and it turns out there is no intern report. I was set up. They got me, and they got me good. To apologise they'd bought cake, fruit, and gifts.

The gifts were two-fold. First some physical things: a guidebook to Chicago, in French; a gorgeous dark blue tie; and a flash drive and a keyring, both inscribed with my place of work.

They also filled a card and two sides of A4 with kind words. Amazing. I can read them. Even more amazing-er.

I still had to make a speech, mind you. I'm also still shaking from that. 

So that was my day. A stressful day that improved but got more stressful at the same time, and a very pleasing way to say goodbye to all the friends I've made on the staff.

New tricks, old cats, and keys. And this damned tooth.

Parents arrive in four and a half weeks. I leave three and a half weeks after that.

This is not making me happy at all.

Still, following Third Year Abroad on Twitter is giving me just a little glee in a sort of schadenfreude way, as I watch my fellow year abroaders try to pretend that the unhappy day has arrived and they have to go back to Blighty. I'm still here, just, and the desire to return gets stronger every day. I can definitely see myself coming back for a Master's, especially if the UK continues to raise the price of Higher Education. In any case, you're not interested in my musings on my future. You want my day. Here you are then.

My wisdom is increasing, and now my teeth feel very strange - as though they no longer fit together correctly. I strongly suspect that this is going to require some minor surgery, which is a deeply unhappy prospect, so if it comes to that wish me luck and hope that I come out of surgery only missing the teeth I don't need. Ultimate test of French right there.

My morning was interesting; a translation and an update to a couple of things. Nothing too taxing, but it was quite enjoyable and I was given free rein to give the text a little more bounce that it got from the straight translation. At lunch I tried out a new trick I've been working on and I'm very pleased with the way it turned out; only one major error and it was brushed aside as "nobody's perfect." I believe, looking back, that if I'd pulled it off flawlessly it would somehow have been less impressive.

Back to the office for the afternoon and more translation as well as a brainstorming session with my colleague in the Association. She wants to do a video do, and has some really interesting ideas that hopefully I'll be able to realise. So far I'm confident, but she might come in tomorrow with something completely hare-brained.

This evening I went to see C, my Monday night student. She's going away this weekend, and last week she mentioned how frustrating it was that people charged her 60€ to look after her cat. Since her going away would mean no lesson (and thus no cash) I immediately stepped forward and offered to do it for half price. The deal was struck, and so today I went over and was shown how the microwave oven, coffee machine, and WiFi work. That's all a chap needs, really, so although I shall be twenty minutes from work (instead of thirty seconds) I'm rather looking forward to a morning commute. I shall be able to stagger into the office and complain about the traffic, it'll be awfully fun.

After showing me round we had sashimi and a glass of wine. I still can't like sashimi. I'm not a fan of raw fish at all. Fried, steamed, poached, roasted but cold - yeuch. Sling it on the fire.

Finally home, to find eating an apple is surprisingly painful. It's going to have to be M. Le Dentiste, isn't it. Yikes.

Have you had any French dentistry experience? How was it? How expensive was it? Please help out with any knowledge you've got.

[Manic laughter]

Stage directions in my life are pretty much the above right now. I have time for manic laughter and half an hour for lunch. Half an hour! I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there are laws against that kind of cruel and unusual punishment.

To recap: this morning started with me discovering that whoever had set up our google+ account had done it assuming you could just set up a personal page as an organisation. Google, however, has spotted that there aren't many (indeed any) folks in the world with a name that is entirely initialisations (not acronyms; acronyms are initialisations that you say as a word, like RADAR or COBRA). Consequently our account has been closed and we've got a stern email from Google, which none of my colleagues read because they don't monitor the social media accounts.

Hum.

So that was a new and exciting spanner that was thrown into the engine of my life. All the same; I thrive on challenge, and before long I had a new page up, in the right place this time, but unfortunately currently administered by me. I need to shift that on to someone else quickly, because I won't be here for much longer and it needs to be dynamically managed.

Speaking of dynamic managing, and dragging the conversation away from me for just a second, can I point out that my little sister is running an entire store's social media strategy, has been elected the local Carnival Queen, and is also doing a degree?

I've already mentioned my brother. Seems like my gene pool is for awesome only.

Anyway, enough about her, back to me. Aside from redoing our G+ page I've also put together several montages for perusal by the upper echelons and rattled off a translation for my secret project. All I need now is willing volunteers and actors. It's going to be so, so much fun. Apply within.

My "English High Tea" project moved forward today too, with posters going up around the school with enigmatic images of scones, jam and clotted cream. Not enigmatic to those born on the shores of Blighty, of course, but to those of foreign birth they seem to represent a perfect mystery.

I played a game of chess with Adeline today, which I almost lost at several points, in part because I was distracted by several students and in part because she turned out to be better than expected. This is always an unsettling turn of events, akin to seeing a tortoise outpace a hare. In any case, she saw her doom approaching and resigned, but not before an exciting battle in which I first lost and then regained my queen. Thrilling.

The afternoon was given over to my friend Alexander, who has such a giant brain, so filled with electric thoughts rushing about, that he has become quite bald. It's a sign of his marvelous brain that I could only understand a third of what he'd written, but I corrected what I could and helped him break forty-word sentences into more manageable, human-sized chunks. I was torn away from that task - I say task, but it's so much more fun that the word implies - by more work from this morning. The upper echelons had sent a messenger to ask me to redo something in the photographs.

A task that would take me but a moment, and yet the messenger - because she, too, does not quite understand how I do what I do with photo manipulation and as a result is not as confident as I am in my pronouncements - insisted it be done there and then. Lucky I've managed to reschedule that meeting for tomorrow, so here's hoping everything else goes well.

(Yea, right. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" or, to put it another way, "No plan survives first contact")

So: tomorrow will be another fantastically busy day, Wednesday I have off which, for the first time since I can remember I am furious about (there is way, way too much to do to just take a day off in the middle of the week!) and the rest of the week I'm without one of my colleagues.

Then next week we've got another three days off ("work ethic" are both hideous, foreign words to the French, and have no place in their vocabulary) and then we're in the middle of May and I've got my year abroad project due, a serious of videos to be ready for two weeks after that and just -

I feel this fortnight is going to stress me out.

Blogs may be a little curter (from French court, meaning short or brief.).

Up-and-down-day

My day started badly. The internet still didn't work - more on that later - and I spent too long trying to fix it by unplugging it, staring hard at it, and then plugging it back in. That didn't work. It never works, but one day it will, and that will be the day I become "The Man With Laser Eyes."

It actually picked up once I got to work; it's roasting hot and I'm in a nice cool office by the window, which means I never overheat and simultaneously have absolutely no chance of seeing the screen as I am blinded by the glare. Today I was working on a mini-guide to help computer illiterate alumni connect to the network. I had done a French and an English version when my colleague mentioned that there were a couple of German people on the list, and would I mind rattling off a version in German quickly?

Give her her dues, she held a straight face remarkably well while I spluttered and reached for the words in French to convey how touched I was that she'd asked me and how utterly awful that same idea was. I must have been a ridiculous figure, and she finally relented and admitted she was joking. The rest of the day passed as always; another chapter to re-read (I keep thinking I've finished with that, and I keep getting more chapters. It's bizarre.) and more students coming and borrowing things. Hurrah! I'm going to work on a survey for other students as well and offer a prize to bribe them into doing it. I love bribes. I love anonymity too, anonymous surveys are absolutely the best. Anonymous everything: job applications, exam papers, feedback forms.

I think a 50€ Amazon voucher would be in the theme of things.

I also corrected a blog post by a student who was writing about an explosion (and who'd tried to make it light-hearted but instead had made it scarier, like a gorilla with an Uzi) that occurred in a petrochemicals plant in Carling, France. The students have to write in English, and I was struck once more by the curiously narrow band of errors all French students make. Missing articles and prepositions  and having real trouble with the third person singular ending -s. Is this common to all students, or only those for whom French is the langue maternelle? 

My afternoon was given over to T.F.I practice, which is getting fractionally better week-on-week. There's one other student who's leaping ahead of me, and being naturally competitive I keep having to remind myself that I'm not trying to beat her, I'm just trying to get a good score.

(I am definitely trying to beat her.)

Following the lesson I headed back to my little mediatheque, saved lots of little pochettes from the bin - I have big plans for those bad boys - and then went to La Défense, to recover my shoes, which I'd worn a hole in from tramping around Versailles. I should have gone to a concert tonight, but I discovered before leaving work that my ticket had fallen out of my pocket at some point during the day and, despite tearing the room apart, I couldn't find the thing. I can guarantee that when I go in tomorrow one of the cleaners will have found it and put it on my desk. You'll be able to hear the cry of anguish wherever you are.

There's a silver lining, though. I've got my room tidier, my washing up done, and my laundry freshly...laundered, I suppose. And, even better, I've got the window open and the sounds of a little town on the outskirts of Paris are drifting in like smoke.

Let's not let this ever end.

Moving about again

I am in my new (new) and (I pray and I beg) permanent office!

The workmen finished off today, and I now have a gloriously open space, with a table for meetings and lessons as well as shelves for books and DVDs. I also have a blank wall, on which I could put posters or project English-language video clips. There will be Blackadder, Ab Fab, Fawlty Towers and the Office before my time here is out.

I arrived this morning feeling utterly washed out; I've not been sleeping particularly well recently and apparently staying up until you almost fall asleep is not the cure I thought it was. However, calls in rapid succession from my supervisor and my co-worker had my brain turning over like the finely-tuned engine it is. My supervisor needed a very boring task done in Excel, so I made a macro and watched with glee as my boring task got a lot easier. Macros are exceedingly cool little things, and if you use Excel a lot I recommend you learn how to use them.

I also had a small translation to do and a copy-edit to do on someone else's translation. A small nightmare, because the translator had translated the present tense in French to the present tense in English. This doesn't sound even vaguely nightmare-like, but in French you can describe events that happened in the past with the present tense - the same way you do when you tell a story in the pub:

"So I'm in the club and this guy comes up to me, he starts talking to me and flirting with me and I'm like..."

Unfortunately, it's not suitable for written text. Thus for half an hour I went through an otherwise perfect translation making "is" into "was" and "have" into "had" and "explodes" into "exploded". I actually really enjoyed the text, which is lucky, because there are another 12 chapters to come.

That brought me to 5 o'clock (which I almost wrote as 1700h, my French ambushes me in unlikely places) and my French lesson with Raphaël, who's my favourite French teacher. He loves tangents as much as I do and we have a good rapport, which is really cheering. We were doing the passive tense, which is old hat for me, but since there were only three of us we worked together, and I tried to tease the right answers out of my friends - which to their credit they hardly needed, leaping to the correct response like gazelle.

After that, I went back to see my supervisor, where we worked out a few kinks in the copy-edit, talked about some more work she had for me, and how I can improve my written style and grammar. Before I knew it was 8pm, and she kindly offered me an hour off tomorrow. I've taken it in the morning, which means I will be staying in bed until the glorious hour of 9am.

I'm telling you. This is the stuff that dreams are made of.

For dinner I have accidentally bought a baguette that could be considered a loaf. Take a butcher's at this bad boy:

Avalanche!

I got a pleasant surprise in my inbox today; an email from the British Council congratulating me on the fact that I'd been approved to work in France next year.

This is pleasant because it gives me something to fall back on, should other career plans fall apart, but surprising because I've withdrawn my candidacy for next year. Or at least I thought I had. So I sent a quick email back, thanking the British Council for the opportunity but mentioning that regretfully I would have to turn it down.

A quick response pinged back; no problem at all. I would be taken off the system. Best wishes for the future.

Ten minutes later I got another email from the British Council, asking if I'd mind terribly if they placed me in the countryside rather than in a city. I am currently trying to formulate an email that doesn't question the reading abilities of those writing these emails. It absolutely isn't their fault, no doubt the system updates at midnight and the email blasts are being sent automatically. Which is why I shan't send the email.

I just find it cathartic to write.

In other news: our network went down this morning, so I was left twiddling my thumbs as I tried to find something to do. I was so strapped for work that I started on the essay I have to complete for university, which will be on manifestations - demonstrations - and why the French are more enthusiastic about it than we are. It will likely be a little fluffy, but should be fun to write - and to read.

I was sent on a mission - an errand, rather than an explosive adventure featuring micro-star-scientologist  Tom Cruise - across campus to retrieve an important cheque. The errand happily coincided with the rain that began to fall in sync with my first step outside, and by happily I mean unhappily. Once I got back, an avalanche of work fell into my lap, including two translations and an Excel project. Using a macro I have to match up questions from our questionnaire with state-approved questions, and it is proving to be something of a nightmare because the answers have to match state-approved answers too.

And neither list is in alphabetical order and there are about fifty questions on our side and 150 on theirs.

Cauchemar.

All the way through lunch I responded to students' requests for their scores, which arrived this morning, and then ran off to grab a swift bite to eat before my T.F.I class. Some good and some bad came out of it; my listening scores are now hitting the mid-80s which is a huge positive, but my grammatical skills still - and there is no other way of saying this - suck.

So that's what I'll be doing after this, after the other two blogs I need to write.

Anyone else ever get annoyed and frustrated that the only important part of their body is their brain and it petulantly demands petty things like nutrition and sleep?

Just me. Right.

While I eat, here's a guy doing some impressions of how other animals eat. They're excellent, you'd almost believe the animals were there in the room.

French secretaries

Some things in life make you want to explode out of sheer rage at being made to wait. Sometimes it's in the coffee-shop, where the person at the front of the queue has apparently been asleep and is now unsure of where they are or what they're doing. Sometimes it's in the laundry room, where someone has left their clothes in the dryer and, as the minutes creep past, it becomes clear that they have forgotten.

And sometimes it's being made to wait for twenty minutes, sent away, brought back, abandoned and then shot up 45 flights in a lift only to be abandoned again.

Let me start from the beginning. We had some important documents in the office that needed to be signed by a man who works in La Défense, so at 3pm I girded my loins, pulled myself up by my bootstraps, and made my way into town.

At this point it was raining. I say this now because the rain continued throughout this little misadventure, and I really want you to understand my soggy unhappiness from the offset.

So after finding the tower in which the elusive Monsieur was hiding I was blocked by four elegant, beautiful, bespectacled secretaries. I felt like Don Draper. I stepped up, presented my credentials, and had them returned with a blank stare. Not a good start, I felt, but perhaps my French had deteriorated after a week in Allemagne. I started again.

- Je suis - I was cut off.
M. is not available today. He will be available later this week.
When?
Four perfect pairs of Parisian epaulettes moved in time.
Later this week.

The frustration notched up a little.

- I need three signatures, that's all.
The look I received might have floored a rhinocerous. I beat a hasty retreat and rang my supervisor, who is also a secretary. She snorted derisively, told me she'd call me back, and hung up.

A moment later, one of the secretary's phones rang. She answered in tones as clipped and polished as her nails. Her eyes widened. She looked down. She looked at me. She looked at the phone. She put the phone down.

I didn't do a victory dance. At least not on the outside.

I was escorted to a life, where a number was punched in and I was ushered inside. Before I had a chance to ask the number of the office, I was flung up 45 floors. The height of a room is 2.4m, which means I shot up 108m in a time that was unpleasantly fast. Several of my vertebrae cracked. My ears popped. I got shorter, and at this height, that's not a fun thing.

I stepped out, trying to get used to the fact that my chin now touched my shoelaces. I waited there while people gave me suspicious looks as they swept past. Finally the Monsieur's own secretary came to find me, and then took my documents and left me in what might charitably be called a broom cupboard. She returned thirty seconds later, scowled, and gave me back the documents. She ushered me back to the lift, which re-cracked my vertebrae, re-popped my ears, and returned me to my normal size.

I then had to rocket home to drop off the documents. I literally ran past, dropped the documents in my intray, ran out and leaped back aboard a bus. Three metros later I was in the right area.

I then managed to take a wrong turn that would give me a lovely mile long walkabout before finally reaching my destination - a meeting with the next President of the CIPR.

I'm an alien

I'm feeling less and less like an alien as I live here longer and longer, but it only struck me yesterday that I have been here six months. I've only got another five months and the past six have literally flown by. 

I am genuinely horrified by time and the speed with which it is passing.

Today has been an incredibly good day, with lots of exceedingly complex workbooks and data sorting to be done. I also got to look at the accounts after my supervisor emailed them to me; they have to be clearly marked as my own and only worked on in my folder, but she will work on her copy and I on mine and hopefully, at the end of the month, they will be identical. There will not be a single cent's difference between them. It's a really exciting prospect, and means if I plan on running as treasurer for anything next year then I'm well and truly prepared. Very exciting!

Accountancy. It's interesting.

The afternoon was more complex data, this time a survey that was sent out to last year's graduates to find out how they're doing and if they've got jobs. I worked through the tasks in an hour and then, since I had an hour still to spare, made graphs to show the data in as many exciting ways as I could. I've got bar charts, pie charts, and a few hundred tables. The next task is to write it up into a presentation and make sure my French is exceptional and my prose neat and professional. 

Data presentation. It's even more interesting.

This evening - which, by the way, is glorious; warm and fine and dry and absolutely what you'd expect from France - was spent in the company of C, who's taking her TOEFL on Friday. We did some really intensive work on speaking, because the test has very strict time limits and diction is the only area in which she has issues. Not big problems, but the university in the UK at which she wishes to study is asking for a really high score. She made some progress but like most people got a little flustered at the strict time limits. I have confidence that she's going to ace it, though. I'm back to see her brother, L, tomorrow, as my other potential Wednesday client - you remember, the crazy house of five boys - has not rung me back. It's not a big thing, to ask or to do, and so for them simply not to bother just tells me that I needn't either.

I know I'm not running an office, but realising that my time here is limited just makes me more irritated at people who waste it - another reason I'm so glad I have so many things to do at work. 

Being grouchy. It's not interesting at all.

So as not to finish on the boring note, here's an ad for whisky featuring the gorgeous voice of Robert Carlyle and the glorious countryside of Scotland, to continue my theme of:

"seriously, Scotland is gorgeous, and Scottish voices to die for."

The land of fairytales

There was no blog yesterday due to a migraine that sat right behind my left eye and threatened to pop it clean out of its socket. That may not actually be how migraines work - I'm no Dr House - but that's certainly how it felt, and I went to bed with a heavy heart. The next day I was due to go to Disney, but with pain that severe I knew I'd have to cancel - and bringing two friends down from Le Havre and then abandoning them would have been awfully rude. Thankfully, with my alarm (summer storm today, completely surreal but very pleasant to wake to) came clarity and renewed vigour; energy, not agony, coursed through my brain. I had breakfast, I got dressed, and I checked the weather.

"Ressentie" means "feels like". "-10ºC" means "You ought to wear a coat, dumbass"

I confess a small problem of mine is that I sometimes overestimate my tolerance for things. These things include, but are not limited to, alcohol, cheese and the cold. As a result, I put an undershirt on, buttoned another over the top, threw on a suit jacket and attached a gift to it and made my way into the cold. The bus arrive quickly, and although it felt nippy, I assumed it would warm up - the sun would shine, the cloud would burn off, and Disneyland would twinkle and sparkle in the light.

Being wrong once is bad luck. Being wrong twice is indicative, but being wrong three times is a good sign that you are not as smart a cookie as you'd like to think. The short version, for those who believe that brevity is the soul of wit, it was exceedingly cold and, despite having got back 90 minutes ago, I have only just regained sufficient fine motor ability to tap this out.

I've also taken on another two students because their father called me when I was tired and freezing, and it was easier to just agree than to turn him down and then explain why. So my week now looks like this:

Not pictured: free time

So that's my week ahead. Frightening. But exciting! New students are younger still, 7 and 9 (I think, the connection was abysmal, if it turns out they're 70 and 90 it'll be interesting for a different set of reasons) so I can foresee this being a real challenge. I'm going to aim for 50-50 English-French teaching and will need to start looking at more detailed lesson plans to really hold small children's attention. If anyone has any advice, I'd really appreciate it.

So: my friends, it seems, slept incredibly badly - no more than five hours sleep between the pair of them. We had to make an emergency stop at Starbuck's before a brisk walk to the RER station Auber. The RER A goes pretty much directly through Paris East-West, and although it's faster than the Metro, it still took us around 45 minutes to get out to Marne-la-Valée and DisneyLand Resort Paris.

It started snowing on the way, big, thick, perfect flakes of snow. This was to become a recurrent theme.

We arrived and were at once struck by how cold it was. At no point did we swear, because Disney never has swearing. Even when lions are being thrown to their deaths by Jeremy Irons (warning: all the sads), and you'd think that at least merits an f-word. Minimum. So there was no swearing at all, all day, even when mentioning how extraordinarily, finger-blackening, blood-freezingly cold it was. We made a game effort and went around every part of the park, tagging the Teacups and Indiana Jones on the way round. We were hampered in our efforts to get onto the more exciting rides because other people were willing to stand in line for 80 minutes to get on them, and we don't have that sort of determination. We were all far too cold.

We broke for lunch in a gigantic theatre and half-watched several of the incredible shorts Disney/Pixar have made. If you've not seen them yet, then here's a lovely little one from Wall-E to get you started.

We all know that feeling.

In any case, by five in the afternoon we were just about ready to crash - trotting around on no sleep in the freezing cold had ground us steadily down, and we made for the train station. Before long we were zooming back through the snow, falling even heavier now, and dragging our weary selves into the station. I said goodbye to my friends, who looked as dead on their feet as me, and made my way by metro and then by bus back home.

The bus, being a bus sent by Satan, stopped half a mile from my flat. That's not far, but in the state of mind where all one wants to do is sit in the warm and drink tea that half mile stretched far, far ahead of me. And blew snow in my face.

In any case, I've made it home. My laundry is on, my alarm is set, and my 7-day week starts again in 10 hours, so if anyone needs me, I'll be the one passed out in bed and not snoring. 

I hope.

The absence of books (or, sadness is an empty library)

This morning I went into work and found out that the person for whom I had done the translation - for whom I had gone into work early - had had it translated by someone else as well. I have zero problem with this, understand, but when the email that came with it said "I could learn something from it" I confess I had to suppress just a little jolt of rage when the educating document had five errors in five paragraphs. The number of errors in mine, though I am loathe to admit it, was 0. I do not object to second opinions, but I object strenuously to those opinions being thought superior to mine when this is patently untrue.

Not a great start, you'll agree, but it got better quickly. I filed some cheques, I ran some errands, I located the memo with all the days off and put them into my agenda. I'm really excited about May, we have a five-day weekend so I'm tempted to grab the rest of my days off and make it a ten day holiday. Who'd like to suggest somewhere for me to go?

The afternoon was given over to settling into my new office. I should have been at a French lesson, one of only two a month, but unfortunately the teacher was ill, so I was at a bit of a loose end in the afternoon until H, my supervisor, asked me to update my little technical plan with the electrical sockets that had been found after the shelves had been moved. I trotted down and my goodness me, that room is a cold, empty cavern without books. It echoes. The roof seem suddenly very high and the walls very far, and it was unsettling in the extreme. I made my measurements and left Echo by herself.

Returned to the bosom of my lovely little office, I was greeted by all and sundry from the floor. The second floor is given over to economists and other intellectuals, so I shall feel quite out of my depth, but for all their brains they're very friendly and have coffee on a continual turnaround, which is a godsend.

I can't procrastinate any more, so here is the moment you've been waiting for - a dramatic reading suggested by Paula: Taylor Swift's I Knew You Were Trouble.

Please forgive me.

I'm working on something else, but for the moment - and I use this word in its widest possible sense - enjoy.