Hello, my lovelies!

Welcome to this week’s Weekend Coffee Share!

How are you? I’ve had a mad week, but I’m so glad to have coffee with you today.

If we were having coffee today, we’d meet at mine and walk into town together. Our annual, inner-city flea market “Zöppkesmarkt” is on this weekend and there’s loads to see and do. Bring a brolly, though, because the weather keeps changing.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’ve already been to the Zöppkes twice. Once yesterday for five hours, during which I met up with friends, attended two concerts and had loads of fun (and drinks) while scouring all stalls for second-hand books.

And I’ve already gone one today, for more books. Both times, even though for some of the books I hit the same stalls, I managed to go home with 18 new-to-me books. I really only go for the books and the banter.

This was yesterday’s haul:

The haul included the English-language books Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Zahir by Paulo Coelho, and Flush by Virginia Woolf. German-language books were Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, Middle Age: A Romance by Joyce Carol Oates, The Man by Irving Wallace, Evil under the sun by Agatha Christie, Liberty Bar by Georges Simenon, The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton, A Master of Conviction by Evan Hunter, Murder She Said by Agatha Christie, Homo Faber by Max Frisch, The Fire Tongs Bowl by Heinrich Spoerl, Nemesis by Agatha Christie, and Murder at the Gallop by Agatha Christie.

 

And then there is today’s haul:

It consisted of the English-language books: The Room and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter, The other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, The American by Martin Booth, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and  A raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. I also found the German-language books An Outline of Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud, The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Selim or The Gift of Speech by Sten Nadolny, Descent of Man by T.C. Boyle, Conversations with Capote by Truman Capote, Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin, Exit Music by Ian Rankin, Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, Maurice by E.M. Forster, Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and a collection of Roal Dahl stories entitled Konfetti in German.

Out of these I am most amazed to have found Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as well as Maurice. You don’t see these over here too often.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you about university. I’ve been catching up on sleep since Thursday, because 23.59pm on Wednesday was my final deadline for the course MA500 Persuasion. Between Saturday and Wednesday, I managed to write 7 papers. I know this was not ideal, but I only tend to be left in peace when I really have an imminent deadline. I studied my butt off, but it paid off. Straight A+ on all of them, and I passed the course with 97.8%, giving me a total degree average grade of 96.8% so far. I am pretty chuffed by this. Just proves I must be doing something right.

I’d probably talk to you about persuasion a bit, because I was introduced to the work of Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg and his non-violent communication which really struck a chord with me. Have you heard about this? It’s an emotion-based approach to communication, which (unlike many other persuasion techniques), takes special care to consider the listener’s feelings and needs, as well as your own. It’s helped me look at my daily conversations on a whole new light.

My next course starts on Monday, and I still need to finish another. But I am taking tomorrow and Monday to prep for my new courses. I’ll get my binder print-outs, print the syllabi and required texts and generally prepare myself.

I will also try and design more Traveler’s Notebook inserts. As I told you last week, a regular size Chic Sparrow Creme Brûlée (it’s a notebook) should be on its way from New Zealand right now. I will be using that one for all my creative things, especially story ideas, research, ROW80 and my book inventory / TBR list.

However, if we were having coffee today, I’d also tell you that I (sort of accidentally) ordered 3 Field Notes sized notebook covers and one for Moleskine X Small. How? Well, someone in the Midori Facebook group was having a sale (I paid $9 for the lot incl. shipping). Loads of lovely colours and sizes. I’d wondered whether Field Notes size might work for me, so I asked her to send me one and gave her 3 colours, saying if she had one in any of those colours, I’d take it. And I gave her 4 colours to choose from for the XS one. She came back to me saying she only had one XS in one of the colours, so that was fine. I assumed it would be the same for the FN size. Then she said, “Oh by the way, I’m sending you all three.” Aw well, for that amount of money I thought why not.

So now I’ll use my regular Midori as my planner, the Chic Sparrow for creative things and one of the FN sized ones for uni – I’ll be making inserts to keep track of assignments, deadlines, readings, etc. I’m sure I’ll find a use for the other ones as well.

Anyway. While I’m sure I’ll still be busy, I should have a bit more time again to actually update this blog. You’ll notice I’m not doing any extra courses at the moment as it got too exhausting and too distracting as well. So my focus for the rest of the year is my uni work and this blog. In that order. Wish me luck.

Thank you for having coffee with me today. I hope you found something you like on our Zöppkesmarkt. I’ll be getting home now (with that white chocolate covered banana I got at the sweets stall) to put my feet up, read a little and watch the rain outside my window (o yes, it started pouring it down again, in case you were wondering why we were getting wet and had to hurry).

I’m sure the other Weekend Coffee Sharers would love to see you as well, so I’ll leave you to it. Same time, next week?