Hello, my beautiful HPFT family! 

January is over and I'm here with a blog post... 

A little explaination: one of my new year's resolutions for 2018 was to keep a diary in which I would note a happy thought each day. Since I had the idea here (we had a thread for new year's resolutions in the Hufflepuff CR) and since I love you guys and since I've incredibly followed through with it and I'm proud (I've only skipped one day), I thought I'd share it with you.

I don't know if it'll be particularly interesting, and some things won't probably make much sense (a lot of my happy thoughts are HPFT-related, actually, so I guess you are lucky ) and I will be translating from Italian, which is always a bit hard...  

Anyway, I will be making an entry each month and maybe you will enjoy reading it... (?)

So, here it goes! 

 

JANUARY 2018

1. The start of a new year and a new adventure. Sit down around a table and spend hours of cheeriness with dear friends. Maybe a small damage can happen, like a paper bag that succumbs to rain, but the beauty of it is that for every small damage a solution can be found.

2. A bit of frenzy, but there's always space to exchange a laugh with the colleagues. And then old memories of a few years ago come to mind and you find yourself wondering: "Who knows if Nanterre is still in A league?"

3. Starting the day with 2 new reviews and a nomination for FROGS has no price.

4. When work isn't either too much nor too little and you can face it with a smile. Pamper myself with some good food and enjoy a night that is only for me: read, write, do what I love most.

5. Man shall not live by bread alone, where bread is a synecdoche for food and food is a metonymy for material good. But anyway food is important and it's always the right occasion for a dinner out with friends.

6. The best part of a Skywalker night with the Matematti? Going to bed at 2am and then staying awake another hour chatting about books and old memories.

7. And after such an intense intergalactic weekend, the fifth movie is a must, right? Hunger Games, here I come! And in the wait, one or two review I didn't have time to leave earlier.

8. Liar is in the voting round, something genial (even if I can't remember what) surely was said in the office and the promenade is hesitated in the Slow Waltz. Mezzanotte per sognar, fanta-sti-car... 

9. Giuliana changed her name in Giulia and the Due Diligence is harder to understand than the eleven dimensions in Subatomic Physics. At least our order of tea has arrived and my challenge had its first entry. The balance is always positive.

10. Getting misty over the emails between Simon and Blue and fantasising of future trips. Back to Sicily this summer? The answer is always the same: 42 CPD

11. Falling in love all over again with your own characters, while lying on the couch with a blanket and a cup of tea. What's better than that?

12. An email by [insert name of person who writes very ungrammatical, and hilarious because of that, emails], an unexpected review, new objectives and... the relax of Friday night. Everything else can wait tomorrow morning...

13. House tidied, new chapter of Jimmy posted, long owed review left. Proficuous day, I can feel proud of myself.

14. Another proficuous day, on the site but not only there. Ready to face a new week! (Okay, maybe not, but anyway satisfied with the weekend, even if on the [insert name of the company I work for] values there's still to work...)

15. Sometimes Mondays are hard, but finding myself sharing the wonderful love of my favourite online community is something that always makes me smile. And then there is the dancing, and nothing is better than dancing.

16. SVTHSA is probably the most adorable story I've ever read (and the first completed book of 2018), on Italia1 there is Harry Potter and the tea tradition in the office is by now established. Extremely happy in this moment.

17. In an emotionally exhausting day, the best part is finding yourself surrounded by your friends' affection and knowing that you are not alone.

18. Surely not a day when everything went smoothly, but at least the fanfiction gives great satisfactions. And tomorrow is Friday and that in its own is a great news, right?

19. Tiresome day closing a complicated week. The up side? Having a cheery dinner with my "adoptive family". And knowing that weekend has finally started.

20. Night out with friends like we hadn't had in ages. Laughing at old adventures and remembering the era of the "Can you make a coffee?"

21. And now the weekend is over and I haven't done half the things I wanted to... but at least the day was proficuous review-wise. Objectives for the week to come: start reading a new book, do the Appraisal, reviews like there's no tomorrow. And maybe finding the time to take the car to the tire repairer and change the burned out light bulbs. All absolutely manageable, right?

22. Right turn in Fox Trot and it finally seems to start dancing. And I also found the time for a little step forward in my FROGS reading. Monday gone, -4 to weekend.

24. Having fun at work when the servers are full of schifezze [filth] and you can run the proc onda(energetica); The tiredness is there, it can't be denied, but you feel it less if you can joke about it.

25. New book started - check, reviews - check, Appraisal... I tried but the server wasn't collaborating, migration... we are working on it. All in all, a productive day.

26. The to-do-list is still infinite and now the flu is advancing, too, but there still are upsides: an unexpected review, a message from [insert friend/possible romantic interest name here] and finally the weekend.

27. Health is what it is, yet the day was proficuous. Proud of myself. And now, goodnight.

28. That thrill of positive nervousness when posting a new story...

29. And then another Matematto announces that he's getting married and you find yourself re-reading old email trails and plannings of foolish graduation presents...

30. At home at 7.15 warming next to the radiator. Organizing an aperitif with ex-colleagues that had been thought more than two years ago. First reassuring review on a story I was/am full of doubts about. And tonight there's The Prisoner on TV. To hell "female little problems".

31. A day that starts with a lot of Hufflepuff pride and that ends more or less the same way (it's possible that I talk about Harry Potter in the office a bit too much...) The pleasant numbness of being on the couch in pajamas and with a pen in hand. The beautiful feeling of being home.

 

And now a few due notes (credits/translations/explainations) that you can feel free to skip:

Nanterre is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris. And a few years ago its basket team was promoted in A league (and I and some friends happened by chance to be there during their celebrations...)

Man shall not live by bread alone is a line from Matthew's Gospel.

Skywalker night = Star Wars marathon.

Matematti is the nickname of my group of Uni friends, coming from the union of matematici [mathematicians] e matti [crazy]. 

Mezzanotte per sognar, fanta-sti-car... is a line from Un bacio a mezzanotte, a 1952 Italian song composed by Gorni Kramer (music) and Garinei & Giovannini (lyrics) and popularized by the vocal group Quartetto Cetra.

Most of day 9 refers to work stuff and it would be too long to explain...

Simon and Blue are characters in Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (in brief SVTHSA) by Becky Albertalli.

The answer is always the same: 42 refers to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

CPD stands for chi può dirlo, which means who can tell, a recurrent line of a colleague of mine.

Italia1 is a channel of Italian television.

"Can you make a coffee?" has a story of its own (something regarding a boy I never went on a date with... ) and that, too, would be too long to explain.

proc onda(energetica); Proc stands for procedure and it's a command in the programming language I work with. Onda energetica is the Italian rendition of Kamehameha from Akira Toriyama's manga/anime DragonBall. So basically that's me and my colleagues being silly...

The Prisoner obviously means Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

 

PS - Now I'm nervous that I'm going to bore you all and I'm super scared of pressing that Submit Entry button... why do I do this to myself?