creative.mother.thinking

I almost got enough sleep, woke up five minutes before my alarm. Then lounged about and meditated a bit. And then I started thinking about the scarf I want to make for the boy and went researching yarn. It has to be the right weight and super-soft.

Breakfast was had. Then more yarn research. My husband showed up and the boy was less late than anticipated. After everybody’s breakfast the boy had to decide about the yarn so I could order.

Then I realized that I need more yarn for the Crazy Tee which meant spinning more. So that is a project and I started right away with pulling out fiber and weighing it and looking for bobbins.

Not running does give me a more leisurely pace for my mornings and I feel like I need that at the moment. It doesn’t mean I actually get other stuff done, though.

My husband came back from running and went back out again to dig yet another vegetable bed. He is doing it slowly this time so we’re hoping for less bed-digging stress.

Then we made lunch. We had planned to make some kind of salad to take with us to the meditation meeting originally. We didn’t go but we still had the rice and eggs we had cooked for it. The whole thing was born out of a vague idea of rice salad and the need to use up the rest of the asparagus. So this is what we came up with:

It was the first time we roasted asparagus in the oven and I really like it. There was garlic in there (roasted as well) and olive oil, lemon juice and some cheese. We ran out of parmesan so I grated some Cheddar. This was rather good and I’m hoping to make it again.

Then there were dishes and I went off to spin in front of the TV:

One of the boy’s classmates came over so they could work on the pieces for the chess set they are making for school. The two of them spent all afternoon in our basement working. Nobody got hurt. Well, at least not much, the classmate banged his hand twice and needed a bandaid. Not too bad. (Beforehand my husband had given the boy a lecture on how to treat someone with a serious cut to the wrist. Poor boy was a little freaked.)

I was so low on energy that I managed to doze off in the middle of the afternoon. I guess I need more sleep still. But I did manage to finish spinning the singles, so that’s good:

I went to bed real early and did not watch the big soccer game with my husband. I also did not watch anything with the boy. First, because of soccer and second, because he was all peopled out and still had things to do.

Today will be another day of mostly nothing. I want to watch more bike riding and would love to ply the yarn and start spinning the yarn for my husband’s sweater.

I think spinning on the wheel is good for my leg at this point. It gets moving without any strain.

Most important will be to go voting in the European election, of course. I think we’ll do that in the morning. We usually do.

I woke up from the alarm again at six and basically didn’t do anything all day. My energy was better, though, and the leg is hurting less and less. I think the magnesium might be working!

There was breakfast. I ate a pastry for once because I had gotten some for both my husband and son and felt left out. Bad move, I didn’t feel so hot afterwards. I’ll stick to muesli again in the future.

Then it was time for my husband’s aunt to show up and he helped put all the recycling into her car while I was doing dishes and then preparing for podcasting. Lots of feedback on the last German episode.

Then we made lunch:

Then I took pictures of my projects for the podcast, took a bit of a break, did my singing warmup and then recorded the podcast. With a false start. This time I used one laptop for recording video and the other one for audio which is a bit insane.

Then there was teaching. After that bodyweight training, a bit of housework, dinner and then some work on the podcast.

And early to bed.

There was a point in the day where I started writing a list in my bullet journal of all the fiction books on my ebook reader that I still want to read. I gave up after two pages when finding I wasn’t even a third through. So I guess I’ll read some more books from the pile of unread books instead of only new ones? At least I pulled one out that I had bought last year to read next.

Today will be another whirlwind Friday with cleaning and lots of teaching and trying to get the podcast ready to publish. (I can’t promise I’ll get it out before Sunday, I won’t have much time today and no time at all tomorrow.)

So, decidedly not boring around here.

I did wake up from the alarm but decided that I didn’t need to push myself to do anything. Basically I have declared myself sick for the time being in the hopes that I will get back to normal faster that way.

I made breakfast and talked with my husband and knitted. I still elevated the leg with the pulled muscle and iced it. This was the second day I had an inexplicable wet stain on the back of my leggings in the morning. Only yesterday it wasn’t inexplicable anymore because there was also a puddle of blue goo on the chair I had used to rest my leg on. The cooling pack was leaking.

That together with the fact that the elastic bandages I’m using have lost most of the elasticity over the past twenty years led me to order replacements.

I did the dishes and then set off to hobble to the health food store. I was rather happy that I could walk without much pain but less happy that I had to walk so slowly. Trying not to stretch you calf muscles while walking leads to an odd kind of shuffle with very small steps. I always find it strange when just one part of the body is affected. The rest of me is all ready to run and jump but one of the muscles in my calf puts in a veto. And then the rest of me says, „Well, can’t you really not go any faster? This is no fun. Are we there yet?”

But I faked patience and listend to a podcast on the way and went to the bakery and the health food store and brought back everything we needed. Good thing I didn’t need much heavy stuff. I had thought about using the bike because it would be easier than the hobbling but then I realized that I always use my left leg to get off and on the bike and that I would probably not succeed in not stretching my left calf at all while biking. So it will be hobbling for a few more days, I guess. The hobble is becoming a little more balanced, though.

Then I helped making lunch. My husband had one of those days where he starts with, „Let’s make lamb burgers,“ and branches out from there:

As one does.

Then I took a shower and got ready just in time for my first student. Teaching was not bad and I saw the potential new student with her mother and grandmother. She was rather sweet and will start regular lessons next week. I’m looking forward to it.

Then there was dinner and the hanging up of more laundry and dishes again. No reason to complain, though, because my husband did the big washing up after lunch.

And then early to bed. I finished „The Bride Test“ and really loved it. First book in ages that almost made me cry at the end. (No worries, they get their happy ending.) And then I started reading a new one right away, of course.

Today there will be another mostly unproductive day with a few hours of teaching thrown in near the end. It still feels weird to not exercise. I hope I won’t get used to just sitting around all day. But for now it’s all about getting my energy back.

I slept in until 7.30 because I only turned out the lights after finishing „Top Secret“ at 1.30. Dumb move. I need a new rule that I can’t start a new Sarina Bowen novel after lunchtime or something. I still fell that it was worth it but it didn’t bode well for Sunday.

So I had breakfast a little late, talked to the rest of the family, did dishes, started reading „The 5th Gender“ by G.L. Carriger and basically sat around doing nothing but reading (and finishing) that, making my way all through the „Kiwi Blitz“ webcomic and watch the Giro. All while elevating my leg and cooling it.

Every other hour I felt that my calf was doing wonderfully and didn’t hurt anymore at all. Then I would get up and walk a few steps only to find that, no, it was not doing wonderfully. But all the resting, cooling, elevating and anti-inflammatory painkillers were doing something at least. I do doubt that I’ll  go running the next few days, though.

On the bright side that should give me a little more time for other stuff. Not that it did yesterday or the day before. As usual when something goes sideways I was thrown completely off track and didn’t do anything productive at all. It was especially weird to be watching the bike race without my spinning. I mean, I could have made progress on the spindle project but I didn’t.

I am really hoping things will go better today. I did warn the boy that he might have to go to the health food store on Tuesday instead of me.

There was lunch:

I didn’t even help with it. Even though my husband is still feeling under the weather. He seems to have some virus that makes him feel meh and a little weak but not sick enough to stay in bed. On the other hand he never feels sick enough to stay in bed. I remember one winter when he was complaining about feeling bad for weeks and I kept thinking that he should either just stay in bed or not complain as much and then it turned out that he probably had had pneumonia without really realizing.

I’d rather stay in bed a little too easily than going full tilt while having pneumonia, thank you very much.

When the Giro was over and I had finished the Gail Carriger book it was time for dinner. I usually try to skip it. I haven’t been all that successful with that lately but since I was taking ibuprofen I decided that eating something was sensible:

That’s fried potatoes with egg. And ketchup. And the painkiller.

Today there will be teaching. No running. Possibly the recording of the podcast but I might reschedule to Thursday even though that will mean scrambling to get it published on Friday. We’ll see.

And I started reading yet another novel, „The Bride Test“. I also have the new Patricia Briggs but I’m saving that a little. Not to mention the 199 unread novels on my ebook reader.

I woke up fifteen minutes before the alarm even though I had gone to bed an hour too late. Weird. I did manage to write morning pages, meditate and write some words for the novel (not enough but progress).

Claudia asked about morning pages. Morning pages is something I and lots and lots of other people learned from Julia Cameron’s „The Artist’s Way“-book. You sit down first thing in the morning and write three pages stream of consciousness. So, basically everything that’s running through your head at the moment as fast as you can. It’s one of Cameron’s tools for getting creatives unstuck and she uses it as meditation.

I started doing these in the fall of 1998 after reading the book. I did them faithfully for years but these days I do them if I can but I don’t write them every morning. I find that they’re helping me process everything that’s going on and when I write them I don’t need to talk about everything with my husband which is good. The other bonus is that they get me started writing for the day.

So after all of that I made breakfast. I finally started knitting the gauge swatches for my husband’s sweater. Sorry, that I didn’t take any pictures. After the first swatch with 3 mm needles I was sure that the yarn I had made was way too heavy and wouldn’t work at all but the second swatch looks like I’m gettin gauge after all.

I’m still thinking because the fabric is much denser and bouncier than what I usually knit. It also feels a little weird to knit what’s basically a worsted weight yarn with 2.5 mm needles. I might make the yarn just a little thinner and keep the needle size. Which is an interesting balancing act. I will swatch again, I think.

Then it was time to start the weekly cleaning and for one I actually did all of it including changing the sheets. Very good. In between I started the process of making pizza from the new kind of dough I was trying. The recipe said to shape the dough into firm balls and let it sit for 1.5 hours:

That’s how the ‚firm balls‘ looked after I had returned after getting a towel. Not very firm.

Throughout the whole process the dough was more like pudding than dough so I’m thinking to use less water the next time. My husband has declared once again that he won’t make pizza for the whole family anymore. It is a bit much with the running beforehand and the teaching after. So I decided to make enough for all of us for a change. I did leave off the salad, though.

The result tasted good, I’m not quite sure if I like this dough (it’s the one by Peter Reinhardt) better than the one I usually make. The process is certainly messier but I’ll tweak it a bit and we’ll see. This was the resulting pizza:

Of course the boy got mushrooms on his, not tuna and anchovies.

Then I left the dishes because it was time to get ready for teaching. I taught all afternoon, student after student after student.

And then it was the beginning of the weekend with knitting and watching Star Trek and kicking back with leftover pizza.

Today there will be running and either a humungous slump or maybe some progress on the to-do list. I’m hoping for some sewing and some spinning this weekend and also bodyweight training and yoga. The boy and I decided that we were just too limp to exercise on Friday night.

So, I’m not quite sure why the day felt so super-busy but I barely had time to sit down all day. That was probably it.