Roads to Safe Places

Done:
✓ sleep in to catch up on sleep.
✓ have porridge with unsweetened cocoa powder and a bit of peanut butter for breakfast.
✓ inspect piles of assorted stuff that have grown on our floors during the past week and throw away half of it.
✓ vacuum everything.
✓ clean all floors.
✓ clean bathroom and dramatically recite "Crossing the Bar" while scrubbing shower.
✓ wipe down all surfaces with furniture polish.
✓ load and run dishwasher.
✓ reorganise kitchen closet.
✓ cut off cables and plugs from lamps to prepare them for being put up in hallway.
✓ nearly electrocute myself doing so because, contrary to what common sense would indicate, the lamps in the hallway are not connected to the fuse labelled "Hall", but to the "Kitchen" fuse.
✓ celebrate fact that growing up I was drilled to use a screwdriver test light before attempting anything on anything electrical.
✓ call my mother to inform her of my near-death experience as she is the one responsible for my test light training.
✓ mope to my mother about fuses, school, and students for an hour.
✓ defrost freezer and peel about 1kg of solid ice off the evaporator coils.
✓ do laundry, including curtains.
✓ play a merry game of sock memory to reunite long-lost sock brethren.
✓ buy black leather coat on eBay for under €6.
✓ buy soft shell coat that looks like a cross between a diving suit and a raincoat but which the reviewers said is very comfortable.
✓ attempt to draw something. Give up when it turns out it sucks.
✓ research short city sightseeing trips Crocky and I could take in the Easter holidays.
✓ research courses offered by the local university and debate feasibility of pulling off completing one while working a full-time job.

Actual to-do-list:
- correct my seventh year's exam.
- talk to the kind crazy cat neighbours.
- draft an exam paper for my other seventh years.
- prepare exercises for my eleventh years for Monday.
- finish minutes of Wednesday's workshop.

Yesterday morning I went to have a look at the big, scary industrial area that I did not dare to go to alone and found that I really should not have worried so much. It's in the middle of Limmer, a part of Hannover, and I'll have to be quick with going there because it is supposed to be torn down.

Also, niaseath, if we want to go there, we'll have to go on a Sunday, because there are still people who work in the main building and I am pretty worried about whether what we are doing is... well, entirely legal. There are no fences and no signs saying that it's not allowed to wander around in the abandoned buildings, but to my mind it sort of goes by common sense agreement that it's probably not - at least I wouldn't wander about on the premises of a factory which is not abandoned - so we'll have to be careful. We'll not the only ones who are going there, I ran into two people with camera bags and tripods on my way there, so it may even be allowed or at least tolerated by the authorities.



Instead of walking through that factory I was a good girl and went back to the canal nearby, which was frozen. It seems to be far colder than any winter in the last five years - at least I see far more bodies of water frozen which wouldn't usually be. To anyone who lives in an area in which it actually gets cold and in which they get a real winter, this kind of weather is probably pretty ridiculous in comparison, but to me, used to mellow maritime climate and a big, central-heated city, it's pretty exiting, although slippering along the half-melted-and-then-frozen-again pavement plainly sucks.

( Ice, ice baby (13) )

( Conti Werk and tramlines (3) )

I'm thinking about starting a separate blog or journal to spam pictures to save your friendslists, as I am pretty picture-happy at the moment. Somehow, Bugbitten never really worked for me, as it kept freezing and/or eating my pictures when I still used it (although that might have been the Uni computers hating the site's guts), and with Flickr I don't really like the album style that much. I'll look around for a site.