Sunday, January 31, 2010

Knitting == Procrastination

I had a lazy weekend. I had to spend most of my saturday alone because Andreas was working. To shortcut any moments of boredom I made a list of items worthwhile to accomplish. It included topics like:
  • clean up basement
  • toss around a shelf in the basement
  • cook
  • exercise
  • clean up desk
  • prepare lessons for the new university class
  • learn math
  • clean up garden
  • hang up bird-feed
  • call mom to share the latest problems with the food processor with her
  • call sisters ;)
Sunday is nearly over now and I can tell you what I accomplished. Basically I did everything on the list  except preparing lessons and learning for my distance study class :(.
Now I am a proud owner of a semi-clean garden, the shelf in the basement is in the right position, the birds will find their feed, we had a great dinner, and mom knows that I don't get along with the food processor. Apart from that I also encountered an old knew procrastination habit again: knitting.
If you need to procrastinate now, start to knit something. Instant satisfaction is guaranteed (at least if you knit socks)! I found the boring black pair of socks I'm trying to finish for ages and knitted a bit but then I surfed through the web and found something new: spiral socks. Although I usually don't like the "one size fits all" approach, I had to try this out. Here is how far I got today (yes it's all from today):


I decided to gift them to someone who probably need some attention thus I have an excuse for further procrastination knitting ;). Maybe I need to make a list of tasks I don't want to do to find out what they have in common. Well, if not I have to switch to larger size socks to gift them to friends.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Money, money, money


Do you have a problem with money? Well, not the usual lack of money problem, everyone has from time to time. I have a problem with the coins they always end up unused in m wallet. I guess I'm a hopeless case. I tried to avoid getting the stuff firsthand by paying with card everytime  I went shopping. This strategy went well but there are some places that resist modern technology and so they only accept hard cash. The canteen is one of this places. I learned from coworkers that this place is great to get rid of the coins. Unfortunately, the cashier didn't like my approach to gift him with my selection of coins (picture above).
Today I figured out that the only way to get rid of this stuff is to trustfully hand it over to the bank.  So I went through all my pockets, boxes, stashes of coins and ended up with roundabout 15 Euro in coins.
If I were responsible for prices and coins, I would optimize the whole money thing in a way that nobody needs coins smaler than 10 cents. :)
What do you do with your coins? Or do you hide them in boxes as well?

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Kiss me ;)

Last weekend we spend most of our time at the "Internationale Grüne Woche" which is a fair for agriculture, alimentation, and gardening. They display trends and technics which will be part of our life soon. Apart from that there is always lots of food from different regions and other interesting stuff. This time I fell in love with a charming animal. They are called alpaca and are somehow related to lamas. The wool is used to produce yarn for knitting ;). 
One breeder told me that the alpacas can see into the soul of a human. They stay around good people and avoid to be close to those who aren't. If you believe in something like this I seem to be blessed:







I'll upload more pictures soon but today I'm tired and my head is still killing me ;).
See you soon!

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Stereotypes vs. Subjective Recognition

Here is a little post for the weekend. We will be in Berlin to help my mother presenting her company at an international fair. Well, and because we want to see the fair too ;). I'll try to take some pictures and share them as soon as we are back and I find some time to do so. I wrote todays post around Christmas when I was visiting my mom. It's about prejudices.

Enjoy and if you want to leave me a note in the post section ;).
Ever since I started studying psychology I find myself stating facts somewhat like that:

“People who live in the eastern part of Germany tend to have a stronger in-group-behavior than people from other parts of Germany.”

During my seasonal holidays I was confronted with some well imprinted stereotypes:

  • the kids these day are all overweighted 
  • people who are beautiful have more success in live 
  • you can recognize a typical women from the eastern part of Germany easily because of the typical hair do. 
In general these three statements are all stereotypes and therefore not true. The first one can be explained easily. This statement is repeated very often in the media. Normally we tend to believe a statement when we have heard it from three different sources (more or less, the theory behind it is quite complex). Having heart it so often we tune in into the stereotype “kids are fat” and we start to recognize all the little fat girls and boys everywhere we are, in the supermarket, in the gym, at the swimming pool, at the ice cream restaurant, …..

Thus our conclusion based on our knowledge and experiences is: “yes the kids these days are fat”. If finding the truth were that easy we wouldn’t need scientists for that. Of course it’s not the truth. A statement close to the truth is “the result of a study showed that more kids were overweight than the study from 19XX recorded.”

Maybe each of the three statements above can be experienced but I seriously hope that nobody believes in them right away.

What’s your favorite stereotype?

I like number two and three ;).

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

New Piano Pieces

Today I pulled myself through the day, somehow. I caught a cold and don't feel well at all. Never the less I went to my piano class this morning and I decided to practice something new.
We tried some pieces but at the end I decided in favor of Händel's Sarbande (HWV 437) in D-minor.
Here's a video from youtube how that piece is supposed to sound:

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Can a women get along with cheap make up?

This question had been on my mind for a while. It was a result from a shopping trip in "Karstadt" which is kind of a big store just like Nordstrom in the US , or Marks & Spencer in GB they were promoting MAC make up. I know that MAC is one of the best make up brands at the moment but it's seriously pricy. Thus I resisted to shop even more make up and thought about a project with inexpensive make up.
On January the 5th I was asked to go to a party, and I thought it's great idea to try inexpensive make up :).
Here is what I used:

  • some powder from basic (less than 5€)
  • eyeshadow base from Rival de Loop (2€)
  • magic mascara from essence (3€)
  • eye shadows (I bought them in Sweden but they don't have a brand) (less than 3€)
  • some liquid foundation (less than 5€)
  • coal pencil :) 
In general I think the answer is yes we could get along with cheap make up if we had to but working with this sort of make up is more challenging than usual.
Here is the result:


I guess it's a question of patience and skill. Since the experiment is over I probably will give most of the make up up for adoption. I know a sweet little me who loves to experiment and who probably will be very trilled to get new make up for free. Let's hope that her mom has nothing against it ;).

In memory of the snow...

which left us today. The past days had been stuffed with appointments, work, all the little issues that always seem to pop up in January and lots of snow. Because of the weather, and my incompetence to get proper tires for my new car I had to use the public transport system.

On the one hand it's actually not that bad. I also found out that I can use a students discount because I'm enlisted with the university in  Hagen but on the other hand early wake ups still suck the most :(. Here are some pictures I took over the course of the last week. Enjoy them the snow disappeared today.


Even the garden looked nice, and tidy :)

This one I made on the way from my vocal guru to work. Astonishing but true, I needed the same amount of time as I need with the car but it took me over an hour to get there in the morning.

This one is the best one. Here's a little quiz for you: Did I take the picture from within the train, or not?

Take care
Me.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Happy New Year

Yesterday night we went to photograph the new year fireworks in Altötting. Unfortunately the weather was foggy and so taking pictures was quite a challenge. In general I'm somehow satisfied with my first attempt in night photography. Here are some pictures I took:
2010 a new year a new attempt to fix all glitches and experience new and old daily wonders. I worked on my resolutions for 2010 but they are not yet ready :( but my bigger sister already posted hers. Guess what she wants to eat more vegetarian food!
That's a great resolution :) go for it! I'll work on mine from now until dinner. After dinner we probably will pack our stuff and practice photographing again ;).

Take care.