April is the cruelest month

"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land"
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Spring has always been a stressful time for us. Since Peter always needs to have instruments ready to show at the international early music exhibitions in early June, which he then delivers to his customers after the show, he is always under a lot of pressure to have the instruments finished in time for the varnish to dry properly before he goes. This year he also went to a show in Japan, so he was under even more pressure to finish.

It has always been a busy time for me too, due to the annual rhythm of major art exhibitions, for which catalogue texts and PR texts need to be translated. This year I have been working on an especially large exhibition project with a team of translators, but since things didn't quite work out as planned, by mid-April I had a crisis on my hands.

So ... no blog updates since March.

Fortunately, Peter was able to take Paddy with him to Japan, which Paddy enjoyed so much that he is not at all happy about being back in Linz now. Fortunately for the rest of us, he took a lot of pictures and put them up on Facebook, so that we could all follow their trip and comment. I think Paddy has a different link, though, so that people without a Facebook account can also look at them.

Last weekend I was at a conference in Vienna, trying to finish the last translations in between listening to interesting lectures and talking with interesting people, so I wasn't here to say good-bye when Peter and Paddy left. It felt odd coming home to an empty house, but then Christopher and I had a good time together at the Crossing Europe film festival.

The film festival ended on Sunday, Peter and Paddy got home Monday evening, and now it is already the last day of April. I still have a number of translations to finish, but everyone who has sent me translation work this week has specifically pointed out that they don't expect me to be working on May 1st. Spending International Workers' Day working would be a sacrilege that I don't intend to engage in.

So now we have a long weekend to enjoy as we start a new month that will hopefully be more enjoyable than the last.