It's my birthday.

And this is me.. today, at 36 :Z.



Falling on a Sunday this year I decided to have my birthday do yesterday, ringing in the great day at midnight. We went bowling and... drinking. Been taking it pretty easy today.

Travelling and stuff.

It's funny. I've always thought of myself as someone who really likes travelling, and would do it a lot. And most likely a lot of people, both that I know, and "out there" see me as this jet setting glamorous person due to me living here in exotic Prague, and being from somewhere else completely.

They are wrong. Well at least the were.. ok the "jetsetting" and the "glamorous" are huge exaggerations and/or entirely incorrect, but the travelling what many people would consider lots is inaccurate as well. At least until recently. Ok the lots according to pretty much anyone is still erroneous, and yes I did just look up the thesaurus to use a word that was neither wrong, incorrect or inaccurate, not that anyone seemed to ask.

I do have a point. The point is I don't travel a whole lot, and until quite recently, not at all. Until some time last year I hadn't been out of Prague for like... ever. Seriously. It took Erik coming for his 3rd trip from Israel to take a day trip somewhere.

Through last year we quite often went off somewhere, and I re-familiriarized myself with some of the non Prague parts of this country, or visited them for the first time. It was nice, but I still hadn't been out of the country for like.. years. Years I tell you! That's a long time for such a little country.

Until this September when I went to Italy. We had a whirlwind trip going to Rome, Sardinia and Tuscany and battling buses, trains, ferries, and planes and meeting people who previously had only existed in the computer.. seeing Erik's parents and.. stuff. It was cool.

And then the weekend before last we went to Berlin. We walked around, visited the wall, mucked around on the U-Bahn, had pleasant mishap free rides on the S-Bahn, ate lots of falafels and kebaps (apparently in Germany there's a p in it) and stuff.

Now I feel all well travelled like I go places or something. Funny how quickly things change.

20 Years On..

No, this is not about Berlin, the wall, my recent visit or whatnot. It's about here, the Czech Republic and the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. I thought I should mention it. It happened 20 years ago.. :)

Things have changed a lot, of course. I wasn't here in 89, or 92, or 95. I was here in 96 and people were already talking about how it was in the early 90s.. by the time I came back in 2000 it was already a completely different place and that was 9 years ago so.. yeah. If you read an article about it (one for international audiences as I'm assuming my readers* will be reading it in English) it will mention that this is a country in political turmoil. Every article about the Czech Republic says that. It's funny to read that because otherwise I forget there's anything resembling turmoil happening.. you really wouldn't know from living here ;).

20 years. I remember when it happened, I was in Australia and it was on the news, of course to our family it was a big deal. I remember it well as I was old enough. Old enough to remember it clearly, and it was 20 years ago. Make of that what you will. Yes, I am making it about myself.

There's stuff going on today, a re-enactment, some festivities. Might catch some, might photograph. Might listen to the music. Might drink. Ok scratch the word "might" from that last one.

*Yeah I know I'm being presumptuous here, but I like the sound of it.

Berlin

A bit of it :)

I'm back..

Got in earlier today. Had a decent time, in fact I'd call it fine. Details later. And photos.. later.

Misshaps were relatively mild..

Oh and by the way..

I'm going to Berlin tomorrow. I shall spend the weekend there. I'll probably take a few photos. And stuff.

so...

It's working, there's usually an issue with starting up or shutting down, but it seems to stay on, at least for a few hours.

*crosses fingers and everything crossable*

The current bi-monthly misshap..

Not sure if these misshaps... computer related or general happen weekly, monthly, bi-monthly or 4 daily, but they happen a lot. A lot!

The most recent (current) one is this very comp. Yes, I'm using this very one right now, obvs.. but it's been giving me problems.

All weekend it kept shutting down, it would start up mostly normally with a blue screen informing us there were problems to be checked, usually got fully started up but it wouldn't stay started for very long. Not long enough to do anything.

We tried everything.. everything! That is, the 3 things each we know how to do and did those things over and over again though those things proved useless in this case. I don't include the things I tried to do which usually worked for me before when I had computer problems, as it wouldn't let me do those.

So.. at some point we tried similar but slightly different things (this is the not me part of we, all my attempts were pointless) and it seemed to do something different. Shut the computer down and slept on it.

Monday it worked like a charm. Well, like it did before which is slow and clunky but it stayed on.
Some time in the evening it shut down, but came back again.

Yesterday.. expecting I'd have a fruitful day of doing stuff on the comp, seeing as Monday it had for the most part worked.. I logged on. Unfortunately it decided to do a repeat of the weekend. I did a repeat of the things I'd tried which had never worked, and they never worked.

In the evening Erik came back and did something slightly different again and it did something a bit different. It looked promising, and today, I expected to have another Monday.

No such luck, it kept shutting down. I repeated a few times, left it, repeated again and one of those times it stayed on and this is one of those times. We'll see what it does next.

Something to Caption

..if you like.

"By the way..

maybe in a few years it won't bore me.."

I overheard that at the tram stop earlier. Why am I telling you this? No reason.

*ponders what she might have meant by it*

Brrr...

Now we've got light snow. Well that's what the weather thing says.. I didn't really notice it myself in real time here. Actually one weather thing says it and the other says "fog". And it's 3 degrees warmer on that one. I don't see the fog either.

*goes back to being absent and stuff*