Archives for November 2018

Woke up too early and was tired all day. I’m thinking I should work on my sleep hygiene again but my husband thinks it might be the next iteration of the cold that keeps on coming back. I guess we’ll see.

When the boy and I were sitting at the breakfast table my husband showed up all of a sudden. And hour earlier than usual. Which was nice in a way but also a little confusing. Needless to say I never managed to squeeze meditation or writing back into the day. Serves me right for not using the time between 5.30 and 6.30 when I was awake but too cranky to do anything useful.

I went for a run. It was fun and all but so cold that I was still freezing an hour later. (Maybe it was the cold after all.)

But first I did finish the cardigan!

The dark color doesn’t really photograph well.

Then I took a shower and helped to make lunch:

Something pseudo-Chinese with rice noodles, carrots, leek and ginger. The leek is from our garden. Unfortunately, we had to throw about half of it out. There might have been bugs but I’m honestly not sure.

Then I wanted to write or do something productive but instead I ate all the chocolate. Because that really helps when you don’t have any energy.

My first student had rescheduled to 3 o’clock (by email at 9.30 the night before – since I don’t check email after dinnertime I only saw that in the morning; but I got an answer to my 6 am-email a few hours later), so I got ready fifteen minutes before (that student tends to show up early). And then I waited. And waited. She showed up at 3.20, telling me that she thought the reschedule was for 3.15.

Yeah.

Which meant I hadn’t done the lunch dishes. I know, there was enough time before, but still.

And then I lost momentum for the day.

Taught some more students, waited for friends of ours who were bringing a wine order, got ready for bed at 7. Still no dishes because the boy was taking a shower.

My poor husband had to teach until 7.30 and showed up rather exhausted for dinner at 7.45.

Then I finally did the dishes and wrote very few words.

I ran the numbers and if I want to finish this novel until the end of the year, and if it runs as long as the first one in the series I will need to write 1,600 words each and every day. Including yesterday which I didn’t do.

Fun!

Today I will do all the things, of course, go grocery shopping, get my new passport that I completely forgot about (I just got a letter that it had been sitting there, ready for me to get it since May, oops), make deodorant, practice music, write all the words, start at least one new knitting project and learn some more about book cover design.

You know, the usual.

Oh, and I decided to do the blanket CAL from Attic24 at the beginning of next year. I miss having a massive blanket to work on. And even though the whole thing looks like it might be too pink for me, and even though I don’t really need another blanket, and even though the yarn is pure acrylic I ordered the yarn pack the other day. I’m really looking forward to it.

So I’ll spin my huge advent calendar in December and then I’ll crochet a blanket in January and February. At least things won’t get boring. Even though I just finished that cardigan that took years to spin for and only less than four weeks to knit.

I woke up early and lounged in bed for ages. Then there was breakfast and then my husband’s breakfast. Again, I somehow didn’t meditate. Bad idea. My days go much better if I take the time to breathe and sit still early in the day.

I wove all the ends in on my cardigan (no picture, sorry) and then I finished the second sock for my husband:

Then I ran all the errands, including buying buttons for the cardigan, tea, everything for lunch and other food. Lunch was about as Bavarian as it can get:

I even went out a second time – in the snow – to get dark beer.

Then there was teaching. With lots of breaks. And then we finally got to watch the new episode of ‚Doctor Who‘. I had gotten an email from iTunes support in the morning that they had added the episode to my account. Phew.

And then I looked at my novel. Not because of NaNoWriMo but, well, I still want to write regardless. And when I set the deadline for Christmas my software told me that I’d need to write 1,900 words per day until then to finish it. Assuming that the second in the series will turn out as long as the first one.

1,900 words day in and day out is a lot. I’m not quite sure I want to do that. So I changed the deadline to the end of December. Better.

But if I attempt to finish that novel until New Year’s Eve it means I have to write about 1,600 words per day. Again.

Novel writing month in December, it seems.

Today there will be running and teaching and all the usual. And apparently quite a bit of writing as well.

The fact that I had given up on NaNoWriMo didn’t sit well with me. So on Sunday evening I got it into my head that it still wasn’t too late.

I ran the numbers and found that an average of 7,600 words per day until Friday would still allow me to win.

So I decided to write like a maniac on Monday. And if I could manage between 8,000 and 10,000 words I’d try to reach the finish line.

Of course I made rules:

1. Normal life still needed to happen.
2. Sleep could only be sacrificed in extreme circumstances, like right before closing time.
3. No sloppy writing just to get the words in.

So I woke up and started writing only twenty minutes later. Made breakfast on time, ate, forgot to meditate and started writing again. The first thing I wrote after breakfast was my sad, way too late November newsletter. Then I wrote some more fiction while my husband was building the fire. Knitted four rows on the cardigan while he had his breakfast. Did the breakfast dishes. Supervised the beans starting to cook on the wood stove while my husband was out running and wrote some more.

Went for my first run in weeks:

It was glorious if cold, wet and muddy. Not many people out, surprisingly. I was super-slow but it was fun and made me happy:

Then I helped a little with lunch, took a shower, got dressed and applied makeup right away. Also forgot to use body lotion yet again. (I only remembered when I started itching while teaching.

Lunch was beans and rice:

Very good. Black beans, rice, kale and German sausages.

Then I wrote some more even though my brain felt like mush and I was starting to get a headache.

Then I taught four students. Listened to the boy practicing piano.

Then we wanted to watch ‚Doctor Who‘ but the new episode didn’t show up in the iTunes Store. We sadly had to watch an episode of ‚Deep Space Nine‘. Don’t get me wrong, we love ‚DS9‘ it’s just that we had been looking forward to ‚Doctor Who‘. Later that night the episode did show up but not as part of my season pass. Instead there was a button telling me it would cost an additional 2.99. Um, no. I’d rather not pay for the same thing twice.

Trying to get a message to support was another trial but I prevailed. We’ll see how that goes.

After all the writing I had done all day I had managed only 3,600 words. (Okay, that plus two posts on revelry, an email, a 1,300 word newsletter and a 600 words blogpost.) I mean, that is a lot of words but not quite the same as 7,600. And while the day wasn’t over yet I knew that writing another 4,000 would be beyond me. I might have managed another 2,500 at best.

And doing it one day would not have been enough. I would have had to pull that same stunt (including the mushy brain and headache) every day for the rest of the week. And Monday is my light teaching day.

So I’m officially giving up for a second time.

My husband said that I could have spared myself the disappointment but really, I’m not disappointed at all. I just had a feeling that I hadn’t tried hard enough and so I decided to do an experiment. To see how much I could get in a normal day if I tried as hard as I could.

I’m hoping that that stunt has gotten me back to writing and that I will finish this novel in the not too distant future at a sustainable pace.

I woke up early and dawdled but managed to meditate before my husband got up, at least.

Then we started talking about how we want to renovate the kitchen and my husband was saying that the one cupboard where we keep our tea mugs and such was the big problem and I realized that we don’t even need that cupboard. We could rearrange another one and put all the tea-making stuff in there.

And true to form my husband fetched a ladder and start emptying the cupboards.

The one that’s the problem is empty now, and the one that was full before is almost full again but with different things. And we did find a place for almost everything.

Since my husband put everything in its new place I’m expecting a bit of re-shuffling soon. I can already see where things that we need often won’t be as accessible as we need. But then I shouldn’t really complain because I was only sitting there saying, „We should put that thing in the basement,“ and such.

And I knitted. And made a phone call. And knitted some more.

Lunch was pasta with tomato sauce, Brussels sprouts and meatballs, a little weird but tasty:

And then I basically spent the rest of the day either surfing the web or knitting.

The NaKniSweMo cardigan is almost done. I’m not happy with how the neckband has turned out so I’ll re-knit that today.

The boy and I watched some ‚Star Trek‘ and that was the day.

The cold is much better now. Maybe I’ll be healthy again soon.

Today there will be running and teaching and I don’t quite know what else. Apart from the knitting of the neckband.

Yes, I haven’t written anything yet again. That’s not something I’m proud of. I’d like to get back into writing real soon. We’ll see how that goes.

I woke up at 5.45 and lounged in bed for ages. Had a late breakfast and then my husband showed up rather early because it always takes about an hour to get the fire going and coffee made in the morning.

I did make nice progress on the cardigan, the second sleeve is growing nicely.

While sitting there knitting I realized that I wasn’t feeling all that great, the sore throat was making a comeback, likewise the ‚feeling hot and cold‘ and the feeling of stuffed sinuses.

So, no running. I did the breakfast dishes and went back to bed.

Spent too much time on the internet. Remembered that I wanted to show Frieda of the Wollkanal-Podcast a picture of my worst pile of yarn and fiber because in their last episode she had said that she believed everybody else had their stash all tidy and organized. Yeah. See For yourself:

Mind you, that’s not my stash per se, that is just the overflow. My fiber is pretty organized but what you see there is odds and ends, leftover yarn, UFOs, handspun that doesn’t fit into the designated containers and several bags full of needles and such that I inherited and haven’t sorted through yet. In addition to that I have bins full of spinning fiber (nicely organized and tidy), bags and piles of mending, a bag full of projects that need blocking and such, project bags everywhere and ziplocks full with handspun on every available surface. Oh, and a box with my sewing-projects in progress and two weaving looms with ongoing projects on them. Plus bags with spindle projects and the two wheels with their respective projects.

You know, the usual.

Lunch was easy to make and delicious:

Homemade mashed potatoes are just the best.

After lunch I did the dishes, dealt with laundry and went back to bed. The boy helped me with both the dishes and the laundry and I taught him how to fold sheets. He had never done it before. It made me realize that at his age I had been helping my mother folding laundry and ironing for years. There is a way to fold sheets with two people that I’m still doing on automatic. And when I was visiting my sister last year and we stripped the guest bed before I left we went through the the folding routine without even realizing it.

My mother has a very structured approach to housework. And everything has to be done just so and has to be ergonomic. I thought that was just how you did it until I met my mother-in-law. She is about as unsystematic as one can get without descending into utter chaos. I find that rather fascinating. And irritating. I like having processes in place for things I do often.

Her way of doing things has also influenced my husband, of course, and so sometimes things happen like me wanting to put his sheets away and finding a sweater on top of the sheet pile.

Weird.

The boy, of course, sorts his clothes and puts all the t-shirts in one pile and all the sweaters in another one. Phew. (We even got him a set of drawer organizers when he got his new dresser and he has a little box for his socks and another one for his underpants and such. As he should. Why anybody would want to hunt for a single sock in between his underwear is a mystery to me but well, not all people are the same, I guess.)

And yes, I can tout the marvels of being organized in the same post as showing you the mess that is the top of my dresser. Those piles are somewhat organized, though, and soon I will sort through them and move things around and have space for everything. The plan is to do all the mending. (Go ahead and laugh.) Then I will move the fabric to the boy’s old dresser that used to be my old dresser and that’s empty right now which will give me enough space in the dresser that the pile is sitting on to put all the yarn in there.

I spent the afternoon mostly working on the book cover design course I just bought on Udemy. I found that I was stumbling on such basic things as moving images around and finding the right font and saving images as a jpg, so I did learn quite a bit. I also designed a horrible basic book cover and learned that the fonts in GIMP are a PITA to navigate. I did look up some google fonts, though, and am hopeful to find better stuff there. There is quite a bit that I need to learn.

This time I’m taking the time to practice everything I learn. It’s taking a bit of time but is helping me developing the actual skills I need. Since I just realized again that knowing something and being able to do it are two separate things. Being able to spot bad design does help in producing good design but it definitely isn’t enough. That’s like thinking that a music critic must be a great musician.

So I’ll continue making bad book covers until I start getting it right. I was also thinking only about book covers for the novels I was writing but realized (I’m all about
epiphanies right now, sorry) that I need to practice first and that means making covers for books that don’t exist. I mean, if I end up doing a cover that’s really great I might write the novel to go with it.

Here’s my awful cover by the way:

The font is awful, I want some gradient color thing on the picture, maybe and I’m not at all happy with the text. That will be my task for tomorrow.

Of course I didn’t write at all, yet again. I hope I’ll be getting back to that soon.

I also spent the afternoon helping my husband and son diagnose problems. It’s really interesting. My husband comes to me, telling me about his problems with the amp he is trying to repair. Basically, it’s a worst case scenario. And he has no idea what went wrong but the whole thing is dead. So I’m asking questions. „If that is the case, does that mean the error must be in this part?“ „What does that mean?“ „What about checking this thing?“ „Or that?”

I do that until he has an idea and wanders off.

Then the boy had been downloading new games. It’s rather sweet. He has been wanting to play certain games for ages but hasn’t bought them because he needed to be 16 to play them. We told him repeatedly that it’s okay to get them now, three weeks before his birthday. So, finally, the day before he decided to buy them because they were on sale.

Downloading those games on the crappy wifi connection that he has upstairs takes ages. And then, finally, he was able to play „Skyrim“ for the first time ever. Only. It wasn’t working.

So he came to me saying he had a big problem. The game wouldn’t work. And he had problems with other games as well. So I started asking questions. „What did you do?“ „What has changed?“ „That sounds like it might be a problem with permissions, have you changed those in any way?”

Until he had an idea, and went upstairs to try it.

It took all afternoon but just before dinnertime he found out what the problem was. Basically, Windows Defender thought that every app he has on his computer is suspect and shouldn’t be allowed to generate files. Hm.

Then we watched some ‚Star Trek‘. Then I didn’t write again. And then I went to bed. (And yes, no going out to see a musical.)

Today there will be more cook cover design, methinks, and hopefully some writing, I really need to get back into the habit.

I didn’t even put yoga on the list.

And yes, this post is 1,363 words, sorry. I know that that’s almost the NaNoWriMo quota. But writing blog posts is easy.