schneefink | Entries tagged with my apartment

We must have gotten some mutant parsley this year. Normally parsley is always the first herb to be insulted and start to die whenever the temperature and amount of water aren't exactly right, but this year the parsley in our box by the window is still alive and seemingly doing well even though we've had several days with a lot of snow and I completely forgot to water anything when I got sick. Every other herb is long dead.
It's a shame I didn't use the herbs that much this year, DD is the herb specialist and she's been gone most of the time.

It took me longer than normal to recover from being sick this time - I was really glad that I didn't have to decide when I was well enough to go to the office - but I'm finally almost feeling back to normal. Now it's the annoying part of the recovery process: getting my productivity back. I'm not good at being productive without external structures and/or a routine, and right now I'm between jobs and also DD isn't here, the presence of someone else also would have helped. Monday wasn't great, but it's been getting a little better every day. Tidying up and re-organizing my room is still going to take a while.
I'm also annoyed that I finally felt like I was getting into a routine with my running and of course now that's interrupted. Boo. And it's Christmas time soon which is somehow always stressful. But part of that stress is because there's several different events with friends and family so at least there'll be fun times.

Look what DD made for our apartment!!

Cross-stitch with a "welcome" quote from Dracula

Not sure how many people will recognize the "Dracula" quote but it brings us joy :) We hung it so it is pretty much the first thing one sees when they enter.

She is currently looking for her next project and I can barely wait. I always profit when DD picks up a new hobby: the previous one was fountain pens, and eventually when her collection grew she wanted to get rid of the ones she liked least so now I have a nice bamboo-shaped fountain pen that I can ask her to refill in half a dozen different colors, convenient.

Our kitchen is done, and it looks good :) Not perfect (e.g. the sink is old, the countertops are a little bit lower than what we'd like, ANTS) and not totally complete yet (two lamps are broken, the bookshelves for the cookbooks and the clock on the wall aren't up yet etc.) but already pretty good. We have enough space and I like the way we organized things. We made lunch and muffins today, so it's officially in use.

For the bathroom we're considering getting Grandmaster shower curtains - it was kind of a mutual "I want this, talk me out of this. You're not going to? Well, damn" situation. It's so nice to live with someone with similar tastes. Our kitchen has space-themed artwork (two pieces already, more to be added.)

We also watched season 2 of Sense8 and the finale, that was fun. Confusing at times, sometimes it felt like I missed details (maybe because it's been so long since I watched season 1, or maybe because we were watching without subtitles and I didn't catch everything), but overall I enjoyed it a lot. I really enjoyed the whole cluster becoming closer and helping each other out and working together. Also, bonus, everyone is hot.

Bad: So many moths.

Good: Probably not clothes moths after all! After further study (and the opportunity to look at them when not flying or crushed) I think they're most likely Indian meal moths. So I don't have to check & clean or freeze all of my clothes, yay!

Bad: Apparently this moth species is very hard to get rid of -.- Hopefully moving will help.

Good: I had some "emergency rations" in my room that I almost forgot about and it looks like those were the source; so far we have found no evidence of moths in the kitchen. Which according to articles doesn't mean anything though, so we might have to throw away a lot. Still, better food than clothes.

Bad: Still so many moths flying around. I improvised a flyswatter and enthusiastically killed over a dozen of them and there are still so many. Ugh. The pheromone trap seems not very effective so far.

Good: DD is back home again and everything is easier with a little help from a friend.

Things I do not want to have to deal with, especially not right now: clothes moths. UGH. (At least I'm 90% sure they're clothes moths.) I noticed one or two in my room a few days ago and put "figure out how to deal with this" on my to-do list, without great urgency, and suddenly today they are everywhere and it is fucking disgusting. But all the shops are closed so I can't get stuff to kill all the flying ones until tomorrow. (And tonight DD's mom comes to stay with us for a few days and she'll probably notice and it's embarrassing.) And then I need to inspect and clean all my clothes and clean the closet and uuugh I don't want to have to do that. Does it at least get me adulting points? At least I learned something for the future: kill those fuckers immediately.

Apartment: Christina decided that she wants her own place, which suits us fine, so DD and I have started looking for apartments for the two of us, going through ads etc. My mom also sent a notice on her choir's mailing list and it turns out one of her choir colleagues knows about an apartment that recently became empty, and we went to see it today. It's on the outskirts of Vienna, with parks and green everywhere but not too far from an underground station, in a nice neighbourhood that includes a very good ice cream shop and a book store. The kitchen would need to be remodeled and the walls painted and some other details fixed, but the apartment itself is lovely, very bright too, and rent would be very cheap. Fingers crossed it works out! That would be a ton of luck. (DD looked around the apartment and said, in a tone of slow realization, "you know… we could have a cat here," and that would be the cherry on top.)

In the afternoon I had a barbecue with my family including some extended family that came to visit, that was nice, and then I went home and DD and I had a movie night with chocolate crème, that was also very nice. We saw "Doctor Strange" last week (the graphics were cool but the rest was okay at best, like, why precisely is that asshole important again) and "Spider-Man: Homecoming" today (half of a really good movie but especially the first half was frustrating because Peter Parker is supposed to be smarter than this), and "Ant-Man" is planned for next week, then I'm caught up on all MCU movies.

It was a good day :) Now all I need to do tomorrow is go for a run and tidy up a bit and study and ask about the next steps regarding the apartment, and bake a cake for a friend, we'll probably finally watch a few more Doctor Who episodes together. Or maybe on Saturday, but Saturday is the Eurovision finale. Choices, choices. Mostly good things though :)

Good things:
The labor law exam today went well :) And I'm satisfied with my running progress: I'm up to 3x4km/week now (slow but that's okay), and today was the first time when I got up in the morning and felt like my body wanted to run. I might have to get up earlier though, it was already very warm at 10:30am. Even though there was a thunderstorm yesterday! It was an amazing storm, I almost went outside to see the lightning even better but I decided I didn't want to get that wet after all.

Not good things:
Our current lease runs out by the end of June, but we didn't worry about it when house management didn't respond quickly to our query because the house owner had told us renewing it wouldn't be a problem. Except it turns out they sold the house, and now we've been told we have to move out. UGH. I really liked this apartment! But now we have to find a new apartment on short notice, then we have to move, and we really hope that we'll get some money back for the brand-new kitchen we installed when we moved in three years ago. (According to a lawyer the chances are not bad but it all depends on how greedy/stubborn the new owner is, which is hard to say also because with the new owner comes a new house management firm and they don't seem to have a good overview of the apartments yet so they're not very helpful either.) This is going to suck. One of my flatmates is very optimistic about the whole thing, the other very anxious, and I'm sort of flip-flopping between those states. Ideally I hope we can find something nearby, because I really love the area, but since we don't have a lot of time our choices might be limited. I don't have any experience looking for apartments in Vienna but maybe we'll get lucky.

Ever since I moved into the new apartment I knew that our shower hates me. (Technically it's not a shower but a large bathtub with a shower attachment, and the occasional luxury of taking a bath is wonderful.) Every time I took a shower the water eventually became ice cold, sometimes only briefly and sometimes it didn't warm up again for a while. I hate cold showers. It was only me who had that problem, never the others, which made no damn sense, but I just sort of got used to it and took quick showers.

But now I think I've figured it out! I generally prefer showering with warm water rather than hot, otherwise I don't want to get out, but it turns out that when the water gets cold I just need to put the water control thingy all the way up to very hot, and then it magically heats up again. Now I can take longer showers again! (It seems silly that it took me so long to figure it out, and before winter would have been very convenient, but better late than never.)

I recently reread one of my favorite fantasy series as a kid, the Märchenmond books by Wolfgang and Heike Hohlbein. (I only ever knew of three books, I recently found out that there is a fourth one but with a different main character. I haven't read it yet and I don't think I want to.) The title means "fairy tale moon", though the English translation is "Magic Moon," which for some reason sounds hilarious to me.

I was worried I wouldn't like the books anymore, but I reread them anyway because I had ideas for these characters for h/c bingo. (No idea why they came to mind after so long. Now after rereading I've discarded the original idea but I have another one, let's see if anything comes of it.) Unsurprisingly I don't like them as much as I did, but I can still see why I loved them and enjoy some elements, good enough for me.

As I half expected, I didn't much like the main character, who always becomes unexpectedly extremely wise in the last fifteen pages and makes a great speech; the special fighting skills were pretty much a given. Especially books 2 and 3 required a lot of work to ignore how silly the central conflict premise was so one could enjoy the rest of the plot. In all three books I really liked the secondary characters, they were a lot of fun. There were continuity problems from each book to the next, I did not expect that to annoy me as much as it did.
All in all I don't regret rereading the books, but probably won't do it again, at least not anytime soon.

( Märchenmond )

( Märchenmonds Kinder )

( Märchenmonds Erben )

In apartment news, most of the construction site is gone! Originally it said end of July, so logically I expected it to last until the middle of August, and it finishing earlier than announced was a happy surprise.
Eva moved out today :( She'd only been here for three and a half months, but apart from DD she was my favorite flatmate so far and I'll miss her. We already found the next person, she'll move in in August. She seems nice too, but at least at her initial visit I found it not that easy to get into a conversation flow with her, I hope that'll get better and we'll get along well. We already know that she doesn't bake, that's a downgrade right from the start ;) DD and I decided to bake more often (and also make more lemonade), I hope we'll actually manage to keep to that.

Our shower hates me. For a few months now the water got cold sooner than I liked and I had to take very short showers, but my flatmates said they did not have that problem, which is odd. Then yesterday I thought perhaps it had something to do with me turning up the radiator before taking a shower in winter, so I didn't do that yesterday. As a result the water became cold even sooner and didn't warm up again while I waited, so I ended up taking a cold shower, which I hate hate hate. And five minutes after I left the shower the water was warm again. Ughhhh.

I'm so busy watching Critical Role that even though I made notes for every episode I'm not in the mood to actually post about it, because I could be watching more episodes instead.

The Buffalo Beauts won the NWHL's Isobel Cup with a 3-2 win over the Boston Pride, a huge upset. Wow. I was already amazed (and sad) that they'd managed to knock out the Rivs. At least the Riveters managed to defeat the until then undefeated Boston Pride in the last game of the regular season.
Btw, the playoff format was ridiculous. You play over a dozen games during the regular season and then have elimination game playoffs, with four teams? Either give the trophy to the team with the most points in the regular season (which they probably don't want to do because playoffs seem to be traditional in North American sports), or have at least a best-of-three format. Like this all you need is a hot goalie, which is exactly what the Beauts had in Brianne McLaughlin. 56 saves, wow. (And iirc the Beauts had 13 shots total!) I read that they shortened it to accommodate the schedule for the World Championships, but they really should have thought of that earlier.
The Canadiennes won the CWHL's Clarkson Cup, but I know comparatively very little about the CWHL.

In NHL news, the Pens finally played another afternoon game that I could watch live, and this time they even won! I almost forgot about it and missed the first period. DD and I even got our third flatmate, who doesn't know anything about hockey, to watch for a few minutes. No goals during that time though, and I don't know how much she liked it. There'll be more chances.
4-0 against Florida, Sid with a hat trick, beautiful. Guentzel-Crosby-Sheary is such an amazing line. Probably this year's version of HBK in the sense of "probably wouldn't have happened without injuries, let's take it as a silver lining." Speaking of injuries, it's ridiculous how many this team has. I'm sorry that Geno is out especially, because he still had a shot at the Art Ross, and I'm annoyed that it happened for such a stupid reason. Let other people block shots, Geno, especially during not-critical phases of games.

Crossposts: http://schneefink.livejournal.com/194453.html

- Things I wish I could: skip scenes of stories I'm writing to fill them in later. Instead I'm stuck because of stupid small details. I'd probably go ahead and post the first chapter (I'm writing a multi-chapter fic! My first one! This is exciting), if only I had a title…

- I was reminded today how much I hate scenes where character A repeatedly asks, or demands, B leave character A's room, or leave them alone, and B doesn't do it. Hate hate hate, and makes me physically uncomfortable. Often more so than actual assault scenes because it's much more often depicted positively by the author.

- Hockey! How did I ever keep up with things happening around the NHL? There is so much. I watched the Pens-Caps game and it was a lot of fun. Flower <3
Four games and Tanger is already injured -.- Sheary too. Also, it's been less than a month and I'm already angry at the DoPS again. Protect your players from other players, idiots.

- Our new third roommate moved in, and I'm optimistic it'll work out well. We probably don't have space in the kitchen for three people to cook at the same time, but maybe we'll find time every once in a while for all of us to eat together. I've been trying new recipes lately, shakshuka and briami for example were easy to make and delicious.

- I've been looking for jobs for a while now – okay officially it's been a while, actually it's only recently that I've made any real progress. (Probably not coincidentally, about 2-3 weeks after I adjusted my dosage of meds.) I have a short list of job ads that seem interesting, and a much longer list of jobs that I probably wouldn't mind doing for a while if there's nothing better. Today I found the first ad for a job that I'm genuinely excited about :) Ideally I want to finish my application letter tomorrow, I already know I'll be very nervous about it and overthink every sentence. Ah well. Adulting. Chocolate afterwards.

Crossposts: http://schneefink.livejournal.com/178688.html

I had yet another spectacularly unproductive week, so, to distract myself from that: Cooking!

DD moved in two weeks ago, and it's been great. Apart from all the other bonuses – an actual friend in the apartment that I can talk to, someone to share chores with and watch hockey and movies with – I love being able to cook and eat together. I eat a lot more regularly since she moved in.

DD is vegetarian and, because of allergies, practically vegan. That's fine with me, I usually eat meat once a week when I visit my parents and sometimes I just add cheese to my portion of a dish. We're eating very healthy, a lot of vegetables. Today, for example, pizza, which is basically bread with vegetables. Yesterday I made a mushroom and potato casserole, which was good (unfortunately required a lot of clean-up, and that on the one day this week when I did it all on my own because DD had a deadline.)

I had a very limited spice sortiment – salt, pepper, garlic, nutmeg, that was basically it. DD cooks with a lot more different spices, which is interesting; I just have to occasionally remind her that I'm not good with very spicy stuff. She also cooks with ingredients I almost never used, like lentils and chick peas and broccoli and soy sauce and tahini. I'm learning new recipes (although to be honest just as often the "recipe" is basically just "put all that together in a pan.") When I got her into watching "Nirvana on Fire" she made Chinese dumplings, they were very good. (We had them with left-over tomato salad, not exactly traditional but good.)

We also explored some of the shops around here that I'd never really used before. In a five minute radius on foot around our apartment there is one Austrian supermarket, a German discount supermarket, a Thai shop, an Afro-Asiatic shop, an Indian shop (new), and three(!) Turkish shops. It's pretty cool. We got spices from the Indian store and we occasionally get fruits from one of the Turkish stores, they have the best fruits. The Afro-Asiatic and the Indian shop also have a lot of fish, and some very strange vegetables I hadn't even seen before.

As a moving-in present from her mom DD got a soup-maker, which I'd never heard of before but which is very convenient. Just put whatever you want in there, wait for ~20 minutes, soup! Excellent, I predict we'll use it a lot especially when it gets colder. We can also use it to make smoothies, yum.

Tomorrow is my grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, so dad + LB + I are driving seven hours there and then seven hours back on Sunday. The things we do for family. I'm not exactly thrilled – the celebration will be nice but the travel time is such a hassle - but LB said he made good playlists for the drive so maybe it'll be entertaining. I told him to add Hamilton because he still hasn't listened to it, and he apparently also included several other musicals, we'll see.

ETA: Aand I just found out that we need to find a new third roommate. Let's hope I get this lucky again.

Crossposts: http://schneefink.livejournal.com/176584.html

I went bouldering today, for the very first time, together with LB and his friend (who've been doing it for months now.) It was fun! And exhausting. LB warned me I'll be sore tomorrow. I've been running semi-regularly, but I've done almost nothing for my arms the past several years and it's very noticeable… Nothing that can't be fixed, and reaching the top is a great feeling.
I don't think it'll be feasible for me to do hockey this semester/year – once I get a job the likely times of the university courses won't work for me anymore, but the alternatives are more expensive and I don't want to commit to that before I've found a job – so for one year climbing could be a fun alternative, I'll see. On top of that I want to continue running more regularly.

I have a freezer now! I'll be able to store ice cream, and most importantly I can cook in advance and just heat things up when I don't have the energy for cooking. It'll be great.

Quotes of yesterday's D&D session:
"I didn't sell my soul, just my body – wait, that came out wrong."
"I have an idea! …can I have an idea?"
"Trust us, nothing too terrible will happen," after which the whole table laughed.
In summary, my character has now made a (short-term) deal with the succubus possessing her, we (temporarily) turned a vrock demon Lawful Good, there was another healing-via-killing-cannibalism-and-reincarnation, there's a vengeful spirit after us that's attracted to even thoughts of its name, and next time we'll finally enter the haunted library. Probably.

Crossposts: http://schneefink.livejournal.com/173209.html

Today:
- I bought a freezer! They had them at Hofer since yesterday and DD and I had to go to three different stores until we found one left. Soon I can finally buy ice cream reserves!

- I finally tried out the Citybike system. The bikes are nothing special, but there's a stop two minutes from my house and I think it'll be convenient on occasion. I should get my mom's bike helmet, she doesn't need it in Bolivia.

- I wrote almost 2k and finished the D&D session summary, the longest so far. Someone has to do it, and I don't mind, but it's cutting into my story-writing energy. Sure I know what happened, but I still have to put it in words.

- Someone almost ran me over with a car at a crosswalk and my first reaction was to shout "Oida!", that made me feel very Viennese. (Especially as someone who is usually terrible with Viennese dialect. My parents are both from further West, and I'm not good at imitating dialects in general… I do speak Vorarlbergerisch though, which has some similarities with Swiss German and is always fun to surprise people with.)

- I finished watching "Yowamushi Pedal." It's adorable! The rec that made me watch it. I was literally flailing and making high-pitched noises at some points. Team! Friends! Singing!
Some of my favorite things, apart from everything, was ( spoilers )

Crossposts: http://schneefink.livejournal.com/171023.html

My least favorite thing about my apartment is that in the winter the bathroom is very cold. *shivers* The windows in the bathroom are old (unlike in the other rooms, fortunately) and that's very noticeable. We don't have a shower curtain or a slide bar yet either, only a shower hose. At first I thought curtains etc. aren't urgent additions, now I don't have time to organize it and I regret that. I'm very glad I don't need to wash my hair often.

Hockey today! For the first time since before Christmas, because last week I didn't feel up for it. I was a bit worried that I'm out of shape again, which fortunately wasn't that big of a problem. Worse was that at first I forgot about my headband to cover my ears, it was very cold and after ten minutes my ears hurt because they're sensitive. Warm-up doesn't work for ears.
My team won 6-3! (I think. It might have been 6-2 or 7-3, we weren't diligent about keeping count.) It wasn't because our two more experienced players were better than the other team's either, because we still outscored them after our two had left and theirs hadn't. Some nice teamwork and passing and effort in all three zones :) I scored a goal, even! Always a great feeling.

Progress on the thesis is slow :( I'm bad at concentrating.