yesterday was busy!

Those of you who caught my status update on Facebook last week will know that I'd planned to accompany the local SCA seneschal and some others he knows on a tour of a dungeon on Thursday of this week (yesterday). Come Wednesday I still hadn't heard back from him as to where/when to meet, so I gave him a call to discover that due to the people who are in contact with the appropriate people to get tickets having been out of town, that plan had fallen through. However, he and I had discussed my helping him get some new tunics cut out, since he's fine with sewing, but doesn't much care for the part about fabric cutting. So I agreed to meet him at his place around 10:30 in the morning.

Since I also wanted to be certain that I did a tiny bit of uni work, I got up the first time I woke (around 06:30), and went in to uni for a couple of hours before taking the metro across town. I spent the day helping him get a couple of tunics cut out (with a break to go to a Chinese restaurant for lunch--my first time eating restaurant food in this country. The deep-fried shrimp don't come with hot-mustard here, and I didn't try asking for any). A bit after 4pm we finished up the cutting and he was happily sewing, and I was getting tired, and wanting to get some work done, so I took the trip back across town. I decided to go first to my office, where I'd left my computer, eat my left-over chinese food while checking to see if anything important had come in via e-mail, and then take the computer home for a quiet evening of rest and uni work.

No sooner than I had sat down to the computer to enact this plan and the phone rang. It was clovis_t saying that he was returning to Milan sooner than he'd originally planned, and would arrive at the station at 18:29. It was 17:30, and it is a half an hour walk to the station. Sigh. So much for plan A. So I quickly ate, looked at mail, and returned home long enough to drop off my sewing stuff and put the cheese I'd purchased while out into the fridge (the block of ice I had with it having melted by then). This left me 20 minutes to do the 30 minute walk to the train station. So, despite it being a hot evening (aren't they all?) I jogged part of the way to the station, arriving pretty much as his train arrived, so I found him straight away.

We had a pleasant evening exchanging stories of recent adventures as we walked home, returned to uni for more e-mail (after showers for each of us to recover from the walk!) and then I got a massage before yoga. I sure needed it! My legs were kind of sore from jogging two days in a row.

So I didn't accomplish the work I'd planned to do, nor did I have the quiet evening I'd anticipated, but I think I managed to have a good one nonetheless.

I am starting to get more concerned about finding an apartment to rent--the arrival of the package I'd posted myself from Sydney (which went via ship) really underscores the fact that it has been long enough since giving my stuff to the shippers for it to arrive any day now (or weeks from now--I still haven't heard from them, though just now sent another e-mail asking for a status update). While I'm happy with the place I'm at, adding 7 cubic meters of stuff *and* the two other flat-mates that it is meant to hold would make it a very tight fit indeed, so I really will be better off finding a place of my own. Therefore I just spent more time on line at the rental web page I've looked at before. Previously I'd used the form on that page to request information on apartments and received no reply. This time I clicked on the links to the individual realestate agencies and sent them e-mails explaining what I'm looking for and where. I did try calling a couple of them, but got answering machines which said something very long and complicated in Italian, so I gave up and switched to writing. I've never reached a human when calling such a place here, and I have no idea if the problem is the time of day I'm calling, the fact that everywhere shuts down in August for at least two weeks of holidays, or if they always screen their calls.

yesterday was busy!

Those of you who caught my status update on Facebook last week will know that I'd planned to accompany the local SCA seneschal and some others he knows on a tour of a dungeon on Thursday of this week (yesterday). Come Wednesday I still hadn't heard back from him as to where/when to meet, so I gave him a call to discover that due to the people who are in contact with the appropriate people to get tickets having been out of town, that plan had fallen through. However, he and I had discussed my helping him get some new tunics cut out, since he's fine with sewing, but doesn't much care for the part about fabric cutting. So I agreed to meet him at his place around 10:30 in the morning.

Since I also wanted to be certain that I did a tiny bit of uni work, I got up the first time I woke (around 06:30), and went in to uni for a couple of hours before taking the metro across town. I spent the day helping him get a couple of tunics cut out (with a break to go to a Chinese restaurant for lunch--my first time eating restaurant food in this country. The deep-fried shrimp don't come with hot-mustard here, and I didn't try asking for any). A bit after 4pm we finished up the cutting and he was happily sewing, and I was getting tired, and wanting to get some work done, so I took the trip back across town. I decided to go first to my office, where I'd left my computer, eat my left-over chinese food while checking to see if anything important had come in via e-mail, and then take the computer home for a quiet evening of rest and uni work.

No sooner than I had sat down to the computer to enact this plan and the phone rang. It was clovis_t saying that he was returning to Milan sooner than he'd originally planned, and would arrive at the station at 18:29. It was 17:30, and it is a half an hour walk to the station. Sigh. So much for plan A. So I quickly ate, looked at mail, and returned home long enough to drop off my sewing stuff and put the cheese I'd purchased while out into the fridge (the block of ice I had with it having melted by then). This left me 20 minutes to do the 30 minute walk to the train station. So, despite it being a hot evening (aren't they all?) I jogged part of the way to the station, arriving pretty much as his train arrived, so I found him straight away.

We had a pleasant evening exchanging stories of recent adventures as we walked home, returned to uni for more e-mail (after showers for each of us to recover from the walk!) and then I got a massage before yoga. I sure needed it! My legs were kind of sore from jogging two days in a row.

So I didn't accomplish the work I'd planned to do, nor did I have the quiet evening I'd anticipated, but I think I managed to have a good one nonetheless.

I am starting to get more concerned about finding an apartment to rent--the arrival of the package I'd posted myself from Sydney (which went via ship) really underscores the fact that it has been long enough since giving my stuff to the shippers for it to arrive any day now (or weeks from now--I still haven't heard from them, though just now sent another e-mail asking for a status update). While I'm happy with the place I'm at, adding 7 cubic meters of stuff *and* the two other flat-mates that it is meant to hold would make it a very tight fit indeed, so I really will be better off finding a place of my own. Therefore I just spent more time on line at the rental web page I've looked at before. Previously I'd used the form on that page to request information on apartments and received no reply. This time I clicked on the links to the individual realestate agencies and sent them e-mails explaining what I'm looking for and where. I did try calling a couple of them, but got answering machines which said something very long and complicated in Italian, so I gave up and switched to writing. I've never reached a human when calling such a place here, and I have no idea if the problem is the time of day I'm calling, the fact that everywhere shuts down in August for at least two weeks of holidays, or if they always screen their calls.