Accomplished, June 18th-20th:

- Finished the Sergei video and uploaded it. (Here are all the videos with Mitsu and Sergei!)
- Made an appointment to pick up mum's books from a store.
- Babysat Henry evening and overnight.
- Got an order for among other things Tunguska 1, which pushed me to finish the new edition of it. Rescanned and retouched 69 comic pages and illustrations, layouted everything and printed a first edition of ten.
- Mailed the order for fanzines.
- Worked on the page numbers for Musée Téléguidée. The page numbers are quite an endeavour in that book.

While taking the printing sheets for the first, crappy edition of Tunguska 1 out of service, I noticed that one sheet was missing. It's untypical of me but still possible that I've misplaced it somewhere.
Or maybe someone has stolen it. It was the one with page 3 and the hawt photo of German revolutionary Ernst Toller. I know that my mum was here at one point when I was away. Mum, you didn't have to steal the original. You have his picture in the magazine already.
Or maybe it was my flatmate. I should give her my comic books so she can practise her Swedish with them. Though somehow I have a feeling that they might make her nervous about living with me.

Inspired by Rah, who among other creative work draws Metanoia, one of my favourite webcomics, I shall try posting lists of what I have accomplished. Not only will this help me realise that I do get work done, but it might also motivate me to get even more work done. XD

Accomplished, June 17th (yesterday):
- Cut a Sergei music video to the tunes of Bruce Springsteen's Gypsy Biker. (The lyrics are kind of unrelated, but I'm sure Sergei would have enjoyed this song from the album Magic, released after Sergei's death ...) Some tweaking still required before the video is finished.
- Rendered typesetting for Dipneuste 22-37 (phew, finished with that at last - that's part of this book I'm making for/with Quentin).
- Screwed the new internet/phone box to the wall (most fun I've had in ages). Connection will not come until the end of the month, though. ;_;
- Babysat Henry over the day.
- Frantically went to check e-mail all day in case there was something wrong with the PDFs I uploaded last night, but my Gmail was happily uneventful.

Today I finished the Sergei video. Here it is:

Bruce Springsteen was Sergei's favourite musician. 

Last time Ilan was here we happened to change trains once at  Ostkreuz station, and the weather was nice and we had our cameras, so we took some photos.



More photos here.

Here are Ilan's photos from the same occasion.

Photos of Ostkreuz by other people!

First off, some tourist snapshots ...



The river Rhône flows from lake Geneva down through the town. The water is very green and clear. The jet of water that you can see in the background originally had a function in the water power plant to the right in the foreground. The power plant is no longer in use, but apparently the people of Geneva wanted to keep the jet, so it was moved out to the lake.



In the old town. Some mountains (in France) on the horizon.





The old town from afar.

And now ... doggies!



"I do not soil the pavements!"



Insane doggies prohibited in this park.



Puppy toilet paper!!!!!!!!!!!1



Paparazzi shot of a doggie by the river.

In the more touristy areas, I spotted some small, energetic doggies. But in all other parts of Geneva, the doggies were big, slow and sleepy. At the opening of the Mapping Festival, there was a girl who brought her doggie with her, and the poor little doggie kept falling asleep all over the place ...



Finally, some birdies in Lake Geneva.



(A lot of my time was spent at the Mapping Festival, but I didn't take any photos of all those happenings with my own camera, because there were lots of people documenting it already with better gear ... When/if the photos and films I did shoot with other people's cameras become available online, I might post a link. Meanwhile, here are Mapping photos by Ork. Yes, there is at least one with me in it.)

Me in Ilan's silly sunglasses in a café on the top floor of a department store (Tokyo Style?) overlooking the town. Nice weather.

I'll add some more Geneva photos here eventually.

As I was dragging my suitcase home from the S-Bahn station last night, around 1:30 AM (the U-Bahn was out of service), some young homeless guy, "street poet", as he described himself, came up to me and asked if I had some space where he could sleep. He was young and wasn't in bad shape at all. His nose looked like it had been broken at some point, and his clothes were a little unkempt, but what do you expect. I was pretty unkempt myself.

I was really exhausted, both mentally and physically, after a long and slightly stressful bus trip from Sweden, which was the finale of a long and, especially towards the end, pretty stressful and exhausting three weeks of travels.
Also, I was in 'anti' mode towards men, because a disproportionate amount of males had been trying to hit on me on the ferry from Denmark to Germany in varying degrees of embarrassing(!). (Damn it's hard to be beautiful! I should make a T-Shirt with the following text printed on it: "My boyfriend's penis is WAY bigger than yours, so sod off". Seriously, though, I should point out that I don't mind when people show interest for me in a polite and kind way - it's certainly flattering. But you guys who get angry when you read this could probably never imagine how blunt and offensive some men can be when they try to 'flirt'.)

So, anyway, when this poor homeless guy said something about how he usually asked mostly girls - "not because of something like that"(!!), but "just because it's more sympathetic that way", that made my warning bells go off.
Not in the sense that I would be "afraid" of him or something, but in the sense that maybe I couldn't take having a conversation with him. (He obviously wasn't hitting on me or anything, but that he made a distinction between men and women disturbed me at that moment. Of course, he could have been wary of strange men and felt safer with strange women, so if I'd have bothered to actually have a conversation with him I might very well have changed my mind about that.)

Unrelated to all that, I also got a small "no, no" hunch. Hunches like that can't be explained rationally. I get them sometimes, and when I don't follow them, I usually regret it. Had it been cold outside and had he been in visibly bad shape, or if I had been in better shape myself, I probably would have ignored the hunch, because it was just a small hunch.

In the end, I pulled the classic female secret agent trick and pretended to be a silly little girl (yes, it still works at age 27) and said in a sweet and dumb way that I couldn't really let him sleep at my place.

After walking 50 meters I regretted my decision and felt like a totally evil bourgeois bastard and like I had betrayed all the ideals I've ever pretended to subscribe to. The only thing that kept me from going back was my heavy suitcase, which I didn't feel like dragging around more than necessary. Of course, that's a bad excuse, as well. For example, if he was still around, I could have asked him if he would have liked to 'earn' himself a place on my spare mattress by taking my suitcase home for me.

I feel bad about that now. But I got this weird hunch, and in that situation, in the exhausted state in which I was, I would rather follow it than ignore it and find myself in an uncomfortable situation. Of course, the hunch could have been wrong. I will never know.

My birthday is coming up (April 19th!), and there might be some people who want to give me some sort of present. Ilan has already done that, so he can stop reading now ...

There is only one thing I want for my birthday, and that is a pair of comfortable and somewhat nice-looking sandals.

Within the previous year, all my main shoes gave up their spirits.
The heels of my boots, that I had worn pretty much every day three seasons a year for two years, were finally too crooked to wear comfortably, and the inner sole had worn off, exposing my foot to the raw plastic underneath, while also one of the zippers broke.
The heels of my sneakers that I got in Houston six years ago finally got holes right through them (but I can still wear them in dry weather, because the soles are still whole).
Aaaand ... last summer, the sole of one of my sandals, which I'd had since 6th or 7th grade - that's 15 years ago - suddenly broke in two pieces! (After that I let the doggie whom I sometimes babysit play with the sandals, and they are now even more broken.)

I got new sneakers and boots very cheaply on eBay, but with the sandals it's a bit trickier. Since I need to be able to wear them without socks, they have to fit me well, so I can't buy them used over the Internet: I need to try them on, or be sure that they fit exactly like a pair of new shoes that I've tried on in a store. I've been trying on shoes in stores, and I found sandals that fit me well and are very comfortable.

Ta dah:     

That's Josef Seibel's "Adelle". They look okay, and come in various colours. Of about ten different sandals I tried on one day in Kaufhof, these fit me the best and felt the most comfortable.

The sandals cost about 50 €. Donate away!
Either you can transfer money to my bank account if you have the details, or you can send me a little something via PayPal:

     

I'll of course be looking for the best deal. Any surplus funds I get will go to Shepherd's Green Sanctuary, an association based in Tennessee, USA, that provides rescue, lifetime care and other aid and assistance to abandoned, abused, neglected, homeless and otherwise endangered pigs.

Some of the Shepherd's Green pigs

Certainly, it would also be a really nice birthday present for me if you would donate to Shepherd's Green Sanctuary directly, and not to me and my sandals. V^(••)^V
Just read the stories of the sanctuary's pigs ...

I had almost forgotten about it, but apparently my entry to the "Face your Pockets" project, which I sent in about one year ago, was accepted. I found out because el bazar de la felicidad cites it.

But in the meantime, it seems that The website of the project! is down ... ;_;

This is me facing my pockets:



In my ego-googlings today, I also found some other funny things.

WTF:



And a doggie with my name:



He's male, 7-8 years old, and available for adoption from Tierfreunde-Spanien e.v.
About his character: "Obwohl er zweifellos Schlimmes erlebt hat, ist sein Vertrauen zu Menschen dabei nicht verloren gegangen. Tinet findet Menschen toll und zeigt dies auch sehr deutlich. Er freut sich über jedes Streicheln und jedes liebes Wort. Sein Verhalten zu Artgenossen ist nicht ganz so harmonisch. Hündinnen werden akzeptiert, andere Rüden findet er allerdings völlig überflüssig. Fühlt er sich bedrängt oder herausgefordert, beißt er in dieser Situation auch zu. ..."
If you change the genders and species, I think the human Tinet and the canine Tinet might have some things in common.

You're The Catcher in the Rye!
by J.D. Salinger
You are surrounded by phonies, and boy are you sick of them! In an ongoing struggle to search for a land without phonies, you end up running away from everything, from school to consequences. In this process, you reveal that many people in your life have suffered torments and all you really want to do is catch them as they fall. Perhaps using a baseball mitt. Your biggest fans are infamous psychotics.
Take the Book Quizat the Blue Pyramid.

I first thought it said "baseball bat".
When I read this book I was at first a bit bored and changed all the characters' genders in my head while reading (I do that sometimes, it's a healthy exercise), but then I got so caught up in the story that I forgot about that.

Blogdrive has put camouflaged Google ads into my entries - again.

Didn't we all agree back in 2005 that it was a bad idea?

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CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK BUY BUY BUY BUY OR THEY'LL KILL YOU!!!!