January 13th, 2009

It must be a sign that your leading a monotonous life, when your days repeat themselves even with the same coincidental circumstances. This day it was, as the day before: overslept, left for work without any breakfast/coffee, and a workday where the overhours were mercifully called off again. I'm not complaining, though, I just find it amazing. After all, Wednesday is my last day of work before my weekends, so it's accompanied with a feeling of relief.

And every Wednesday night I meet my pal Gerhard at the pub, a tradition that's almost 20 years old by now, so it's a grand way to end a working week. This time our friend Ralf joined us, and we had several hours talking about cinema and music.

The topics this time were John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Merzbow's early works, a new Pere Ubu album, which is a live album of old concerts, but in a rarely documented lime-up, and the death of Rowland S. Howard, best known as the guitarist of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds.

We also talked about Inglourious Basterds, made our jokes about the new Joseph Vilsmaier's new movie Nanga Parbat and the death of Eric Rohmer. All in all a great evening as usual.

January 9th, 2010

Saturday is always my back-to-work day, since I have my weekends on Thursday and Friday. Currently we've been ordered to do over-hours, so it's 10-hour work days all through January. My problem with over-hours is not just the extra time at work. The whole arrangement affects my free time as well, since I arrive home tired and fall asleep much earlier than I usually would do.

This was also the day that the blizzard was predicted, but it never arrived here in Regensburg. There was hardly any wind (like the day before), and there was some snow in the evening, but nothing spectacular. As so often we have different weather than the rest of the country...

I finally got my DVD copy of Inglourious Basterds and watched it in the evening, I'll report on that on my other blog. However, it was nice to see that Tarantino built in a homage to cinema owners and projectionists and even took time to demonstrate some of the work that is done in the projection room. It gave me a sense of nostalgia watching this and remembering my times doing the exact same things as in this movie.