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I'm sitting here, surrounded by a trio of rather militant cats. Following a week of relative feline bliss, Sheleg has started to reassert her position of queen of the household, and the growling and hissing (and occasional fighting) is rather painful.
On Sunday, after spending a weekend with friends, M and I came home and almost immediately began to tear the place apart in an attempt to make it something other than a typical bachelor's apartment.
We started with the kitchen, which is woefully short of storage space (and severely lacking in the accoutrements necessary for a foodie like me), moving cabinets and appliances. On Tuesday we popped by Ikea and picked up a butcher block cart, so now we have somewhere to store our pots and pans and our wine "collection". The cart was a display model, normally sold for €39, but Ikea had painted a blue stripe on it, presumably to show their colour stains, so it was knocked down to €19. I'm not in love with the blue stripe, but it gave me an idea of how to hack it so that it fits with my design sensibility (i.e. looks like nothing that may have come from Ikea). I've since cooked a couple of meals, and though it's still tight in there and I still need some more tools and storage, it's shaping up nicely. Over the last two days I've made magnetized spice containers, and today I started filling them up. And no, I don't know why there are 17 packages of black pepper in this house.
The living room was the next project. It's a fairly large room, with a sofa and arm chair (angled) in one corner, a massive (Ikea) dining table in the middle, and another recliner in the other corner. The whole set up was brutal. The dining table was essentially placed where you would a coffee table. After much argument with M (not even getting into my distaste of the actual table ;)), we set the table perpendicular to one of the walls, and used the little nook behind it to set up an office, so now the table serves more as a desk than a table. We bought a small bookcase and had some existing storage, but there's still a lot of sorting and storing to do.
The bathroom and bedroom have remained untouched for now. There's not much to do there anyway - perhaps just change the colour scheme.
I should mention that we live in a "Dachwohnung" - an attic type apartment, so most of our walls slope inwards from about a meter above the floor, which isn't really a big help.
I have a lot of thoughts and ideas on how to decorate, but for the time being we're waiting to hear about a new job for M, which will mean moving to the north end of the city, so I'm not investing too much effort in making this place pretty, so much as livable.
On the employment front, I've sent out a couple of applications, but mostly I've been getting a lot of translation work, with a new potential client popping up that I'm fairly excited about. I sent off a translation sample to them today, and hopefully they'll like it.
There isn't much work to do today, so other than puttering around the apartment and spending time online, I'm fairly relaxed. I might grab Harry Potter in a bit to try to get through more of it. We've been so busy that I've only gotten through about 120 pages since we picked it up on Saturday.
Tonight we're riding our bikes to a biergarten about 3-4kms away, in Taufkirchen. I love the biergarten! Bring your own food, buy half a liter of radler (beer with lemon juice) and tuck in. The last two times we went we brought some games with us, which was a fun way to pass the time as well.
rappy: cats+plane=scars for life
highwaygirl: awwww
highwaygirl: they will recover, it will just take time
rappy: I wasn't talking about the cats.
The poor kitties had been through a lot the past few weeks. Furniture disappearing, and along with them favourite perches, all sorts of strangers traipsing through the flat as I was showing it, movers, painters... They really had no idea what was going on and were a little on edge.
On the day of the flight I still had a bit of packing to do so I was a little ragged. M had flown in at 1 am the morning before and I went to meet him at the airport, we then spent the day running around getting all sorts of minutiae taken care of, and then threw a little going away party on my aunt's roof, which was great. Unfortunately, all this translated to practically no sleep. I had a mini-meltdown at around 3 pm but that wasn't anything that a good boyfriend, a loving sister and some ice cream couldn't fix.
I had arranged with the new tenant that he could come in to clean the apartment in the afternoon. We closed the cats on the balcony and went off to my sister's, and then proceeded to my cousin's house, where we whipped out some dinner and hung out until it was time to go to the airport. We swung by the house, picked up our luggage and the cats, and went to my brother's place to drop him off. The crying started approximately two seconds after the car started moving. It continued until about 10 minutes before we landed. Eight hours later.
It was miserable. We managed to get through check in and security fairly easily. We even cheated a little, placing Kiwi on the scale twice instead of having them weigh both cats. Schnitzel is a big girl and the limit was 8kg, including carrier. Had I known then what I know now, I would have just sent her in the hold...
We boarded the plane and within minutes the entire plane was grumbling. The cats continued to cry through boarding, taxiing, take-off and through to the seatbelt sign being switched off. I had another breakdown during this stage and balled my eyes out for a good 10 minutes. As soon as the seatbelt sign was off, M grabbed the two carriers and commandeered one of the two rear bathrooms. He placed Kiwi on the toilet seat (lid down) and lowered the baby-changing table to place Schnitzel on it. They did not stop crying for almost the entire time, but at least the passengers had some peace and quiet, even though they had to stand in line for the bathroom longer. We stayed in the bathroom, taking turns with them. Luckily the bathroom was clean.
At one point, during dinner service, one of the flight attendants told us we'd have to clear out of the bathroom after dinner. We brought out one cat and she immediately made a racket, so M asked another flight attendant, who got permission from the cockpit for us to stay in the toilet. Which is where we spent our time in shifts until we had to prepare for landing.
When the seatbelt sign came on again we brought them out, and miraculously they shut up after about a minute, remaining fairly quiet from that point forward. They were so quiet at the airport that we were never even stopped to have their documents checked.
Upon exiting the airport I sat down on a bench with them while M took the train a couple of stops to pick up his car. The cats? Silent. They were just looking around curiously.
We got home and quickly whisked them upstairs, closing the door to separate them from Sheleg, the resident cat. We both collapsed on the sofa bed almost immediately. M slept for three hours, I slept for seven. I was dead to the world.
Since then my girls have mostly stayed in the living room, though they do sometimes venture out, while Sheleg stays in the downstairs closet, mostly. They occasionally pass one another and hiss, but there's no fighting, so we're fairly pleased. I'll be happy when (and if) they become friends, but I think it'll be a while yet.
K & S seem to have forgiven me for the ordeal. I'm not quite certain if I'm ready to forgive them, however ;).
That I was moving to Munich? I didn't, did I? Well, here I am, nonetheless!
The story dates back to February of 2006. I was transferred to a new job on a project I had been with for several months. I hated this new job with such an intense passion that I regularly spent the bus ride home in tears. If I had to describe the job in a nutshell, I filed all day, every day. I did it on a swank Access database, but I filed and did statistics the whole time. *HATE*.
Anyway, this was a project with a foreign company, and soon after I started the position my foreign counterpart was promoted and I now worked with a perfectly lovely man, M. M smiled a lot and nodded in agreement to most of what I said. It was only later that I learned M couldn't understand the vast majority of what I was saying. Suffice it to say, however, he's picked up enough words since then to get me to move to Munich (cats in tow) and shack up with him!
The past year has been full of travel back and forth but we finally decided we'd had enough and needed to actually live together. We initially intended to live in Israel but for numerous reasons put that off for a bit and for at least the next couple of years we'll be Europe-based.
The past few months have been filled with preparations, including a month of intensive German lessons (and no, I still can't form a sentence), divesting myself of many of my possessions (given to various siblings/friends/relatives), taking apart my apartment and finding someone to take over my lease, moving my possessions into storage, and flying two reluctant cats.
I'll try to update this site a bit more often now with actual content rather than just pictures. After all, I actually have exciting and unclassified stuff going on with my life now! More on the flight in my next entry.
It's been a while since I've paid any attention to the list. My 1001 days are up in October and it isn't likely I'll finish to much more. I did cross one off today.
83. Eat a meal at "Catit"* - [Completed 06/07/07]
My impressions:
1. The food was certainly unusual. There was a bit TOO much happening on the plates, with too many flavours competing with each other. Some dishes were great (my cousin's first course scallops, for example, which were thinly sliced and served in a sour brulee type sauce), others were ok. My main course, panko-crusted scallops could have been great, but it had a green sauce of some sort that simply negated all of the good. My brother's risotto was too sour.
2. The prices had no connection with reality.
3. At those prices (close to $50 for a main course, $30 for a first course, $15 (!) for a plate of seasonal fruit), they should be able to afford someone to proof-read their menu to avoid such unfortunate mistakes as "comfit".
4. The back patio is really great - not too many tables, not too crowded. We didn't even hear the two tables next to us.
5. I can now say I ate there, but I certainly can't claim that it was beyond creative.