It's still winter!

And winter at its best!

Who ever said that snow is white?

(Sorry for making you move your head 90 deg. left to view two of the photos!)

To brighten up the day

Goodness! Working from home leaves even less time than working in the office. However, taking into consideration my long-lasting cold and snowfalls and traffic jams it must be more efficient and in fact I do not want to be stirred from home in such a state, it means developing my cold to complications. Well, enought of that, to brighten up the day which I spent hardly lifting my eyes from another endless piece of technical wisdom and business emails, these pictures:

I leave it to the reader to guess where they are from!

The Blue Castle... again

Pencil drawing scanned and printed, refined with a nib pen and ink, coloured by wax crayons and oil pastels

(A Birthday present for Oksana, a kindred spirit whom I got to know thanks to Lucy Maud Montgomery)

Being busy

Dearest, loveliest everyone who is reading this and dear diary too, I'm so busy at the moment - even now late in the evening at home I am typing a busines email (!!!) I cannot make any updates thogh there are quite a few things happening I plan to write about here in the nearest future (and maybe even drawings too!)

Photo a week dated, now the snow is already wet, no sun too.. But everything has its good side - it's a perfect weather for making a snowman (and someone has already made a tiny on on the train station bench!)

Happy St. Valentine's (though I personally do not think much of this holiday) and happy upcoming Chinese New Year too (hope to have some break with that - only a break from translating business letters to start translating something else... a new technical manual - at least I won't be pressed for time and required to do both things at once!)

Fever and drawings and the agony of moving I do not know where

The awful manual finished, the urgency and pressure of it must have taken all my nerves and strength, because I felt feverish Tuesday morning sitting at the office so I left after lunch. I turned out to be rinning quite a temperature, indeed. I lay in bed all the rest of the day remembering the time 18 years ago when I was down with flu, the bitter anti-flue powders in thin papers which I could never swallow and this red teddy bear my mum brought to me when buying medicine at the drugstore, it might have helped me to get better. Mum told me that there was another girl in the shop who wanted to have such a bear, but thу one mum bought was the last one and that girl was in tears. But I was the lucky owner of this little thing (there was not such amount of toys in shops back in the late 1980s) and he was quite a friend to mine: all that winter. I took him to walks, when shopping with grandma, played in snow with him until his plush skin got all wet (he's plastic inside) and started falling off, so granny had to stitch the print trousers and skin together with a thick wide thread. I discovered him in granny's attic last spring and now he's on my favourite bookshelf next to the best and the cosiest and the most beloved reads.

Besides remembering being ill in childhood I dreamt about Anne's cosy House of Dreams and various ideas for drawing too. I hoped to read quietly the next day (Wednesday) while being om sick leave but I just couldn't because of a splitting headache. However, I could write (I never could just sit ildly - well, unless I am dreaming, but dreaming or thinking things over or making up stories in your mind is not being idle in my opinion!) - so I made a long diary entry with my fountain pen, then took the thick book of nursery rhymes with illustrations by Y.Vasnetsov and just revelled in his beautiful drawings and then I picked up notepaper, a gel pen and wax pencils and... you can see the rest. (I don't know if you believe I was suffering from migranes, but I was, it just felt too much pity to waste the day lying down, especially that I have to spend most of my time doing boring translation tasks at the office and do not have much time for doing something creative). I pasted the rose onto the envelope with a letter to a friend, and it's in the mail already.

Yesterday I already had to translate business letters from home... :(((

And fancy what happened today? I came to the office to find no laptop on my desk! Part of our present office is moving (including me) and evidently moving things during work-time is considered prior to all duties and obligations. Well, I had nothing to do, just gathered my papers, dictionaries and other things to be moved and went home. So I'm practically having an unplanned day-off! I never saw the new office and I plan to go there tomorrow to see what the new environment is like, I'm definitely having more work therefore less time than the two others who must have already equipped their places (during working hours!!!) leaving some poor corner for me. If it is so there's going to be a big scandal! I'm not going to leave it at that! We are moving in on Monday but the executive director has not given me any information as to the new working schedule (the new office means commuting), or my working place (do I have a desk and a chair at all I wonder, there must be something to put the laptop on I guess?). Should an executive director not take care of all people working under his guidance? But what would you expect of a vain 24-year-old boy? Should not all employees with a company be treated as equals after all? Evidently it's not the case here. Well, I stop here, I said more than enough!

The good thing is that the new office is to be in the center of a bigger city, with the British Council library (English fiction and non-fiction, magazines, films, documentaries audiobooks... ahh, cannot wait!), bookshops and my University nearby, so I could drop into my old school to see the people who treated me as a real colleague and who gave me good education which does not seem considered or respected or valued where I am now.

The weather keeps frosty. It was such a pity I haven't taken a camera with me today. I don't yet have any pictures of the morning sun, and today's was a fabulous light-golden sunrise.

Regency Sketches

I finally decided to collect my Regency drawings of several years in one
post (some are from University notebooks and were done in very boring lectures!). I used film stills and photos for a couple, others are from my own imagination (definitely inspired by Jane Austen novels and films nevertheless)/. You'll probably recognize a couple of scenes from Jane Austen novels...

Illustrations exhibition and two good finds for my home library

I did go to the "Magic Pencil" exhibition even though I did not parttake in the master class. What seemed most amazing to me is that quite a few of the artist were using computers and photography in their work. Some of them print out copies of their sketches to colour them! The collage techniques were really interesting. On the whole, the exhibition inspired me to create something of my own... but I have to create (if this word is applicable here at all) a translation of an instruction manual instead - by Monday! Maybe my second education should be connected with illustration, must think where I can develop the skills I have. These are a couple of works from the exhibition,

you can learn more here: http://magicpencil.britishcouncil.org/

Besides, we dropped into a second-hand bookshop afterwards, where I found two treasures: the 4th of Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and What Katy Did Next (just adore all these books about girls). However, both are not the 1st in the series, and that's something of a disadvantage, I read only the 1st of the Little House and none about Katy, these are such rarities here!