Archives for April 2020

I woke up at 5.30 but decided to doze a little longer. Started my morning routine fifteen minutes later and then got derailed again. But I did meditate and write morning pages. Had breakfast on time and then decided that my unbalanced budget was bugging me enough to warrant half an hour of my precious me-time in the morning.

My husband showed up a little early. The boy showed up quite a bit late but my husband and I still got out the door earlier than usual for running. I just left the dishes for later that morning. And that turned out to be a wise decision. The masses were only starting to show up when I was already on my way back. Here is my halfway point:

The weather was really nice:

I did intervals of four minutes of running and two minutes of walking and actually ran most of those. Did a total of 8.5 kilometers in 73 minutes. Yes, I’m still extremely slow. Yes, after all these years I still can’t run for longer than four minutes without taking a break. If that. I’ll get there eventually.

Back home I did the dishes and helped to make lunch. I wanted to take a shower before that but lunch was ready early:

Then the boy helped me with the lunch dishes and we talked a bit. Then we met for a planning and brainstorming session for our schedules for the next few weeks. I thought since we both are having problems with organizing our days we might help each other. Sometimes it is a good thing to talk things through with someone else in order to find a solution and my husband hates planning and schedules.

From then on my afternoon went downhill a bit. Just when I finally wanted to take my after-lunch break with my novel and some chocolate my husband showed up to show me something. It was as if the whole afternoon was one big transition period.

Around four I was so frustrated that I didn’t get anything done that I uploaded the podcast on Youtube and folded all the clean laundry. I finally took my shower and then it was almost time for dinner and Star Trek.

Afterwards I read a bit, started writing this post, wrote in my bullet journal and went to bed. I even flossed.

Today there will be yoga, and finally the podcast, and the planning of the week, maybe I’ll watch the Growing Gills book club video from Friday and finish my Viajante. We’ll see.

I was so excited about the whole „Strengths for Writers“-workshop thing that I went to bed way too late and also woke up too early at 5.15. And then I dove back into what was exciting me again.

I was all excited and happy and feeling optimistic, had breakfast and when my husband showed up I talked at him about the whole thing for quite some time. Until it became clear that my husband had wanted to talk about something completely different instead. Because the night before the German government had talked about how to ease back into some resemblance of normal life over the next few weeks my husband thinks that this is the time to plan for when our students will be back in person.

Um, I beg to differ.

I guess quite a few people heard, „School will start again for students who are supposed to graduate before the end of the school year on May 11th in Bavaria,“ and „small shops may open again next week“ and understood, „Normal life will recommence shortly.“

I had started to think about what we’ll do throughout the next months too but then had reigned myself in and decided to wait until there would be a timeline for this. I am also thinking that it would be a very good idea to continue teaching remotely for as long as possible. Even though the teaching is somewhat frustrating.

We’ll see how that goes.

Then I went to the grocery store. Scored a huge packet of toilet paper and could have bought a big chunk of yeast but decided against it because I already got a small one last Tuesday. The grocery list was pretty short, I could carry it all without help.

My husband made shrimp risotto:

It was wonderful. I am starting to get a little tired of the wild garlic but there isn’t much left anyway.

Then I talked with the boy, hung up a load of laundry and taught my one student of the day. I got myself a thingamabob to connect the iPad to the internet via Ethernet because I was hoping it would be faster than wifi. Well, the good news is that it is working. The bad news is that it didn’t work with FaceTime. Weird.

Went back to the podcast, found that the fix that took almost three hours to render the day before hadn’t fixed anything and proceeded to mix the Youtube portion of the podcast completely independently of the audio portion. That took about an hour and I still hadn’t listened to the podcast or written show notes.

The health thing I’m having that I thought was a yeast infection and was treating like one didn’t get better with the treatment. So I googled my symptoms. And realized that I had reached the point where I really wanted to see a gynecologist about this. So I called in and got an appointment for later today. Not the right circumstances for tele-medicine, I’d say.

The boy and I watched some Voyager, I did not exercise because I really didn’t feel up to it but managed to go to bed on time.

So. Today will bring an actual outing to the doctor, quite a bit of tele-teaching and another evening of watching Star Trek while knitting. And then the weekend.

The days are feeling both very short and endless at the same time. Very weird.

I had set my alarm back to six because not getting enough sleep isn’t helping. With that ‚intelligent alarm‘-feature it woke me up at 5.43. I hadn’t slept enough yet again and I hadn’t even written in my journal at night or made a list for the day.

I was all intent on going through my morning routine smoothly and then – didn’t. By now that shouldn’t be surprising to me but it always is. I’m forever an optimist, it seems.

I did eat breakfast on time, so that was good, and then opted to not write fiction. Which led me to just give up on fiction-writing for the time being. When it’s not happening setting intention every day isn’t helping.

Everybody showed up on time, for once, and my husband started the wood stove. It was still pretty cold in the morning.

Then I went running:

The weather was gorgeous, rather cold but sunny with a little wind. There weren’t too many people out. I did feel a little dispirited and found my 3-minute running intervals too hard. Meh. But I loved being outside and moving:

I came back home and the pea soup was already on the stove. It was delicious:

Yeah, my husband doesn’t really get the concept of soup. Stew is the best he can do. The boy and I did the dishes right away while we were talking about language learning, the sounds that you have in German but not in English, superconductors (something with bosons, sorry, didn’t understand anything) and linear algebra. You know, the usual. All topics that he is interested in, clearly he inherited his love of learning from me. My husband loves learning new things and ideas as well but he has a clear focus and doesn’t tend to accumulate interests at quite the same rate.

I took a bit of a break, then spun while watching a podcast. This is the coach that I’m taking the „Strengths for Writers“-class from. Since I had taken the test the day before I really wanted to learn more about what I found out but hadn’t received my personalized thingie yet.

Then I put on my big girl pants and started working on the podcast. I re-started the whole process of putting the jingle in in GarageBand and then importing the video where that audio came from into iMovie and putting the audio file in there as well, and then – the two didn’t match up. Again.

I did some research, found out that that is not an uncommon issue, tried a fix and that took literally hours where a program that was correcting the frame rates of the video was processing. Not a good solution in the long run.

Then it was time to watch the Growing Gills book club session of the day. I’m still not doing the exercises but watching the videos does help me in a way, so I will probably go on with that.

I started writing this post, then met with the boy for watching Star Trek, almost forgot to hang up the load of laundry we had done that day and so a day where I actually did quite a few things still felt a little unproductive because working on an issue for ninety minutes with nothing to show for it is a little meh.

Today there will be grocery shopping, teaching one student and I want to get that podcast done as soon as possible. And then there is the course I’m taking. I finally got something to read and learn.

I did a little better yesterday, managed to meditate, write in my journal and write a few words of fiction. I talked a lot with my husband. I watched two webinars, one about how to teach online without losing energy and the other was the „Growing Gills“- book club. The first one wasn’t really helpful. It did take almost ninety minutes of my time, though. The second one was better but nothing new for me, I’ve already read the book twice or so. And the concept of ‚open loops‘ that we were discussing is the same idea as in „Getting Things Done“, a book that I have read twice as well.

I went running but it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. There were masses of people outside:

I didn’t take any picture of those people, though:

On my way home I walked more than I ran, then helped my husband with lunch:

Talked some  more with my husband, watched those two webinars, started working on the podcast but didn’t get anywhere. Researched some computer trouble, watched some Star Trek with the boy, procrastinated the bullet journal and going to bed and finally turned the lights out an hour too late.

But today everything will be better. Of course.