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not feeling cheerful, so let’s keep this brief.

I should be happy enough, all my problems are first-world problems, and I will realize this and cheer up any minute now, but I’m just back from a long weekend at the in-laws’, and seeing the Sniglet was really super, but now I’m gone and he’s still there and I miss him so much my heart hurts.

He says the lessons are okay, but he doesn’t like the boarding part of boarding school, the room is cold and lights-out is earlier than he’s used to so there’s a lot of alone-time, which is difficult at first.  Drat, sigh, rats. I’ve reminded him that transitions are difficult and our feelings about things can change over time, and give it a chance and all that, and I know this is true, but right now it’s as hard for me to say as it is for him to hear. I knew settling into boarding school was going to be tough for him, but I hate that I’m so far away while he goes through this.

Argh. No song du jour of the day. Music sucks. So does everything else. Grump.

oy.

Turns out there’s still that hole in the internet over the in-laws’ willage, and blogging is difficult. Also not really necessary, since I’m not having much fun.

hiatus

Popping down to Bavaria to help Secondborn settle into his new school, and not taking the computer! I will probably be feeling lots of feels and thinking lots of thinks, but I won’t be able to tell you about them until I get back. Unless I learn to be less annoyed by the WordPress Android App.

I’ll be back next Monday. And then I’ll start blogging reliably. No, really.

Postcard from Lisbon

So this is what Lisbon looks like from atop one of its many hills. It’s a nice city, on the north edge of a big giant bay at the end of the Tagus river. DrBob had a flat that was tiny but awesome and we stayed there two nights before heading up to our hotel.

I didn’t actually take a lot of pictures, but one of my favorite things was that so many of the buildings are faced with tiles, a holdover from the long Moorish occupation. They’re called azuleijos, and of course you can also see them in Spain and even in the Netherlands, which has its own tile traditions, but they’re much more frequent in Portugal, in my experience. (DrBob: that’s because you haven’t seen Sevilla yet. Alala: that’s because someone hasn’t taken me to Sevilla yet, despite 18 years of nagging…).

Here’s a thing I noticed: a much higher proportion of women in sensible shoes than you usually see in a European capital. The hills might have had something to do with that. And the fact that the sidewalks consisted of cobblestones. Marble ones.

We also took a train out to Belém and walked along the waterfront to the Monument to the Discoveries, which I find fascinating. Okay, fascist sculpture is always a little weird, and homages to superior humans should be looked at somewhat askance, but it is kind of remarkable that tiny, poor, peripheral Portugal did this amazing thing for a century and a half, and then went back to being tiny, poor and peripheral.

We also visited the Belém Tower, which was even cooler than it looks on the internet, and then wandered over to the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, where we did manage to take a few photos, which I then could not identify once we were home because we went to so! Many! Monasteries! But this one was quite pretty, especially if you can ignore the stone penises decorating the upper arches in the cloister.

Song du jour of the day: Vida Minha by Filipa Sousa – Portugal’s Eurovision entry this year.

And then nothing happened

SO I lost my job. And I did some poking around, applied for something fabulous at Lego and have not heard back which is a bummer but there you go, and then I thought you know, I’m going to Portugal for a week and a bit, maybe I should just relax and resume the job search when I get back.

And it was a very nice holiday, but on the day we returned, I sprang a migraine, so the trip was followed by three days in a darkened room – well, two and a half. And half a day of hopping around like a flea on a griddle because I felt so GREAT! Because I was PAIN FREE! And YAY! And then the next day I sprang another migraine.