Anyway, despite the weather, good times have been had. My brother and his wife came over for a lovely weekend, during the Berlin beer festival, so we had a great time. This time, they decided not to bring their children to the beer festival, which was probably a wise decision... (Last year's visit). The weekend after, my parents came to visit. It was wonderful to see them, although they were not particularly lucky with the weather either. They are great visitors though, insisting on organising their own day-programme, giving us the opportunity to go to IKEA...
After that weekend, Fedor started his CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults) course, which actually takes up nearly as much time as promised. It is nice to both be in a serious working mood, although it would be nice if Fedor managed to free up his weekends a little... Oh well, too bad! Anyway, it's halfway now, so he only has 2 more fulltime weeks to go.
Last weekend, Fedor and I took the train to go to the Netherlands for the wedding of Joost and Kim. It was another beach party (like Bart and Tineke) and they were also lucky with the weather! The bride was gorgeous (and pregnant), the groom was drunk (unlike the bride) and the guests were merry: it was a perfect party!
Unfortunately, our trip back to Berlin didnt go quite as planned. We finally arrived home at about 2am (with 2.5 hours delay) and after repacking my suitcase, I only had about 2.5 hours to sleep. And being naturally stressed about this, I only slept for 1 hour.... At 5.30am, my taxi arrived to take me to the airport to fly to Glasgow for the European Economic Association. Thankfully, I arrived in time, because my presentation was in the first session on the first day. It went very well. For the next few days, I had the opportunity to meet with many old friends, meet many new ones, see some interesting sessions and enjoy Glasgow. And enjoying Glasgow is what I did! I have not got the photos from camera yet, so that will follow soon(ish), but I can tell that on the days it wasnt raining, Glasgow really is quite pleasant!
Anyway, I got home on Friday, in time to go out with Fedor's CELTA mates and to have dinner with Nicole and Pieter last night. Today some housework, and back to work tomorrow!
Talking about work, before Glasgow, I spent two weeks working on a project with my pirate-friend Anja, who works at my institute part-time. And in these two weeks, we produced nearly an entire paper. And not only is it nearly finished, it is also BEAUTIFUL. We have very, very high hopes for this paper, because it has a simple and appealing narrative and it just looks very, very promising. As soon as it comes out as a Discussion Paper (hopefully in a week or two), I will provide a link to it and tell you a little bit about it. It is just so incredibly cool, I am quite in love with it... :-)))))
For now, I say:
Tschüßi,
OJ
