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I'm still at the office, work is more or less finished, and my cleaning lady is still at my place, so remaining here for a bit longer is more comfortable (odd, I know, but I just can't sit and read or watch TV while she's working).
And so I thought, why not do an lj post? It's been so long - not that much has happened in the meantime, at least nothing of significance.
Where to begin, then?
Since I'm still at work, let's start with that.
It's been a rather stressful time, just as I'd thought it would be, but at least I've been doing some productive things. Preparations for the EURO 208 football championship madness are finally finished. We don't have many visa applicants as of yet, which isn't very surprising, given the Turkish habit of doing important things like applying for visa at the last minute. Well, at least we're prepared for the onslaught in May and June.
The Embassy's homepage is practically finished. Creating it had a rather funny side effect: Since there was a persistent problem with uploading certain documents, I wanted to try whether there was a general uploading problem and therefore put "Bermuda", which has been sitting on my hard drive for ages, on ff.net. It worked, and so I could at least be sure that the problem was limited to the software the ministry had put at our disposal for creating the homepage.
It seems that Doris, Gabriele and I have a sinister prophetic gift: Whenever we make absurd jokes about what might happen to make our workload even heavier, it does happen. For example, we were sitting together a few weeks ago, eating our lunch, and musing what the ministry might do to drive us completely bonkers. Well, we said, there's a large delegation at the beginning of April, then the Foreign Minister will be coming to Turkey for an official visit, and in May there's the federal President. Plus of course the EURO 2008. What else might they do? Hmm... They could do an inspection of the Embassy. Ha, ha, ha. Two weeks later, the inspection was announced for the beginning of May. We vowed to never, ever make that kind of joke again.
Inspection wouldn't be bad per se, since the Embassy is well organized etc., but the problem is that, for a whole week, we'll practically be at a standstill. Which, combined with this EURO business, is definitely not a good thing.
We'll survive, I suppose, but it's going to be tough.
The Ambassador - well, the less said, the better. That's at least one thoroughly positive aspect of the inspection - all shall be told. Not that it's going to change anything, but at least somebody from outside gets to hear about the madness.
Private life is of course nonexistent, at least as far as the mythical being called boyfriend is concerned. Is there really such a thing? One doesn't know for sure.
But we had great fun imitating the TV show "Das perfekte Dinner" (The perfect dinner) among the Usual Suspects, i.e. every Saturday night for 5 weeks one of us invited the others for dinner, trying to make it as perfect as possible, and then the guests gave votes and also a filmed comment, and on the last evening the winner (the one who'd got the most points of course) was given a gift voucher we all had bought, and the filmed comments were watched. That last part was the most fun, especially ebcause Tamara, Doris's daughter, was cringing with embarrassment because of what she'd said. ("I can't give full marks, there was too much blue in that table decoration") Anyway, Doris won - she totally deserved it - and it was a wonderful experience. Apart of course from the lethal stress during preparation of the dinner. The first version of my starter (veggie terrine with herb mayonnaise and marinated tomatoes), which I'd fortunately prepared a day in advance, was a total failure, and I had to whip up version no.2 with practically no ingredients left. If I hadn't known before that I'm not made for professional cooking, I'd have known it then.
Before starting to write this entry, I had a look at the ss_hg exchange and realized that the master list has already been posted. Of course it has, it's already March! If I ever have enough time to answer the rest of the reviews, I don't have to use the sockpuppet anymore, which is a good thing, because I forgot the password. And I do hope that, once the EURO nightmare is over, I'll get to read all those lovely fics.
In spite of lots of work and a bit of exhaustion, I have nevertheless managed to do something I wanted to do last year but somehow never did: I bought furniture for my balconies. So I'm now the proud owner of a deckchair for my northern balcony (I also bought a small table for that balcony, though it's mostly for ze boyz, so they can sit there and control the universe), and a chair and four tables for the southern one. It isn't warm enough yet to sit outside, except in the sun, and that's already too hot, but in a few weeks there'll be breakfast and lazy afternoon naps, at least on weekends.
That's all for the time being.
Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll have another moment like this before the end of June, although I sincerely doubt it.
In the meantime, the best of luck to all of you, take care and enjoy life!
And so I thought, why not do an lj post? It's been so long - not that much has happened in the meantime, at least nothing of significance.
Where to begin, then?
Since I'm still at work, let's start with that.
It's been a rather stressful time, just as I'd thought it would be, but at least I've been doing some productive things. Preparations for the EURO 208 football championship madness are finally finished. We don't have many visa applicants as of yet, which isn't very surprising, given the Turkish habit of doing important things like applying for visa at the last minute. Well, at least we're prepared for the onslaught in May and June.
The Embassy's homepage is practically finished. Creating it had a rather funny side effect: Since there was a persistent problem with uploading certain documents, I wanted to try whether there was a general uploading problem and therefore put "Bermuda", which has been sitting on my hard drive for ages, on ff.net. It worked, and so I could at least be sure that the problem was limited to the software the ministry had put at our disposal for creating the homepage.
It seems that Doris, Gabriele and I have a sinister prophetic gift: Whenever we make absurd jokes about what might happen to make our workload even heavier, it does happen. For example, we were sitting together a few weeks ago, eating our lunch, and musing what the ministry might do to drive us completely bonkers. Well, we said, there's a large delegation at the beginning of April, then the Foreign Minister will be coming to Turkey for an official visit, and in May there's the federal President. Plus of course the EURO 2008. What else might they do? Hmm... They could do an inspection of the Embassy. Ha, ha, ha. Two weeks later, the inspection was announced for the beginning of May. We vowed to never, ever make that kind of joke again.
Inspection wouldn't be bad per se, since the Embassy is well organized etc., but the problem is that, for a whole week, we'll practically be at a standstill. Which, combined with this EURO business, is definitely not a good thing.
We'll survive, I suppose, but it's going to be tough.
The Ambassador - well, the less said, the better. That's at least one thoroughly positive aspect of the inspection - all shall be told. Not that it's going to change anything, but at least somebody from outside gets to hear about the madness.
Private life is of course nonexistent, at least as far as the mythical being called boyfriend is concerned. Is there really such a thing? One doesn't know for sure.
But we had great fun imitating the TV show "Das perfekte Dinner" (The perfect dinner) among the Usual Suspects, i.e. every Saturday night for 5 weeks one of us invited the others for dinner, trying to make it as perfect as possible, and then the guests gave votes and also a filmed comment, and on the last evening the winner (the one who'd got the most points of course) was given a gift voucher we all had bought, and the filmed comments were watched. That last part was the most fun, especially ebcause Tamara, Doris's daughter, was cringing with embarrassment because of what she'd said. ("I can't give full marks, there was too much blue in that table decoration") Anyway, Doris won - she totally deserved it - and it was a wonderful experience. Apart of course from the lethal stress during preparation of the dinner. The first version of my starter (veggie terrine with herb mayonnaise and marinated tomatoes), which I'd fortunately prepared a day in advance, was a total failure, and I had to whip up version no.2 with practically no ingredients left. If I hadn't known before that I'm not made for professional cooking, I'd have known it then.
Before starting to write this entry, I had a look at the ss_hg exchange and realized that the master list has already been posted. Of course it has, it's already March! If I ever have enough time to answer the rest of the reviews, I don't have to use the sockpuppet anymore, which is a good thing, because I forgot the password. And I do hope that, once the EURO nightmare is over, I'll get to read all those lovely fics.
In spite of lots of work and a bit of exhaustion, I have nevertheless managed to do something I wanted to do last year but somehow never did: I bought furniture for my balconies. So I'm now the proud owner of a deckchair for my northern balcony (I also bought a small table for that balcony, though it's mostly for ze boyz, so they can sit there and control the universe), and a chair and four tables for the southern one. It isn't warm enough yet to sit outside, except in the sun, and that's already too hot, but in a few weeks there'll be breakfast and lazy afternoon naps, at least on weekends.
That's all for the time being.
Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll have another moment like this before the end of June, although I sincerely doubt it.
In the meantime, the best of luck to all of you, take care and enjoy life!
