September came before I thought it would, and was way warmer than I like it. Maybe I was a bit tired, maybe it was just the heat, but I was in a bit of a funk in the first week of the month. And last. And the two in between. 🙂 Hence, the almost no activity here.
Work did not so much catch up with me as I failed to catch up with it, despite putting in an insane amount of hours. 190 for one client alone, to be precise, and that was too much all by itself, as little things kept popping up and then ballooning into slightly bigger things. Draining my time and my energy.
To add to all of that, my kid started a new school (so far, so good) but one a lot less internet savvy than the last one, so there was this period where I had to learn to live without structured e-mails from teachers and zero sensible information on the school website and no actual kitchen in the school, which means extra prep for me on every weekday. So my kid’s wish to be taking a lunchbox to school came true. The added hustle of making food, taking him to school (last year he was going to a local school, all by himself), getting into the new school year and preparing for a week long school trip in the same month really pushed me to my limits.
I wrote almost not at all, as my head was too full of, well, everything. My life-while-not-working was better for all the stress, even when it was not all hanging out with people. The first weekend of the month was warm enough to go for a day trip to Mrežnica, a river with many lovely nooks not an hour from Zagreb and one of the rare places in Croatia you can comfortably take the train to. Loving trains, loving swimming – that was one awesome weekend.
The one after that I spent also half on a train, going to Sisak, attending SkON, where I had much fun doing Round Robyn, quizzes and just hanging out at an SF con. I skipped the local anime convention Pandakon in favor of a(nother) weekend at the sea-side, which was a great decision. The weather was still warm enough for swimming, both in the Adriatic and in the river Slunjčica, near Slunj, on our way back, and the island of Ugljan devoid of people made that weekend getaway a perfect ending to the summer.
Round Robyn at SkON 
Slunjčica
I also found time – stress makes me sleep either way less or all the time – to visit Kinoteka, an old movie theater that used to play classics when I was a kid and has recently begun to do so again. September featured a week dedicated to Ava Garnder, a favourite of mine. I managed to go see The Hucksters (1947), a movie I had not seen before but Mogambo, the movie that made me love Ava, was on at the end of the month when my stamina was slowly winding down, so I missed it.
Even though my local pool and spa were closed for renovation, I managed to do sauna twice and to swim in the morning before work at least 4 times this month. What suffered the most was this blog, as I did not have any brains left over to do my minimum four a month posts.
I hope October will be better.
