Ungemütliches Wetter!

I love this word in the German language: ungemütlich.
There's not really a perfect translation for it in English. It essentially means "uncomfortable." But that doesn't capture the full sense of the word.

To understand it best, you probably need to know its antonym: gemütlich, which is probably my favorite German term. It couches "comfortable" along with "cozy" thus implying an atmosphere that is warm, inviting, and friendly. Now if you can imagine the opposite, you get a better sense of ungemütlich.

I bring this up today, because ungemütlich is a precise, one-word description of the weather: grey, miserable, with a bone-chilling drizzling rain that beckons me to pull a cashmere turtleneck out of winter storage and cuddle up in its soft warmth.

I'm just back from teaching my high school class in Essen, now need to make some medical appointment calls for a client (translation/interpretation services), and then I'm off to get other relocation clients settled into their new apartment in Dortmund, before driving to Düsseldorf for a parents' meeting at school tonight. Mondays are always my most manic days :) While I love my students and my random clients, I crave the relative normalcy of an office. Juggling freelance assignments keeps me running all the time.

Because I won't be home til about 11:00 tonight, I crouched beside my pond in the rain, to capture this quick lily pad blip. Hope you like the little heart. Now off I head into extreme Ungemütlichkeit.
Happy Monday :)