Booyah!

So, I'm back, dearest digiblips, from a wonderful long trip in the underbelly of the world *shrug* what can I say, I fell off the edge. Very super short update?

- even if it's still spring, it's actually summer. fleas and ticks, and pollen, and it's a jungle out there
- reading, reading, reading like a maniac
- still no government in poor old Belgium, while politicians are still at it, beating the zombified horses
- the world remains a scary place, even if Al Qaeda lost its sugar daddy: North Africa and the Middle East are on fire, causing bewilderment in Europe, while the massive emigration movement causes cracks upon the cracks the banking crisis left; the Big One or his little brother caused a nuclear disaster in Japan, just in time for Chernobyl's anniversary; and it's okay to shoot bad people if it's in another country than your own; God's own vacuum doing overtime during a super tornado outbreak, and it's not even 2012!
- I quit the job, because that certainly was not working for me
- fencing-wise, I've been engaging my medial shin muscle in excessive amounts of eccentric muscle activity, and now I've got periostitic shin splints, yay!
- I got tired of getting lost with the car when I don't have my flesh-and-bones tomtom along and bought a GPS. I changed the voice settings (the default chic and smart Flemish or Dutch "named" voices are annoying, sounding too much like *I* am the idiot). Now it talks like a robot woman with half a brain, and who can't decide whether she's from Holland or France. Which is just poifect to my Belgian senses!

Oh, and while I haven't been talking much to the Cow Watcher, I've got this funny feeling he's decided the solution to the Barynn (monster) trilogy is actually simple: make it FOUR books *headdesk*
*mumbles* and I wasn't even working on B *headdesk*

Jungle fever

Too little sleep because the damned birds are too noisy at 5 a.m.
Now, birds are always noisy in the morning. First light, they all do their interpretation of "Good Morning Vietnam"  in their racial twitterese.
Loud, happy, chirpy twitterese.
Then they decide they're hungry and go hunt for worms and stuff and quieten down.
That's how things should be. But nowadays they are so damned chirping noisy, for so long, that I'm wide-awake come 5:30.
And I think it's my own fault too. You see, last autumn should have been Serious Pruning time. Not just a little snip here and there, but the real tree-killing work that's needed once every two or three year. But silly me, I managed to sprain my thumb real bad with fencing (a sports injury bearing the frivolous name of "ski thumb"), and so no snipping and sawing and hacking that season. This means my garden, a long overgrown tunnel of 4,5m wide and about 65m long, becomes the safe haven for all sorts of noisy birds, who feel safe from the three clawed hunters and thus make some noise.
I was going to tackle the overgrowth in spring, but I don't really know what happened to spring. Came and went, and now I'm here with jungle fever.
So today, since it was dry enough, and much much cooler than the last couple of weeks, I got out the axe and the saw and got to work. One third of the trees and bushes I needed to tackle are done. I'll continue Saturday if the weather keeps up, so my poor blistered fingers and still sensitive thumb can rest some. Also, tomorrow we've got visitors, which means I'll have another kind of cleaning to do.
I only hope that I managed to keep free of phototoxic juice, but I'll guess I know for sure tomorrow...

Shtuff

So, while the Belgians all wait to hear who's going to be leading the informative round of the government's formation, I've been using my day of unemployment and the beautiful weather to finally get some taming done in the garden.
After having abandoned it for many months (saber priorities), it had turned into a jungle worthy of the African continent (except: no bananas!). I've been running around with the machete (well, pruning shears simply doesn't sound as adventurous), dodging extremely dangerous insects (giant woodwasps aren't really dangerous except to the sudden scare they can give you by suddenly zooming past), and working until crippled (luckily, since I'm no longer used to the hard garden work, I got a blister before the body craptastic had something to complain about).

Also, I got some mild sunburn. That'll teach me, hiding indoors for weeks on end.

So, now I'm going to rest by trying to get the Barynn Companion in enough shape so I can actually put my office in some order.