Today I got to sleep in, have a very leisurely breakfast – not in bed – went on a nice stroll with my husband to get flowers for his mother, had excellent Indian food made by said husband which included spinach picked from the porch, got to weave a bit on my new loom, and got this heart, sewn by my son as a present:
Beautiful, isn’t it? And the colors are just perfect.
So it’s the first day after what’s officially called “winter break” but that’s really all about carnival. This year we continued my husband’s tradition of being sick on Fat Tuesday. Our son started feeling bad on Monday, and that was pretty much it with the rest of the week.
I really hope that being sick during Christmas break, and now this one won’t continue for the rest of the year. I wasn’t all that bad but all I wanted to do all week was sleep for 8 or 10 hours a night, then linger in bed, get up, do a little housework, have lunch, take a two hour nap, sit around doing nothing for the rest of the day, and repeat.
It’s nice to take a rest but I don’t really like coming out of a work-free week being more behind than before.
That week of feeling unwell is also the main reason behind the lack of podcast around these parts. And blog. I also spend way too much time on ravelry.
I had, as usual, a long list of things I wanted to accomplish the last week, I wanted to get my new/old spinning wheel running, start a new sweater, play piano and guitar, and such nice things.
I think it might be time again to stop expanding and focus instead. I can’t start doing more and more things all the time, something will have to go.
One thing that seems to have gone already is the monthly writer’s meeting. Since last summer there have only ever been two or three of us meeting, and too often it had been me sitting around in a bar all by myself. So in December I stopped posting the dates for the meeting, and waited what would happen. One of the writers knew because I had met her on other occasions. At the beginning of February one other said, “What’s happening? I’m not receiving updates.” And I answered that I would love to continue the meetings but only if enough people were interested. That has mostly been it. We’ll see.
No writer’s meetings mean that I’m no writing short stories. Which is a bit of a pity. But then there are other writer’s meetings I could attend. Again, we’ll see.
I did continue to write on my current longer (hopefully novel-length) story, though. I’m at that point where it all feels totally boring and arbitrary to me but I think that might not be a realistic assessment but only my feeling that this has been going on for long enough, and that I’d like to start something new and exciting.
I almost thought about committing myself to blog every day for March but then I thought that might be a bit too much. Still, more than once a month might be a nice change of pace.
See you, and thanks for all the nice comments on my blog anniversary post.
you could go to see the pop-up gallery the Munich Creative group is hosting. There will be painting, and watercolors, and photos.
There will even be photos I took, and I’ll be singing, playing the ukulele, and reading a few of my stories.
Until then I might be a bit busy but that’s nothing new, isn’t it?
Every other Tuesday I meet with a few other women who belong to the “Munich Creative Group”. We meet for breakfast, and we tell each other what we have accomplished in the past two weeks, and what we want to do in the weeks to come. These meetings have been surprisingly inspirational, and the group as a whole is a veritable fountain of information. Want to know where to find art supplies, classes, get organizational tips, software or marketing help, improve your CV – there is bound to be someone who knows about it.
Today we met at a new location, a café that happens to be one of my favorite cafés in Munich. Twenty years ago I lived right around the corner from it.
We also made plans for a group show in mid-February. I’m very excited about that. I will definitely sing or play something, and I might even step out of my comfort zone and show a few of my photographs. Here are a few impressions from today’s breakfast (of course I only snapped pictures after everybody was done with their food, not before when it looked delicious).
I also got a new mug for my husband’s morning tea or coffee. His old one lost its handle a few months ago, and since then he has been burning his fingers every single morning. And he isn’t a morning person on the best of mornings, so imagine his mood with hurt fingers (musicians usually are very particular about their fingers – my first thought when something happens to my hands is if I’ll be able to play or not). When I gave him his present at lunch he couldn’t help but smile:
Yes, I’m wishing all of you a happy, and healthy new year.
Yes, I’m still alive and well but it seems I’m in something of a “recharge and hibernate”-stage.
I’m not even in the mood to write some 2011 wrap up.
All is well, and I’m looking forward to some hot tea and turning the heel of a sock.
I’m thinking about effortlessness, and belly dance, and ukulele songs, and spinning for sweaters, and love, and computer games, and reading, and I might drink the leftover prosecco in a minute.
See you.
One of the things keeping me busy and off the blog was the fact that we had our second house concert last week. When my husband had the first of these back in May he had wanted them to become a bi-monthly thing. Well, it took us a little more than that to put it together again. The idea was for him to play the kind of music he wanted to play with his then new project, and invite other musicians as well.
He had just started playing with a saxophone player we have known for years, and in the beginning it went quite well. After a while it turned out that the sax player wasn’t as comfortable with free improvisation as he had thought, and so my husband ended up alone again.
I, on the other hand, had been wanting to do some more improvisation for years. And had been looking for other musicians to do it with. I had thought about playing with my husband again, of course, but none of us was sure how that could go. Until about two or three weeks ago we decided to just try it. And it worked just fine!
So we decided on a date, invited a bunch of friends, bought potato chips, peanuts and drinks, set up about a dozen chairs, and had a concert at our house.
I’m really glad that so many people came to see us, and from what I heard and saw they did like the music too! It was a lot of fun, and it isn’t often that I say that about performing.
I didn’t sing much that evening, I was playing organ, drums, and ukulele in addition to singing. We changed instruments quite a bit so that things wouldn’t get boring.
At the end, after the encore one of the guests said, “And now I would like to hear the Les Paul with vocals.” And so we did. We had never tried that before because we thought it wouldn’t work. But that’s the thing about free improvisation, isn’t it? No need to plan everything ahead.
Emmy was nice enough to record that on her phone, so you can see and hear us too. Oh, and that weird look on my face near the end? That’s me realizing that the amp didn’t work anymore.
I didn’t really mean to not write any blog posts for more than a month, but there you go.
See you.
Well, as you might have noticed I mainly stayed away from the blog. After a rainy and cold start we have had fully blown summer weather, and we tried to make the most of it while it lasted. So this is just a quick post to tell you what happened till the end of July:
I went to a friend’s party in Bamberg:
I went to another Creative Arts Breakfast Meeting
Rode my bike to a nearby “Biergarten”
Took my son to see the Smurf movie. Went there by bike. It was my first ever 3D movie. I think I prefer the 2D kind.
Went to a fellow writer’s birthday party, brought my guitar along and sang to songs for her.
Along with my husband and son rode my bike to the Andechs monastery again. We tried a new route that was brutal. I saw this for the first time ever:
After three hours of biking we absolutely had earned this:
and then we went all the way back home again.
Went to a writer’s meeting.
I had ordered a new spindle at the beginning of summer break and after only ten days it arrived. (I had ordered it because I found I need a medium weight one for the big sweater project I’m doing.) It’s a Bosworth Mini made of redheart wood, and it weighs 19 grams. It spend fabulous, and is very pretty.
Invited two of our neighbors over for barbecue. They’ve been living next to us for seven years now but this was the first time ever that we did anything together. We had a very enjoyable afternoon and evening. My son’s besets friend came over as well and stayed overnight. Since we started in the afternoon, and it’s impossible to have anybody over after lunchtime without offering cake in Germany I made this:
Then we did our very first space clearing ever. Before we had had the impression that the house was full of bad vibes from the people who lived here before us. Now we feel much better.
Then I got two packages in the mail. the first one is from LabCat from the US who tried to send this at the beginning of May because we did a swap. Well, after two months the package was back with her, German customs hadn’t wanted it to enter the country, for whatever reason. Since she spent the beginning of August in the UK she sent it again, and here it is:
And on the very same day I got a package from the “fiber fairy”. No, really. In the revelry group I love the most there is a tradition of sending people fiber anonymously. Mostly when they’re having a bad time. Imagine my surprise when Dan of Gnomespun fiber sent me a message telling me that he needed my address because the yarn fairy had wanted to send me a gift. Wow. And it’s gorgeous. I’d say that I can’t wait to spin it but actually knowing myself it will be some time before I’ll get around to it.
The another trip to the beergarden. Yes, we love it there. It’s in reasonable biking distance, it’s big and has gorgeous trees, the food isn’t too bad, and the beer is nice.
I always eat the same food there:
And there were so many wasps that my son’s soft drink needed a cover:
Next thing we bikes to yet a different beer garden again, this time the Hirschgarten right in Munich. We went about 15 kilometers, a little more than an hour. We met a couple of people there (not pictured here):
Last week it was unbearably hot, and we went to a nearby lake so our son could practice swimming, this time by train because it was just too hot to bike, and then, a few days later, we went to a nearby outdoor pool, by bike again.
Then the weather cooled off, and we were happy to stay indoors again, as that is our natural habitat anyways. Of course, next thing we’re heading to Italy for camping. In a tent. We’re already starting to pack, and then we’ll be away for a week or so.
And, very exciting to me, I did manage to publish my very first ever sock pattern on ravelry. You can go and buy it. It’s available in German and English, and it’s anything but dull. Cables, lace, intricate construction, and very enjoyable to knit if I say so myself:
Really. That’s always my favorite part. When I go out, to a concert usually, sometimes to meet people, or go to a restaurant, afterwards I take the train back, and it usually takes some time, and then after that I walk home.
Where I live now I have a ten to fifteen minute walk from the station, depending on which train station I get off. Usually it’s the fifteen minute walk because that means the train ticket is much cheaper. And I don’t mind the walking.
When I still lived in Munich I sometimes walked home for hours. Sometimes on high heels. You know how that goes, you are at a party, and it’s a bit out of the way, and you think you just walk to the nearest subway station instead of taking the bus because there aren’t that many buses in the middle of the night, and then when you arrive at the subway station the subway has just left, and that means you’d have to wait for twenty minutes, and so you decide to walk to the main station which is only thirty minutes away, and when you are there you decide that it wouln’t make much of a difference if you walked all the way.
Of course it helps if there’s someone walking with you. You talk and walk, two things that go together very well. But I also like walking alone.
There are women out there who don’t walk anywhere when it’s dark outside. For them each shadow must hold something evil ready to leap out at them. In all my years walking home after going out nothing has ever happened to me.
It’s usually pretty quiet then, there aren’t many people or cars around, and I can just walk home, think about the evening, maybe listen to some music on the way. Walking home makes a great transition between the buzz of the city and going out, and the quiet of my home.
My husband and I have taken to go to these free improvisation concerts lately. They start early, at 8, and they don’t last all that long so every time we go we plan to go for a beer afterwards. There’s a really great brewery next to the place where the concerts are; perfect.
And each time so far both of us just went out of the concert place, up the stairs, and then walked to the train station instead of taking the subway. We both declared that we’d rather go home soon. That meant walking for fifteen minutes to the train station, waiting for the train, taking the train, and then at the other end walk fifteen minutes again.
We have our best conversations while walking, and especially when walking home. Usually we then change from jeans to sweatpants, open a beer each, and talk some more but really, walking home is the best.