/2/ fruit salad

The first week back at College for me was spent hurriedly writing an essay (on 1840s German Novellas) and revising for my mock exams (on German historical linguistics). That means there were days I didn’t leave the house and made my desk into my nest/safe space/study zone.

I have a lot of tricks and tools which I use to get myself in the zone: fresh plants on my desk, a candle, Brahms in the background, wearing a certain type of perfume, a mug of Earl Grey… and, my favourite, fruit salad.

It’s healthy, there’s vitamins and sugar and calcium and fibre, you can have it for breakfast, lunch, dessert or even just a snack, it’s super quick and easy to make and you can nibble at it all day.

I just chop up some fruit (usually apples, pears, oranges/clementines, bananas and other fruits in the summer if there are some, add a “dressing” of yoghurt mixed with orange juice, and sprinkle toasted sesame seeds on top. Perfect!

/1/ cozy, bright and beautiful

Inspired by Chez Larsson (Swedish, chic, crafty) I’ve decided to try to do one of those photo-documentary things this year, picking a photo to sum up my past week. I'm going to do it for a grand total of at least one week – because my resolutions are plentiful enough!

This is the first thing I saw - and therefore photographed - when I woke up in 2013.

I had spent the night before on a mattress in the attic of a friend’s boyfriend’s house in Bristol, having whiled away the last hours of 2012 by drinking Cava and watching the fireworks from Clifton Suspension Bridge (magnificent, if you were wondering).

There were some newly-made friends to my right, some bitchy German girls to my left, and even a friend from college near by – though I didn't’ find that out until today! Isn’t life full of strange coincidences?

The day of New Years Eve had been resolutely overcast and rainy, so the sunlight streaming through old panes of fogged up glass, casting watery patterns on the wall and illuminating a cup of tea on the sill, was the a perfect image with which to begin the new year - cozy, bright and beautiful.

Plans, plans, plans

Lately, I’ve been getting worse at planning.

The flip side of recently finding that really pleasant “it’s going to be alright”, contentment kind of happy is that I’ve lost all the ‘good’ parts of being the hyper-organised, over-thinking, always-early eager beaver which I used to be.

So, partly as a resolution to be more forward-thinking, and partly as a resource to use as a motivation tool for when I’m procrastinating instead of studying, here is a list of my four dreams/goals I have right now for life after Uni:

1. An MA in Literary Translation into German at the LMU in Munich

    

2. A PGDE in Primary Education at Edinburgh University

   

3. A year spent as an EVS volunteer at SEEDS in Iceland

   

4. A year spent TEFLing in South America (this photo was taken by my parents in 1980s Brazil)

   

So many acronyms, phew!

Hopefully these are the things which will keep me focussed and energetic when it’s half past eight in the evening (20:38 to be precise) and I have 180-odd pages to read about German novellas of the 19th century… After all, no matter how boring that is, it will indirectly and eventually lead me to my dream life of working part-time as a primary school teacher and spending the rest of my time translating German bestsellers into English.

Oh, and by the way, just to prove to you how much I love planning (and how flighty I am when it comes to career commitments), you can file this under “Fiona’s long and varied list of plans for the future”, also featuring…

• 52 weeks is a long time to be away (where I want to internship-hop in Oslo and Stockholm),
• career change, age 19 (where I want to work in TV),
• cold, cold, water (where i want to kayak down Greenland),
• what i want to do with my life (where I want to travel and save the planet),
• weird facts (where I want to be a bouncer, no, really)
• and dream home (where I just want to find a place to live).