Sunset, signs and sighing

I'm feeling a rather tired and somewhat despondent today.  I keep sighing.  I must remember, that in the same way that the cowboy has a choice, (he can focus on how old he feels this weekend and moan about it, or he can appreciate my being there to celebrate his birthday with him and the presents I've got him) I've got a choice about how I see this period of my life.  I can focus on how much I'm losing, or I can focus on the nice little moments I'm having because of being forced out of my flat to go and look at other flats or go and contemplate how to handle packing up all my things.  I have managed to enjoy some lovely walks lately, not least the walk to a flat in Žižkov yesterday.  The place didn't fill my heart with joy and I'm concerned it would be super-freezing cold in winter, but I suppose it's still an option.  Nonetheless, I got to see a part of Prague that at this time of year feels very mediterranean.

The sunset as I walked there was lovely.  The view of hlavní nádraží as I walked all the way past it was sort of bitter-sweet but beautiful against the pinky-orange sky.  The glass of wine I had when I got there and we got chatting about the flat (a friend's flat, as she's moving out in September) was also rather enjoyable.  And the walk back up Italská on my way back to the incredible area of Prague I live in, that I am most fortunate to still inhabit, was really soothingly wonderful too.  It just makes me all the sadder to have to leave here.  Perhaps though, the heat and my resulting tiredness is a way of anaesthetising me to the worst of this so that I can stay calm and still get on with things without truly losing the plot.

One minor problem is that I can't get a response from my landlady about the terms of leaving and I really need to establish this to know for sure what my remaining options are.  Maybe she's on holiday in blissful, remote peace and quiet while I stew about how I'm going to handle all of the stress that lies ahead.  Either way, I need to just try to hold tighter to the reins of self-care that I must take to get me through this and make the most of every opportunity to go for a walk in this area while I still can, as it gentrifies before my very eyes with the new Starbucks 

and a soon to be built Costa coffee 

and a certain 'je ne sais quoi' about the vibe of the area in these late summer balmy evenings.   What do I have to do to prove I'm cool enough to still live in this area?  I guess that's actually a no-brainer - obviously all I have to do is wave the right amount of money under a landlord's nose in cash and that would solve everything.  I just don't have that kind of money, though, unfortunately.  Who knew writing and singing and helping people to learn how to say things in English were not lucrative professions?  If only I'd been warned....

And to think I even went to an interview today, in a desperate attempt to see if there's any hope in being able to generate enough money to be able to eventually come back and live in this area.  What a fool I was.  They don't pay enough, want tonnes of proof that I'm super-good at what I do before they'd even begin to pay enough (minimum of a 3 month wait, she said) and they expect me to give a damn about them when they didn't even bother to click on the links in my email signature to find out more about me when I applied to have worked out that she was expecting a female candidate today, not a man?!  Sorry babe, you scratch my back; I'll scratch yours, that's how it works.  I was interviewing you as much as you were interviewing me and that not checking out my other work by clicking on a simple link means you just FAILED the test, babe.  Na shledanou!

I'm back!

The routine has fallen out of this blog - of that I am acutely aware - but I am going through a whole host of changes and hope to bring that to this blog in due course, so for now, please accept my apologies and see this site as a 'site under re-construction' deal in the meantime.  It is not that I have lost interest in writing, rather that other interests and necessities (such as earning money) have been tugging at my shirt hem like a three year old needing urgent attention.  

First and foremost, I've been adjusting to being back in Prague, then had a flying visit to London which threw me in terms of climate and didn't help get me back to a sensible sleep pattern.  (Not to mention all this airport stress getting too much.  Though I got a rather nice kind of over-clothes-massage from the security woman in San Francisco.  She said I'd been randomly selected for it and it was, "My lucky day".  The architect stared at this potentially arousing intimate pat-down as she reached around my back to check I wasn't storing a bomb under my bra fastener and, when finished asked me, "did you enjoy that?!"  But most people are finding all these airport checks and restrictions less than amusing: see this )

And now Prague time beckons because all my meet-ees who didn't want to start back immediately due to a couple of Bank Holiday days here that meant everyone took time off, are now booked in and I am down to my last 500 crowns in all Christendom until I get paid and have thus taken to eating sweet corn out of a tin mixed with mayonnaise as my evening meal.  And I'm worn out from the trying to squeeze in an important couple of meetings while in London and slept longer this morning as a result.  So I'm still thrown as to what time zone I'm on and will somehow have to manage to get up and leave the house at 7.30am tomorrow for my first meeting!  Phew!

The good news is, there are positive things afoot, from the spectre of a bit of freelance writing (that will materialise, won't it?) to a possible music publishing deal which is waiting to be assessed by the MU that I've had to re-join in order to access their free "Contract advisory service" which could threaten to send me overdrawn if I don't get some Skype meet-ees in London or a substantial article payment in £s soon.  So I'm on the edge of the platform again financially, but the memory of San Francisco sunshine and palm trees is keeping me optimistic.  For now.

In the meantime, I hope to make the necessary changes to this blog in due course, as well as fill you in on the rest of the road trip experience as and when I can.  And when I get my new website page up and running, you'll be the first to know!  Just for now, I'll introduce the first change:  henceforth the architect shall be known as my cowboy, purely because of the acquisition of this hat:

I can't prove to you how brilliantly it suits him with a photo of him in the hat because it would break his anonymity, but take it from me, all who've seen him in it attest to the fact that he was surely born to be a cowboy!