daily journal

It’s all way more reasonable than it sounds! I swear!

I had another no-good, unproductive morning. No, I can’t just pick up my cell phone real quick, nope. So my July yoga streak didn’t really get off the ground. Breakfast was had nonetheless and on time, the boy went off to school, the usual. I did plan the upcoming month but did not get far enough to actually think about when all those wonderful things will happen. Looking at my current schedule my only hope is to make the best use of the next four weekends and the five times off at the end of the month.

I finished a cowl for my husband and am really liking it:

When I checked my email just before breakfast I read one that mentioned the summer sale on WMG workshops. That email also mentioned that they have a new Publishing 101 course. And that there will be on going from the beginning of August to mid-September. And that felt like exactly the thing that will help me to maybe publish something. And I just got some extra money from teaching. And then I realized that there will be another course that I’ve been wanting to take since last year and that one will take place next summer. (The courses are all online but there is the question of finding the time for it.) So I enrolled in that as well.

The third one happened when I was doing the lunch dishes and listening to a podcast with David Gaughran and there was mention of his free course about book marketing. Now, I have no idea when I will look at that one. On the other hand, the other two courses I will most definitely take. First, they are far from free and even at 50% off they are not exactly cheap, and second, the have very specific dates when they will take place and they have homework that I will have to hand in on time.

I did go running but it was already super-hot when I went out and that resulted in a lot of very sweaty walking:

The weather was gorgeous but it would have been a much better idea to start two hours earlier:

I came back home, took a shower, tried working on the novel but fought with my husband which threw my focus off. Husband was stressed out because there have been new COVID-19 cases in the next town over, cooking alone is stressful and there are flying ants trying to take over the annex. I should have helped him more, definitely. Flying off the handle when he came back to tell me that the vacuum is already in the annex hallway was not well-timed.

Lunch was tasty even though the mood was a little low:

I taught all the students. Had two conversations with my husband because of what happened earlier. Finally managed to eat dinner at 7.40. Went online again, started writing this post, decided to leave the dishes (there weren’t that many), spun a bit while watching Youtube, did ten minutes of yoga in bed to make up for the lack of morning yoga and went to bed at an almost sane time.

Podcast? What Podcast?

Today there will be the grocery shopping plus the walking to the garden center to acquire more ammunition in the battle against the ants. I will be teaching lots of students, one after the other all afternoon.

Woke up on time and managed the whole morning routine minutes working on the novel. Got the boy out the door in time, talked with husband, almost finished a cowl.

Then we did some chores and I went to the tea shop and the health food store. I did not buy any chocolate bars or potato chips which made me rather proud. It’s a bit sad but these days that’s major achievement.

I didn’t have to help with lunch, okay, I did chop a few herbs and green onions, which meant that I had time to actually sit down and read through a few more pages of the novel. I got to move a task on the Kansan fridge to ‚done‘ even!

Lunch was a family favorite, pasta e fagioli:

I took a little break, folded some laundry and taught all the students, including one who will start lessons next week. Then I ate dinner, talked with my husband some more, procrastinated doing the dishes, started writing this post, shuddered because my list of things I needed to do was too long and decided to push them all to another day. Apart from the dishes.

I read a bit more of book five in the „Death before Dragons“-series which I’m really enjoying and went to bed.

Today there will be running and quite a lot of teaching. I guess I can just give up on my other to-dos. I’d like to plan for this month, spin and do something with the podcast episode but things aren’t looking good.

No idea why but I totally overslept. Until 6.10. Something is wrong with the smart alarm on my watch. I did manage some yoga, though, but no meditation, no nothing. Then breakfast, my husband’s breakfast, some knitting and a lot of talking and then the waiting for the boy. With more knitting.

Then finally dishes and such. I did call my mother and mostly told her why we won’t come to visit in September. I looked the train schedules up and the whole thing would be madness. Since they live in a tiny town there is no way to get there Friday evening after teaching so I would have to leave here at six to be there at around 2.30 and there is no way to leave there early enough on Monday morning to be back in time for teaching again so I would have to step on a train Sunday afternoon at 5.30 to be back home again shortly before midnight. Um, no.

Meanwhile my husband started cooking. He had big plans. Well, even bigger than usual. We have these wine leaves growing in our garden. The wine used to grow up the balcony but it got all moldy and was starting to destroy the balcony so my husband cut it back. It still wants to grow back so every year my husband lets it get to the point where we can use the leaves for cooking.

So we had a Greek extravaganza. Two kinds of stuffed wine leaves, vegetarian and with ground lamb, tsatsiki, skordalia and tomato rice. It was very good and demanded a glass of wine to go with it:

Oh, and I forgot the zucchini from our garden and the salad.

After that I read a bit and set up a Slack channel for my online writing group. Then I sat around a bit and read a little and spent way too much time on social media and then I finally recorded the podcast. Phew. I did it in three parts because of the camera time limit. I hope it will turn out okay.

The boy and I watched the very last episode of ‚Firefly‘ while eating dinner, then I spun a bit of BFL:

I helped the boy transfer some files from my old laptop to his computer (he couldn’t find a thumb drive and the laptop thought it didn’t have a keyboard, things like that) and then he helped me do the huge pile of pots and pans and plates.

Today there will be an early breakfast for the boy again because he will go to school again, running for me, quite a bit of teaching and maybe some work on the podcast, we’ll see.