Autumnal grumblings and a nasty cold

Autumn has set in with a cloudy, mist-filled vengeance and gloom and darkness now seem to be the order of the day. Even here in Prague. Consequently, in my over-enthusiasm to workout harder in my aerobics sessions to develop strength and avoid colds, I miscalculated the difference in temperature in this flat and exercised without a jacket to begin with, and got a cold. Or was it just the stress of never knowing when I'll have time to myself these days and a lack of soothing candles and lights and things that make me go mmmm...?

This cold has been particularly nasty and I'm only just getting better, but in my slowness to recover, I've bought myself some time to do some much needed ground work in trying to build up meet-ee numbers again as well as get better paid writing work and improve my website to be more of a showcase of all my areas of work. So I guess I've been working hard without realising it. As usual. I even got out to a networking event. God forbid. Actually, I surprised myself and actually followed-up a couple of acting related contacts. Joining one more casting agency can't do any harm I suppose.

In the last few weeks, the cowboy and I have managed to get out for another couple of mushroom-picking trips, which has made me an above average foreigner when it comes to recognising edible varieties.  This, for example, is edible:

These, on the other hand, are not.

See, expert, right?

Well, not exactly. But at least I'm occasionally capable of picking the right ones so that not everything I gather has to be discarded. Although sometimes, the ensuing mushroom soup with potatoes that the cowboy has made, has given me the worst tummy ache ever. And you do not want to know the side effects of that. I shall not go in to such matters. Ugh. 

The gorgeous autumnal trees and colours of the leaves have been cheering me up though. 

And having a nasty cold has given me a good excuse to curl up in bed more and catch up on some old David Attenborough documentaries. Which is soothing, fascinating and in the case of the mole-rat things that live underground and gnaw away at soil to make their burrows, disgusting all at the same time. The platypus was just amazing though.

New Rules

It's been a long break of not having time to write anything for myself, but, for today at least, I'm back! I've been caught up not only with some demanding paid writing work (it's terrible pay but I'm building up my portfolio of business, finance, politics and health/fitness articles, so hurrah to that!) but also with the trials and tribulations of living with a Czech boyfriend. Emphasis on the word 'boy'. Oh, how I long to be with a person who can be an adult at home as well as at work. My survival here depends, I have realised, on being able to negotiate enough time away from him or to myself to be able to cope with whatever is thrown at me and an unwritten rule to never, I repeat, never, expect or hope for kindness, understanding, love and affection given without prompting, or washing up completed by anyone except me.

These are the new rules in my current living situation:

1) Do not expect anyone to do any of the following: make tea in the morning, make meals at any time, do food shopping, washing up or any general cleaning unless it is you.

2) Get to bed before the other person so that you don't have to get into late-night difficult conversations that destroy all hope of sleep.

3) If you leave nice, loving post-it notes, thank you notes to accompany a red rose you bought, or buy special little things while food shopping just for the other person, do not under any circumstances hope for reciprocation of any kind.

4) Buy your own red wine and drink it while the other person is out.

5) Have a 'coffee fund' to escape the flat more often when suburbia and the quiet isolation of being in a flat you didn't want to live in in the first place begin to grate.

6) Make "acceptance, acceptance, acceptance" your new 'political party of one' manifesto.

7) Wear nice clothes while you can because you never known when the next Czech bank holiday might creep up on you and force you to accept a prolonged trip to the mountains to wear a hiker's uniform that makes you feel frumpy. (That would be the coming weekend.)

8) Be supremely grateful for rent-free living because this is the huge advantage that makes up for it all while income is slow to materialise.

So, in the meantime, I've developed a terrible YouTube habit of watching Kermit the frog interviews about all sorts of Muppet films, DVDs and TV shows past and present, as well as a cafe bill that is close to the sum total of my meet-ee income, bar one meet-ee who pays me directly into my Czech account, which serves to slowly be allowing me to save up. A bit.

And I've taken to re-training myself in the area of shopping. Seeing as I now live right next to a shopping centre, which I have to walk past to get to the metro station, it is no longer viable to cry, weep, pout or otherwise feel sorry for myself in the face of hundreds of things I would love to have but cannot afford. So I have purposely been attempting over the last couple of weeks to constantly think of things I love, such as, red roses, books, magazines, iPads, posh knee-length boots, YSL red lipstick, Wine-coloured dark lipgloss, dresses found at random on Net-a-porter (my addiction of the future I predict), Côtes du Rhône red wine (or the Rosemount Shiraz/Cabernet wine when French wines are not available even in the local big supermarket because this is the Czech Republic), tight-fitting warm Victoria Beckham-range type dresses that go over black leggings and feather earrings/hairbands of all kinds of crazy colours, and flights and hotel stays in London, Paris, San Francisco or NYC and imagining myself having them. Some of which is possible, some of which is a stretch to even imagine being able to afford. (The flights to NYC in particular, though I know I could stay in a friend's flat if only, if only, if only I had the money to sublet her flat or give her almost the cost of the rent at either Christmas or in Spring and I've NEVER been to NYC at Christmas...)

Anyway, the upshot of all this fantasising is, I am learning to not wince in lack-of-funds thinking whenever I see a lovely soft jumper or gorgeous dress or sparkly big handbag, and instead imagine that one day I could indeed afford this stuff or even walk into the L'Occitane shop without feeling like I'll be singled out as working class scum, and thus unworthy, at first glance. And I am writing lists in my head of what I already have, which I am enormously grateful for: Macbook (hallelujah!) iPod (hurrah!) red, Kurt Geiger shoes (Kermit the frog-like "yay!") and Nokia slide phone that is reliable and still works, bless it (Gott sei dank) and all of this is helping. Bit by bit.

Here are the pictures I printed out of dresses I loved on Net-a-porter (and I purposely didn't look at the price) and stuck in my scrapbook:

Happy perusing. The cowboy has just come back armed with a bag of freshly picked (giant) mushrooms, so we're having salmon and mushrooms and spinach tonight which is not only a culinary experiment, it is an experiment in sharing the cooking duties. Hmm. Strange new worlds...

Mushroom picking and other preoccupations

It's been about a week now since I moved in with the cowboy and we're managing ok, but I'm beginning to develop a Jeff Goldblum-like twitch that becomes apparent everytime I get too much exposure to company and not enough time on my own.  I'm wondering whether this will gradually develop into a full-blown illness, much as Jeff Goldblum's character turned into a disgusting mesh of fly and human and I'll end up a gibbering wreck on the floor in about a month's time. It looks like I'm going to be here longer than the month I had hoped it would be limited to, because former meet-ees expected back in September have failed to materialise and new ones are few and far between and the writing work I've got pays so little for the amount of time it takes, it could take about a month before I earn a week's rent.

And in the meantime, I feel slightly more isolated than I did before, in a surreal world of Mums and babies because this area seems to be full of them, or at least the local shopping mall on the way to the metro (where the nearest shop is located) is. And it feels very disconcerting to be in the suburbs again, just like I was when I was growing up, having to accept yet again that I must do exactly the thing I don't want to do and hope that it's temporary. I hope there is a lesson in all this that I can learn just once and move on from, because otherwise this has been a series of years now of going to live in places I don't want to be (Prague) and doing things I don't want to do (have meetings with meet-ees) and not earning enough to get me out of here and onto something better (my whole earning life in a nutshell).

But I shall not dwell on this. The re-spinning of this whole experience would be: I'm now doing better paid work, I've actually got some ongoing paid writing work and I'm living rent-free with a boyfriend who's fairly easy-going. These are all pluses. Another plus would be, that one of the new skills I'm picking up here in the delightful Czech Republic has now stretched to identifying useful flora and fauna and indeed, fungi. You can't be a proper Czech if you don't have a good knowledge of which mushrooms you find in the countryside are good for eating and which will kill you. I have now got to 'mushroom picking 101' level by at least identifying viable edible mushrooms, but I couldn't tell you if they happen to have any close relatives that look very similar that might actually kill you. So, not quite Czech standard yet.

I was the first to spot the ripe hide of a huge mushroom in the field 

that started our search on Saturday. It looked like a giant toad from the angle I first caught it at, but then I realised it was a mushroom that was a little too old for eating, but by going over to inspect it, we actually stumbled upon younger, edible options, which was rather good. And the meadows that followed (aren't they pretty?)

yielded one or two more, 

along with lots of beautiful flowers and every so often, a sign showing the other wildlife we might be able to find here. From otters, to harvest mice, to vipers and little deer, I got to learn some useful names.

The harvest mice [myška drobná] in one of the other pictures looked so small and diddy that the cowboy decided this could be my nickname for the day.

We hadn't planned on picking mushrooms and we didn't have a paper bag to put them in, but we made do with tissues and a plastic bag and took them home relatively intact in order for them to then undergo the slicing and drying process that the cowboy always does. 

Once they are properly dried, they go in a jar and can be used at any point in the future to make a kind of mushroom sauce that goes rather well with chicken and rice, which I must admit, is rather a yummy specialty of the cowboy's now that I particularly look forward to.

Having spent this weekend away in the mountains, yet again, without internet access and without much opportunity to read or write things because we went by motorbike this time which limits the number of things we can bring with us, I feel a great need to stay in Prague this weekend. But the cowboy wants to go and see his brother in another part of the countryside on the other side of the Czech Republic.  I'm not sure I can do it. If nothing else, I need a break from weekends spent doing things according to his agenda and above all I need some time to myself. I think I'm going to have to look like the super bitch, horrid girlfriend he suspects I am, and just say no. In anycase, if I want to earn any money at all from this writing lark, I need to up my productivity, work all weekend and make sure I write about 10 articles in a week in order to hit the higher rate of pay allowed for anything over 8 articles from one Friday to the next. And with that, perhaps I should get going on the next one for them today.