Olek's mum is staying with us right now. She arrived on Tuesday and they (Olek and her) are going back to Warsaw tomorrow morning. It has been really nice but also tiring to spend time with her. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but everyone in Olek's family is really desperate for us to have kids. It has been going on for some time, but since we've gotten married, there's nothing holding them back. His mum leaves out no occasion to tell me (or him) that now would be the perfect time to have kids and that we shouldn't wait too long because the closer you get to 30 the more difficult it will be and anyway our "spare room" (hey! It's our office, it's not spare!) would make a really cute nursery.
When we were in Warsaw around Christmas, Olek's grandma stuffed me with food and then looked at my belly and went "Ohh, doesn't that look suspicious?" (Well, duh! You just made me eat 2839651 pierogis and cake and cookies. What's my belly supposed to look like?).
Anyway. Ugh. I can sort of understand them, because not only is Olek an only child, but his two cousins (the grandparents' other grandchildren) are both around 30 and one is divorced without kids and the other one isn't promising any kids either. I totally understand that they want to have (great)grandchildren, but we're nowhere near ready to have children. It would be nice if they could just keep their hopes to themselves. Even if we wanted to have kids right now, we'd be having them because we want to, not for someone else.
It's not helping our cause that Olek's best friend's wife (they got married in August) is 4-ish months pregnant. Apparently she's also on sick leave during the whole pregnancy, because she gets tired easily
In other news
I've started my new job, taking care of Indian doctors getting specialisation training in Germany. I help them with bank/authority stuff, finding a place to stay, etc. Basically anything they could need a native speaker or someone who knows the city for. It's probably the easiest and most enjoyable job I've had so far. It's really interesting and a lot of the time, it doesn't even really feel like working, which is awesome.
I've also been working on my thesis, which is going ok, but slower than I would like. I'm writing about double marking of evidentiality in Polish (you can disregard that), so I have a few thousand example sentences with for example "apparently" that I need to go through to find examples of (what would translate to) "Apparently (he's) supposed to ..." Anyway, it's tiresome and not very interesting (although what I've found so far is promising to give interesting results).
Since Olek's leaving with his mum and coming back on Tuesday with his dad and his dad's girlfriend, I'll have the weekend to myself and hope to get a lot of work done. I want/have to send my avisor some first results by Sunday.
My health insurance pays for two health/prevention courses for up to 500€ (I think) a year and I've never used that option. So I looked into what courses they pay for and it's a lot of stop smoking, lose weight, nordic walking, etc, which I'm not interested in, but they also had yoga and autogenic training and other relaxation techniques. So I'm signing up for autogenic training, starting the week after next. I've never tried anything like that, but seeing as it's free I figured could give it a try.
I also need to go to the gym more often, because that's not free and I shouldn't pay and not go. Working out also does make me feel better. I just need to find a schedule that works for me. I should probably get up earlier and go there in the morning and then start working when I get back. It'll be easier when Olek's classes start (after the 7th) because he has class at 7:30 like three times a week and I can just get up with him. What kind of university has classes that early anyway? I had classes at 8:30 a few times (not more than once a week each semester, though) and my profs were always apologising for making us get up that early, "but there was no free room at any other time"
I think this should do for a blog.
Sorry to hear about the pressure from family.
I know how tough working on your thesis can be, especially when you feel like it's somewhat tedious at the moment. I hope you can get some work done on it, though-- it feels good once it's over!