Well last week was my birthday, which was filled with lovely cake, thoughtful gifts and a rather large surprise. Trust me, you’ll be seeing more on that later. But for now, let’s go back a week, to Pau’s birthday, and one of the last moments of Autumn.
I’m tracking back a few months to finish up on our Summer holiday tales. To catch up on where we last left off in the Lapland Lake adventure, follow the links here, here and here.
You guys! I submitted my thesis last Tuesday! So I thought I’d do a couple of ‘throwback Thursday’ type posts to catch up on some of the adventures we’ve been managing in the last couple of months of chaos. But then, well then my immune system, which, I have to admit, was really making a stellar effort to not get me sick during the final push, took my holiday as a chance to take its own. So instead of blogging, sewing, cleaning, gardening, painting and so on, I spent the last couple of days lying on the couch, feeling sorry for myself, calling myself the ‘King of Congestion’, and bathing in a shame spiral filled with chocolate, tissues and Gossip Cat (which is what Andy and I call Gossip girl, because we are fairly convinced that Gossip Girl is actually a High Society Cat. Probably a Persian Cat, because those guys are regal, but, lets face it, mean). Which is why this turned out to be more of a ‘throwback Saturday’. Apologies.
I think I ended the last post by mentioning that, as golden ‘hour’ set in on our evening up in Lapland, the lake turned to glass. We took to the boats…
Also known as ‘actions have consequences’.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the plans before we headed up into the far north. Kind of selfish, but I figured that what with the thesis-writing and all (yes, father, I’m doing it), I could let Andy handle the ‘Tandy’ side of things. Turns out that scientists are fairly good at planning missions, and we were in the very capable hands of Sime and Lucy all along. I’m so, so grateful for their hosting skills. Here’s how it went.
There’s a certain time in May, every year without fail, when the Regional train that takes us from the city to work, suddenly takes on a funny odour. Sickly sweet, the smell of hot, stale fruit wine. And every year we say to ourselves ‘we really should go to the Baumbluetenfest before we leave Germany.’
In another episode of ‘scientists do craft to distract themselves from their terrifying professional lives’, I present to you my fimo flamingo friend, kindly made by fellow Phd-er, Mercedes.
A couple of weekends ago, Andy, whose surname pretty much directly translates into English as ‘Cherryblossom’, marched us off to an event honouring the family flower.
Which a child tells you that their new and greatest love in the world is a tiger, skateboarding, drawing mustaches on oranges, or Disney’s ice queen, you can choose to believe that, probably, eventually, they will grow past this phase. When a grown man travels to Mull, falls in love with puffins, starts religiously watching a puffin-related show aimed at children, and spends (presumably) hours in front of the mirror perfecting his ‘concerned puffin’ look… well, there’s not much you can do except sit back, watch, and occasionally feed the flames of his peculiar passion.