Rainy August

Property of Stormberry

 I had a reading last month with Madi Murphy, an a-mazing intuitive astrologer, and I had a hoot at her reading! She has a podcast and I TOTALLY recommend it to... everyone?

Like I said, the reading was fantastic, but on a bit of a forecast she warned me about the period between mid October to mid December, as it was going to be a trying time. She told me, thought, that even though it would tax me, I should not worry because I had what it took to go through it, and that I should just let myself go with the flow. If you know me, that's easier said that done, as I am the flow. And, of course, it got me worried.

Well, this month things got a tad... unpleasant. It has been raining quite hard, and we even had hailstorms. And well, I found out that my windows have not been sealed as they should, and rain pours through the frames. But also, I found I also had some leaks on my roof. I was very worried because curretly my financial situation isn't the most comfortable, so I was quite anxious about the bill I would have to foot for the repairs.

Since this is a very important job and needs to be done well, I called a very responsible, trustworthy team, and they came yesterday and fixed my roof. And the bill was such that I could very much afford it. I was so happy because I didn't go over budget, that I decided to be  responsible person and save the unused part, and so I invested it. It's not much, and it will yield just a little of interests, it's a first step towards my future financial security. Savings always make me feel safe.

However, today the rain came and an old leak came back with vengeance. I felt like crying as I saw the water pouring down the ceiling over my staircase. It was far worse that before!! I quickly took pictures and called the workers, who had promised to come tomorrow first thing in the morning and fix with within the warranty of their job. Of course I'm still anxious about the leak, but I feel so much better now. Before them I had have issues with other worker teams that charged over and over for the same job, and in the end you had the feeling the problem wasn't so bad as much as they saw a chance to milk you for as much money as you were willing to fork over.

All the other leaks were solved, only this one got really bad, but hopefully, tomorrow this will be solved as well. I just hope my whammy period got scheduled earlier and this was all, because, really, I would rather not have to go through more worries for the rest of the year. (Or next year.) (Or the next ten years.) (Or the next twenty years.) (Or for the rest of my life. Yeah, that sounds about good.)

The End is Nigh

Property of Stormberry.

In my last post I wrote to you about a book, written by the father of a friend, which I didn't really like that much. The book, not the friend. Then, I've got a book from the same author - given to me by this friend - and I was over the moon. It was a book he had written (my friend's father, not my friend) about Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish socialist revolutionary, who lived in the turn of the century (like, the past turn of the century, from 1871 to 1919, or so), whom I like and whom I want to research a little more. Yes, I could have started by reading her letters (which I have... in German), or her books (I just realized I actually already have some of her books on my Kindle, because I could lay my paws on it for free...), BUT my friend had said his father had written about her, and I wanted to read that book. I actually pestered him for a while since I had to wait until the book actually hit stores here.

The first third of the book I really liked. It's about Rosa's life and her circumstances. It does have a few things that make me cringe, like a notorious disregard of the use of commas and other puntuation signs, a profuse use of outdated, obscure terms nobody uses anymore... since the Middle Ages, a strange tendency to call Wrocław "Breslau", and never noticing that today is called Wrocław, among other strange things. Mr. Quesada's misogynistic views still came across regarding Ms. Luxemburg, but after reading his novel, I guess that was to be expected.

Then I passed the first third and... and I lost my cool. Strange things happened in the book, like a chapter finished with a page and a half of back-to-back quotes, pretty unrelated one to the next, and no reason as to why they needed to be included. To me it felt like an unfinished chapter, where he had dumped the pieces he wanted to develop, but then forgot about it and sent it out to print. Then the grammatic errors started to pile up, like separating the subject from the verb with a comma, when it had no need to be done that way, sentence connectors bracketed between commas, because HEY! Commas are trendy. Aaaaaand then came the graves error of all: crass mistakes about economical theory and economical interpretations. Like what? Like claiming that the "merchandise WAGE" has a price... when the mercandise is Labor and Wage is the price of it. Because, you know, you can't go to the market to buy a wage, but you can buy Labor by hiring someone, and you pay that Labor with a wage. Or claiming that Jean-Baptiste Say claimed the contrary to "production creates it's on market", when M. Say said that "the Supply creates it's on Demand", and Mr. Keynes proved him wrong.

And to think that this man's son is an economist that could review and correct his father's mistakes.

The book also includes circular chapters that go on and on and on about one single idea. Like a pile up of all the ways the same thing can be said. The piled idea? Imperialism is the extended Capitalism, and it needs wars to keep gobbling up more and more resources to keep the increasing production and profit creation. No less than four chapters are devoted to this one idea without adding anything to it. No historical frame, to facts, no nothing, just this one idea repeated over and over in different ways.

I'll finish the book, because maybe it will have a good ending, and because I want to extract as much of it as I can, but from what I read, I can no longer trust a single word. If the economical material in it it's flawed, how could I trust the rigurosity of the research behind the rest?

Property of Stormberry

Other than that, the days have a tinted, mulled quality to them. It's the last week of work before out mandatory vacations, and nobody wants to work, everybody wants to party and drink wine, or use the time to chat with friends at the office. Goodness yes, we all have stuff to do, of course, but we don't want to do it. The sun shines just the right way, the way we here call "Christmas Weather", and trade winds chill us all.

I haven't made my holiday shopping yet, which is so funny, because usually I'm already done and ready by this time. Ok, normally by this time I am in Europe, unpacked, wrapped in my winter gear and again confronted with the strange selection of veggies at the Hungarian supermarkets, and profusely planning all my errands and visiting my favorite places along with planning out all my visits to my friends.

This time around I'm staying put in Costa Rica because I have Grand Plans: I have to be here for when the building of my house starts! :-) House I am already calling House of Seven Gables. It will have five gablets and two gables, BUT it shall be officially considered as a house with seven gables. Because I say so. :-)  Cool, right? I also have to save some more money for it, of course, because there's not such a things as too many precautions, and so I want to be all prep'd up. It's so exciting! ^_^ I'm just so over the Moon with this.

So yes, I'm being a responsible adult and staying here for my beloved house. It feels so good to say that. ^_^

I've also had a couple of other successes this year, like I managed - after great obstacles and issues - to get the director lady of the Marketing Faculty to give me the green light with my thesis project. Not like she had anything to object to my topic, but because she was objecting things that she should have done previously. It didn't sit well with her when I pointed out - with evidence and sending a copy of the e-mail to her boss - that the things she was objecting where her responsability to fix. It took her until the last day of work at the University for her to finally give me the go. So next year I'll start my fourth thesis project.

I also managed to pass my B2d German course, which completes the B2 level - which is the highest middle level - and which means that next year I'm in for the C1, which enters in the advanced level. Not like I really feel like I know all that much German, mind you. So, in the light of that I'll take a couple of summer classes - I'm thinking about a class in German Literature and another in German Art and History - to practice. In this same line I've also started considering taking an intensive course of German in Germany through the Goethe Institute. This is still a raw idea, as I have to consider things like how my finances will be after the house building, maybe a trip to Europe in Spring that's still not fixed, the remaining vacation days I'll have left, how things will stand with my thesis by then, my workload, and how things will fare with my Accounting.

However, if this comes true, I'm planning on picking Düsseldorf for studying, and a four-week plan somewhere in the Fall.

Property of Stormberry

But this are all plans for the future. Currently I want to live and enjoy this time of relaxed days, "mulled" as I called them earlier, because days do seem infused with the taste of mulled wine, even if it's not customary here. In case you wonder, we did have mulled wine or Glühwein to end our German class, because that was given. (And we had also Lebenkuchen too!)

I haven't been much at the city center, but last week I went once, and I liked it. It's not a pretty city, with low buildings, lots of dirt and crumbling places, narrow streets that can't cope with the amount of cars and busses crammed through them but I kinda like it.

This year - due to the self imposed budget constrictions, I decided to go for books for most of my gifts - and keep my gifts to the minimum. (A good thing about finally cutting some of my toxic relationships in my life is that I'm no longer obligued to scout for gifts for people I know won't appreciate them.) I'll concentrate on family and my closest friends, and that will be it. For that, I plan to make a few trips to San José city center, and wander around, checking shops and coffee shops and allowing myself to be seduced by the taste of a city that doesn't carry a tropical flavor, but that has warmth, and umph and some strange creativity. Where the garbed cosmopolitan vision of sadly pusher-uppers try to imprint upon a culture that will always, always prefer simple comfort and laid back attitude to over-processed confections.

Hey, these are we a nation that likes to lounge on a hammock, that do like skyscrappers and high tech... as long as we don't have to sweat for them, because we love our free time, and our free time means time to grab a beer with friends, laugh and be completely impulsive and spontaneous. Blame it on the fact that we have beaches 45 minutes away... we are used to the easy way of life and we really don't want to change. And these days, are Our Biggest and Easiest Days.

Gables

The small one isn't a gable.
The one at the left is.

Ever since I went to Salem, Massachusetts (the clarifying is needed, since there's a Salem in Oregon and another in New Hampshire, and I went to the one in Massachusetts, which is the one where the witch trials were held in 1692-1693), I have become somewhat obsessed with gables. For those of you who don't know what a gable is (I didn't until I went to visit the House of Seven Gables), it's an architectural structure, where a roof seems to come out of  the side of another, but have the same high. Like their upper beam is on the same level. Pretty much all I know of gables comes from my visit to the House of Seven Gables in Salem, which used to belong to the Ingersol family, related to some degree to writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has also become a writer I've gone obsessed with, also after my visit to Salem.

The look of the gables is quite charming from the outside, as it gives a roof a lovely something, a thing to give it interest, not to mention the source of light and space it can add to a space that usually doesn't get used enough, or properly. Of course, this is mostly used on buildings with roofs that have a steep angle, so the idea of a gable doesn't seem likely for buildings with flatter roofs.

After several considerations about my future and where will it be spent, I decided that I'll end up living here, in Costa Rica, thus I'm finally on the road of buying my own house (yes, after so many years, but then again, up until a few years ago I planned on living in Hungary, so there was no point in looking for a house in Costa Rica). The choices are either buy a house or buy a small piece of land (I don't actually know how you call this in English, but it's an area with no building upon it, good to build a house on it), and build a house to my liking. Both options are so popular in here, that often housing development companies buy a large piece of land, segment it in several parcels and then sell them to clients with the option of building for them one of the houses they have previously designed, or just the parcel for the client to build on it whatever type of house they please.

Last year I went to check out a Home Expo, and have been paying more attention to houses available for buying, apartments and so. Though I keep checking, it pretty much looks to me like that's not a choice that would satisfy my needs. It's like you can't find a single house with just one bathroom. Nobody thinks about the inconvenience of having to clean two bathrooms? All options I've checked have tiny kitchens, tiny bedrooms, walk-in closets and two or more bathrooms, and that doesn't meet my requirements. I want a good sized kitchen where cooking and baking is actually possible, not one where the only "cooking" that can be done is reduced to microwaving and coffee making. I also need a room that can house my books, and that means a proper sized library. I don't need two bathrooms, and I definitively don't need a master bathroom or a master bedroom. If the house is all mine, why would I need extra privacy?

Anyway, in the light of all this - and the exorbitant prices of houses here (really, often much more expensive than larger houses in the U.S,) - I decided it would be better to buy a parcel and build on it a house. And this is when the idea of the gables got inside me even more. At first I was worried that it would be hard to get builders here that would understand the concept of a gable as I want it, but then I found buildings in the city that have gables (ever since I knew of gables, I can't help it but check the roofs of buildings, hoping to find one), so I took pictures so I can tell the builders (when the time comes) what kind of roof I want.

The following thing was to decide how to use these gables in my house plan. Evidently, I'll need a two story house, which I wasn't originally considering, but if I want gables - and I want gables - then I'll need a two story house. (No, I'm not going for a three story house, that's just too much.) I've already planned what I'll have in the lower level, and how I want it pretty much arranged, and have an idea what I want for the upper level, but the shape of the gables might be complicated. Basically, I can put a bedroom in one gable and in another put a bathroom and a storage room (divide a gable in two, so half of it is the bathroom and half of it is a storage room for towels, toiletries, cleaning supplies, bed linen and such). Of course, the idea like that is nice, but how would it look?

This is where I started checking out images of interior design using spaces in gables and angled roof attics. Some of the images I've found are these:

For a Bedroom occupying a whole Gable

An interesting idea for a bedroom in a gable. It's cozy and perfect, though it puts two windows when I'd like only one.

Again a cozy solution and only one window.

For a Bathroom occupying half a Gable

The window is  in the wrong side of the gable, and the distribution isn't of my liking, but I like how it fits.

The window is in the right side of the gable, and I love the colors and style, but not the separated shower and tub.
I see a toilet and a basin with a counter in place of the tub, or even on the side of the shower, take the shower away,
and put a corner shower or shower and simpler styled tub. After all, in my own house, I shall indulge in bubble baths.

Well, this is what occupies my thoughts currently. I'll be scouting for images on the net and in my tumblr (no, I don't have an instagram and though I've considered getting one over and over, I end up not doing it because of the data-sucking they do), but if any of you have ideas, or links to point me to more sources of inspiration regarding gables and interior decoration in gables, I'd love to get them!