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 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.

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.

• Life is quite good, I have more students than I had in a long time, I’m busy playing the ukulele, teaching my knitting, and spinning classes, and have stepped up to do a bit more of the chores around the house.
• Today I’m packing for a trip to Frankfurt to visit Winterkatze and Katho for a couple of days. I’m going sans family and am looking forward to it very much. I’m also looking forward to coming back home afterwards.
• At the end of next week I’ll be meeting yet another friend I haven’t seen for some time.
• The weather is sunny, and quite cold, and I love it.
• This week I actually managed to go for a run with my husband. When I run on my own I always run in the hallway, and yes, I know that’s a bit weird. But last week, since I didn’t have to go on my own, we went out and ran though the woods, and had a great time. Also I’m just about as fit as my husband.
• I’m still tired all the time because I’m still not going to bed early enough. On days when I could sleep in I wake at 7.30 regardless of when I went to bed. One of these day’s I’ll manage to get at least 8 hours of sleep every night.
• The day before yesterday I started a somewhat crazy spinning project. I’m planning to spin for a hat on my spindle, and finish the yarn until next Wednesday.
• I’m very pleased to say that in the last two days I have managed to spin half the yarn I’ll need. I will take the spinning with me on my trip, and hope I’ll make progress while traveling.
• At the moment I’m not writing any fiction. Also I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I do plan to start writing again soon, though.
• There’ll be another podcast tomorrow or so, and after that I’ll post the story I wrote for this month’s writers meeting.
• Now I have to see if the clothes I want to pack are dry yet.

See you.

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:

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.

Waiting for the time I lose weight, waiting for the time I suddenly get a grip on my life, waiting for the night so I can get some sleep – the list goes on and on.

And while I’m waiting I’m sitting in front of the computer, reading blogs, checking e-mail, reading and writing on ravelry, checking twitter. I sit there and tell myself that later I’ll surely do something productive, finish writing that knitting pattern, play the piano, sing a bit, finish sewing that skirt, edit that story. And then the next student comes, and I teach, and part of me waits for the lesson to be over, and then comes the time I’ve been looking forward for hours, the one hour of glorious free time that I have all to myself, and I’m all set to do, whatever, one of the things that are so important to me, only first I’ll check e-mail, and twitter, and ravelry, and then I have to go to the bathroom, and then I get hungry, and then there are only ten minutes left, and there’ll be another glorious opportunity, two hours later anyway.

It’s not that I don’t get things done at all. It’s just that a lot of my time and energy goes into the internet equivalent of watching soap operas. And all the time I fool myself, I list the things that I achieve, and it sounds mightily impressive until you see me sitting here on this chair all day long, looking into my monitor.

“I don’t have time for that.” I say. And I’m right in a way but in a different way this is like my son telling me that he has no time to pick up his room because he has to watch his favorite show on TV. Because there are only 30 minutes in an afternoon, aren’t there?

So for quite some time now I have been fighting this feeling that I’m just waiting until my life is over. Until my husband is dead, or my son has moved out, or something. It’s like I’m waiting for some magical transformation of my life, and then, at that point, I will emerge from all the waiting with my life suddenly just the way I’ve always imagined it.

I started to meet with a bunch of other women who meet every other week to help each other reach their creative goals. The last time I went there I told them that it’s not the time that I lack. It can’t be because I have two hours each day to waste on the internet. And one of them said, “Only two hours? But weren’t you the one who put a timer on her router?” Yep. That was me. The timer cuts me off from the internet between 10 pm and 8 am. I also disabled the wireless so I have to be near the ethernet cable to go on-line. Still, that leaves me with a lot of hours to spend sitting in front of the monitor, doing nothing productive.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, and e-mail, and ravelry in particular but the question is how I feel after a day of checking in with my imagenary screen-friends, when I haven’t sung or played, or written, or picked up my bedroom.

So each day I try again, I kick myself in the butt, pick up after myself, exercise, do something productive on the computer, tear myself away from the screen to live my life here, in the moment, right where I am. I turn the computer off, I pull the ethernet cable out, I carry my laptop to the kitchen where I can’t connect to anything but myself. And then I hope that this day I will manage to spend my time with something else but sitting, waiting, and wishing.

(I know that “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing” is the title of a Jack Johnson song, and when I first heard that I instantly thought that line describes my life very well at the moment. I did have to look up the lyrics, though (not the chords by the way, interestingly I know those almost by heart by now) and the rest of the song does not have much to do with me.)

I’m feeling completely exhausted with one more week to go until summer break. I hope next week will get a little less busy.

These days I’m even too exhausted to knit or spin much. Or blog.

As usual it’s only a lot of small things. Bake a cake, go to a party, bake another cake, housework, students, teaching, exercise, move things from one place to another, meet people, meet some more people, talk to people on the phone, talk some more.

I’m really looking forward to summer break which is probably a mistake because I usually don’t like summer break.

On the bright side I’m reading lots of books, I’m exercising, I’m making music every day again, the never-ending turtleneck of doom is growing. I’m even thinking that I might finish it some day.

I think next week I’ll post the last story I wrote.

I know there’s a reason why I usually only post pictures in July but this year there was such a lot of rain.

See you.

And then somebody mentioned the book “Refuse to choose” that I read some time ago, and that reminded me about how I have wanted to do a map of my house showing all the works in progress that lay around everywhere. And since I don’t usually draw I thought it might be fun to take pictures instead. And then I thought you might like to read about that, so here we go (and since this is a very, very long post you might want to grab a cup of tea or something):

I started at the desk in my studio/office. This is the first sock for my soon to be ready for purchase sock design “Meadow Abstract”. I’m currently knitting the second sock, correcting errors in the pattern, and hopefully soon, I’ll translate the whole thing into English. (Underneath is some tax stuff, and random paperwork.)

Left side of the desk we have guitar tabs for “Road Tripping” a song I’m currently learning to play on the guitar.

This one was sitting in a bag right on top of my desk but it does look better like this, doesn’t it? It’s my current spindle spinning project. The fiber was dyed to go all through the rainbow, and I’m trying to preserve the colors while spinning.

On top of the spinning shelf inside the lazy kate there’s a ball of handspun Merino waiting to be swatched for a sweater, and underneath that some weaving that my son did, that I still need to hem. Don’t mind the green yarn on the bobbin, that’s not a project.

Too lazy to pull that out of its bag, here you see in the front my current wheel spinning project, also in the paper bag some red silk that I started spinning but don’t care about at the moment, and some cotton sliver that I started spinning on a suspended spindle. I don’t consider this a real project because I don’t care if I ever get that finished or not. It’s just for practice.

Big, huge, next spindle project. This is actually a sweater waiting to happen. My huge, big, scary project for July. (Two pounds people, two pounds of Corriedale.)

Piano. With some random sheet music. Playing the piano has been an ongoing project of mine since 1979. Still not finished. Probably never will.

Potholders to be. We’re down to only one pair so I bought some yarn today. After taking this picture I put it in one of the yarn storage boxes in the bedroom.

Pile on top of the stereo speaker: notebooks with stories waiting to be typed into the computer and eventually be published somewhere, book I bought to read for a book club that I never got around to open, and underneath the “Zen of Screaming”-DVD that I have been wanting to work with for about a year or so. Already watched it twice.

Stack of paper next to the computer: “How to make your own deodorant“-recipe that I printed out to have it ready for when I go to the health food store next time.

Next up the former guest bedroom, now the place where we watch TV:

Underneath the table there’s a basket with all my leftover sock yarn in it. Well, most of my leftover sock yarn. This will eventually be a blanket. Now to the bedroom:

Denim skirt to be sewn. I actually finished drafting the pattern, and cutting out the pieces on the day before we left for vacation but some time in the afternoon I finally listened to my husband’s advice, and didn’t try to finish it at all costs before leaving. It really only needs sewing by now…. (And no, I’m not a tidy person. This is draped over two dressers, actually.)

As I said. Underneath this mess is the dreaded mending pile. You see: the box the denim came in, the stuffing for another project that I’ll show you later, the finished sample for my soon to be released “Celtic Summer Sock”-pattern (need to fix errors, take fetching pictures of socks on my not-so-fetching feet, translate pattern into English, and such). Under those are my husband’s beloved Wollmeise socks that have a big honking hole in them, some brown yarn for a sweater I’m knitting, and some handspun Wensleydale. I don’t like the project I made out of it, and now I don’t know whether to rip or not.

Shawl waiting to be blocked.

Socks to wash by hand, table runner to be ironed to get wax out, apron to be ironed.

And off to the kitchen:

Green thread to sew the binding of my green corduroy skirt (that I have been wearing for ages) to the skirt itself.

Spindle with the part of the rainbow fiber on it that I’m currently spinning. Books to read on the kindle, episodes of Buffy to watch. (And lots of things to put away, oops.)

My corner of the kitchen bench in bad light.

Books and magazines that live on their own shelf next to the kitchen bench but I thought it would look better if I spread them out a bit. I have been trying to finish reading “Shadowrise” for ages, and the task is no less daunting for the fact that there is yet another part of that story to read after this one. I’m almost through with both spinning magazines, and some of these days I’ll educate myself about color in spinning so I can start dyeing fiber as well.

Spider sock in progress (lives in the red knitting bag).

Second “Meadow Abstract” sock, see above (orange knitting bag). Yes, my knitting projects are color-coded.

Mossy turtle in progress. That’s the project I need the stuffing for. Not all of the stuffing, mind you. It lives in the beige knitting bag that lives in the green knitting bag but that’s only temporary.

Beginning of sock yarn blanket. That I haven’t worked on for about two months. After taking this picture I transferred these bits, the crochet hooks, and the pattern to the knitting basket shown above.

Never-ending turtleneck sweater of doom. I have been knitting this thing since 2009. I’ve even started writing a song about it. I once was almost at the same point as I’m now, only the thing was too big. Now, after more than 1 1/2 years I’m finally starting to knit a sleeve. I need to calculate the rate of decreases now so this will only take a few weeks or months at least. For some reason I never get around to things like that.

After taking this picture I thought I had found all the works in progress but then I remembered. And went back to the bedroom:

This innocent looking broom handle will eventually become a backstrap loom. I now have everything I need.

Another project, I call it “Let’s get Susanne back in shape.” These are my running shoes.

For recording. This is a podcast waiting to happen, also improvisations waiting to be captured.

Four novel manuscript waiting to be finished. Well, okay, three because I don’t like the first one, and will never do anything with it.

Novel waiting to be edited.

You still with me? No wonder I feel a bit overwhelmed. I think I shouldn’t really start anything new soon. What do you think?

So we went to an open air theater and saw a production of Pippi Longstocking:

My mother’s roses on the living room table:

Our son got to play with my cousin’s Lego train set:

And my mother’s garden full of roses (I have a thing for roses but I’ll spare you the other rose bush pictures):

At the place where my parents live (not where I grew up but where my mother grew up), there’s a genuine castle on a hill right at the town center:

Castle entrance:

Inner entrance (whatever it’s called):

The keep (I think):

Courtyard:

Different view:

Where you get your tickets (we didn’t go inside this time):

Castle with sheep (You know I had to take that photo don’t you? And no, I don’t know which kind of sheep this is or where to get the fleeces, sorry.):

Castle from the other side of the hill (I know it looks as if there were a forest but there’s actually a park a bit further down):

And that’s it. I didn’t take the camera with me on the bike ride, I didn’t take any pictures while playing mini-golf (my son’s first time), and I totally forgot to take pictures most of the time.

Now I’ve one week left before resuming regular teaching, and I really hope to pop in here once or twice in the near future.

I wanted to write about vacationing at home some more, put up a story or two, and tell you all about how I’m failing my “one goal for the year”. And I will, eventually. For now I’m helping my husband prepare for a house concert, He will be playing here at our house tomorrow evening, and we’re getting everything ready while doing our usual teaching and stuff. There’s also a friend of mine visiting whom I haven’t seen for years and years. And I’m planning my knitting classes for fall. This is the picture I took today for my “Knitting perfectly fitting pullovers”-class:

See you.

We also, usually, tend to make big plans for projects of all sorts, and then in the end, spend all our time off work and school at home, each of us in his own room, doing things alone. Which is quite enjoyable but then we do like to spend time with each other as well. Even if we sometimes need a little reminder.

So this time we started Easter break even before it had begun by thinking about what things we’d like to do, and possibly when. And fit those things around the appointments that were already made in advance, like my writer’s meeting next week, and my husband’s rehearsal, and important soccer games that have to be watched on TV, and also out wedding anniversary next week. (I’ll be out that evening, at the writer’s meeting. Yes, it’s alright, I got clearance by my husband, and I plan to go out with him some day next week instead.)

Last Sunday we went on out first bike tour for this year. There was a sheep shearing fest at a local museum farm thing, called Jexhof. There were also quite a few handspinners there, representing the local guild. I have recently become a member but have never been to any meetings. So we unearthed the map with all the bike trails, looked up how to get there, decided we’d go late in favor of eating lunch at home first, packed some cookies, water bottles, sun screen, sweaters, and in my case a spindle and some fiber and set off.

When we told my mother-in-law about our plan she nearly fainted. For some reason she thought the museum was so far away it would take us about two hours to get there. Um, no, only a little more than an hour. That’s what we had guessed when looking at the map, and that’s how long it took.

The weather was fabulous, sunny and not too hot. I found that I get easily out of breath when biking uphill due to my asthma but recover very quickly. It’s still a bit weird to me, all the people we meet see a not-young, over-weight woman riding a bike, and gasping for air at the slightest molehill, and I’m the only one who knows that I’m actually quite fit. But I sure don’t look like it.

When we arrived at the historic farm there was a huge crowd. Everybody had brought the children to see the sheep being shorn. We went in anyways.

My son then went to climb trees and do other important things, while my husband was happy to sit in a quiet corner, away from the crowds, and I went to look for the spinners who were sitting in the other part of the yard where the café and most of the people were.

I actually did know one of them, a regular from the other spinning group I belong to, so I stayed and chatted, and watched sheep being shorn, and answered questions of the people passing by. “Look, that lady does crochet!” (No, she doesn’t it’s called spinning, dear.) that woman I knew before even gave me a big wad of Falkland top, very nice and soft and smooshy, and when I ran out of fiber I gathered my family, and we rode our bikes back home.

Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures at all. I’m a bad tourist. Still, it was a great day, very nice bike ride, and it felt like being on vacation for real.

And another sunny day here, I’m getting pretty spoiled, haven’t had to wear socks throughout the day for days on end now. (Weather report say we’re due to get low temperatures and freezing nights again starting Tuesday.)

We did mostly household chores like stripping all three beds which reminded me that we don’t own enough sheets for all of them. We need an extra duvet cover for my son’s bed because we gave him a bigger one than he had before. Having to sleep in the sleeping bag was averted, though, by doing the laundry quite early, and now everything has dried in the glorious sunshine to be put back on the beds again soon-ish.

I spun for about 40 minutes, and I read a bit, and I went for a walk, and I even played the piano for a short while, and now my husband reminds me that I had wanted to play guitar today as well which I’ll better do soon, before it’s time for dinner.

I was also asked about what my favorite kind of chocolate is, and all I could come up with so far is, “It depends.”  And so I have been pondering what kind of chocolate I like, and why, and how to categorize that in a way that another person could choose something I like, and it all has become way too complicated. I can’t even say if I like milk or dark better because it’s all about context, texture, and flavor. And there is a place in my heart both for very expensive and fancy dark chocolate and cheap candy bars. Nothing with liquor in it, though, I like my vices separate.

The thing is, I tend to think way too much about what I like, and why, and how to tell in advance because with all things – music, clothes, color, food – I keep meeting people who tell me, “If you like that you will like this.” and then I don’t. And then they point out that it has everything I said I liked, and they are right but I still don’t like it. And this puzzles me. And makes it really hard for the people I love to find suitable presents for me.

It’s like with colors. One can’t usually go wrong getting something for me in orange. And blue is always a bad choice. Unless it isn’t.

So I keep looking at things and thinking, “Why do I like this, and don’t like that? What is it about that that I like, and about that that I dislike? But then there was this other thing that I liked even though it has that quality that I usually don’t like but that time was different, but why?”

And I know that I’m over-thinking things – as usual – but I thought some of you might relate.

The children are all looking at the gorgeous ceiling to find saints that they know:

I also have to-do-list software. Then I found myself, after running, checking “running” off in three places. And then I thought that my journaling had gone a bit too far.

I started to record all these things in order to measure improvement. I wanted to achieve certain goals and I started of actually measuring whether I achieved them or not. Otherwise one can think that one exercises at least three times a week only to find that, oops, a week has gone by, and then another. That’s all very valid. I also love my morning pages, so I sit down and write them almost daily. And then I don’t for a few days, and then I go back to them. No problem.

I do love putting my exercise time in my calendar, and with the toggle of a button I can see all the days that I exercised in one place, and then I feel all virtuous.

The food journal, that’s another thing. I have started writing down what I eat many times in my life. And I started again on January 1st. At first I was all good, but then I missed a day here and there, then a whole week, and now I find that I’m really not all that interested in keeping a food journal. I don’t count calories or anything. I just write down “1 piece of toast with almond spread, 1 glass of orange juice, 1 cup of black tea with 1 piece of sugar”. Of course food journaling can help when you want to know what’s going on but I don’t need to write down “ate a whole bag of potato chips because I was bored and angry” to see why I have gained weight. There are people who eat better when keeping a food journal, I’m not one of them. I have food journal entries laying around the house from years ago that go, “Was completely pissed and therefore ate a bag of chips, one bag of gummy bears, half a chocolate bar, and two beers. Feel lousy and bloated. Half an hour later: finished the chocolate.” (Just typing this makes me nauseous these days. I think I have come a long way.)

So I try to be good with the food journaling but what’s the point. It helps to show me that the treats I give myself are not exactly treats because they happen just about every day. These days I’m rather good with food, mostly, and so I will skip the food journal.

But you know, every time I write a paragraph here I remember yet another journal of mine, and add it to the first paragraph. It’s clear that the record-keeping has gone out of hand. I’m not quite as insane as that list of journals implies, though, because there are quite a few of these journals that I no longer keep. But right now I’m on the verge of giving up on record-keeping altogether. These journals were meant to be helpful for me, not something to occupy me all the time. I think I might get rid of one or two.

It’s not like I bought about twenty notebooks one day and thought, “From now on I’ll record everything!” I just bought a morning pages book in 1999, well the first of many. And I’ve had general notebooks even longer than that. I remember going into the one big store in the small town where I lived until 1986 to buy a notebook because my life had reached a level of complexity too high for keeping it all in my head. That was about the same time that I started using a calendar as well. Until then there was the family wall calendar for things like doctor’s appointments and that was it.

Let’s see – the morning pages stay because I like them. Having several general notebooks makes it a bit hard to find things later but still I like it. And I have a system. Sort of. So they stay as well. Also the knitting notebook, and the place were I record my reading. I started cataloguing my books when I had bought the same book twice one day. I hadn’t remembered that I already had it. The gratitude journal didn’t really work out for me. When I read back it only made me realize how unhappy I really was. the control journal for housework never really worked either. I do know that I have to clean the house at least once a week. I don’t really need a checklist because a look at the house itself will tell me what to do.

I’m quite attached to weighing myself daily. I even have an iPod app that gives me progress reports on how I’m doing with weight loss. I think I’ll keep that. Apart from that I think I might take some time off from journals. I have taken a bit of time off from trying to improve myself in all areas at once anyway.

So for now I’ll accept that I’m both journaled out and self-helped out. I take a break. And I won’t create a new task on my electronic to-do-list that’s called: take time off from journaling, repeat daily until further notice. I promise.

I also know that I haven’t written an update on my year of happiness in months, and yes, I will wrap it up eventually. I also didn’t write my yearly “List of books I’ve read” yet, and I don’t know if I will but then you can go to librarything and look up my “books read in 2010″-list.

Christmas was very nice this year, with most of the traditional elements:

the food

the tree (a bigger one this year)

the angels my mother gave us.

I hope you have a quiet time as well.

Then I helped the mother of a three week old baby with her sling. About seven years ago I volunteered, people can get my phone number and make an appointment with me, and then I show them how to carry their babies in the sling. I keep forgetting that I’m on the list because so far only three people ever called me about that. It was nice to get to help someone but then I find that the baby thing is not my thing anymore. I really like to encourage the carrying and the use of a sling but I will remove my name from the list.

Then I helped my husband to cook, had lunch (excellent Greek food today, calamari, tsatziki, and kritharaki), had a fight with my son because he needed to hurry up to get back to some school activity, threw him out the door, and taught four students.

And now I’m sitting here, my last student of the day canceled and so I get to do All the Grocery Shopping, and maybe get a tree so that this Christmas we might have one that looks a little less sad, crooked, and Charlie Brownish.

By the way, this new format of blog post comes from me posting these little daily reports on a spinner’s forum where everybody just tells what kind of day they had. When I looked at that, and that it was quite long I thought it might make a good substitution for a real blog post. I hope you like it at least a little bit.

also de-frosted the cake, decorated the breakfast table,

and set all his presents out.

Today I got up extra early, snuggled a bit with said son (my favorite bit of the day so far), we had breakfast all together (for the birthday even my husband got up early). Then bringing the child and the cupcakes to school, all the while feeling guilty because my MIL was out shoveling snow, and then I felt bad again when the teacher asked if I would come and get the tray later. I thought my son would be totally able to carry a tray home from school, especially when it’s empty. (For the tray full of cupcakes, not so much.) Only later did I realize that in today’s culture where walking through the snow is considered cruel punishment most parents would have picked up both the child and the tray. It’s really weird that I have my mom guilt-moments at the exact time when I’m spending all my time and energy doing things for the son instead of me.

Then a bit of drinking tea and chatting with husband, then errands again, now I’m all set with buying presents. Then hanging up of laundry, and running for 30 minutes (indoors!), having lunch with my son and his friend. His friend is about the loudest talking kid I know. When I went to the annex to take a shower my husband said, “Guess what pitch our son’s friend’s talking is.” I said Ab. I was right. (This flummoxes me a little, and makes me proud.)

Then I made them both do homework, then I taught two piano students, then I started writing this and had a piece of birthday cake, then I taught four more students, and then was now.

I haven’t knit or spun any so far. Now I’m waiting for my last student of the day and then it’s beer o’clock.

Tomorrow I will host a Star Wars birthday party. So far I have everything I need for a cake with blue frosting, green colored soda, extra strong paper and elastic for making masks, and a list of game ideas. And origami paper for folding x-wing-fighters. I have the feeling that beer o’clock will come early tomorrow, and that I won’t be doing anything on Sunday.

I have been all bake-y lately, I even made my very first Stollen. Lactose-free and only a trace of fructose:

The end.

My ta da-list for today so far (that’s what you already have accomplished):

Last week I went to a meeting. I have recently joined a group of women who meet every five or six weeks to talk about gender and giftedness, and last week the topic was ‘jealousy’. And the woman who started this group had prepared a nice little paper, and on that paper there was something about tsav. Now I know that most of you will never have heard that word before, but I had, and I read the paper, somewhat distracted while thinking about what I wanted to order once the waiter came around, I read that and thought, “Wait a minute, that’s not what tsav is.” Tsav, by the way is a term that refers to a form of witchcraft and comes from a language spoken in the Cameroon Grassland. I wrote a paper on it back in the days when I still studied cultural anthropology at university. We went on, talking about jealousy in ourselves, and others and as a cultural phenomenon, and I found myself – as usual – talking, and talking, and talking, and I wondered why I was going all expert on this, again, and one or two days later the answer popped into my head in the middle of the night. I did, because I was the one with the special interest in psychology and sociology for years, and those women were working in science, or law, or architecture. That was why I kept thinking, “But why don’t they know how that works?” They didn’t, and they couldn’t.

I don’t go around reading books on sociology, psychology, or anthropology these days, but there still is a place in my brain where all these theories live, I only had forgotten about them. They are a bit dusty, they don’t get much use but they are still there.

Then the other day a student of mine asked something about music notation, I don’t remember what, and all of a sudden he got the twenty-minute lecture about how music notation evolved since the 9th century. Oops. I tried to keep it as interesting as possible but still, that was the result of having studied musicology at an institute that specialized in medieval music. (And for those of you trying to get all that university study straight, I studied music education with a minor in musicology, and cultural anthropology.)

And then, yet another day about a month ago, somehow, I was talking to somebody about knitting – I do that all the time – and some time later I found that I had talked for fifteen minutes without stopping about sheep. My friend was polite enough to say that he really had learned a lot about sheep that night. The thing was that we were in a group of people and one of us had bread rare sheep in the past so she had a lot to say as well.

And then, last week again, my husband and I talked about the part of Germany where I come from, and that part has been known for its linen in former centuries, and all of a sudden I found myself explaining how to prepare nettle for spinning.

Now, it’s not unusual for me these days to speak about fiber as you know, because I spend quite a but of my time thinking about it and working with it, and most of my students get an impromptu spinning demonstration at one point. After all the spinning wheel is sitting right there, but those psychological, and sociological things? I keep forgetting that they are there. Like my dissertation, I wrote about learning theories in music for ten years, and of course that’s not something I talk about a lot in daily life, but then sometimes, usually at parties I find myself standing there, talking to someone, and it all comes back.

The weird thing for me is not that all of that stuff is still there if a bit rusty or vague for lack of use but the weird thing is that there are these things I spent years of my life with, and now they are totally unimportant and gone.

And the weirdest thing of all is the jazz standards. I used to sing mostly jazz, and when you’re a jazz musician you spend a lot of time learning a set of standard tunes. Like when you’re studying jazz at the conservatory here you have to know about 150 tunes by heart. I never knew that many but still I knew quite a few. I don’t sing jazz anymore these days, and I don’t listen to jazz mostly but then I go to a concert, or I watch something on TV, or I sit in a bar, and there’s music in the background, and I think, “I know this tune. I used to now all the lyrics.” and then I have to sit and listen and think until I know the name of the song. And then I remember all those songs buried in my memory. And I wonder why I never sing them again. And I wonder if I could maybe just say that I’m a jazz singer again, get a piano player and a band, get up on stage, and with a minimum of preparation just sing for hours. I might.

And then I feel really weird because it’s like I’m cut off from my past. All these things that I started and then left behind, I don’t really know what to do with them. They do come together in a way, but they can’t all be present all the time. That has always been a problem for me, both the reason why there are so may areas of interest in my life, and why I am not really an expert in anything, or a master piano player. I keep fluttering from subject to subject. I sit in a jazz concert and long for something more avantgarde, I sit in an avantgarde concert and long for something a bit more groovy, I listen to rock and long for something a bit more edgy, I don’t know.

My husband once said that our task for the middle years is to bring everything together we started in our youth. We thought about what I had done so far, and he came up with the idea of music theater with fiber performance art. It didn’t seem very realistic.

Do you have forgotten pockets of knowledge as well?

I knew there was a problem there, and so we put a timer on our router. No WIFI between 11 pm and 8am. No checking e-mail before breakfast. What good does it do anyway. I remember one night I went to check my e-mail one more time before going to sleep and what I got was notice by a student that he wanted to quit. I got so upset that I dropped my iPod on the floor and the display cracked. My work and the rest of my life is quite tangled together, and no person in her right mind would want to check work e-mail at midnight. I also find that I’m much more productive in my writing if I’m not connected to the internet at the same time. Which is why I do quite a bit of that either in bed or in the kitchen where the neighbor’s WIFI is so strong that my own signal can’t get through.

Then I read “The Power of Less”. There wasn’t something in there I had never heard before but it was helpful in a few ways. And it got me thinking about how I use the computer and the internet again. And you know what I did? I disabled WIFI in the house altogether. My husband and I both have an ethernet connection at our desks. I have a laptop so I can use that to write wherever I want but when I want internet I have to go to my desk.

I also limit the checking of e-mails to three to five times a day. When I check e-mail I do it when I have time to answer e-mails as well, I check, I react to most of the e-mails that come in and then I close my internet program. My computer used to be turned on all day long. If I ran errands it would sit on my desk back home on stand-by. I no longer do that. There are a couple of times a day that I surf the net, and I still spend a lot of time there but I usually don’t go in blindly clicking right and left but I ask myself, “What do I want to do here? How long will I do it?” and then occasionally I’ll look up from my monitor and ask myself if there’s something else I should be doing instead.

The thing is, instead of feeling deprived by this I feel much better. I enjoy reading blogs more, not less, and I found that the computer on stand-by had a bit of a pull on me all the time. Like a party going on in the adjacent room. I feel as if there are a few less things to do, a few less things wanting my attention. No WIFI, and a different attitude towards the net has really made me happier.

The one thing that has dropped by in this is twitter. Twitter is really made for sitting in front of the computer mindlessly hitting refresh. I still read there, and post but very rarely. I often just open it to see how certain people are doing. If you send me a direct message on twitter it will reach me nonetheless because I get notified by e-mail. But other than that there’s just a little bit less chatter in my head. And I love it that way.

But then this is the first day of fall break (which lasts a whole week, ahem), and we’ll ignore the fact that it’s only two more days until NaNoWriMo, and that I still have to read through the first part of the novel I’m supposed to write the second part of so that I can make a list of things that happened, and people I wrote about. It would be especially nice to remember the spelling of my main character’s name.

I’m also currently doing a self-imposed round of spinning workshops. I suppose things won’t get boring any time soon, which is a good thing. I did take a few more pictures that I haven’t shown here, so get something nice to drink, lean back and let me show you what I did:

I recorded more podcast episodes:

I got out my sewing machine and made “treadle booties” for my spinning wheel. When folded the treadles tend to knock against the wheel which then leaves marks in turn. Majacraft recommends wrapping the wheel in a towel but that’s bulky and tends to slip.

My husband happened to run errands for once, and he remembered how much I love roses and got me these:

I looked around for pretty things to take pictures of and these were on my desk.

Trying to take another “artsy” picture, this is a table that my son arranged in his room.

I got a surprise package that was all wrapped up in Mozart galleys:

That confused me a bit because I have a friend who used to do research for the new complete edition of Mozart’s works, and that was what the package was wrapped in. It turned out that the package was a very belated birthday present that a knitterly friend had gotten for me in Scotland:

It is the most amazing roving. It’s from sheep that live on the beach and eat seaweed. They have a dual coats and the soft layer is gorgeous and really soft, and special. I might have to learn how to dye fiber for this.

I also spent a lot of time and energy finishing knitting projects that have been sitting around for up to a year. First, a new sweater (pardon the sweat pants):

Socks for my husband:

A shawl (another Damson by Ysolda Teague made from Drachenwolle):

Now on to my self-imposed (and self-taught) spinning workshop. I wanted to learn how to make really thin singles for lace because I have this gorgeous Blue Faced Leicester top that I want to make into a shawl. I started spinning from that top only to find that there is much to learn, and so I used something else I had sitting around. Here you see the fruits of an evening of spinning:

After two nights of this I decided to learn how to chain-ply it on the third night:

The pin in the picture above is a big pin but still, the yarn is pretty skinny. I know a lot more about spinning real thin now, I also think it might be a good idea to wait with the spinning of this until I can afford a lace-flyer and lace-bobbins. Not that they are a magic trick but I think they will make spinning lace yarn considerably easier.

I will go on and take pictures and post them here because I like it very much. I only stopped doing the “a picture a day”-thing because I have too many things I need to see to every day, and more often than not I was frantically taking a picture at 11.30 at night. Also my life is not very visually interesting, I sit at home all the time, and often when I do go out I forget to take the camera.

Every evening I prepare myself to spend the rest of the day sitting in the kitchen while my son sleeps. He is afraid alone, and our house is built in a way that in order to keep him company you have to either stay in the kitchen or the master bedroom. My studio and the room where we watch TV are both in the annex along with my husband’s studio, and so we take turns to stay near him.

I also spend my mornings in the kitchen waiting for my husband to get up. I’m the one who makes breakfast for our son and tells him to hurry up each morning. That gives me about two hours for myself until my husband – who works late on his music most evenings – comes over to have breakfast.

And all of that means that each day I’m carrying this from my studio to the kitchen and back:

Also my spinning wheel and fiber. I already got myself a small laptop bag because my old laptop was all scratchy at the bottom. That happens when you have breakfast or dinner, and set your laptop down on the kitchen table without cleaning it, and when you decide to watch a DVD you move the laptop back and – voilà – breadcrumb scratches.

Now I’m feeling a bit weird here. If I were working somewhere else but home, of course, it would be all very natural. Taking my computer, and my kindle, and my ipod, and a pot of tea and some snacks with me. But then I would have a bag to hold it all. But since I’m supposedly working from home I carry it all one or two things at a time, and all of a sudden this irritates me. “Just a moment while I get my spinning wheel and my computer.” I say to my son, and then I move back and forth, spinning wheel, empty thermos, computer, DVDs, the bigger knitting bag that I left in the “TV room” the night before. This is just ridiculous.

But then, making myself a designated “carry stuff to the studio and back” tote also seems a bit ridiculous.

What would you do?

• Tini
• NaNoWriMo
• Martina Hees
• Verena Stricken Winter 2010 (und das nächste Mal sollte ich mich vielleicht darauf beschränken, die Vorschau durchzugehen….)
• meine Projekte auf Ravelry

So this morning found me actually preparing for it. After overcoming the initial shock I thought that might be a good idea. Now before you get all crazy ideas, I’m not outlining or making character sheets or anything for the novel, that would just be weird, and neither am I cooking a month’s worth of meal in advance. I did in 2006 but it didn’t really work out the way I planned. In fact that month I spent more time cooking lunch than I usually do despite all the planning and freezing and assembling. Especially now that my husband cooks lunch eight times out of ten. (Okay, I’ll tell the truth: nine times out of ten, and that tenth time is usually Chinese takeout or something equally challenging to make). So here’s what I did to prepare:

1. Had a talk with my husband to tell him that I want to. Again. Now, my husband has never been happy about NaNoWriMo ever. I can’t blame him. At best it’s as if I’m never quite there, at the worst I’m totally stressed out about getting my word count done while being cranky and sleep-deprived, and totally neglecting my family and housework. I didn’t actually manage to have this talk gracefully in any way but I’m happy to tell that this time (unless last year) I managed to tell him first without telling anybody on my blog. He still isn’t happy about it but there isn’t much he can do. I also might have promised to do all the housework by myself until Christmas or something. (Which works really well, which is why I’m sitting here typing instead of hanging up laundry like I should right now.
2. Told my writing group that I want to do NaNo again. Sadly there’s only one other writer joining me. Everybody else is being sensible on me.
3. I unearthed last year’s manuscript because right after I thought, “I want to do NaNo again!” I thought that it would be cool to write a second part to my fantasy novel of last year. I thought it might be a good idea to read that before I start writing the next part if only to get my main characters name right. (It wasn’t Selina as I had thought, no, it’s actually Serena. I think. Maybe I should get a start on those character sheets, ahem.)
4. I started importing last year’s novel into my writing software (it’s Scrivener, by the way). Importing is easy but it might actually help to break the thing down into chapters and scenes so that’s what I’m working on right now. Also I’m making a list of characters. Just their names and who they are. I have quite a few of them by now and I’m starting to confuse them sometimes.
5. Made a plan. Now I’m well aware that time doesn’t grow on trees and so I know that for me to write roughly 2,000 words a day something else will have to go. My plan is to skip writing morning pages and spend that time (6.15 until 6.45 in the morning) working on my novel. Then, after sending my son off to school and my husband’s breakfast I’ll write another 30 to 45 minutes. If I do that it will bring me well ahead, about 1,000 words. Then I need another writing session, maybe after breakfast instead of checking e-mail, and another one in the evening instead of watching DVDs. Sounds great, doesn’t it? And still leaves me with enough time to sleep, eat, work, spend time with my family and exercise. (Wish me luck, please.)
6. Got into the habit of writing every day again. I had been doing so well with my “500 words a day” until mid-July but since then I’ve been struggling. But now that I’ve given myself a mighty push and a stern talking to I’ve started to work on my current story again, and I find that I enjoy that very much. The plan is to set that aside for November and start again either in December or maybe only past Christmas. We’ll see how wiped out I’ll be feeling come Advent.

Is any of you doing NaNoWriMo this year? Why not?

First the corner in my bedroom that holds all the crafting books and most of the yarn:

Looking into those boxes:

The biggest box holds sweater yarn, the medium one is mostly dk and sports weight, and the smallest one holds most of the sock yarn. Then there is the drawer that holds mostly the yarn of works in progress. Also, miscellaneous sock yarn, notions, fabric and interfacing. There is more fabric stash elsewhere, I have a box with 3 meters of canvas in another dresser, and a box with 3 meters of denim up in the attic. On top of the dresser is a plastic bag with yarn for a hat and mittens for my husband, and several pairs of socks in use together with the library books. (Since taking the picture the socks have been washed, I have installed a dirty socks basket, the hat has been knitted, and the rest of the yarn has been put into the drawer.)

Then there is the small shelf above the bed that holds all my handpainted sock yarn. Also dictionaries. (You might note that there are way more dictionaries than sock yarn.)

In my studio there are some bins with spinning fiber. There is also another, very small box that holds yarn and finished projects that I need to take pictures of for ravelry. Don’t panic, the yarn fits easily into the drawer in the bedroom.

Looking at these I think that I might not have enough yarn in the house. What do you think?

Well, I managed to follow it back to a couple of fashion bloggers but was unable to find it’s origin, sorry. Nonetheless there are of course rules to this award which are to tell you about ten things I like, and to name ten more bloggers for the award. I will gladly show you ten things I like but I won’t be tagging anybody, sorry, I have this feeling that I have done enough tagging for the moment.

Because I’m sadly behind with the posting of my daily picture I thought I’d combine the ten things I like with that (for the rest of my daily pictures please visit my flickr):

1. homemade tortillas with guacamole
2. watching my son sleep (this was a picture he wanted me to take, he is actually posing)
3. blue skies
4. knitting a new hat for my husband
5. roses
6. beer
7. me
8. watching my son read
9. fiber
10. books

]]> http://creativemother.de/2010/10/05/it-really-must-be-2006-again/feed/ 2 http://creativemother.de/2010/09/26/what-to-do-when-your-computer-goes-boink/ http://creativemother.de/2010/09/26/what-to-do-when-your-computer-goes-boink/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:03:45 +0000 Susanne http://creativemother.de/2010/09/26/what-to-do-when-your-computer-goes-boink/ [...]]]> Last weekend I had a case of Computer! Emergency! Panic! It came to me after a week of regular “first week of school”-panic, and on top of “first live performance in five years”-panic. Really, it was lovely.

So, Saturday morning (more than a week ago) after breakfast I went over to my studio to “just check my e-mail” which usually is code for “plop down in front of the computer and lose myself in the depth of the webs for an hour or two”, and when I tried to turn on my laptop all I got was the grey screen of doom. The second attempt got me as far as the “grey screen with blinking question mark”. Bad sign, not good at all.

That was the beginning of 2 1/2 days of me sitting in front of the machine, trying things, doing research on my husband’s computer, rushing off to get spare parts, and dismantling and re-assmebling my computer. I didn’t sleep properly in days and found that there is indeed one thing in the world that makes me lose my appetite, and that’s a computer emergency.

Now, I am a bit embarrassed that my computer is that important to me, and I have indeed contemplated going analogue again, I’m not sure – for example – if my electronic calendar is really worth the hassle; but it was my husband who got me to ponder this question even further.

Let’s face it, we might think that computer emergencies are the exception, and fortunately they are, but I find that there are enough of them to warrant a plan on how to deal with them. This past hiccup caused me to spend about a week thinking about not much else, and I had to spend quite a bit of money as well.

Granted, not everybody has three hard disk failures in four years (and I won’t get another re-furbished machine, that’s for sure) but I had them. And there are quite a few more of the smaller crises like software updates going wonky, or user error, or mysterious ailments that cause half your calendar to disappear.

So I’m making some rules for computer emergencies for myself. And I’ll print them out and put them somewhere I’ll find them again. Before I write about those, though, there is something really important to remind you (and me) of – you’ve probably heard it before – BACK UP. OFTEN. When my first hard disk crashed I lost about half a year’s worth of family photos, digital music, and some other stuff. This time I was fortunate: the computer broke the morning after my regular Friday backup. I’ve been using ibackup, and that has been the only reason that computer failure didn’t turn me into a small ball of whimper. My new computer comes with time machine, and I really hope that works. So, the rules…

… when I get to my computer and something is wrong the main rule is: remember real life first

1. Do I have any pressing things to do like feeding my son or being somewhere else?
2. Have I taken a shower already? Chances are that fiddling with the computer will let me lose my sense of time completely. Yes, fixing the problem might only take twenty minutes but what if it takes two days? Which it usually does.
3. Do I have something to drink nearby? Have I been to the bathroom? Last Sunday I got so mesmerized by working on my dead computer that I only drank my morning tea and a small glass of wine with lunch. Nothing else.
4. Is it past six o’clock in the evening? Wait until the morning.
5. Tell my family that there is a computer emergency and ask them to come and look for me once and hour or so.
6. Don’t panic. It’s just a device, it’s not my life.

The other thing I did was that this time when I bought a new computer I got an extended warranty. So for the next three years whenever anything goes wrong with my computer I’ll go to the nice computer shop, bat my eyelashes and say, “There is something wrong with my computer, please fix it.” And I actually bought locally because of this for once.

I could have fixed the computer in the end but I would have needed a new hard drive (which I already bought), and on top of that a new keyboard/trackpad/top case-part because I managed to break that while installing the new hard drive. And yes, one should be able to install a new hard disk in a Macbook without opening the whole computer but you can only do that when the guys who installed the last hard disk (after the first one broke) put back everything including the white tab that you use to pull the broken drive out. So I would have ended up spending another 130 € on a four year old laptop with a broken optical drive.

So in the end I got a new shiny computer which I really love and have wanted for quite some time now. But it took me almost a week to restore everything, and there are still about three programs that won’t work. Of course, I bought those years ago, and now with the shiny new computer, of course, comes a shiny new version of the operating system.

Next thing I’ll have to get my audio interface work with the computer. Wish me luck.

I usually opt for accurate memory of the day over artsiness so that may be a factor as well. Here are the last few days:

On Wednesday I did a ton of stuff and went to IKEA all by myself. By car. I played “guess the right exit” being hindered by having a road map that’s about 15 years old and doesn’t show all those fancy new autobahns they have built since then. In the end I got there and back with a ton o new shelves and things, like you do. This is something for my “new” stereo (it’s one of many in our garage that have belonged to my late father-in-law). Ii all started with an offhand remark of mine that my speakers really are crap, after which a neighbor and friend of ours came over with huge, enormous speakers. I had to get rid of one of the smaller shelves in my studio for them. Then we found that the new speakers sounded awful with the amp I had, and my husband lugged another one over from the garage. The new amp (and pre-amp) didn’t fit into the old stereo’s home, so I got myself a new one. Came back home, had dinner, and put the thing together. Mind you, I had had my camera in my bag the whole day.

More shelves. Thursday was the day I had a dental operation to have a titanium screw put into my lower jaw. It was actually less painful than I had imagined it to be but I spent most of the day sitting in my comfy chair watching old Fred Astaire movies (as far as I know there aren’t any new Fred Astaire movies, it’s just that I went on a “musical from the thirties”-binge while icing my cheek). Meanwhile my son pestered my husband hard enough to make him put together his new shelf.

A miracle happened. The day before my husband had gotten my son to help him tidy his room and clean up! For the first time in months (if not years) not only can you see the floor, it has been vacuumed as well. Instead of de-cluttering I opted for buying a new shelf and bins…

On Friday my son and I went to the local library, and here you can see why he truly is my son. He even likes the same books I liked as a child. This pictures was taken while he started reading his first ever Dr. Dolittle-book. (He had read it all through by the next day, ahem.) Here’s my bonus shot, library shelves (yes, I know I have a thing with shelves this week):

As you can see in the picture I took today, new stereo finally in place:

It sounds magnificent, now I only have to get back into the habit of listening to music through speakers. These days I put everything on my ipod and listen to it while I’m walking but that doesn’t really work for all kinds of music, and I think I stopped listening to music because the sound was so awful before.

On a totally unrelated note, I don’t quite know what to do with the fact that a lot of you don’t understand a word of both my new knitting podcast and the accompanying show notes. Maypole alerted me to the fact that all she could (almost) understand of my last post was “click here” (well guessed by the way). If I start the show notes with some explanation in English the podcast looks a bit weird on itunes, like a German podcast with English show notes. Translating the show notes on the other hand is a bit peculiar as well since everything is out of context.

Anyway, the things I mentioned on the podcast – apart from what I’m knitting on right now – is modern sword fighting, something I took a class on some years back, that tries to merge medieval sword fighting techniques with martial arts training; NaNoWriMo, which I’ve written extensively about, a couple of knitting patterns, and the “World Wide Spin in Public-Day” website. Come to think of it, the only thing I linked to that’s in German is the sword fighting thing.

I hope mixing things up here on my blog doesn’t bother you all too much. Of course I could go and put my “pictures a day” somewhere else, and the knitting podcast still somewhere else but I’m not posting much as it is.

So please don’t get angry at me for posting in a weird language from time to time. See, there is dire need of a German knitting podcast. There are tons of them in English, and pretty amazing ones at that, but looking for a knitting podcast in German right now is like looking for water on the moon.

(And now I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to listen to a podcast in a language I don’t understand at all. I might have to try that out some time.)

Last week was near perfect, I spun, and knit, and cooked, and read, and thought about projects, and even exercised.

Now I’ll bake a cake, give myself a pedicure, knit some more, and who knows, maybe I’ll even sew myself a nice sundress out of a curtain to wear to a brunch tomorrow so that – rather than feeling like a fat, badly-dressed idiot – I’ll feel like a fat, eccentric idiot who is fun to be with.

This – of course – is entirely reasonable and doable since it’s only afternoon by now.

See you.

1. Actually go on vacation for about a week.
2. “Spring” clean the whole house.
3. Prepare knitting classes for fall.
4. Relax.
5. Teach my son to swim.
6. Edit my 2007 NaNoWriMo-first draft.
7. Paint kitchen.
8. Learn background vocals for songs to be played at friend’s birthday party in mid-August.
9. Learn how to bake bread.
10. Take a picture every day and post it on the internet. For details on this you might want to check out Sue Snaps.
11. Play the piano every day.
12. Sing every day.
13. Play the guitar every day.
14. Finish spindle spun sock yarn.
15. Spin yarn for Vine Yoke Cardigan.
16. Try my hand at doing a knitting podcast.
17. Renovate my blog so that it looks nice again.
18. Meditate every day.
19. Exercise.

Sounds all very reasonable and do-able, doesn’t it? [Insert mad laughter here.]

Summer break starts next week.

This is what you get if you leave me on my own for the day. I took this picture in the evening after work, and that’s my blue tea mug there from breakfast, my stein from the night before and every pot that was used throughout the day. My poor husband.

After taking the picture, though, I cleaned it all up. I do do housework eventually but it might result in a dirty kitchen for most of the day. I’m still working on getting better at this.

My inability to cope with housework over the past two days was also due to the fact that I’m stuck at two creative projects I’m working on. Oops, make that three. I started to blast through one of the blocks though.

- spinning orange Merino/Silk while watching the Tour de France on TV

- my husband staying home unexpectedly (he had planned to go to a party and stay overnight)

- barbecue in the rain (both we and the barbecue were in a dry place)

- baking bread (it’s rising as I write this).

I know it’s a bit weird, turning this blog into a photo blog. There are so many unwritten blog posts rolling around in my head, and I can’t seem to find the time to write them down at the moment. Blogging became just one more thing on my list that I didn’t manage to do in time. So I decided to take the pressure off. At the same time there were two people reminding me about taking photographs, both visitors who came into our house for the first time. Both of them asking about the pictures on our walls. Which reminded me that I was the one who had taken them. And that I sometimes like to photograph. So for now you’ll get more frequent posts with less words. I also was inspired by Amanda Soule who always fills my heart with joy.

The funny thing is that by taking pictures of the things I love about each day my mood has lifted, and I feel a bit lighter and happier.

The whole family having dinner together.

Caipirinha with lemon instead of lime.

Today it’s sour cherries, two days ago currants. Lots of chores, not so much art but good nonetheless.

Last Thursday I wrote a story for the writer’s meeting but parts of it don’t work yet so there will have to be – revision. Gasp. Most likely it will never be finished…

I got myself a new spinning wheel which I love very much, and am spinning like a crazy woman because it’s “Tour de Fleece”-time.

I’m still working on becoming a happier person. I’m only not that successful. I think the next thing I need is discipline.

I have been thinking about starting a knitting podcast for months now. Only I am really too busy, I don’t ant to commit, I’m not really blogging either, and I am working on making more music. As always. Also, I can’t record intro music because my piano is de-tuned again.

It’s only three weeks until summer break, and the I will have all the time in the world. Of course. Says the woman who wrote “Why I hate summer break” somewhere on this here blog.

I also sold my old-ish spinning wheel.

I attended a spinning weekend, and had a ton of fun.

My parents were here for five days.

My next student will be here in two minutes.

See you.

That remark got me thinking about how I always tell people that I have only little time, and how most of them don’t understand why. I found that I know quite a few people who have a life where they putter around at home and do little else; like people who are retired, or people who are between jobs.

On the other hand I know other people with children, and while those usually have a lot of things to do, and places to be, they still don’t really get my life. Take today as an example: my son went to a friend’s house because he wanted to ask her to come over to play. A little later the friend and her father came over to ask whether my son could go swimming with them. My husband and I both answered the door, and helped find my son’s swim gear but though it looked as if we were both at home and available in fact we were working at that time, telling our students to please excuse us for a minute, we’d be right back. But the friend’s father couldn’t know that. My parents are here for a few days as well, and I find that it’s hard for them to tell if we are working or not. From the outside we look like people who hang around all day with quite a few visitors popping in. (For those of you who don’t know, my husband and I are both working as music teachers from home. Singing, piano, guitar, bass, you name it, we teach it.)

So to give you all a glimpse into my life, and so you understand why I keep saying that I don’t have a lot of time, here is my regular schedule:

6.15: My alarm goes off, and I try to wake up. Since I went to bed too late that’s hard, and at first I don’t succeed.

6.30: I finally managed to wake up enough to start writing morning pages.

6.45: I should be getting up now but my morning pages aren’t finished yet.

7.00: I’m finally done. I wake up my son telling him to please hurry because we’re already running a bit late.

7.10: I start doing breakfast, calling out to my son to get dressed already while I make breakfast and his snack to take to school.

7.28: I yell at him to finish eating already and get his toothbrush ready because his friend will pick him up soon.

7.35: Wave my son goodbye, start eating breakfast myself while reading a book.

7.55: Meditate for ten minutes. I just returned to this again, and right now I just clear the table, set a kitchen timer and sit down at the table again, close my eyes and try to focus.

8.15: Still sitting at the kitchen table I take out my notebook and write 500 words on my new story.

8.40: My husband gets up and prepares his breakfast. I stay at the kitchen table and knit a bit while he eats and we talk.

anywhere between 9 and 11: We finally get up from the kitchen table, clean the kitchen and debate what to do next. We either do something together, or we do errands or housework or I sit down at the computer, or – sometimes – we use that time to fight which throws the rest of the day off kilter.

11.30: When I have turned the computer on after breakfast this is usually the point where I realize that another hour of my life has gone by without me doing anything productive. What happens next depends on what day of the week it is. If it’s Thursday or Friday that’s the time when my son comes home from school. On the other days there is a bit more time to do grocery shopping, exercise, or housework.

12.00: My husband and I both are angry that the morning went by without us noticing, we’re both hungry, and too late for starting lunch.

12.45: We all sit down at the table to eat lunch.

13.15: I realized that I didn’t take a shower yet, and rush off, leaving my husband and son and the pile of dirty dishes and pots behind.

13.35: I try to force my son to practice the piano right now because later the piano will be occupied by students.

14.00: I teach. If you meet me at my computer during that time it’s usually between students. (Like now. I started this post earlier when I had 15 minutes, and the next student is supposed to be here this moment. ((And I wrote that sentence two days earlier but now I’m waiting for another student who isn’t showing up because of the world cup, and so I’m back to blogging.))

19.30: I’m done teaching for the day. (Well, on Mondays and Wednesdays, on the other days I’m finished earlier which means I get to have dinner with my son.) I go upstairs to my mother-in-law’s and fetch my son. If everything went well he will be in his pajamas, teeth brushed, and dinner eaten. When something went wrong I do whatever isn’t done yet. I talk to my mother-in-law, this is like a mini-conference two or three times a week. Who has to be where when, and such.

20.00: I tell my son to please hurry, and read to him. I then allow him to read a bit on his own and go to the kitchen to make dinner for myself. (My husband usually eats earlier but that depends on the day.) I finally eat dinner, often with a book. Sometimes my husband pops over and we talk a bit.

20.30: I tell my son to turn off the light. At this point usually my husband takes over, and settles himself in the bedroom to practice violin. Our son doesn’t like being alone at night so one of us has to stay in the kitchen or bedroom at all times. Our annex where we make music and watch TV and such is almost soundproof so only one of us can be there at a time. Until last week this was the time when I would plop down in my easy chair and watch an episode of something on DVD but since this week this has become my practicing time again. So I try to sing, and play the piano or guitar for about 45 minutes or so.

21.15 or so: I come back from the annex so my husband can go off and have a bit of fun either watching soccer, or reading, or playing guitar. If I were smart that would be the point where I prepare for bed but since I’m apparently a bit thick at this point I usually sit down to read or knit or spin. Well, at least I’m no longer spending all my time watching TV shows.

about 22.00: I prepare for bed lamenting the fact that I won’t be able to get enough sleep again.

Throughout the whole day we do laundry, dishes, errands and such, and I find that having dozens of people here every day does make a bit of difference. At times when we aren’t teaching we only have to clean half as often.

The thing that’s hardest to explain is the morning between breakfast and lunch preparation. That’s when our whole life happens. Cleaning, doctor appointments, the writing, the music, the reading, the knitting, the spinning, the yard work, sex, meeting friends, phone calls, office work, the grocery shopping, the laundry, the errands, the internet surfing, the blog writing, the recording, the thinking, the exercise, and I’m sure I have forgotten something.

Mondays my husband and I usually reconnect with each other after the weekend. Tuesdays I go to the health food store and do errands. Wednesdays I try to go to the farmer’s market. Thursdays I do the real grocery shopping. Fridays I try to clean the house. On weekends we like to spend some time as a family together and to do everything we didn’t get around to do during the week.

Since we talk to people the whole afternoon we’re usually “talked out” in the evenings. So we’re not very social then. We’re also totally behind on everything right now since my husband spent the last three years making his new album, and I was sitting around depressed for months on end.

I’m a musician. If I spent all my time making music that wouldn’t feel enough. If I spent two hours each day practicing that wouldn’t feel enough. And if I don’t play I get cranky.

I’m also a writer. Writing 500 words a day does take the edge off but it only feels like dipping my toes in the water.

I’m also a mother. Only spending mornings and evenings with my son feels like very bad parenting.

I’m also a housewife. Having the house all dirty and cluttered doesn’t feel right either.

I’m also a person with a big head full of ideas and projects but I have made my peace with that.

The thing is that I’m never sure whether I’m doing as much as it feels like or if I’m just a lazy people who never stops complaining. What do you think?

Lately I had been spending quite a bit of time gazing at nice and shiny and new Macbooks. (Also at spinning wheels again, but that’s another story.) And then I asked myself why I wanted a new computer that badly. Apart from it being shiny and new, that is. My computer is now four years old but then it’s working fine, and I don’t really want to spend that kind of money right now. So I sat down with myself and thought about why I want a new computer. And then I found that there are two things about my old one that drive me crazy: 1) the battery is no longer working so I always have to take the cord and plug with me, and 2) the DVD-player isn’t reliable anymore, it only reads certain DVDs, and sometimes it decides that it doesn’t like a certain DVD right in the middle of the film. That’s very annoying.

Now mostly my laptop sits on a desk in my studio-office-room but every day in the evening I unplug it from everything that is attached to it, and haul it, an external DVD-drive, the power plug, the drive’s plug and cable, and the current DVD of choice off to the kitchen so that I can watch an episode of Dr. Who while my son sleeps. With earplugs, of course, but I keep the earplugs in my handbag near the kitchen.

When I first got my laptop I would go and sit in the garden and write or surf the net but I no longer can because of the battery. Having to bring all that other stuff with me every single day when I move the computer from studio to kitchen and back is annoying and I really don’t like it. Often I leave the external drive in my bedroom where it clutters my dresser. At one point I contemplated making a bag that holds all of this stuff at once so I could better move it back and forth, and then I thought again. Of course, if the problem is the battery and drive what I need isn’t a bag (though bags are good, I like bags), what I need is a new battery and a new optical drive.

And so that’s what I’m doing right now. I ordered a new battery (and I hope it will arrive soon), and I looked around on the internet and found a tutorial for getting at the drive, and one for cleaning the lens of the DVD-drive with alcohol and a q-tip (some people say you shouldn’t use alcohol by the way, just so you know). So that’s what I did today. I unscrewed a gazillion teeny tiny screws, I put them on the table in order so that I would remember which one to put where, I almost broke the drive when I tried to open it, I almost gave up three times, I cleaned it, I had to put the drive back in and out again six times, and in the end I broke some plastic thing that should have held a screw (but the screw is still there and is not lose, and the thing it was supposed to hold is not lose either, so that’s good), and then I put it all back together again, turned it on and tried it out and – it’s a miracle – it still works and it even reads DVDs again. Yeah!

This is just one example of the things that go on my nerves day in and day out. The small things. The top of the dresser that’s crowded with yarn because I have been wanting to get a new shelf for the yarn but I haven’t. The heaps of CDs on top of my stereo that don’t have a place to go, the magazines that are sitting in a pile on the floor because they don’t have a place to go, the pair of jeans that I have to pull up every other second, the sneakers that are scruffed and on the verge of disintegrating, the handbrake of my bike that doesn’t quite work, all these things, insignificant and tiny things those bother me the most.

And I was only reminded of this because I finally decided to do something, anything about the things about my computer that had been going on my nerves for more than a year at least.

What’s bothering you?

The next time I feel something is wrong I’ll stay and have it checked until they find something.

For now I’m happy to be rid of the nasty tooth, and am recovering nicely. But I don’t feel like doing much of anything, not even knitting. I plan to sleep a lot, and lay on the couch watching Doctor Who. After I have finished teaching for today. See you.

I like to travel light as much as the next person, and I’m always making fun of people like my mother who always takes about three times the clothes I do, and ends up bringing things home that she didn’t even wear on the trip. Of course, the secret to packing light is not to mind if you look the same every day, and to have comfortable shoes that you can wear day in and day out. (Sometimes I think wearing shoes like that might be one of the secrets of happiness but this is not about shoes.)

Still, when I’ll be getting out of the door to travel my luggage will be quite a bit heavier than the one described on the minimalist blog. Why is that so?

Well, for one I’m not staying in a hotel so I will bring shampoo, and soap, and a hairdryer (a tiny one but still), I will bring an emergency travel towel (something that really comes in handy more often than you think), I will take a second cardigan, and contact lens solution, and my cell phone charger, my camera charger, my ipod charger, and my PDA charger.

Why do I need all these gadgets? Well, I won’t bring my laptop, and my PDA with its foldable keyboard is my means to get my 500 words a day in.

I will also bring more clothes than her because while I could wash my clothes while away I don’t like to do so when I’ll be only gone for a little more than a week so I’ll bring four tees, a cardigan, four pairs of socks, and four changes of underwear in addition to what I’m wearing the first day. Depending on the weather forecast I might also bring a pair of sandals in addition to my grey walking shoes, and I’m contemplating to add a pair of slippers since we will be spending quite a bit of time sitting around indoors.

I will bring a bathing suit because we plan to go swimming, I will bring a lace shawl or two, and I will bring a bottle of wine and some dark chocolate as presents for my parents.

I will bring a notebook for my morning pages, and another one for just general notes, I will bring my best pen, and a book to read, and I already bought three new books for my son to read, and I will bring a pack of Uno cards to play with my son. Last year I took three books for me but this year I decided to only take one paper book, and I have a couple more on my ipod. But I can think of a lot of situations where you don’t want to bring an electronic reading device, or where you can’t charge your ipod, or just imagine what if it falls to the ground and breaks, and then you’re stuck without a book to read.

We will have two eight hour train rides to fill, and a whole week’s worth of evenings sitting in our rented apartment while out son is already asleep.

I will also take a bottle of water or two, and sandwiches and cookies, as you do when you’re traveling with a child, and a husband who is lactose and fructose intolerant. We will also take tea, so that my mother doesn’t have to buy some that she’d never drink anyway.

And of course I will bring knitting. You didn’t think I would forget that, wouldn’t you? I already started a pair of socks who’ll come with me, and I will start another lace shawl, one that’s intriguing but not as complicated as the one I’m currently working on. I also will bring a spindle or two and 100 grams of fiber, and if everything goes according to plan I might have a nice pair of socks made from that fiber upon our return. If everything doesn’t go according to plan I will have lugged around 100 grams of fiber, a 15 gram spindle, and a set of double pointed needles.

I will also take some sheet music since my husband plans to bring both an electrical guitar and the violin with him, and since the guitar is already there I might finally get around to practice the songs I’ve been teaching my students lately. (That’s the “so you’ll have to play it this way, only much faster, and as you can see you have to look out to not make this mistake I just made”-school of teaching. In my defense I have to say that they are playing quite well.) So. Sheet music, picks, guitar tuner, and a capo.

And two yoga DVD’s. I’m not taking my running shoes though. See, I’m sensible. And I will exercise in my pajama bottoms.

And before you think I’m totally crazy I might have to add that when my husband and I went to Brazil for two months all the luggage we had were our two backpacks (one is about the size of a carry-on, the other is a bit bigger), and each of us had a second backpack in addition to that. We could easily carry all out stuff around. So, the clothes I take for ten days would be enough for any amount of time, I only would have to wash them.

We didn’t bring a guitar, though, we bought one there.

So I can never decide if I’m a light traveler or not. I try to be prepared (sunscreen, water, a hat, an umbrella, a pocket knife) but not overloaded. It’s a tricky balance. What about you? Do you travel light or not? How many pounds of knitting do you usually take? Or books?

You know, there are people who do “100 things to do before I turn 40″-lists but really, I have a “100 things I absolutely have to do until next Tuesday”-list. It comes with an attached “list of things I wish to do with my life” that’s enough to keep me busy for the next two or three decades, and that has such nifty points as “write and record an album of original songs”, and “write a novel”, and “edit the first draft of a novel I have sitting in my file cabinet and get it ready to be read by other people”.

I have heard of people who are bored, I’m usually not one of them, unless you make me sit and listen to small talk for more than thirty minutes in a row. But even then I usual take out my knitting, and then I’m fine.

Back to the list:

1. Sew a bag to hold my two new spindles: I solved this by buying two zippered pouches that are intended to keep bottles cool. They are neither beautiful nor particularly suited to the task but they are better than ziplocks and already assembled. I tested them on Sunday, and yes, they hold the spindles and fiber, the spindles didn’t break.
2. Weave in ends, sew buttons on, and block every single piece of finished knitting that’s on the “knitting to be finished”-pile: I did sew the buttons on my new Tappan Zee cardigan. It took me all of five minutes. I didn’t want to show up at the spinning meeting with a cardigan lacking buttons.
3. Darn socks, and other items of clothing: Very funny. I almost feel like my mother-in-law when she was getting rid of her old bedroom furniture in 1995 and there was a pair of jeans in need of mending in there that had fitted my husband some twenty years earlier. I have to say, though, that I cull the mending pile on a regular basis so that all clothes in there still fit someone in the house. Well, apart from the pair of corduroy pants that belong to me, and that are now two sizes too small. But I’m working on it.
4. Clean the house including windows. Again, very funny. I did keep the kitchen in pristine condition throughout the weekend, though. I just didn’t cook.
5. Sew a skirt. Nope.
6. Finish knitting clues 4 to 7 of the Alhambra-Shawl. Knit eight rows of clue 4 on Monday morning. Haven’t touched the shawl ever since.
7. Get enough sleep. Partial success, I did sleep enough one day, not nearly enough the next. I’m on a new, improved, and very strict “get ready for bed at 9.45 pm”-routine though. Already managed it once. (Pat on the back.)
8. Go to spinning meeting on Sunday. And I did. And it was a lot of fun. And I spun, and spun, and talked, and spun.
9. Bake a cake to take to spinning meeting. Did it. Just barely in time but it was a huge success, I didn’t take any of it home again even though there were only four of us.
10. Exercise. Well, I took a long walk.
11. Do something special with my son. We went to the toy store where he bought himself a new toy, and we went to the farmer’s market and got some greek food. We don’t eat that any more because my husband can’t have it. Since he was away it was the perfect treat for my son and me. After eating that he spent the rest of the weekend with my mother-in-law.
12. Take pictures of all the finished knitted items. Again, very funny. The sun still has only been seen from afar in these parts.
13. Write a story for the next writer’s group meeting. Still have to do this one, has to be finished by tomorrow. Fun.
14. Finish doing taxes. And again, taxes are sitting here, mocking me.

All of this is not much of a problem. The problem are all the things that were on my to-do-list before, that have gotten on the list since then, and my brain going on overload because of all that.

One of my problems (and I told you about that, I know) is that every problem immediately creates a set of sub-problems and -tasks. Like my son got invited to a birthday party next week. There is:

1. Talk to mother who invited him, tell her that he would love to go.
2. Tell her that she can give my number to another boy’s mother so that only one of us has to make the half hour drive.
3. Think that it might be nice to make a family outing of that. To go there by train, and spend the afternoon in a café while my son is at the party.
4. Talk to my husband about that. He agrees.
5. Think about the fact that we will have to bring birthday presents for the twins, think about when to get them, and what to get.
6. While out doing errands today, go to toy store and buy presents (that was very efficient of me, most unusual).
7. Make a note that presents will need to be wrapped but only after my son has seen them.
8. Look up trains for getting to the party and back, and look up ticket options.
9. Write a post-it note for my husband to put date into his calendar.
10. Put date into my own calendar.
11. Put date into family calendar.
12. Hope that there is still suitable wrapping paper in attic.
13. Make note to look for wrapping paper before going to the grocery store next time.
14. Go and look for wrapping paper.
15. Put wrapping paper on shopping list.
16. Buy wrapping paper.
17. Wrap presents.
18. Get ticket.
19. Get family to station on time.

And I’m sure I have forgotten something. Like telling my mother-in-law that we will be going there so that she doesn’t make plans for my son on that day.

One part that makes organizing this household such a big task is that every single thing has to be talked through with three other people. Often repeatedly. Everybody has to have every information. I should make hand-outs. Like the sheets of paper you get from the school. You know what, I think I just had a perfectly brilliant idea.

One part is that the flow of information heavily relies on a seven year old. He said to me that he needed some brown or green clothes to wear to a school event. Then he told me that he had already chosen the right clothes with the help of his grandmother. I didn’t ask her about it but just today when he was on his way to the event my husband found out that the particular pair of pants he had planned on wearing were not in his closet. That’s because they have been to small for more than a year. My husband didn’t know that. I’m the only one who has any idea what clothes my son owns, and I was busy teaching during this particular crisis.

And so it goes on and on. Tell somebody about an event, then remind that somebody about the event. The writing group I attend is organized through a yahoo group. We meet every second Thursday of the month, except when we don’t. Keeping track of dates seems to be really hard, so I’m using the group’s calendar to send out reminders for the meeting. Three days before, and one day before. But then there’s one member of the group who is not on the yahoo group so I try to remember to send her the dates through e-mail. And then there’s another one of us who sometimes doesn’t check her e-mail for ages, and so if I haven’t heard anything from her I text her.

I also talk about the meeting with my mother-in-law because I can only go if she’s free to take my son, and I talk about it to my husband, and I mark it on my calendar, and on the family calendar that’s hanging in the kitchen. I remind my husband about a week in advance, then again three days before the event, and on the same day. In between reminders he will forget all about it because he likes his head nice and uncluttered. Just like me.

And in all of this the thinking about the things I have to do takes more energy than the simple doing of the things would do, only you can’t do all the things at once, and so you have to think about them, and make lists and stuff.

I might be doing something wrong, though. What do you think? Are your lives and to-do-lists feeling as overwhelming as mine?

1. Sew a bag to hold my two new spindles.
2. Weave in ends, sew buttons on, and block every single piece of finished knitting that’s on the “knitting to be finished”-pile.
3. Darn socks, and other items of clothing.
4. Clean the house including windows.
5. Sew a skirt.
6. Finish knitting clues 4 to 7 of the Alhambra-Shawl.
7. Get enough sleep.
8. Go to spinning meeting on Sunday.
9. Bake a cake to take to spinning meeting.
10. Exercise.
11. Do something special with my son.
12. Take pictures of all the finished knitted items.
13. Write a story for the next writer’s group meeting.
14. Finish doing taxes.

That’s pretty do-able, don’t you think?

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.
5. Exercise three times a week or more.
6. Play the piano every day.

Well, I had, let’s say, mixed results. Still, even trying has made me a bit happier. It’s not about succeeding all the time, it is about inching my way towards a happier me. So let’s see how I did:

1. I didn’t do well with the “going to bed on time” again. You could say I should just give up on this resolution but still I know that this is key to feeling better. When I manage to get eight hours of sleep or more I feel so much better. Of course, today I’m feeling smug because I managed to get enough for two nights in a row. I really hope I can continue this streak. I’m planning to give myself stickers again for every day that I manage to turn the lights out before 10.30. Wish me luck.
2. The picking up after myself goes really well. I even do the kitchen, and have managed to tame the laundry monster. I give myself a pat on the shoulder for that. Now I’d like to add some cleaning into the mix. That would be fantastic. I only don’t quite know when to do it but I fear this has to come out of my computer time.
3. I’ve been writing constantly, and I’m really happy about that. There was a point where I was totally unhappy with my story, and didn’t write because it felt all so arbitrary, and made up. And then I found that what was really bothering me was that I had all these characters at the beginning of the story that got abandoned, and then it all went somewhere else. So I decided to bring them back in, and now the writing is flying. So far I have written about 45,000 words on this. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? And all I do is spend about twenty to thirty minutes a day on this. The thing that I’d really like to do on top of this is edit another story of mine. I can’t seem to find the time to do that as well. May I’ll take that one along when we travel at the beginning of June. We’ll see. For now, while I’m mostly writing “only” five days a week I’m really happy with that.
4. Think about the things I love about the people around me. That’s quite hard to do for me. But I’m slowly getting there. Every time I feel myself dreading to teach I remind myself of what delightful people my students are, and then my work seems less of a drudgery and more enjoyable. Every time I think, “Oh, and now I have to get my son to bed, I’d rather watch TV.” I remind myself how much I love reading to him in the evening. Every time my husband goes on my nerves I reming myself of the things I love about him, and how much he does for me, and this family. And that makes me happier.
5. The exercising. Well, the good thing is that I am exercising. I exercised ten times in the month of April. Not quite the “three times a week or more” quota but still way more than last year. Again, I don’t quite know where to fit the exercise into my day. I usually have a bit of time after lunch but really, I don’t see myself going for a run on a full stomach. Still, I’ll be getting there.
6. The piano, well, failure. I blame others, of course. You see, there it is, my shiny new piano that I love. A few weeks after getting it I decided to have it tuned. I got a complementary tuning with the purchase. You’re supposed to let the piano sit for about three weeks before having it tuned, so I did. It was mostly okay, only a few notes out of tune here and there but there was a slight problem with one of the keys, and so I asked them to send a piano tuner over. The tuner came, he asked me how I wanted it tuned, I said, “Please, tune it to 440 Hz.” He said he probably couldn’t do that because it was a new piano, and a little “high-strung”. (One of these days I’ll get my piano tuned to 440 Hz. One day. One day when I switch from guitar to piano I won’t have the feeling that everything sounds shrill and out of tune.) So, this nice little man tuned the piano. He spent more than an hour on a piano that was almost in tune. Then he played a few chords for me, and left, and I felt all happy that my piano was finally in tune, and ready for my husband to record something with it. Until my husband stopped me that evening and said, “You know that your piano is completely out of tune, don’t you?” Well, I didn’t, and he was right. The piano sounds much worse than it did before the tuning. There are keys that play two different tones simultaneously, and obviously that tuner must have had a very bad day, and a problem with very high and very low notes because those sound horrible. This has somehow taken the joy out of my piano playing. I toyed with the idea of having him come back and tune it again but then I just decided to have my regular piano tuner come in, never mind the 100€ that will cost me, at least the piano will be in order afterwards. So I’m looking forward to this Thursday very much when he will come in, and care for my poor piano. While I didn’t play the piano that often I did start to practice guitar again, so things are looking up.

The thing foremost in my mind this month, though, was how much weight I have gained. I’m feeling quite unhappy about that. When thinking what part of it made me unhappy the most it is not how I look, or feel, it’s how my clothes fit. And the fact that I’m taking up more space than I think I do, I’m constantly bumping into furniture, and if I am in a tight space, and somebody wants to get past me I have to flatten myself against the wall. Also I’d like to become a bit fitter; but mostly it’s my clothes.

Last year I thought I’d be back to a normal shape in no time, and I wasn’t going to buy a whole new wardrobe but by now it’s about 20 kilos I want to get rid of, and if I manage to get in weight-loss mode again, and lose weight at my usual pace of about 300 to 400 grams a month, then – well, let’s just say, I definitely need a few bigger t-shirts until I’m back in shape. So that’s the thing I’ll concentrate on in May. So far I have been trying to sort my clothes into what fits and what doesn’t, and I haven’t quite been able to make time for that. Not even on the two ‘free’ weekends I had. Of course everything will be getting even busier as usual in the next two weeks so we’ll see how that works out. At least I went out shopping with my husband who needed a whole new wardrobe too (because everybody needs new clothes every three or four years, not because he ‘outgrew’ any of them), and now at least I am the proud owner of a second pair of pants that almost fits, a really great new jacket, and a blouse. Onwards and upwards, then.

1. Do you read while you cook?
   Sometimes. Of course you can’t do it when you do “real cooking” but when you’re waiting for your frozen pizza, of course I do. Also, these days I’m trying to behave like a grown-up, and so I actually clean the kitchen when I have a short lull in cooking.
   When I was still living with my parents I did it all the time. My mother said that she had never before heard of someone doing this. Since this is a question in a meme, I guess I’m not the only one. (But then Winterkatze and I go way, way back.)
2. Do you read while you eat?
   Yep. I don’t when we’re having family meals, and I don’t usually read when eating breakfast but every meal I eat alone or maybe with my son – I read.
3. Do you like novels with a lot of cooking and eating in them?
   I do like Diane Mott Davidson’s detective novels. Other than that I haven’t read anything like that. Since I mostly read genre fiction with only a minimal amount of description … I guess I don’t actually look for books with food in them.
4. Have you ever tried a recipe out of a novel?
   Again there’s Diane Mott Davidson. Her “what-to-do-with-all-the-egg-yolks”-bread has been a staple in our house at Christmas time. It’s even better nowadays because I can get real cranberries to make it. When I first tried it there was no place here where I could get creanberries, and a friend actually brought me some from the US.
5. Do you collect cookbooks? And can you guess how many you’ve got?
   I don’t collect cookbooks anymore but since my husband likes cooking very much there was a time when he got cookbooks right and left. We have three quarters of a bookshelf full of them, but that’s only because we threw out every book we weren’t using on a regular basis. The one thing that’s still missing is a good one about Chinese cooking. The ones we use the most are the Bavarian cookbook which has all the regular things in it, like pancakes, how to roast beef, and that’s where I’ll go first when dealing with things I don’t do often, and the Indian cookbook.
6. What do you like better – cooking or baking?W
   Not sure. I do very little of both. I used to prefer baking because I associated cooking with everyday drudgery, and baking was for special days only. What I really like about baking is that the final step is so neat. You pop that thing in the oven, clean everything up, and then you have your nice cake in your clean kitchen. When you’re done with cooking you have this mess of dirty pots, spoons, and splotches to clean.
7. What kind of cooking do you prefer (Italian, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Mexican, others)?
   When I’m cooking myself I mostly do traditional German dishes because those are the things I do better than my husband. When eating (and cooking) I like things best that are like stew. Everything is on the plate at the same time, and mixed. So I like Chinese food, German stews, soup, I also like Indian, Thai and Mexican food but not as spicy as my husband prepares it.
   Having said that I also have a fondness for the meat with veggies and potatoes thing. I guess I just love to eat, and I’m not picky. When cooking I don’t usually do the fancy, my cooking is quite plain.
8. Are you someone who always snacks or drinks while reading?
   Definitely not. Not anymore. My idea of heaven used to be sitting in bed reading while eating potato chips and drinking beer. Fortunately I weaned myself from that habit, and I have a “only eating at meals”-policy. My teapot never leaves my side though so I’m drinking all the time, whatever I do.
9. Is there something else you want to tell about “books and food”?
   Well, it was definitely interesting how many of Winterkatze’s bookish readers also feel very strongly about food.

Now it’s your turn, dear readers, what about your reading, cooking, and eating habits?

• iPod cover
• yarn
• paper to print business cards on
• pajamas
• pants
• map?

You know what I brought home with me? A bottle of wine and two bags of chips, and this is why.

I had added the map at the last minute because as I was looking up the way to get to my meeting (new location this month) I found that our current map of the big city had a price tag that still read “DM”. It’s been Euros for nine years now, a whole new highway has been built since then, also about a dozen new train stations.

The one thing that I didn’t put on the list was “bottle of wine”. I forgot to but I still had to buy one because I had promised to bring one, then found that for reasons I can’t fathom we had only one bottle of red wine left in the house which – while very tasty – looks like a cheap bottle of wine. And while I can tell people to “Just go on and taste it, it’s really good.” at my house, it just doesn’t look good as a gift.

So I left the house with a full wallet and the intention to pick up a bottle of wine on my way to the train station at the local health food store. Which hasn’t gone out of business, woohoo, though it had been a close call. I went in there, looked for wine, couldn’t find the one I wanted, found that all the other brands were wines we had tried and found inferior and decided to just get a bottle of wine in the city.

I hopped on the train, and made a plan of how to buy everything on my list without having to go into too many stores, and without crossing back. Just like a puzzle, like you do. First thing I went to the yarn shop. I knew what I wanted, two balls of yarn to knit my husband another hat because he accidentally felted the one I made him before. (Our son is very happy with his very cool new hat, though.) I also wanted another ball in the same color and some turquoise or so to make matching mittens. I went into the shop, looked at the shelves, found two balls of the light grey I wanted, and then I started looking for a contrasting colorway. I stood there for about ten minutes, pulling out balls of yarn and reading labels because their yarn is sorted according to color which makes finding the same yarn in different colors really slow. In the end I didn’t find a color that I liked, there were only two balls of the grey though I need four, and so I left the shop without buying anything.

I briefly thought about going into another shop for the yarn but then I came to my senses again, and remembered that that’s always what I do, and inevitably the other stores have even smaller selections of yarn.

To relax a bit I then went on to find myself a bottle of wine, and succeeded, and then – because I was so frustrated already – the two bags of chips somehow found their way into my bag. I’m really proud that I didn’t buy any candy, though, I’m trying to go candy-free at the moment, and I thought that would be a bit counter-productive. (Whereas buying potato chips is entirely reasonable, of course.)

Next I went to the apple store where I had never been before in my life, and tried to buy a case for my iPod touch to use when I’m exercising. I wanted something with velcro I could fasten on my arm or some such thing. I entered the store, and thought, “Where is all the stuff?” I only saw a lot of computers on tables, and a lot of people playing with them. I started looking around for the accessories. I also would have bought a nice little cheap lightweight external hard drive if I had seen one that had caught my fancy. After a while I gathered that maybe what I was looking for was upstairs. So I went up, and right there were things to buy. And I have to say I even did find a case just like I had wanted but, sadly, about double the price I had been willing to spend. So I thought to myself, “I’ll just buy some velcro and make myself a case out of leftover fabric.”

I didn’t really want to go into the paper store after that so I tried to find what I wanted somewhere else – and failed. And I thought, “I’ll just use that old orange paper I have lying around, who needs fancy business cards anyway.” (I know the faulty thinking in that but I thought it anyway.)

Next the dreaded clothing store. I need to replace both pajamas and pants because of the two functioning pairs of each that I have one is falling to pieces. Literally. Both my comfortable jeans and my not-as-loved pajamas have big honking holes in them, and are not really fit for wearing anymore. What bugs me the most are the jeans because I bought them only about a year ago, and they were quite expensive. Now, I don’t mind spending money on pants, especially if they fit, but this amounts to 12.9 € a month I spend on jeans. And that’s not considering that I have been wearing this pair of jeans with holes in it for a couple of months now. They are my “home jeans”.

So I decided to buy some cheap jeans instead. Nothing fits me right anyway. One thing that quickly wears out on my pants these days is the place where I always grab them to yank them up. I’ve seriously considered wearing suspenders. It’s annoying. I get up from a chair – yank. I sit down – yank. I walk a bit – yank. It’s completely automatic right now but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to wear something that doesn’t threaten to expose my underwear. So, this time, cheap jeans.

I really tried. I looked at everything. I wanted this to work. Black pants would have been fine, jeans would have been fine, pinstripes, no matter, something that fit me. You know, in the end I didn’t even try anything on. I looked at the cut of almost every pair of pants they had in there and instantly I could see why I had started buying more expensive jeans.

Next to the pajamas. Pajamas are easy. They can be baggy, they don’t have to look particularly smashing, I’m content with everything if it has long sleeves and pants, is made from a stretchy, jersey material, and is not pink or has any cute animals on it.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t find pajamas either. Everything was pink or with bows or beige or had horrible things printed on. So I thought to myself, “I’ll just buy some jersey and make myself some pajama bottoms, and use the top that I have from the pajamas I bought last time where I didn’t bother to try them on first, and now I have pajama pants I can’t even pull up properly.”

The only thing left on my list was the map. I already felt quite dejected by the consumer culture, and so I thought the book store would cheer me up. One can always find a book, right?

Well, I went all through the store, I went to the section where they keep the maps, I looked into self-help books, and novels, and life style and whatever, and I left with – nothing. Of course, this might have had something to do with the two dozen or so books I bought in the past months but then it also might have had something to do with all the heaps of “I’m a bestseller, buy me!”-books there that I don’t have any interest in reading. You can’t really browse because the things they have in stock are mostly “the book of the day”, and that’s it. When I complained to a saleswoman at my local bookstore about how few books they had there she said, “But we can get every book within a few days.” Yeah, you can but I also can get every book through the internet in a few days, and then I don’t have to leave my house (twice, once to order, and the second time to pick the book up), it’s faster, and I don’t have to spell the title for somebody, or have a debate on whether this particular book exists or not. I was polite that time (that was a long time ago), I didn’t say, “I know it exists. I could have ordered it on the internet and have it here faster and cheaper but I wanted to support local business.”

It’s also worth noting that with all the time I spent in shops clearly looking for specific things to buy not one sales person talked to me. None. No one asked me if they could help me, or what I wanted or anything. I just wandered around on my own, getting more and more frustrated.

So, what have I learned through this? I really should never expect to find anything I need in the city. Or at most local stores. I used to love to go shopping with enough money. At least for a bit. But these days I always seem to come back empty-handed.

So now I’ll have to make another list. It’s titled, “Things I have to sew:” I hope I can get around to it before my one pair of pants, and one pair of pajamas wear out as well.

Oh, and an interesting fact: I couldn’t find a map of the city in the city. Well, not the one I wanted anyways. There are very small ones without some of the suburbs, and I found one of those. (Not in the book store, not next to the other maps, though. I could have bought one of Madrid, or Hamburg, or a travel guide to Siberia. All great things to have but a map of the city? Much more practical for me.) I won’t give up though. One day I’ll have everything on my list, plus a fabulous bottle of wine.

• I have a new piano, and one of these days I’ll show you a picture. One of these days when it’s not raining or snowing or totally grey outside (or dark, like it’s now).
• I took part in the ravelympics. That’s like olympic games for knitters. I knitted and spun almost day and night, and I have medals to show for it.
• Also, I have designed a new lace pattern, and have high plans to make the pattern available for the public, plus “publishing” the other lace pattern I made. You know, the one I finished in November.
• One day in the future you might even hear me playing my new piano on this here blog. Who knows. A friend of mine has already been complaining that there are no new songs to listen to.
• I finished a kick-ass story last month which you will be able to read here shortly. (At least that one is finished.) It’s all very exciting because it’s something I really considered finished. And the writing is quite unusual for me. No la-la-la-sort-of-chick-lit but it actually has adjectives.
• At the last spinning meeting I tried a friend’s spindles, and I really, really loved them. I even loved them better than my beloved Golding spindle. I was good though, I didn’t snatch them from her and took them home, I didn’t even go home and ordered some right on the spot, no, I sold two of my spindles first to raise the money for buying new ones. (People who buy new pianos should practice a spot of restraint in spending money.)
• Especially since both the car and the heating broke in the last weeks. Both just after I ordered the piano, of course. But all is well now.
• I signed up for NaNoEdMo because I thought it would be a good idea to edit one of my attempts at novels. I hadn’t thought about the fact that in order to successfully edit it I will have to spend something like 50 hours with my manuscript this month. So far I have done nothing but unearth the manuscript, and finding the editing pen that a friend gave me at the celebratory dinner after my first NaNoWriMo in 2006. Finding the manuscript was easier than I had thought. I opened my file cabinet, looked for the folder marked “NaNoWriMo novels” and pulled the manuscript out. Actually I thought I would have to spend ages digging through piles of paper but no.
• I’ll give you an update on my “year of happiness” as well.
• Some day.

So there will be at least something on this blog in the near future. How have you all been?

As I told you last month I made a bunch of resolutions. Those were:

1. Go to bed on time.
2. Pick up after myself.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends.

1. And again, I didn’t manage to go to bed on time very often but still I have slept more than the months, or years, before. I find that I have to cancel watching DVDs most evenings. In order to get enough sleep it’s a very good idea for me to go to bed very, very early, and just read a bit. That’s seriously cutting into my knitting time but still, every single day I manage to sleep enough or nearly enough I feel happier the next day.
2. I’ve been doing very well on the “picking up after myself front, and that makes me happier as well. There are still heaps and piles in some areas but I’m getting there. And I manage to do a bit more housework which my husband appreciates very much.
3. I did write 500 words of fiction (or sometimes more) about five times a week. It seems that there’s always something coming up, and that six times a week is very hard to accomplish. But still I have several thousands of words more of my story than I had before January. It’s great.
4. I didn’t do that well on the “thinking about the things I love about my family, students, and friends”-front. Especially with my son I got decidedly cranky. But I can say that his sleeping is getting better. It did take a bit of a threat, though, I have told him that he is not to come to me at all until morning. Since he wants me to leave both his and my bedroom door open all night so I can hear him I told him if he so much as calls me throughout the night I will not only close the door but lock it. Apparently that was just the thing it took. You might want to wish me luck, we’re currently working on the “debate everything your mother says”-issue.

The other thing that makes me happy is that I’m starting to lose weight. Well, to be honest I’m down by 100 grams over the last month but still that’s something because over the last two years my weight has been climbing up every single month. Losing weight is something I hope to achieve through becoming a happier person but I’d say the goal of happiness is much better than the one of getting slim.

The thing that makes me even happier than losing a hundred grams is that I might be starting to exercise again. I did some yoga on Sunday (very slow, very easy yoga that made me realize how much out of shape I am), and yesterday I did my very first ever “Couch to 5k”-workout. See, I’m decidedly not a runner. I’m not built for it, not even when I’m a normal weight and fit, and I have never been able to run for any length of time. But when I was thinking about what kind of person I want to be I found that I’m really envious of people like my husband who just put on their running shoes and then go off jogging through the fields for an hour or so. And then I thought about what Mel had started some time ago, and then I read Kris’ post about how she managed to run a marathon, and that got me motivated.

I didn’t know whether I should talk about it here because all I’ve done so far is alternately walk and jog for a total of thirty minutes once, and I did it at home just staying in one spot (and I know that’s not quite the same as moving forward while doing it, but trust me I did work out and I can feel every single muscle in my lower body right now). I’m not about to go out on the street with this anytime soon, and I’ll never run a marathon for sure, ever. But still. I feel pretty amazing having tried out something new. I plan to do the next session of walking and running tomorrow in the morning.

So this will be the fifth resolution in my “happiness project”, exercise three times a week or more.

After we came back I switched my dead Macbook for my eight year old eMac, and hoped that I could use that for teaching. What a good thing that I had made a backup just days ago. The only thing that would have been gone forever where 1,000 words of the story I’m currently writing.

Wednesday was also the day my new notebook arrived. I absolutely love it. I have been tip-toeing around it for about a year now, thinking that I’d make one myself but it never happened. I even bought a poor substitute that I never was happy with, and that destroyed the lining in my favorite handbag with its sharp edges. I always carry a notebook, and I love that this can hold regular sized notebooks as well as loose sheets of paper.

Thursday morning I spent making lists of ingredients, and timelines for party preparations (in my new notebook), and copies of all the recipes we needed. Thursday afternoon I went to buy even more groceries. (In between I kept turning my dead computer on, and off again, and then I found that sometimes it booted from the installation disk, and that the diagnostic software claimed that the hard disk was still perfectly functional.)

Friday we did a little cleaning, then there was a great amount of teaching (as most days but that Friday was near insane). I was totally flustered because of both the looming party, and the fact that every single lesson brought up something that I needed on my computer. Also the eMac doesn’t work with my iPods. Or with any of my student’s. I started spending my free moments looking longingly at new computers. And I found that the new Macbook doesn’t come with a Firewire connection. Which I desperately need for my audio stuff.

In the afternoon one of my students suggested something for my computer that didn’t work but it brought me to a point where I googled “Macbook grey screen beeping” and found out that my problem was not a dead computer but faulty RAM. Bingo! I still had some RAM in a drawer because when I bought the computer I had immediately upgraded. And once I switched that for the old one the computer was working again. Phew! I immediately did a backup of everything.

My husband and I spent the rest of the evening preparing onions, ginger, and seasonings for next days party. And we rehearsed the Bach piece he had wanted to play for our guests. Through rehearsing we found out that the piano had de-tuned itself over the past two weeks. My poor husband had to try and match his violin to a piano that produced several pitches at once.

Our son spent the night at his grandmother’s place, very helpful. Saturday was spent cutting, and stirring, and seasoning, and cooking, and baking. In the end I barely made it into my “party clothes” and make-up, and I was really, really happy that I had insisted on setting the tables first. Which meant carrying the tables, and chairs, and plates, and glasses, and silverware down from my mother-in-laws apartment, before setting everything up. My mother would have been proud, I even had matching paper napkins.

We made Samosas, Pakoras, Naan bread, Lamb stew, fish curry, Dal, Almond Chicken, and mango creme. Doesn’t sound that much work, doesn’t it? Only we made everything from scratch, and somehow it took about nine hours to prepare everything. With the added bonus that all the dishes had to be ready at the same time, of course. I’m so not going into catering.

The party itself was very nice, only I didn’t enjoy it that much, I was just too tired. Our son managed to sprain his ankle for the second time that day, claiming that he had broken it. Well, it wasn’t broken but it wasn’t fully functional either. The party went on until three in the morning when my husband’s brother left. That conversation with him between one and three was the highlight of the day for me.

The next morning after about five hours of sleep we started cleaning and putting everything away. That went on for the whole day as well. In between we had an argument with our son who wanted to attend a birthday party despite his sprained ankle. In the end we caved in, and I took my mother-in-laws car to drive him over to that indoor playground about fifteen minutes from here. (And still I don’t know why it’s reasonable to have a birthday party where every single child gets carted around by his parents. I would have had to spend one hour in the car to get him there and back.) When we arrived at the playground thing and I got out of the car it smelled somewhat funny but I didn’t think about it. I got my son to the party, and left to go home. After some time the car started to behave in a weird way. Well, I barely got home and when I did the car stank and a woman passing on the sidewalk said, “Is your hand brake on? Haha.” Haha, very funny. At first I felt very dumb for not realizing that I had forgotten the hand brake but then I thought again, how I always check it at every single light I pass. Well, it seems that years and years of putting the car in a closed garage that’s not really ventilated might cause your hand brake to rust so that it can’t be disengaged anymore. Fun.

Now how to get my child back from the birthday party? My child that could barely walk? Before researching public transportation I remembered that there was one other mother that I recognized, and I had her phone number. I was lucky because she was home, and she agreed to take my son with her. Phew.

Monday was a quiet day, and we started to relax. Only the annex seemed to get a little cold. We didn’t think much of it and went our merry ways. On Tuesday it was clear that something with the heating was not right. But it was only the annex, not the main house. (This always sounds like we’re living in a mansion but we have a very small, very old house to which we built a three-room-annex for teaching.) So we decided to call the furnace guy the next day.

Just after teaching that day my son and mother-in-law came down the stairs and my MIL said she couldn’t bring him to do his homework. When my husband and I told him to do it right this minute he said, “Not yet…” It was six in the evening! So I threatened him into completing his homework (which took all of ten minutes, whining and crying included), and then he handed me a letter from his teacher. I’m to come in on Friday, it seem that we’re not the only ones having slight problems with him at the moment. (As an aside, we already have an appointment to get help, no worries.)

Well, we didn’t take that all that well. That evening I declared that from now on he was to sleep in his bed all night long, no exceptions. (As I explained in my last post we have a contract now, and this has resulted in him falling asleep in his bed but still every night he came over to sleep in the sleeping bag on the floor.) I had told him this but still he was very surprised when at 5 in the morning there was no sleeping bag in my bedroom for him. I told him to go back to his room and stay there. He cried, he started to bargain, but I had none of it, he had to stay. (By the way, he didn’t even mentioned being afraid that night. Seems like his fear was a convenient tool.) The rest of the night was somewhat unrestful, I had to put him back to his bed every 30 minutes or so but his protests became softer and softer.

The next day I realized that a) I had to find a way to get to the health food store without a car, and b) if I didn’t get to the big city that day the next time I could would be a week from now. So I left in a hurry while my husband phoned the furnace repair people. I went to the big city and ordered my new piano, something that would merit its own post if my life weren’t so full at the moment. We had realized that it would take us ages to save enough money for the piano, and that our regular expenses had gone down (no more daycare fee and one mortgage paid off). So I went in and ordered my new, shiny, black piano, and it’ll get here in two weeks or so.

Before leaving I received my very first shipment of the Rockin Sock Club, something really exciting but I didn’t have time to open the package yet. When I came back from my adventures in the city, laden with groceries and very hungry the furnace guy arrived and I spent the next thirty minutes helping him decipher the manual for the part of the furnace that controls the annex. Then my husband came to tell me that I had exactly ten minutes left to eat lunch before my first student arrived. (Then he spent the next hour or so helping the furnace guy who then phoned his boss who came also in.) For now we have heat in the annex again, and there will be a new part to be put in in a couple of days.

Then I taught for the rest of the day, spent the evening knitting for the first time in days, and fell asleep like a stone. I was waken by my son at 2 a.m. clutching his pillow, a blanket, and a big bag of stuffed animals but I sent him back to his room, and he didn’t even cry!

Today my husband decided to try the car again, and came back saying it went fine, nothing wrong with it. So I took it to buy groceries and get the beer cases from the party back to the store. The car acted a bit weird when I left the garage, and once I went down the street there was this “wup wup”-noise coming from the tire back right as if I had a flat. I turned around immediately and drove home again. Of course my husband thought I’d gone all female on him but when he checked the car again he barely got back into the garage after moving it for about three meters back and forth. So the car is clearly broken. Fortunately this is mostly my mother-in-laws problem since it’s her car but since we all use it we’ll pay half of the repair. Unless it’s very expensive which will mean it won’t be worth it. We already decided that we won’t buy a new car again. We’ll see.

So now I hope that the next week will be a little quieter. Tomorrow I’ll see my son’s teacher, some time the next week we’ll get our heating in order again, and then I’ll get my new piano, and then we’ll have “winter break” for a week.

How are your lives going? Exciting as well?

Oh, and by the way I have a piano to sell. It’s walnut, about thirty years old, and just had a complete overhaul.

It all started at the beginning of November (yes, that’s three months ago, almost) when he sat in front of TV to watch something about a zoo. At 5 in the afternoon there was a trailer for a murder mystery. In this trailer there was a tiny blip showing somebody wearing a halloween costume with a green mask and devil’s horns.

The night before was the last night my son has slept in his bed since then. And if that wouldn’t have been unnerving enough he is also afraid of being alone. So when, for example, he is playing in his room, and I’m sitting in the kitchen, and then I want to get something from the basement, and I’d be unwise enough to open the actual door and get down the stairs there would be a wailing child running after me. And when I’d get up again he’d stand there, mad at me and screaming, “How dare you leave me alone? You know I’m scared!” On the other hand he will totally go to the supermarket alone and buy a toy. No problem there. It’s just being alone at the house. Or rather somewhere where he doesn’t see or here another person because we never ever leave him alone at the house.

When he is going to sleep there has to be someone with him in the next room (we have drawn the line at being in the same room) at all times. So I’m no longer allowed to watch DVDs in my very favorite chair in front of our big old TV, no I have to sit on the hard and cold kitchen bench with my laptop who then decides it doesn’t like this particular DVD. After that I go into my bedroom without having talked a word with my husband (who is in the annex, working on his new album) and get to bed, the bed I share with my son. I’m not allowed to turn off the light completely, and I have to push him back to his side of the bed repeatedly and with force because for some strange reason I don’t like to share my pillow. Also, repeatedly through the night there will be a clear, ringing voice calling, “Mama?” in near panic. Which makes me more awake than him and then, just when I have gone to sleep again, he asks again.

My husband and I have been taking turns in “night duty”, and once or twice a week he sleeps at my mother-in-laws place to give us a break. I only really realized how much I feel like being on a leash when yesterday while my son was away with his grandmother I sat in the kitchen knitting, and then wondered what my husband was doing. I sat there for a while and then it hit me: I could just stand up, leave the room and go over into the annex without someone yelling at me! Wow. Sweet freedom.

Now, for those of you not familiar with my son, he is not 18 months old, no, he’s 7 years. He knows perfectly well that he is safe in the house. Ever since he turned three we could leave him playing in one part of the house and go to the annex, at least briefly. He has always been afraid of the dark so he there’s a light in his room, and for quite some time now there had to be someone in the next room when he went to sleep. Once he had fallen asleep whoever was on duty that night could walk out, and then only return when it was time to got to sleep ourselves.

I have a big problem with this. I can’t sleep properly. When I hear anybody scream “Mama?” I have to suppress the urge to slap that child whoever it is. I have told everybody I’ve met for the past three months about this. I’d say I have a problem.

Now, I know that he is really scared. I know that his fear isn’t rational and I remember how it is at that age. That’s why he has a light on while falling asleep, and that’s why there is someone near. But then I also remember that even though I was afraid there were bears in the basement I still went there. Telling myself, “There are no bears in the basement, there are no bears in the basement.” all the time. And you know what? I never saw a single bear there.

My son on the other hand, my son who knows perfectly well that there are no strange devils lurking in the corners of our house, my son ends every talk about how we just please want to sleep again, and how we know that he is scared but that he is perfectly safe with the same sentence: “But I’m scared.” Yeah, we knew that already, thanks.

I bought nice educational books, I elevated his stuffed giraffe to a monster-slaying super-toy (worked for half an hour), bought him a magic slumber mouse (he was set on trying to sleep alone but then he went off to his grandma’s and the next night he was – too scared again).

Everybody we have talked to so far has said the following things:

• every child is afraid of something
• there are a lot of children who still sleep in their parents beds
• this too will pass
• maybe stickers will help
• and the final thing, when we kept on saying, “Yeah, we tried that but it didn’t work.” or “Yeah, I knew that already.” then people say, “You have to get help.”

And you know what? They might be right. On the other hand it’s not as if I didn’t know anything about behavior modification or parenting. And our son is really, really stubborn. You know, I’m a pretty stubborn person but that’s nothing compared to him. I talked to a student who happens to have a son the same age as mine about what to do when your son is really rude and threatens to hit you, and he said, “Well, then he has to go to his room until he has calmed down.” And I looked at him, blinking for a couple of seconds with a blank look, and then I said, “And he just goes there?” And he said, “Well, if he doesn’t I make him.” That made me laugh really hard. I can, of course, lift my son up and carry him to his room, and I might even manage to close the door behind him but since we don’t own a key to that door there is nothing to keep him in there. I put him to his room, he comes out again, I put him back, he comes out again, I start screaming, he’s howling, I put him back… One time we spent 90 minutes pulling on opposite side of the door both of us screaming, and then he was only three years old. And when everything fails he just runs off to his grandmother.

Still I have decided not to let him oppress me any longer. He wants to wail behind me when I’m leaving the room? So be it. I also told him that he has to sleep in his room again. He’ll get a sticker for every night he spends in his own bed, and after two weeks we’ll go ice skating. Yesterday he actually fell asleep in his own room. My husband was lying next to him, but still. I went to bed at 11. At 11.30 he started calling me. Then he called again. Some time later he started crying. Then he called again. At 1 o’clock in the night I allowed him to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of my room…

Tonight we’re signing a contract, both of us. He will either sleep in his room alone without making a noise or he will go to my bedroom on tiptoes without disturbing me and stay in the sleeping bag. When he stays in his room until 6.45 there will be a sticker. 14 stickers equal a trip to the ice skating rink. There will be no discussions , no wailing, no nothing. I might have to add that we have a “no discussions about things I should do or buy for him after 6 in the evening”-rule. This child will have a debate about whether or not he will eat breakfast, come to the table or dress himself for school. I told him he’s free to not eat and walk to school in his pajamas, whatever he wants. Then he yelled at me for no making him stop reading when it was time to get ready. Very funny.

Wish me luck.

My first reaction? Hahaha! Me? And then I thought, well, I’m not exactly stupid, but then I thought of all the really intelligent people I know like a friend’s husband who is a genius working in AI research, and people I met in university with a mind so sharp they seemed to cut themselves, and everybody else. But then this nice knitter told me a bit more of it (and with every trait she described I thought “That’s my husband!” and “That’s my husband too!” and “But that’s me!”), and she recommended some books to me which I immediately bought and read. One of the books was full of the life stories of gifted people, most of them hadn’t known for ages. And while I certainly have never learned a language in three months, or done anything that remarkable until reading those books I had operated under the common prejudices that gifted people are people who wear glasses, are a bit awkward in social settings and get high grade in math and science.

Well, I do wear glasses but my grades were never really good, all of my teachers were seriously disappointed of me because “she could have done so well if only she had applied herself”. She, on the other hand, felt that she had applied herself as well as she could, but never got it quite right. For all my life I have been suffering from having this great potential. I know that this is a luxury problem but it does not feel good, the knowledge that you could have if only you had done things different or maybe if you could have turned yourself into a different person.

So, after a couple of weeks where I felt that the things that are wrong with me, the things that make me stand out, and never fit in anywhere, and that make me say the wrong things, and forget to smile at people, and that make me jump to conclusion, and talk in a way that people go “Huh?” all the time, that these things might be due to my IQ. Sounds weird, doesn’t it?

I went here and took an IQ-test. I felt very nervous that day, my son had woken me up early, I was seriously sleep-deprived, and also had hormones that made me feel like I was thinking my way through pea-soup-like fog. I went to the test and there were only five other test-subjects, all of them male and looking as if they were studying math or engineering. The guy guiding us through the test was wearing a suit, and I immediately disliked him.

Then came the test. There were only four parts to it, some language, some math, some where you had to rotate cubes in your head, you know that kind of test. I found the language tasks quite easy, I had the feeling that I should have taken the spatial orientation test a bit more serious (typical for me all I could think about was that I wanted to get out and drink something at that point), and the math tasks made me realize that my daily life doesn’t include any math whatsoever. I was too slow to finish that one in time.

When the test was over I was certain that my score would be too low but I knew that I can solve this kind of problems if only I can think straight. After the test a couple of us went out to have a beer, and there we met a few Mensa members. And that was really interesting. All of those people were testified gifted. That was about the only thing they had in common because they were very, very different, but: You know how annoying it is when you go to eat something in a restaurant as a group? How people always take ages to order and can’t decide? Not with these people. I have never seen a group of people that big order that fast. And not one of them did the, “What are you getting? Do you think I should get the duck? Does anybody know if the duck is good here? Really? You’re getting the pork? I don’t know, maybe I only eat a salad.”-thing. None.

There was a scene with the waiter at the restaurant – and I won’t bore you with the details – that was quite funny, and usually this would have been one of these moments when I burst out laughing, and then everybody looks at me with that “what’s funny there?”-look, and then I try to explain, and then nobody gets it but with these people the waiter went away, and every single person at the table burst out laughing. They were all very much awake, had a spark in their eyes, and don’t like small talk.

I know that a lot of people consider standardized IQ-tests to be irrelevant, and I know that the only thing they can tell you something about is the exact same kind of cognitive intelligence that they measure but still this meeting together with the information from the books I have read point me towards the conclusion that having a very high cognitive intelligence might make one different enough from most people that you don’t fit in.

It doesn’t make you smart in every situation. It might make you perform very badly on tasks that are too easy, for example. You might have problems with people, you might abhor small talk, or you might do well, and have no problems whatsoever. It usually makes you quite stubborn, quite independent, relatively exhausting, and in some cases so perfectionist that you never finish anything.

Not to leave you hanging, I got my test-results, my IQ (when sleep-deprived and feeling dumb as a brick) is in the top 1% range of the population. Usually I don’t tell that to people because when I do I feel like boasting, which Im not. I don’t feel particularly smart. I’m pretty confused most of the time, I often don’t get things, and the knowledge of it makes my unfulfilled potential weigh even heavier on me. And while I’ve always known that my mind often works really fast that doesn’t keep it from drawing the wrong conclusions very fast too. I either get things right away or they never really stick. Also I’m still the same person I was before the test.

First I thought I shouldn’t tell anyone. Then I thought, wait a minute, I talk about things here like thinking I might be bipolar or having ADD, and now that I find out that I’m gifted I don’t tell? Now that I have found out that the thing that makes me feel different and not fitting in is not something that’s wrong with me at all, now I won’t tell anyone? What kind of a reaction is this?

Well, it’s understandable especially when you’re living in Germany. You get the “So, you’re good at math, that doesn’t make you special.”-response quite often. Not that I’m good at math. Or that look that now you have told someone they think that you feel superior. It does get worse when you tell somebody that you think your child might be gifted too. I told it before, my son is bored in school. I remember starting school, excited to learn something after all, and then I waited for it to become really interesting and challenging. And waited. (It did become interesting when I did my dissertation but then I never got my PhD. Failure again.)

People here in Germany mostly don’t get what the problem is. They think you’re just a bit smarter (and in their heads they think “Well, if you’re so smart why aren’t you doing better in life then?”). For me the problem has shrunk since I know the reason for all this feeling weird. It also helped me because now I know that I’m not alone, there are others like me out there, and there are ways to find them. One of those ways has been the internet, I have this feeling that there are quite a few really smart people out there writing blogs.

When I finally took the courage to tell my parents my mother said (slightly bored), “Of course, we always knew. That’s why we had you start school early.” Of course? So why did nobody ever tell me? All I ever got was the “We are so disappointed that you’re not doing better.”-look. Together with the “It’s so easy for you, don’t think you’re something special.”-talk. And then my mother said, “Well, since you’re not in academic research it doesn’t make a difference anyway.”

To all those parents out there who might have a gifted child, and who don’t want their child to know so that it doesn’t feel different from the others I say: Please tell them. Your child doesn’t need you to tell them they’re different. They can’t hide it anyway. It’s just good to know the reason why one is different. It’s not a deficit, it’s an asset. One can have a lot of fun with a brain that works well and fast. Really. And trying not to set yourself apart won’t work. Trust me, I have tried all my life.

I don’t want to go on adding one unhappy year to another. The question of course is “why so unhappy?” and there isn’t really an answer. My life isn’t particularly hard, all my loved ones are healthy and safe but you can see that I’m unhappy, you see it when you look at me and there are about 16 kilos of unhappiness on my frame that weren’t there before. Of course my first impulse was to focus on “do better, use more willpower, never eat sugar again”-plan but then that one never works. A case in point being that the two words I chose for 2009 were “discipline” and “abundance”, and by august I had already forgotten about them. Though I have to say, the “abundance”-part did happen. So that was nice. And I did find out what was wrong with me which helps with the healing (word of the year of 2008).

So, while I’m obviously doing something wrong with the whole word of the year concept I still want to chose one, like a motto for 2010 and I’m focusing on happiness. I have this feeling if I concentrate on being happy the rest of my life will fall into place as well. Now, first thing I did was order a book – well, okay, several. I bought “The happiness project“, of course. I have been a longtime fan of Gretchen’s blog and with that theme I had planned for this year, how could I not? I also bought “Refuse to Choose. A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love”, and for good measure “Unclutter Your Life in One Week“.

I also made a couple of resolutions because only thinking yourself happy is not enough, I know from experience that there will be some doing in the process, and that the road to feeling happier is also plastered with tiny little baby steps that might make me feel worse in the short run. So my resolutions so far are:

1. Go to bed on time: (Yes, I know, what else is new.) I know that this has been on my list forever. But I actually managed to sleep enough during winter break. Since school started, though, I had one night with adequate sleep. Out of seven or so. But I’ll do better, I promise.
2. Pick up after myself: Already my own room (maybe I should start calling this my studio, sounds so much better) looks almost civilized and my husband likes this new/old habit of mine very much already.
3. Write 500 words of fiction at least six times a week: This is working great. That’s because there is a group, or at least a banner, so every night when I think that all I want is to sit and watch “Torchwood” for the fourth time I push myself to write my 500 words or more. And – surprise – having written them makes me really happy.
4. Think about the things I love about my family, students, and friends: I tend to focus on negative things, like most people, I feel much better when I happen to remember how much I love my husband and son, for example. Generally I try to focus on the positive rather than the negative. And it is working already.

So, I wish you a very happy year 2010. Have you made any resolutions? Broken them already?

The things that somehow didn’t happen this year were about all the new good and healthy habits I had incorporated into my life since 2004 or even before that: exercise, healthy and moderate eating, sleeping enough, cleaning, making music, writing, meditation, you name it. On the other hand I’m proud to report that I made music just yesterday, and last week I actually dusted and vacuumed half the house. Ahem. I’m on it, though. I’m slowly picking myself up again, I have started de-cluttering, and if I go on like this, who knows, maybe even my son’s room will be clean before Christmas.

Last week was even a bit more busy than always with my son turning seven on Thursday. Here’s the usual “table with cake and present”-photo,

taken at about seven in the morning without any light to speak of (and yes, that’s a pink unicorn, sorry, but he loves it), and here the “all his other presents” one:

Well, apart from the bike my parents gave him but we only bought that later in the day after school. As you can see my son has a well rounded personality, he loves both pink plastic princess things and manly machine things. I made the doll myself, it’s another Ysolda pattern. My son loves it so much that he insisted on taking the doll with him all day, and her hair is already starting to come apart. Also he says I need to make her a jacket. And a nightgown and underpants. The book on planes is from my sister (and he loves that too), the other book is a collection of poems for children. His new bike was carefully selected to be manly enough for now and the next three years. (And, but don’t tell him yet, he gets loads of very boy-appropriate Lego “Power Miner” things for Christmas.) And because I’m so proud of the doll (I had to embroider the face!) here’s another picture of her. My son named her Gabriele:

I am very, very happy that I could persuade him to skip the usual birthday party with seven friends, and cake, and games. Not only because I find that kind of children’s party exhausting and stressful, no, I distinctly remembered last year when the party was over and he said, “I never want to celebrate my birthday again!” He doesn’t like chaotic and loud any more than I do. Over the year, of course, he forgot all about it and wanted to celebrate at a fast food place, or an indoor playground or some other crappy and commercial place that other children are celebrating there birthdays at. There is even a local furniture store where you can have your child’s party, no kidding. Needless to say that I didn’t want to do anything like that. So I thought a bit. He was dead set on not staying at home (that would have been extremely uncool, obviously), and he’s new in school with only a few, very few friends. So I thought, why not take his best friend to a museum? And that’s what we did. It was splendid. We went to the Deutsches Museum. This museum is really interesting, and they have a special part for children. My son had never been there but his friend had been often, oops. It didn’t matter though, they both loved it and we went and tried things and looked at things and huge sailboats and airplanes and helicopters. We weren’t there for long, only about 1 1/2 hours but that turned out to be perfect. Afterwards I let them choose between cake and burgers, and we had – burgers and fries.

I know, this sounds like it couldn’t have been fun but that’s only the way I’m writing this. As proof I quote my son’s best friend who said on our way back home (exciting train ride) that she wants to celebrate her birthday at that museum too. Ha! The museum does offer real birthday parties as well but, well, that would have required planning ahead. Also more costly than train tickets and fast food. I didn’t really have to pay for the museum because I had bought a 10-block-ticket years ago, and it is still valid.

My son also wanted to celebrate with another friend, one that he knows from kindergarten and never sees these days. He wants to have a pajama party. I dropped an invitation at his place (very late), and still have to hear back. I think this was all too near Christmas so I’ll phone his mother after the holidays to arrange something. That was the deal, two birthday celebrations. But I’m good with that.

So now it’s only two more days until Christmas (we celebrate on the 24th, of course), and I still have to get a tree and a lot of the food. But we decided to make Christmas even more low key than usual, no big fancy cooking either, and so I hope that everything will be nice and quiet. I already go all the presents (yay me!) but I haven’t wrapped anything, and I think I will leave that for Wednesday evening. We’ll have to work until then, quite late in my case unless my students don’t show up as happened today (the three last students canceled and the one before that just didn’t show up). Then on Thursday we’ll get up late, and then put up the tree, and then make some music or knit or something, and then decorate the tree, and then make our special Christmas food that’s supposed to be dinner but I think we’ll just have it for lunch, and then lazily unwrap presents so that my son doesn’t drive us all crazy. You see, in my husband’s family you have to wait for the unwrapping of gifts until after dinner. First dinner, and then the singing of Christmas Carols, and by then the child is totally freaking out. Since I have a very impatient father we used to unwrap the presents at some time in the early afternoon so you could play with your new toys before having dinner. I hope we’ll do it a bit more like this this year. And then he can put together his Lego for hours and hours and the next day and the next, and I will be sitting next to him, help him read the manual and sort the pieces. That’s one of my favorite memories from last year, spending two days building a ultrasonic space ship or something.

As for the next year I have decided to start the new year right now and my goal is to become happy again. That will be interesting. I have already started, and I hope to gather momentum even before New Year’s Eve. What about you, did you have a good year? A bad one? Something in between? Usually it’s something in between, isn’t it?

But then it occurred to me that if my pile of unread books is really that low, why is it that every flat surface of the house is littered with books? And why do I never finish reading anything? And why does it take months for me to finish a book, even one that I borrowed? And why am I running out of bookmarks? Well, meet my PPUB, my Pile of Partially Unread Books:

(After taking this picture I found another one innocently hiding on a shelf. And then, after writing most of this post I found yet another one in a pile of knitting books sitting on the floor plus at least two unread knitting books.) I used to have a shelf dedicated to unread books, and I used to have only one or two books in progress. Now there is this pile on my desk, and the pile in the kitchen, plus the extra shelf in the kitchen. (What, you don’t have a shelf in the kitchen for books that you are currently reading? How odd.)

So, first to the unread books. There is from top to bottom (The links go to librarything, this post took ages to write because my nifty little Amazon helper plugin isn’t working. Otherwise there would have been pictures as well.):

1. Odd and the Frost Giants – well, it’s by Neil Gaiman that’s reason enough for me to want to read it. It’ll probably get read very soon. It’s also a very short book.
2. The Lake of Dead Languages – I think that Meno recommended this. Several years ago. It has been sitting around since then and I just didn’t feel like reading it.
3. Until I Find You – I bought this because I used to eagerly await every new John Irving novel. Then I read the first paragraph and since then haven’t felt compelled to really start it. Especially since a friend told me she didn’t like it.
4. Buddhism for Mothers of Schoolchildren – Received this two days ago. I have shown restrain and not started reading it, despite wanting to.
5. Mein Urgroßvater und ich – This is a book I used to love as a teenager. There was some talk about it in the German blogosphere a couple of weeks (or months) ago, and I decided to buy it. It will be great to read with my son but not now. I’d like to reread it on my own, though.
6. Green Lantern 47 – what to say, I have a subscription to Green Lantern comics. It will take all of 15 minutes to read it but my problem is that I can’t have my comics lying around where my son can see them because he gets scared very easily. (That’s a topic for another post, by the way.) So “Blackest Night” with pictures of people fighting and zombie-like aliens, well, I better keep that in my room which means I never read it because in my room I only read stuff on the computer. I’ll find the fifteen minutes eventually, though.
7. Respect the Spindle – When I heard that Abby Franquemont wrote a book I absolutely had to have it. This one is likely to be read first. (And it’s a great conversation piece. I have showed three students how one makes yarn on a spindle because the book has been lying around on my desk. That means I showed them how I make it, they didn’t want to learn themselves, but still.)
8. The Craftsman – it did sound interesting when Jo wrote about it on her blog. It was a birthday present from my parents.

My problem is the pile of books that I started but never finished. The problem is similar to having a lot of UFOs (that’s UnFinished Objects in this case) in knitting. You get all excited and start something new, and you do this so often that you never get around to actually finish anything. As for my knitting UFOs I sat down in October and finished almost all of those things whether I felt like it or not, and now I’m down to very few works in progress and feel much better for it. I have this gnawing feeling that it might be time to try something like this for books. I buy a new book, I get all excited, I start reading it, and then it gets stuck in a pile or two and another, newer book sits on top of it. Part of the problem is that books are so stackable. My pile of partially unread books contains (again from top to bottom, well almost I forgot some the first time):

1. Off the Page – recommended by Jo again. I love books about writing, and I thought this one would be great. It is so far, I took it with me on a trip in May, read one or two chapters and never got around to it again.
2. A New Earth – recommended to me by Christine Kane years ago. First my husband read it and since then it has been sitting here because it requires me to actually think while reading. That requires specific reading arrangements.
3. The Power of Now – I thought I’d start at the beginning, and read this before “A New Earth”. There is a bookmark somewhere in it, I guess.
4. Anger – I got this for my husband and after reading it he thought it might be a good idea for me to read it too. And it is. But – the thinking again.
5. Schulz and Peanuts – I read an official Charles Schulz-biography some years ago, and enjoyed it very much. I have been loving the Peanuts ever since my father brought home six volumes of collected Peanuts strips from Canada. I learned English reading these. (My English teachers were quite baffled by my unusual vocabulary.) Oh, and this one was given to me by my sister. I think for Christmas – last year, I hope.
6. Zum Buddha werden in 5 Wochen – this was a bit of a joke. I expected to read it through in about two days. That has been month ago. Oh, and the title translates as “Become a Buddha in five weeks”
7. Use of Weapons – a friend brought this because she thought I would like it, and she is right. I’m dragging my feet though because I resent the “look I’m making this suspenseful in a clever way by mixing the timeline all up, and now you can guess what’s when”-strategy of this book. Of course, if I had read this in my usual state before becoming a mother I wouldn’t even have noticed the cleverness because I would have read it fast enough to not be bothered by this. I’d have raced through the book, and at the end all the pieces would have fallen into place. Like I didn’t realize that “Pulp Fiction” isn’t told in chronological order until my husband asked where the two people from the beginning went. (He meant the couple who robbed the diner.) In my head everything had unfolded in perfect and timely order.
8. Fatal Revenant – I’m having a bit of a problem not only with fiction these days but especially with epic fantasy. I love, love, love Stephen R. Donaldson and especially the Thomas Covenant books but I’ve been reading this for ages because it’s not exactly an easy read, and – well – I have to look up names all the time which is the thing that happens when you go for weeks without reading it and then want to come back, and then I’m not always in the mood for something that moves rather slowly. I’m sure it is me, again, because I read the first six books of this in no time flat.
9. The Wisdom of Menopause – I bought this for obvious reasons after my last visit to my ob/gyn. I’m actually reading it at the moment, and it’s getting a bit better since I gave myself permission not to read every single word of it. I am allowed to skip parts that don’t interest or concern me.
10. Lick the Sugar Habit – this was recommended by Mel, and it is an excellent book. Probably. Only it has been hanging around the house for too long already. And somehow I’m not that thrilled to read about all the ways sugar wrecks havoc with my metabolism. And to be frank, the message is: “Sugar is bad, avoid it.” Maybe I won’t finish this one.
11. The Mindful Way through Depression – I have written about this before. It is an excellent book, and the only reason I’m that keen to finish is that I no longer think that I am depressed. On the other hand mindfulness helps with several things, not the least life as a whole so maybe it’s time to read this already.
12. Inside Songwriting – I’m always reading books about writing and writers and then sometimes I hope for more books about songwriting. This was recommended by Vikki on her blog. I saw her post about it and immediately bought it. I took it with me to a writer’s group meeting two months ago, felt incredibly inspired and then sat it down on top of a pile on my desk. I keep moving it to the top of that pile because a) it’s a pretty color, and b) it looks better to my students than having Green Lantern comics sitting there.
13. Batman – Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? – What can I say, it’s by Neil Gaiman. And I did read the beginning but then my usual “comic problem” kicked in, I can’t have this sitting around where my son or my students can see it. So I basically had to stuff it in a drawer. Or at the bottom of the pile of unread books. It’s nice and big …
14. Head First HTML- I bought that back in the day when I got serious about blogging, I think it was just before going from blogger to wordpress. It’s not exactly light reading material, more of a course. I did quite well doing the homework for a couple of weeks, and now I’m at the part where I should start learning CSS. With a wordpress blog, and being unhappy about the layout hereabouts it would be a very good idea to learn CSS but then – there would be the thinking again.
15. Handbuch Buddhismus – a book that my husband gave me for my birthday years ago when I started being interested in buddhism, I am not sure if I like it or not, it is very German, a bit dry and academic, and I never can remember anything (that’s not the book’s fault, it’s me I have read numerous books about buddhism by now and all the names and dates and crucial facts keep slipping out of my mind.

Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? In fact there are more partially unread books in my possession but those are the ones that I have made peace with never really finishing. The books you see here are the one that I still think I will get around to read anytime soon. So what to do? I won’t burn the books and I won’t throw them away. They really do interest me. I think I will organize the books, I already cleared the “unread books” shelf (well, part of a shelf) and now it actually holds unread books only. I will keep one fiction and one non-fiction book in the kitchen, and find a nice clear spot on the floor for the rest, I think. Oh, and please remind me not to buy any more books on Buddhism for me.

Of course my plan was to continue on, and make this mad November-dash into a nice little daily habit but so far it’s been the same thing as the years before, I haven’t written one word after crossing over the finish line.

This year I managed to do this as low stress as possible, I was very good and wrote mostly in the mornings, even if that meant turning on the computer at 6.15 and writing 500 words at breakneck speed until it was time to wake up my son. I never wrote late in the evening, these days I’m just too tired for that.

Life conspired against me, and so I ended up falling behind starting the second week. And I fell behind and behind until at the beginning of the last week I was on the brink of giving up. Then I remembered that that’s always what happens, I start out all smug, ahead of the game and then I feel like I can never do it. And then I decided to finish early even, and I had two days where I wrote like crazy. The second of these days was Saturday and that was the only day in this year’s NaNo that I asked my husband to do everything else so I could write. I wrote 6,000 words that day, and I even went grocery shopping, and took a shower. (Not necessarily in that order.)

I also finished knitting my NaKniSweMo-sweater the day after. Now it is sitting there looking at me because I still need to weave in the ends, wash it, get buttons and sew them on. The sweater is very pretty, I’m only afraid it might not fit because the yarn is rumored to grow bigger with washing. Sadly I can’t show you a picture because I keep forgetting to take one while there is still light outside. My motivation for really finishing it is also quite low because I won’t be wearing it for the next months. While it is wool it doesn’t have a turtleneck, and I know from experience that only turtlenecks make me warm enough in winter not to catch a cold. So, this lovely low neckline will be something for early spring.

I found that knitting a sweater in a month isn’t all that hard for me. Even when I start five days late, and I’m knitting something in a fine gauge, that is to say with sock yarn. The knitting was very pleasant and quite mindless. I find that that’s the way to go at the moment, my head is quite full, mostly with mundane and trivial things, and so I enjoy knitting stockinette around, and around, and around. Quite unusual for me.

As every year I find December quite overwhelming. There’s the present buying, and the present choosing for Christmas as well as my son’s, my mother-in-laws, and my husband’s birthday. There’s the school things to do like helping with the Christmas crafting, making and wrapping a nice little present for my son (that’s not supposed to cost anything, nice touch), and about half a million things I just can’t remember right now. We have already reached the point where we don’t go anywhere anymore, and if you’d happen to invite us anytime until February the answer would be an automatic “no”.

I’m still blessed to be teaching quite a lot, and I mean really a lot. For the first time in years I had to turn down a potential student last week. My timetable is full. On the upside that might mean I might get my new piano a little bit earlier. Last week I suddenly had a revelation about the piano. I thought that if I wait until I have all the money to buy it I will never get it. But I could pay it in installments. That’s totally do-able. And reasonable. Yes, it is. So I’m looking at a bright new shiny piano in my future. Sometime next year, I hope.

And my husband will be giving me this for Christmas. It’s a flyer for my spinning wheel. It’s called a “freedom flyer”; that does sound lovely, doesn’t it? A friend already told me about it, and when the new “spin-off” magazine arrived there was an ad in there, and I made my husband drop everything so I could show it to him. I would have bought it right away myself with part of the money I got for teaching those two knitting workshops but then my glasses broke on Saturday, and so that money will go elsewhere. And he (my husband) said, “Does that mean you want this for Christmas?” And I said, “I don’t know, it is too expensive, and I don’t really need it.” “Do you want it?” “Um, yes.” “Then I’ll give it to you for Christmas. Go on and order it.” And I did.

Oh, and about the glasses? Turns out that I’m getting old. Well, I knew that but not only do I need glasses to help me with my nearsightedness, I need reading glasses as well! For now I’m trying to do without but this will get interesting (and quite expensive) in the future.

On the plus side I’m getting new glasses! And they look pretty! And it will be safe to wear them for driving! And I will be able to watch TV again! Because right now I’m wearing glasses that are way old, and the whole world is fuzzy and looks a bit depressing. I spend most of my time spinning while listening to podcasts…

This year feels particularly hard to me but maybe it just feels that way now that I’m slogging through the words, was behind. I should be well over 30,000 by now and I only managed to crank my word count up to 28,429 today because I chained myself to the computer and didn’t let myself loose before having written for something like 2 1/2 hours (with additional breaks). The story is gathering momentum though so it doesn’t feel like I’m writing uphill all the time now. I remember that from years past, week 2 is always the hardest.

People always ask me why I do it. (To be fair, people ask me a lot of things, for example why I’m not skiing, so I’m used to this.) Well, it is a bit insane but there’s nothing but the feeling you get when you reach the finishing line with your 50,000 word first draft of an original novel written by you and can show off your winner’s certificate. To see how that looks go to this old blog post of mine.

The next thing people ask me is what I then do with the resulting novel. Ahem. So far I have had two of these sitting in a nice little drawer. Then last year I pulled them out again and read through them. Well, at least one of them. The first was so bad that I just couldn’t stand reading it again. The second one has potential. I’m thinking about editing it maybe when it’s National Editing Month. (There is such a thing but I don’t know how it’s called and where to find it.)

Anyways, everything is going fine, I was only wondering why I feel so tired all the time and then I remembered: a) I haven’t slept enough again, and b) I have been doing a lot of writing on top of my regular life, duh, that’s like, you know, work. And this year November has been a bit crazy with things I have to do and places I have to go, and then I haven’t even dusted for weeks. (I have great plans of cleaning today, and even going grocery shopping. Wow.)

As you know I’m also attempting to knit a sweater in the month of November, a sweater that I started five days late and then had to frog after the beginning but – it’s coming along nicely. While I have fallen a bit behind because there were three days in a row that I didn’t feel lucid enough to start the sleeves, and while I’ve been knitting on the sleeve cap for three days now (something I would have imagined to take about two hours or so) the sweater is two-thirds finished by now.

I think there will be another crisis on the weekend since I plan to go on a yarn excursion complete with meeting an online friend from Stuttgart on Saturday and there’s spinner’s meeting on Sunday, and I know from experience that while I always think I can write my quota in the morning I rarely do, and then get all cranky. But then, who knows, this is also the first year of NaNoWriMo that I haven’t written everything late at night. Mostly because I’m so tired in the evenings that all I can manage to do is stare blankly into space and maybe knit stockinette stitch in the round.

Okay, off to clean, my son will be coming home from school in twenty minutes or so. See ya.

Yes, I decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year. First I was all sensible and only wanted to use it to get back into a regular writing habit, and write about 500 words a day. And finish a story I had started in June. Then I thought that not starting something new was like cheating. And then I thought, “Well, I can try how many words I can write comfortably without stress during fall break, and then I can decide later.” And – I think I’m hooked again. For now it’s really enjoyable if a bit crazy, I have managed to write mostly in the mornings so I could do other things later in the day without having to live with the dread of unwritten words all day long. In the past I have often procrastinated until bedtime and then written in a very bad mood and very tired.

Last Sunday I had my IQ tested (I don’t know if they found any yet I’m waiting for the results), just yesterday evening I went from teaching piano to teaching a class on lace knitting, and then to teaching mindfulness knitting meditation. After the meditation class (that went really well) I went back home to eat a salami sandwich and drink beer in front of a particularly gruesome episode of “Buffy – the vampire slayer”.

Today I went from the yarn shop to the health food store walking the whole way. Next to me was one of these very young men in a hoodie with big pants and a woolen hat, and I thought, “What does he think I’m listening to right now?” Well, I guess he didn’t think about me at all but right then my ipod played this:

I really have taken a liking to this particular System of a Down album. Now that I’m listening to it again, it is quite operatic. And then the ipod played this (not heavy at all) only in a version sung by Anita O’Day):

And this just about sums up my life that I really love both of these songs.

And I don’t usually post youtube videos here because I have to admit I don’t do youtube, when you put a video in a post I will usually not watch it. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I have to turn on the speakers, and then I have to sit there and pay attention until the clip is over but I no longer force myself to.

I also don’t usually write short posts without a defined theme but I thought maybe it’s time to change my “format”. The “long, thoughtful posts”-format doesn’t seem to work for me at the moment.

But I still have layers. See?

If it weren’t for my husband the house would be a disaster, and I’m still working on this “go to bed on time”-thing. Also on the “put things away”-thing, and on “complete things on time”.

So, what is it that I’ve done?

1. I have designed and charted a triangular lace shawl:

I used traditional Estonian stitches from a stitch dictionary for this. The lace knitting class I’m teaching is already half done, only two more weeks to go.

2. I also am teaching a class on mindful knitting that is more fun that I had hoped for. I’m not really knowing what I’m doing but I’m very used to the “learn by teaching”-method and it usually works well for me and the students.

3. I’m knitting up a storm, trying to finish the UFOs lying around (Un-Finished Objects).

4. I’m transferring one of my stories from notebook to computer. I wrote this in June, back when I decided to write 3 pages every day. I’m still not finished with the typing, and for the last few writer’s meetings I only had this story to read to my writer friends. Since the story is now standing at 3,000 words, and they are still sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for what happens next, all is well. But I better finish the story.

5. On the same note I have decided (yes, I’m big on decisions today) to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year, only I’ll be “cheating” by setting myself a goal of a mere 15,000 words. That will be like going to a marathon to walk 5k very slowly but I know from experience how I feel after having written the full distance. I’m no good for at least the rest of the year, and won’t be writing either.

6. I wrote two half blog-posts. Unfortunately two halves don’t make one finished post. One of these days there will be sunshine and free time at the very same moment, and I’ll take some pictures and tell you about the joys of knitting with handspun. And some time this year you’ll get an account of my son’s first day of school. Which happened a month ago. Oops.

7. I’m also thinking a lot about being intelligent and school. Of course, one reason for this is my bright son who now reads as well as the average third grader (as far as I can tell, I only teach three third-graders at the moment), the other reason is a conversation I had with a woman I met in September. And I remember how bored I felt all through school, and it only got better in grad school. How I didn’t do homework for the last four years of school. And how I really want my son to have a better school experience than I had. Unlike me I’d like him to learn how to study and manage time some time before he turns 25.

But I already found myself telling him that when he is bored in school he better sits there quietly and politely, and that there are other places to learn things. At home for example. My husband and I decided that he needs something a bit more challenging and are turning lunch breaks into informal teaching sessions. (No, we’re not pushing him. We’re just having regular conversations with a bit more explaining for him.) So he’s getting a dose of stories about Italy or Brazil, a bit of history and politics, and also throwing a ball, salsa dancing, and crafting.

8. I have also turned inwards once again, so if you happen to be a friend of mine, or someone to whom I owe an e-mail, or someone who used to know me through comments on her blog: “It isn’t you. I’m not communicating with anybody right now.” Part of this is due to the fact that I’m teaching a lot these days. Which means that I see people and talk with them for hours each day. While I’m reading blogs, and tweets, at the end of the day (and in between as well), I just want to sit there quietly. Well, as quietly as you can when you’re part of a family.

9. I have bought a ton of books, and am reading, among them one on writing songs. Yes, I’m still thinking that one day I will be writing songs again. Maybe even this year, who knows.

After all it’s fall, and that’s always the time to make plans, and get more grounded. I do it every year, some years I’m better at following through other years I’m worse, who knows. Even though we had snow today. Snow. It’s freezing (in a literal sense). Still, snow or not for me it’s fall, and time to get things going again.

I have loved Steve Reich’s music ever since I first heard about it in school. I had a very extraordinary music teacher in grades 11 through 13 who broadened our musical horizons whether we wanted to or not. To me it was as if I had just waited for something like this for all my life. It was there that I first heard contemporary composers, African drumming, and such, and her lessons were quite different than the ones I was used to before.

The funny thing is that I all but forgot about this kind of music. So yesterday I switched channels on my TV and all of a sudden there was this guy talking, and I thought, “I know him. who’s that?” and then there was “Music for Pieces of Wood”, and I thought, “Oh yeah, Steve Reich. How do I know this piece? I don’t have a recording of this, so why do I know every single note? Oh – I’ve played this in university.”

While I sat there, completely transfixed, my husband entered the room. He opened the door, took one look at the screen where Tehilim was played and said, “Steve Reich.” Matter of fact. And I thought, “This is why I love this man. He doesn’t even ask if this is about Steve Reich, he just knows it.” Even though he didn’t know that piece of music before.

Since then I have been in thinking mode again. About music, and the kind of music I love, about things I keep forgetting about even though I love them, and how much I’d like to make music that has that kind of feel to it, how I keep forgetting that one can not only make songs but music that consists of rhythmic patterns and transmutations, music that uses the human voice as an instrument instead of the main focus of everything, and about the fact that I don’t play drums anymore which is a bit weird but okay with me.

And, together with my husband, I have been thinking about living the life of a composer. Not that I’m in any danger of doing so, since that would require me to actually compose some music first, but my husband would very much love to spend his life inventing and playing music and being able to make a living of that.

And we found ourselves wondering how does someone like Steve Reich do it? Where does his money come from? Does he do his own laundry? Is he married? With children? I looked him up on wikipedia and found that yes, he is married and has a son, his income seems to come mostly from grants, commissioned compositions and touring, but I couldn’t find out anything about the laundry and the dishes and such.

Which is a shame. I would like it very much if I could learn more about the actual living conditions of other artists. Especially those who are able to earn a living by making their art. I know a bit more about writers thanks to writers who blog. But musicians don’t seem to take to blogging.

I know how my husband does it, getting up in the morning, doing household chores, cooking, folding laundry, trying to squeeze in a bit of guitar playing before lunch, then some time with our son before teaching, and teaching, and teaching, in between doing a bit of housework again, answering e-mails, making phone calls, teach some more, preparing dinner when he’s already feeling starved, playing the guitar again while waiting for our son to fall asleep, and then, finally, at the very end of the day, at the time where he feels like falling into bed, he goes back to the very same room that he spent his whole day in and works on his own music. For me that’s the time when I slump down in front of TV, the time where my energy is completely depleted and I’m running on empty.

I guess he is too. But – as you can see by my example – it’s either making music on empty batteries in the evening or it’s not making music at all. And then, after he has spent evening after evening recording, mixing, recording additional instruments, learning how to play drum set because he doesn’t have a drummer, learning how to record, adding more layers, other instruments, mixing some more, my husband really is too exhausted to go out and sell his music.

Because that’s the other thing. These days it takes him several years to make an album anyways. In the end he’s usually so fed up with that huge thing that ate his life for the past years that he just puts it away in a drawer. Both him and me aren’t any good at marketing. And to be frank, this isn’t something we are really interested to learn. We’d both love to have someone else take care of the advertising and selling part. In fact, we’d both love to be able to give the music away for free, something we both have doing for years now, if only somebody would pay our rent and such.

Steve Reich is really exceptional. He is so in many ways but also in that he isn’t teaching. Most composers do one way or another. Most musicians do. My students always think that a musician is someone living the life of a rock star, always on tour and/or in the studio. Well, I know a lot of musicians and most of them are teaching to earn a living. Some of them are also playing in bands on weekends, a lot of the ones I know have jobs that don’t have anything to do with music but you’ll find that the minute they have children on top of their jobs the music has to give way.

Music is cruel. You can’t just set it aside when you don’t have the time and pick it up again later. Much like an athlete you have to stay in training. After a short while your muscles get weak, you lose your calluses, your dexterity, and the ability to play the music you hear in your head. When you put too much other stuff into your head, housework, organizational detail, advertising, finances, mindless blubber, and when you stop listening to music because you “don’t have the time”, you even lose the music in your head.

I know all about it, it has happened to me. My head full of things I have to do, things I have to remember, and places I have to go, my life empty of space to just sit down and listen to something or play, I felt as if I had died inside.

Just the other day I was walking down the street and thinking about what the ideal life would look like to me, and I found (as I always do) that I’d be perfectly happy to spend my life writing both words and music, creating whatever strikes my fancy. And my husband as well. Right now we seem to cram creativity into the nooks and crannies of our already very busy lives. And often there is no space for creativity left.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jealous of Steve Reich, it’s just that living the life of a composer, or the life I imagine a composer like him to have – which might have nothing to do with reality – seems like a wonderful thing to me.

I had wanted to write about my son’s first day of school, and creativity, and ADD, and knitting with handspun, and about why I don’t like it that my blog is so fiber-heavy these days (and why I’d rather update more frequently), and still about being idle, and society in general, and about making music, and how I had this neat idea for a “Creative Commitment Challenge”.

But then life happened, and I had to phone students right and left to find a new schedule, and then my mother-in-law went on vacation so my parents came to visit and care for our son this week.

And tomorrow I’ll go and see an aunt of mine that I haven’t seen for something like 35 years, and so I don’t think I’ll be blogging on the weekend either.

So, this is just to tell you that I’m still alive, and feeling well, and quite exciting about things that make my head spin (only personal, and there won’t be anything coming out of this, I think).

I hope you’ll all have a nice weekend. See you.

Since the meeting started earlier on Sunday – at ten – and I had to pack, and have breakfast, and check out of the hotel before that I was in a bit of a hurry on Sunday morning. Of course that didn’t prevent me from talking for too long again over breakfast. Since I had to catch a train in the afternoon, and since the Bürgerhaus is near the train station but the hotel isn’t I decided to take all of my luggage with me.

At first I had felt very smug that I still could close my backpack after all the yarn I had purchased the day before but then I found that my second knitting bag, the one with the workshop supplies still sat outside. Oops. Then I found that I had to get more cash for the rest of the day because while I already had bought all the yarn I wanted I also wanted to have something to eat that day, and maybe buy some stitch markers and knitting needles. So I went in search of an ATM machine only to find that my card couldn’t be read. The same with the next place. (Note to self: get card replaced because that happened again last week.) Fortunately my other card got accepted. So now I’m the happy owner of some KnitPro wood needles, and some new stitch markers.

After finding a place to hide my enormous backpack I went to teach my knitting workshop for the second time. It was as delightful as the first time though we all had a bit less energy on this second day. Then I found some potato soup to eat before going back to the classroom, this time to take a workshop myself. That was the “finishing techniques” workshop taught by Sharon Brant. I didn’t really expect to learn something new in that workshop but I did. 1) It’s a good idea to use checkered fabric for blocking finished knits because it’s easier to lay the pieces straight. 2) How to get a buttonhole tidy, though I haven’t done a buttonhole in ages. And most interesting that 3) I am a quite fast knitter. I felt a bit sorry for the teacher because every time I’d looked up from my completed assignment I felt like putting her under pressure but really, I was content just to sit there and wait. I also knew the feeling because in my own workshop that day there had been a very fast knitter who got up and left with her finished sock heel as the other just started to ask me to show them the second step. I didn’t compete in the speed knitting contest, though, because I didn’t realize there was one until after the winner was announced.

Also, I still don’t like to knit sweaters flat and sew them together, and though I hate to admit it, my mother taught me well. I felt a little defensive, just sitting there in the workshop instead of oohing and aahing about all the exciting new things Sharon showed us. It was like when there was a knitting daily post about “the best way to pick up stitches for a sock gusset” or something, and I had really high hopes for that, only to find that the “very best way” was the exact same way my mother had shown to me, and her mother to her before me, and that’s the exact same method that has me having holes in my traditionally knit socks all the time. Sigh. But then I have to remember that I have been knitting for thirty years so far, that I made it through the knitting craze of the 80s without much in the way of patterns, always trying out new things. And that I have – for the past two years or so – learned more about knitting techniques from the internet and books than I ever knew before.

So, the workshop was great, and did indeed show you the things that you can’t learn out of a book. Unless you buy Sharon Brant’s “The ultimate knitting bible” or something, that is.

After that I went back to the marketplace to show my handspun shawl to Christine from Drachenwolle because she had dyed the fiber for that. And I talked some more, and some more, and I was very sorry to leave in time to get to the train.

My trip back home went smoothly, and I was so full of all the sights and sounds of the weekend that I haven’t been able to knit anything more complicated than stockinette in the round since then. I came back to my family and somehow things didn’t went as I imagined them, and we all celebrated my return by having a big fight. None of us wanted to but we were all so tired. My husband found out that I indeed do some of the housework when I’m home because my absence was noticeable.

I came back, unpacked my bags, wanted to force everybody to look at the yarn I had bought, failed, and then we just decided to call it a day. Since then I have been back to teaching again, my son has had his very first day of school ever, and the week went by in a flurry of minor excitement, and phone calls from students, and forms to fill out.

He loves school, he loves his teacher, he loves homework, and tomorrow will be the first day that he is going to school all alone without one of us with him. It’s really easy, he just has to leave the house, turn left and keep going, only it would be a good thing to remember to look out for cars before crossing streets. He already made a new friend, so everything is going well.

And here’s a picture of the things I got at Backnang:

7 skeins of Drachenwolle sock yarn, roving and lace yarn from Spinning Martha in the front, a special ravelry bag, turquoise Merino-Cotton for my husband, a gift skein from Filatura di Crosa (very soft and nice), knitting magazines (also a gift from them), and some knitting needles and removable stitch markers. Today I showed all this to my husband and son and my husband agreed that, indeed, I had been sensible in my purchases and didn’t buy too much. Now I only have to find a place to store the yarn…

Saturday I could have slept in but, alas, I woke early. With the free wifi in the hotel I found myself surfing the net even before breakfast (no family to keep me in check), and had to question my sanity at this point. When I went down for breakfast it turned out that the whole hotel was firmly in knitterly hands, and once again I chatted non-stop until I had to go and get ready for the meeting itself.

This time I was in the company of other knitters and so I did manage to find both the yarn store where we were to get our tickets and the way to the Bürgerhaus where the actual meeting took place. That yarn store the Wollstube Wollin is truly amazing. I’m used to yarn stores that carry only one or two brands of yarn but this is wool paradise. At that point I was really good and only bought this:

One skein of Drachenwolle, and two balls of Merino/Cotton for a hat for my husband (I got that at 50% off in his favorite color.)

At that point of the day I still had hopes of having lunch somewhere but ended up in an ice cream place that was so overwhelmed with all these guests that I sat there, knitting about a third of a sock without even seeing a waiter. Then I left. Next to our tables there were three people shaking their heads exclaiming, “They’re all knitting! All of them! Look! they are all knitting.” They might have been additionally confused by the fact that one of us was in fact, male.

So off I went to the Bürgerhaus, my fellow knitters had left me to take their new yarn to the hotel, and to change shoes, and was greeted by what has to be the most photographed statue in all Germany after this event:

Of course, since I had only bought 200 grams of yarn (at that point) and was wearing my trusty if unfashionable sneakers I was ready for everything. You know, I felt a bit weird at the beginning of the day with my two knitting bags slung over my shoulder but once again – I wasn’t the only one. Knitters and bags seem to got together like hot water and tea. Inside I was greeted by an explosion of color, and a hall full of chatting knitters. Splendid. And then I even managed to grab something to eat and some water. I had been afraid that I would have to teach my first workshop on an empty stomach, not a good thing at all.

When I went to check out the room where the knitting workshops were taking place I almost ran into “Mama and Papa Ravelry”, Jess and Casey. I managed to not go squee! and rush towards them, and immediately afterwards I turned shy as I sometimes do (not very often but always when something is important to me) so I didn’t speak to them at all. For the whole day. They entered the hall and we had some speeches of which I didn’t take any pictures. But here’s yarn, and knitters:

The one thing that I didn’t like as much was the fact that all the workshops were in the same room. We had big tables and each workshop gathered round one. Originally I had planned to talk a lot in the beginning but then I soon found out that people couldn’t hear me anyway so I just shoved my scripts in front of the participants and told them to start knitting.

I had been quite nervous because I had never taught a knitting workshop before. I was teaching “sock construction according to Cat Bordhi” and I was afraid that all the participants would sit there, “New Pathways for Sock Knitters” in hand and ask me about wing stitches and what to do if your ankle is that size, and your foot is that size, and all sorts of technical questions that I would then have to look up in the book, and probably screw up.

Instead they all were very, very nice. Most were quite competent sock knitters of course, since the topic is somewhat special, but in the end each and every one of them left with their own little sock heel and saw that, yes indeed, it works both toe-up and cuff-down. I even had to explain how to work “wrap & turn” for short rows which I hadn’t expected. It seems that most Germans do what we call “Doppelmaschen” when working short rows. (The link leads to a German pattern. To see a picture of the “Doppelmasche” (that would be double stitch which is not the same thing in English, sorry) scroll down to the bottom.) After a seemingly endless time that I had to wait until everybody finished their gusset increases and that I tried to pass by telling interesting bits about sock construction and knitting in general, and by simultaneously knitting a gusset myself which I then screwed up because I can’t teach and keep track of my sock heel without using a row counter. Then instead of using my very big prepared sock heels for demonstration I just went round the table and showed everyone individually.

It’s truly amazing how different people knit. Some are very fast, some are much slower, and they all look different even though I only had “continental knitters” in my group.

After my own workshop I went back to the big hall and bought yarn. And talked, and met people, and took out my spindle to spin with some of the others. Then I just sat down with a couple of people I had met before because I experienced a bit of people and yarn overload.

After that I went directly to the after-hours-party, I think. (That can’t be, I must have unloaded my two bags of shiny new yarn and fiber first.) We had excellent food there, buffet style, I had some beer, and talked and talked. I enjoyed the talking so much that I stayed way later than I had wanted. The beer was a bit of a disappointment, by the way. I like to sample local beer, and I had some at the place where we ate the night before but this very excellent restaurant only had beer that is local to Munich. And when I’m home I don’t usually drink it because there is better stuff to have.

So I went home late, then decided to finish off my half-bottle of wine afterwards while reading. Which – somehow – led to me being somewhat late on Sunday. Interestingly I didn’t have a headache. Must have been good wine.

(And yet too long so there will be – part 3.)

I’m perfectly aware that that was last weekend but then I seem to become busier and busier, I really should do something about this, one of these days, you know, when I have some spare time on my hands.

(This is a series of too long posts about that meeting. Feel free to skip.)

Before going to the meeting in Backnang (that’s near Stuttgart, and I didn’t know there was such a place before either), I went hiking in the Alps with my husband and son on Wednesday, and to a writer’s meeting on Thursday complete with shopping for all the school supplies and clothes my son will be needing until the end of the year. Even my to-do-lists were making to-do-lists but, strangely enough, I managed to do everything on time without forgetting anything important. I don’t even think I forgot anything. I might be getting better with this after all.

The raveler meeting was on Saturday and Sunday but I decided to go there on Friday because otherwise I would have had to get up really early on Saturday and teach a workshop after a long train ride. I tried to pack lightly as I always do but failed miserably. Not only did I put two knitting projects, an extra knitting bag for my workshop, books and handouts, I also packed enough clothes for a week. Since I planned on buying yarn and spinning fiber I took the big backpack, the one my husband used when we were traveling Brazil for two months, and it was full. As was my giant purse/knitting bag. Also my muscles were still sore from four hours of hiking in the mountains on Wednesday. When I got on the train a woman was looking at my huge rucksack and said, “That will be a long trip, won’t it?” Um, well, only this weekend.

In my defense I have to say that I also brought a bottle of wine for Friday night’s “pajama party” complete with two wine glasses and a corkscrew. For the whole trip I was unsure if maybe those people with ridiculous trolley suitcases on wheels do indeed have a point but every time I went my merry way, up stairs, down stairs or on and off trains I remembered why I choose to carry all my luggage on my back.

In order to get a cheap ticket I had booked a train that arrived at Stuttgart Friday noon but there wasn’t anything to do for me in Backnang until the evening when I had a date with a couple of twenty or so other knitters for dinner. So I decided to stay in Stuttgart for the afternoon and visit the Lindenmuseum. I had been there before, back in the days when I still studied cultural anthropology. I found that I already new most of the exhibits but it was very interesting to see how I had changed in the meantime. Ten years ago I was mostly interested in West Africa, and America, this time I spent a lot more time in the Asian part of the exhibition. Also my interest in African musical instruments has waned somewhat and instead I studied every piece of fabric, every garment and every tapestry.

There was a part of the exhibition showing Japanese interiors and tea things that I loved, and then I rounded a corner, saw a big Buddha in the corner, and had to stop myself from bowing before him. That wouldn’t have happened to me ten years ago for sure.

Backnang, the place of the meeting (for once I’m trying to stay on topic here because there will be quite a few knitters interested in this and they won’t be interested in hearing about museums I guess) is very picturesque. I can’t show you, though because as always I didn’t take a lot of pictures.

The hotel was splendid, I had a really nice very big and comfy room, and I didn’t even get back pain after sleeping there. That never happens. When I entered the lift that took me up to my room I already met a woman with big bags of spinning fiber. I looked at her saying, “You’re here for the meeting, aren’t you?” “Yes,” she said, “I went to Wolle Traub today.” I looked into her bag, “That’s Ashland fiber, isn’t it?”. And yet, it was, and yet she didn’t find me peculiar for knowing that.

When we knitters booked the hotel we were said to hear that there was no bar or restaurant to gather in so we decided to have a little party in our rooms. Hence the “pajama party”. In the end the very nice hotel staff put some chairs and tables in the yard for us so we could sit there and chat.

After putting away my mound of luggage I explored the city of Backnang, and totally failed to find any of the important sites for the weekend. That’s what happens when you don’t want to look touristy and refuse to take out your map. You wander around, manage only to find big box stores and buy underwear for your son instead of yarn or something interesting. I also felt a bit lost and therefore phoned my husband who, of course, didn’t hear the phone ring and didn’t answer.

That was the last moment I felt alone, or lost, or lonely for the next days. You know, I often feel a bit weird with my knitting and spinning obsession and I do know that it’s not entirely healthy and a bit out of control but it was very, very nice to be in the company of people who were the same. I found my tribe! Almost 300 people in one spot who all carried gigantic bags with several knitting projects, people who wore wool sweaters, shawls, and socks in weather better suited for short sleeves and bare feet. People who, like me, first looked at your knitted item, asking you about the yarn or the pattern or both, then looked at your button with your ravelry username, and then looked into your face. All of a sudden I wasn’t the only one who lost her train of thought in the middle of a conversation because she wanted to figure out where she had seen the pattern for the sweater the woman on the table next to her was wearing. (By the way, there was a dark haired youngish woman at the Kunberger Aura on Saturday evening who wore an orange cropped cardigan with cabled lapels and hood. She had a red t-shirt underneath. Does anyone know her, and what’s the sweater called, please?) [Edit: And thus is the power of the interwebs and of knitterly friends, Frau Schlamuser just told me that it was Arwen's Cardigan made by Catluzipher. I just knew that I had seen it in Interweave Knits and I was right.]

But back to Friday evening. (I might have to write this in several installments, it’s getting huge.) There were already half a dozen knitters gathered in the hotel lobby when I came down the stairs. One of them was Frau Schlamuser whom I had met a couple of weeks before in Munich. We had decided that it was a bit weird to travel hundreds of kilometers to see each other when we are living next to each other already. There were others that I recognized from their avatars, and/or the user names they had on their buttons. A bit later I had a button of my own and there were quite a few people looking at me saying, “Oh, you’re that creativemother!” knowingly.

We all went to a new restaurant nearby. That restaurant had only just opened, the menu was very short, the waitress was totally new to this, and they all were quite overwhelmed by a group of twenty or more people. We had to wait for our food a long time, it was partially cold, all in all one can only hope that they will get better at this. We did have a lot of fun though:

I’m only showing you some of my pictures because I know that not everyone is comfortable with seeing his or her picture on the internet. So, instead of gathering for our little “party” at nine, as we had planned, we only started that quite a bit later. And when I finally brought my wine and glasses and such, almost no one wanted any more. So after a delightful evening I was stuck with half a bottle of wine left. Oops.

I’m really too lazy to link to everyone I met but it was so nice to see the faces of people I only knew through their forum posts or blogs (and that in my mind’s eye looked like their cats or like a bunch of socks or something because that’s what their avatars look like on ravelry). I also met a lot of people I hadn’t known before. And all of them were nice, and sociable, and fun to talk to.

After all that talking and drinking and eating it got a bit later than I had wanted. I was in full-blown people-and-talking mode but I think I stopped all my story-telling and general talking now and then to see if the people around me looked bored, or wanted to say something too. Most of them weren’t shy themselves so I was cool. All Friday evening (and Sunday) I had to answer the question, “Is that Ishbel?” because I wore my handspun Ishbel that I stil haven’t taken a picture of, and on Saturday I contemplated pinning a note to my shawl saying, “Yes, that’s Wollmeise. Yes, it is a Faroese shawl, the pattern is Irfa’a by Anne Hanson. I’m not sure about the colorway, I think it’s Red Hot Chili.” But then, where else to wear a lace shawl like that but to a knitter’s meeting?

I’ll continue this in part 2.

We rode our bikes, and hiked, and went swimming, and had food from our garden, and made pizza from scratch, and went to Bamberg, and had barbecues, and the weather was fantabulous, and on the days that it wasn’t we sat indoors, making things. As always I haven’t been as productive as I had wanted to, but my piano is all working again (and the sound is much better now, I can’t believe it), and I have knit half an unplanned cardigan.

So, here are a few pictures (Well, quite a lot of pictures but I was amazed at how many things we had done without taking the camera.):

First harvest this year.

Hiking to the Andechs monastery.

Ammersee

Ammersee again (there’s nobody in the picture I know, by the way)

A day later we grilled the fish be bought at the lake, and again some of our own peppers.

We even moved the garden furniture. (And behind the furniture you can see the pots that hold all our tomato, eggplant, pepper, and chili plants. Right before the jungle of zucchini, and beans, and potatoes.)

We made lactose-free pizza from scratch, with spinach,and eggplant from the garden.)

I taught my son how to use a sewing machine, and he made several bags.

I went to the botanical garden.

And it’s hothouses.

We went to Bamberg as every year. (And I have no idea why the weather looks so grey, it really wasn’t.)

My son took a lot of pictures, including this one of me packing.

I read a lot of books, I knit a lot, I spun a lot (and I have to tell you about my new spinning wheel), went to beer gardens a lot, and rode my bike a lot. We’ll be having friends over on the weekend, I’ll prepare my sock knitting class for the German raveler meeting, and will help my husband with his album in the making. He’s been busy recording and mixing for the last few weeks.

Two and a half more weeks to go. We’ve been enjoying our family time so much, I hope we can keep this up when school starts again.

I have been doing things but posting here hasn’t been one of them. I’ve been playing computer games on my ipod, I’ve been ordering and receiving a new spinning wheel, a couple of weeks ago I found out that I probably have ADD, we’ve been making the most of every single non-raining day that we had so far, I found out that not only am I weighing as much again as just after I had the baby (I never was heavier, btw), I’m also completely unfit so that a hike that seemed like a breeze last year left me panting and with sore muscles for days this year (well, I wasn’t panting for days).

I’ve been reading books, watching Torchwood all through for the second time, and Farscape, finished two pair of socks, started two other pairs of socks, frogged back a quarter of an intricate lace shawl only to start something new with the same yarn, decided to also rip back a turtleneck sweater that I’m making (half-finished), decided not to order any books, CDs, DVDs, computer games, yarn, or spinning fiber ’til the end of summer break, only to buy four comics, and another game (it was only 4 Euros I swear).

I have a long list of things I want to do until the middle of September:

• work out again (see above)
• design and knit a lace shawl for a class I’ll be teaching next fall
• install a new version of WordPress on my blog and that of my husband
• sew some pillow cases and coasters
• write a story about summer in the next ten days
• ply the Corriedale I spun up, and spin up some lovely hand-dyed BFL I bought (that’s a sheep breed for those who don’t know, Blue Faced Leicester -I doubt that they really have blue faces, though)
• write at least one blog post about “How to be idle” and “Idle Parenting” – for the record, these books are marvelous and eye opening, and very helpful. Now I feel like a revolutionary instead of a lazy person
• tidy and maybe clean the house so that some flat surfaces will be visible again
• pick up the guitar and play once or twice
• ditto with singing and piano
• have my piano repaired (which means that there won’t be any piano-playing for a week, since parts of it need to be removed)
• go on at least two more hikes
• go swimming with my son often so that maybe he will be able to swim at the end of summer
• go to a party in Bamberg in two weeks
• attend the first German raveler meeting in the middle of September and before that to prepare my class there
• use the hammock and enjoy the garden as often as I can

Right now it’s raining, I have to answer a gazillion e-mails, and phone a handful of people but my son is upstairs with his grandma and my husband is recording bass lines. Oh, I’ll do some singing for him soon, too.

You know why I love vacationing at home? If I were somewhere else right now I’d have to sit in a tiny ugly hotel room with both my husband and son, sitting on uncomfortable beds with nothing to do but wait until it stops raining.

Now I’m a bit more grown-up and living in a different part of Germany where my birthday always happens in the last week before summer break. This year on a Monday. Which somehow feels wrong. At least my morning student moved her lesson (for her own reasons) but in the afternoon I almost had to work from 2 to 8. (I know it’s only 6.45 now, another student had to cancel.)

My new bad habits of not phoning friends, not sending birthday cards, not commenting on blogs, and working all day long means that I haven’t received that many birthday wishes so far. (My father sent an e-mail and I talked to my sister on the phone. Oh, and a cousin of mine sang “Zum Geburtstag viel Glück” on my answering machine. I think I might be ungrateful.)

On the other hand I was woken by my dear son at 7 with the words “Happy birthday Mama!”. I’m still trying to teach him that the “Don’t wake me before 7, please!”-rule does not mean he has to wake me precisely at seven but it was nice nonetheless.

I’m told that he didn’t want to draw me a picture but then he had the idea of giving me a meditation session. We fitted that in somewhere around 12 today, we met in his room with our cushions, and he had organized a candle, and some incense, and had drawn all the curtains. We sat there, the three of us, for a moment of much needed peace.

It had been my husband’s idea to leave our son home from kindergarten today. The two of them went out on their bikes to cut flowers for me. So sweet.

We had cake for breakfast, and went out for Asian food for lunch. I still haven’t had any champagne yet which is a shame but I’ll get to it later, I promise. It’s already cooling in the fridge.

I just looked at the post I wrote last year for my birthday. I wrote that I had been looking longingly at spinning wheels on the internet. Well, guess what I did today? I know, I already have a spinning wheel but I’d like to have a travel wheel. And since I have received generous gifts of money from both my husband and mother-in-law I’m almost halfway there. Of course, being me I’m already planning to order one tomorrow, and then save the money for it later. (The reasoning behind it goes like this: If I take my birthday money, and the money I’ll earn by teaching that one student all through summer break, and the money I put away for the piano, I’ll have enough. And the wheel will be here in time for the next spinning meeting, and I don’t have to pack my wheel into plastic bags again (the other spinners were already laughing at me last time), nor will I have to sew a bag for a wheel that I won’t be lugging around much longer.) Very reasonable, isn’t it?

Apart from those nice little printed pieces of paper in envelopes I also got a heap of books because this time when my parents asked me about what I wanted for my birthday, not only did I say, “You know, I have an Amazon wishlist,” I also added, “Maybe my sister will help you with ordering something.” Because while my father has been having a computer since the late 70s he is still on dial-up and using a browser that doesn’t do java or flash or anything. So my dear sister helped out and I got a lovely package filled with books. I already started reading “How to be Idle” nodding my head at every other paragraph, and reading parts of it aloud to my husband.

When I woke up this morning I planned to write about how crappy the last year has been, how bad I feel about my weight gain (I have an ipod application that tells me I have gained 5.4 kilos in the past year.), and how I’m still tired, and meh, and not making any music or writing stories and such. But now that the day has gone a bit further along I feel much better.

So now (I have taught my last student for today in the meantime, these blog posts sometimes stretch out a bit.) I will go to the kitchen, to my dear family, open that champagne bottle and celebrate a bit. For about half an hour until it’s time for my son to go to bed. And then some more after he has fallen asleep.

I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks now. It’s not that I actually wanted to get rid of my son, it’s just that I imagined an almost three day break from parenting to be quite delightful. And it was.

This time I managed to pack in advance and without stress, I think I’m getting better at this traveling thing. We ended up having to borrow the biggest suitcase my mother-in-law owns for his things. We got a list of things to pack, among them hiking boots, rubber boots, regular shoes, and house slippers. Three times everything and about as many towels as I would pack for the whole family. The list wasn’t unreasonable though, it just took care of possibilities like him getting wet or dirty every day.

When I sent him off on Tuesday I once again was struck by the tendency of modern society to make everything into a huge drama-filled event. Fortunately only one child started crying when entering the bus but there was a lot of forced smiling going on with the mothers. Instead of dropping my son of with his suitcase in tow, like I had imagined, I got to stand around for half an hour. When the bus finally disappeared around the corner I overheard several other mothers talking about how hard it was to let their precious children go away on their own for two nights. And I thought, “Huh?”

Of course it is weird to have him stay away from home without relatives but then I know he’ll have a blast. And while I do miss him I miss him much less than I thought I would. When all the other mothers went away wiping their eyes I put on my ipod and set the music to loud while thinking, “Yeah! I’m free!” There was a swing in my step and it hasn’t really left me since then.

I’m used to not having my son around all the time. He spends his day in kindergarten until 4 in the afternoon, and then he is at his grandmother’s three days a week. And on weekends he frequently sleeps at her place too. So I really didn’t think that I spend much time on caring for my son. Often I only see him shortly before bedtime, and in the mornings for breakfast. So I went on about my day on Tuesday as usual when suddenly after my last student left I realized that, no, I didn’t have to rush off to fetch my son. I could just stay at home, watch the Tour de France on TV and spin. Very relaxing.

In the evening I waited for my husband to finish work before having dinner. We spent a delightful meal talking and eating. Afterwards we did the kitchen and just when I thought, “Oh my, it’s bedtime.” I remembered that it wasn’t that day. Instead we went for a long walk and still had enough of the evening left to watch Torchwood in my case, and obscure bands on youtube in my husband’s. I went to bed at midnight, feeling slightly guilty for staying up late, and then I realized that I didn’t have to get up in the morning. No alarm clock! I just slept in until 8.30, and woke all rested and relaxed.

The next day again there was time for talking with my husband, eating lunch at a leisurely pace, watching a bit of Tour de France and spinning before teaching, and after work, instead of rushing off to fetch my son to put him to bed before having dinner myself I could just play the piano a bit before eating with my husband. (Wednesdays my son stays with his grandmother after kindergarten and I fetch him in time for him to go to bed. In order to get him to bed on time I postpone my own dinner until 8.30 or something. Usually I start getting hungry around 6.)

I got to watch two episodes of Torchwood this time, knitting away, I went to bed at twelve again, and again, I got up in the morning somewhere around 8.30 feeling fresh and well.

I have to say that I’m a bit shocked about the amount of time and energy I have when my son isn’t home. I didn’t know it was that much. I’m also quite shocked at how peaceful I feel without him. Yes, there is someone missing, and I really don’t want him to stay away, only I suddenly find that my life works better without him.

Of course I spent a lot of the past days musing about whether I am a heartless, and unfeeling person. I watched the other mothers when their children left the parking lot. They weren’t looking elated, they were sad. Or maybe they were just putting on an act, driving home in their cars afterwards, closing the doors to their homes, and pulling out the champagne, but I doubt it.

I find that I spend a lot of time thinking about why I don’t feel like people expect me to feel. Like the “they’re growing up so fast”-sentiment. That’s always uttered with a sense of loss. Like Beck did in one of her parenting posts. And I really believe that she – and all the others – are feeling it, and yes, I even can understand the urge to keep my child close, only most of me shrugs her shoulders and says, “So what?” Yes, he’s growing up, yes, he will be going away someday, and you know what? I love it.

I don’t want my son to stay at my side forever because, frankly, he’s got better things to do with his life. And I’ve got better things to do with my life too. Of course I want to stay in his life. It would be very, very sad to have a son who refuses to speak with me when he’s older. I hope that we’ll always love, respect, and cherish each other, and that we will seek each other’s company.

I didn’t quite know if I should write this post. Because in all this you have to keep in mind that if anyone came to take my son away from me I’d probably try to kill him. We’re speaking of my own flesh and blood, about a person I love more than my life. But still, having a break from being a parent feels nice once in a while.

Oh, and the best thing was when about two hours after the children had left I found two calls on my answering machine (we almost never answer the phone). First was a message from a fellow mother saying, “Oh, you’re not home, well since we agreed on calling each other when the children are safely at their destination…” (I didn’t agree on anything, I didn’t know I was supposed to sit next to my phone until someone told me my child had survived a 90 minute road trip.) The next message started with, “Hello, this is Verena from the kindergarten…” and my first thought was, “Oh God, something has happened!” because why would she call me otherwise? Well, she called to say that – the children had evidently survived the trip. Please, I don’t need an hourly update on my child’s status. Really. I’d like to hear from you if something went wrong. When I hear nothing I’ll just assume that he’s alright.

He’s probably having a great time. He’s surrounded by all his friends and teachers he loves, they have been hiking, and playing, and telling stories, and sleeping all in one room in their sleeping bags, and eating delicious food. And as everybody knows, the only thing better than having a nice vacation is coming back to a nice home again. He’ll be back in about three hours. Until then you’ll find me enjoying my time. And then I’ll give my son a great big hug.

Then the lovely Brenda Dayne talked about her quest for self-made jam on her podcast, and I thought I’d rather post this on my blog than jam up her comment-section. I was sure I already had written a post about how we make jam but all I could find were a few pictures of jam-making in a post about my yoga bag. So, this time I hired my husband as a photographer and set out to document our jam making process. It is, by the way, really easy.

The first step, the one that might be a stumbling block for a newbie, is to collect jars. Every time we buy jam, or mustard, or tomato sauce or anything I put the jar and the lid into the dishwasher, and then it goes into a big cardboard box in the basement. We go through a lot of jars here because my mother-in-law makes jam to sell for charity each year. Otherwise we’d have enough jars to store several years worth of jam. If you’re fancy and wading in money you might go and buy jam jars though I can’t tell you where to find some, I only once heard of somebody who did.

Then you pick the berries. In this case we picked almost two pounds of sour cherries that had been quite decimated and damaged by the rain (but this year there weren’t any worms – hurray!), and about three pounds of Josta-berries, a special kind of berry that’s a cross between black currant and gooseberry, excellent for jam. Here is a picture to prove that I actually ventured out in the garden in person:

And these are all of the Jostas that we picked:

We were lucky enough to make it indoors again before the next rain. Also, I have to add that since my mother-in-law is the champion of jam makers we only picked the remnants. After my son had gone to bed I washed and cleaned the fruit. And I borrowed a machine for pitting the cherries. About two hours later I put the cherries (now mostly without stones) in one pot after weighing them, of course, the berries in the other, measured the canning sugar (that’s the important part, you know that sugar with, um, sugar and pectin), stirred everything and went to bed. (Imagine a picture of sugarcoated berries in post here. It was dark, it was ten in the evening and I didn’t take a picture.) The pots are our usual cooking pots, it’s only helpful when they are big so that the jam only fills about half of the pot. But you can do it in a smaller pot if you are careful. Only it’s harder not to spill boiling jam on your stove.

Note that I didn’t cut or mash the fruit in any way, we like our jam with lots of pieces of fruit. Also, traditionally you’d use only the berries juice for jam but my husband likes to have the whole berries in.

The next time you have a bit of time you go down into the basement and fetch the box of jars and the pots of sugary fruit. Then you wash the jars, you rinse the jars (you don’t want to have detergent in your jam, don’t you?), and then you put them into very hot water. That helps with them not exploding when you put the jam in, they are already very warm.

You also need a clean dish towel or two, a wooden spoon, a timer is helpful, and these things (but not the water kettle):

The wooden thing is what we use to mash food; if we had a real masher we’d use that. You bring the fruit and sugar mixture to a boil. When it starts boiling you mash the fruit (see, that saves time in preparation because you don’t have to sit there cutting fruit into pieces for hours). After mashing you let it boil for about four minutes. Then you set up you glasses in a neat row on a towel. You can wet the towel but since our jars just sat in a sink full of water, and we don’t dry them everything’s wet enough. Make sure that you know which lid belongs to which jar. That is essential. Also it’s good to leave a bit of room between the glasses so you don’t knock them over while filling them. There’s no picture of me actually filling the jam in because that’s the very hot phase of jam making. You don’t want it to cool down too much, and so nobody has time to take a picture. But here’s one of the cherries getting warmer (and blurry):

Ladle the hot jam into the bowl (that’s the bowl I use to whip cream. It’s narrow and has a beak (I hope that’s the right word) the bowl you saw in the picture before last, I mean.). Pour the jam into the glasses with the help of a wooden spoon, making sure that there is fruit as well as juice in every jar, and that the tops stay clean because otherwise they won’t close properly. Make them quite full. Then close the lids firmly, and turn them upside down for about ten minutes. (Not much longer because otherwise the jam will be stuck to the lid forever, and forever, and they will be very hard to open later. Ask me how I know this.)

Make your husband clean all utensils, and the kitchen (I had to go and teach a student, I swear), and there it is:

See, easy peasy.

I finally managed to write something by writing a first draft in English. My excuse for being more comfortable with writing in English has always been that I’m more used to it because of the blog and the internet but yesterday as I was scribbling down my draft on a piece of grocery list at midnight I thought again and I think that I take writing in English a bit lighter because it feels like paying with toy money. It feels a bit less real and therefore less threatening.

I told my husband about my feeling that writing in English is a bit less real for me than writing in German (I know it doesn’t feel like that for most of my readers) and he said, “English is your teddy-land!” I don’t know whether you’re familiar with teddy-land, it’s a land that my son invented where all his stuffed animals live. He goes to sleep there because teddy-land is mostly his bed, and my son is emperor of teddy-land.

So, it seems that English is the land where I go to play. I do know that it is a real language and that there are people who speak nothing else but for me it is as if there where teddy-land inside my computer, it’s where all the nice stories and music come from, and they even invented their own language. Plus there are all these nice imaginary people, and there seems to be a lot of knitting and writing in my teddy-land.

Anyways, here is my draft for the short bio:

My name is Susanne. I’m a singing teacher.

I love improvisation which keeps me in the moment, as does mindfulness meditation.

Since I also love to knit I combine the two in mindful knitting.

I told you it was only three sentences. The tricky part was connecting the singing with the knitting, and the meditation.

In German and after several re-writes it turned into:

Mein Name ist Susanne. Ich bin ausgebildete Musikpädagogin und unterrichte seit mehr als zehn Jahren Jazz- und Pop-Gesang.

Mein Interesse gilt dabei besonders dem Bereich der Improvisation, der spontan im Moment entstehenden Musik.

Die Konzentration auf das Jetzt, diesen Moment ist auch das Grundprinzip der Achtsamkeits-Meditation, und dieses Prinzip verbinde ich mit meiner fast lebenslangen Liebe zum Stricken durch “mindful knitting”, Strick-Meditation.

Kreativität hat viele Facetten.

That’s (in toy speak):

My name is Susanne. I am a trained music educator, and have been a singing teacher for jazz and pop for more than ten years.

I’m especially interested in improvisation, spontaneous music made in the moment.

The focus on the now, this moment, is also the guiding principle for mindfulness meditation. I’m combining this principle with my almost life-long love of knitting through “mindful knitting”, knitting meditation.

Creativity has many facets.

See, it turned out to be four sentences in the end.

As for the classes, there will be a lace knitting class (that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?). I probably will be designing a lace scarf pattern for this, one that starts easy and gets more difficult over the six week class. There will be a class called “knitting as a spiritual way” where we will use knitting as a focus for mindful sitting meditation and we’ll think about how knitting connects people, how it tells stories, and such.

And then there will be the most exciting class for me (never mind that I’m making each of these up as I go along) the circle singing. There will be a one-day workshop where we will be making up songs as we go along. If you want to hear this kind of singing, go to the webe3-site, or go and listen to Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesongs-CD . We’ll stand in a circle, and I’ll make up patterns for the others to sing, then we’ll build patterns upon patterns, and in the end there will be music made by all of us together. If the students are able there even might be a bit of soloing.

So, if you’re living next to M.unich I’d love to see you at these classes. I probably will put up a link to them once they are link-able. The knitting classes will start in October and the circle singing will be November 8th.

Seems that there might be a bit more posting in this place now that the procrastination is out of the way…

The reason I haven’t been blogging lately (well, one of the reasons but an important one) is that I am procrastinating. I’m procrastinating writing a short bio about three sentences long. It’s due tomorrow. I think. It was like, “And then could you please send us a short bio, a new picture of yourself, and the rest in the next two weeks, please?” And I, of course, always professional said yes, instead of saying, “I’m sorry but I don’t do bios or advertising for myself. I’m physically unable to do so. The last time took me six months and in the end my husband wrote it for me.

If you’re anything like me now would be the point you were heading over to my “About”-page. Well, that’s something I labored on for two hours calming myself with the thought that I can change it anytime. Which I haven’t because my son is now 6 1/2, not 5 anymore. I’d take those lines to introduce myself but they are not appropriate for the job. I will be teaching classes on circle singing, lace knitting, and knitting meditation (don’t ask) in the fall, and I need something along the lines of “Hello, I’m Susanne, and I’m really nice and warm, and also competent and helpful in all things knitting-singing-improvisation-and-mindfulness-related.”

The procrastination, by the way, spread out into the rest of my life. Household, blog, knitting even, spinning, and some other areas I can’t seem to remember at the moment.

The post I did want to write instead of this one will land on the pile of “posts I will write someday when I have time”. (Right now it’s titled “But everyone drives their kids around all afternoon!”.) It would have been a good one but I couldn’t have done it in the ten minutes I have left until my next student arrives.

So, dear internet, can you think of a short bio for me? And tell me why I thought it might be a good idea to start something new again on top of all the other things I do? Oh, and remind me to tell you how I found out that I have ADD…

(And that line in the header is from a song I started to write some years ago. I didn’t finish it of course.)

On Wednesday we all went to a fabulous concert, WeBe3 at the Unterfahrt. It was my son’s first time ever attending a jazz concert. We didn’t have a babysitter, and since he didn’t have to go to school this week too we decided it might be fun to have him with us for the first part. He behaved marvelous even thought the concert didn’t start until his usual bedtime. At first he was a bit disappointed because he had expected to go to a big concert like the rock concerts he has seen on TV in big stadiums but we were at a nice little jazz club. He was very interested (and well prepared, we had been listening to WEBe3 CDs all day long. At one point he said, “I wish this were on CD, and I could listen to it in my bed.” but he didn’t fall asleep. In the break my husband took him back home, and I got to stay and see the second set as well.

I always feel a bit strange at these concerts. I have been to many WeBe3 and Rhiannon (who is a member of WeBe3) concerts over the years. Just that day I met someone who told me he had attended one of Rhiannon’s workshops 12 years ago. I remember being at that workshop with him, and I doubt that it was my first with her. So, I know the singers on stage very well, and I know about two thirds of the audience as well, since there are a lot of singers who come back again, and again.

I know those singers, and I like them but we only meet for the workshops and concerts. It’s not like we were a community or friends or anything. So I get to experience a very familiar feeling, being part of something, and being apart at the same time.

Everything was wonderful until after the concert when I decided to say hello to Rhiannon because this year I didn’t attend the workshop. I waited and waited, and then waited some more, and then got to say hello, and then waited some more, and then talked some, and waited, until I had missed my train by four minutes. Blah.

That experience, combined with PMS and heavy sleep deprivation because I had been up until half past three, only to be woken up by my son at 8, sent me back to a feeling of not being an artist, and not being a real musician, and that crappy familiar mindset.

I decided to not take those feelings seriously, to just write my story for my writer’s meeting on the same evening. Of course I could have written that story two months ago, or one month ago but, as usual, I chose to procrastinate about it until the very last minute. I wrote about half of the story with gnashing teeth, then I hit a wall, and then I had to leave in order to get to the meeting.

That was one of the most interesting writer’s group meetings ever because besides me nobody else showed up. You can imagine how I felt at first, sitting in a café at a table on the sidewalk, waiting for one of my fellow writers to show up so that I could discuss my writer’s block, and general lack of creativity with them, and waiting, andcursing myself for being too busy to send out my usual “I’m coming who else will be there”-e-mail.

Fortunately I had taken the book “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance” by Julia Cameron with me. I hadn’t want to at first because it’s heavy and I was already running a bit late. In fact I had left home with my hair still damp and no make-up in order to catch my train. I didn’t quite know why I wanted to lug that heavy book around but then I got to read for an hour, and I found myself just a bit more grounded, and a bit more optimistic, and I made a plan.

I decided that each, and every day I’d play the piano for ten minutes before switching on my computer. And I decided to, somehow, find the time to write three pages of longhand on something fictional.

I’ve done that two times already and I can say that: a) I feel much better, b) if I do that I don’t have time for doing something on the computer before three in the afternoon, this will be interesting when tomorrow my regular teaching starts again, c) the story I started for the meeting, and that I had wanted to be about 1,000 words long, now stands at 1,800 and has barely started, and d) I’m really excited, and am looking forward to even doing housework.

So, now I’m praying for the strength and discipline to continue with that. I also tackled things that have been laying around for ages, I have weaved in the ends of two lace shawls, and two pairs of socks, some of them had been laying around, finished, since the beginning of the year. I also finished a pair of socks, and finished spinning the yarn for a cardigan. I had started spinning that in August or September of last year.

And the most startling thing that I have been doing was that I helped my husband with moving and turning the compost yesterday. We worked in the garden, all three of us together. You probably can’t imagine the novelty of that, the last time I did any yard work (and that was before my son was born, mind you) my husband took a picture as proof.

When I can go on like this I will be able to ease myself into a new routine. A much happier routine. Because when I start my day with morning pages, and a bit of exercise (I’ve been doing morning pages and a bit of T-Tapp in the mornings before even getting out of bed for a couple of weeks now.), I can face the rest of the world, and life, and everything much calmer.

Which is a lie because I came home an hour ago, have emptied all the backpacks, and bags (with my husband’s help, of course but not my son’s who declared that he was not in the mood to unpack). Now there is a load of laundry in the washing machine, I have read my most urgent e-mails and am happily sitting here with a functioning internet connection. It turns out my father has been paying for his high speed wire-less internet connection for more than a year without it actually working. Which means that he is still on dial-up because: he needs to clean his office before he can have somebody some over to fix his set-up. He has a working router, a working connection, and a working computer, the only flaw is that they are somehow not talking to each other.

So I have been without blogs, and ravelry, an twitter and DVDs for a whole week, and it hasn’t been too bad.

And now I’m very, very tired, and plan to sit in my own backyard in the hammock with a beer.

But I’ll see you all soon.

At first I was relieved that I had pulled the ads from my website so that I no longer am under the obligation to post two or three times a week, then I was tagged and wanted to do that very much but – I didn’t quite know how, and then – it all became a bit ridiculous.

So I have decided to just post anything to tell the few readers that are still hanging here that I’m still alive, everything is well, I don’t seem to be depressed right now (yay!) and life is good. Only a bit busy. Just a moment ago I counted how many students I have and it’s 33. No wonder I have the feeling of less spare time.

Also I have been going to bed on time almost every day, which is wonderful also but cuts into blogging time even more.

Also I don’t use my wifi anymore but the cable connection which means that I spent quite a bit of time knitting in the sun this weekend, without my computer.

So I leave you with pictures of our Easter breakfast (I know that was weeks ago, see how behind I am), and a promise to post again soon.

You can see that we’re more about the food than the decoration in our house. The stuffed bunny always shares breakfast with us, it’s my son’s favorite toy.

Self-baked lactose-free “Osterzopf”.

Last Saturday, when I went to another “day of mindfulness” I had an epiphany, in fact I had several but I won’t write about them all at once. I hope. The epiphany I had was that mindfulness might be the one thing that will save my life.

It’s no secret that I do have a couple of problems, for example just two days ago I told my husband that I really have a problem with my weight, and he said, “You don’t have a problem with your weight, you do have a problem with your eating habits.” Point taken. I’m dealing with depression again, and with hormones, and with depression triggered by hormones, it’s a bag full of fun here. At least I haven’t had an “overdrive”-episode since I started knitting obsessively again. I think.

The realization that cultivating mindfulness is the key to change my unconscious habits is not a new one for me, I have been knowing that for years now. I also have experienced the benefits of being more mindful. It’s only that with my life so busy I keep forgetting to make that a priority. In the drama of everyday life I keep thinking, “I don’t need to sit today, I’ll do it again tomorrow, and anyway, I already know how to do this.”

Well, as with music, knowing this doesn’t really count, you have to keep practicing. And, like with music, it’s not something that you practice for a while, and then you know how to do it, and that’s it for the rest of your life. You have to go back to it over, and over, and over, and over again.

I’m currently reading“The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness again. And I’m finding it very, very helpful. Now all I have to do is practice.

We all have these things that we think we should be doing more of, or that we want to do more of. I bet that each of you has a list like:

• write more on my blog,
• write more novels,
• write more songs,
• spend more time with my child/children,
• exercise more,
• clean the house more,
• spend more time with my significant other,
• be more happy,
• meditate more often,
• spend more time with friends,
• lose more weight,
• spend more time in the garden,
• finish more projects
• get more sleep

You all know your own “more of”-list.

And now I’m wondering, what is it that I want less of? Because you can’t always put more and more and more into your days. They are quite crowded as they are, aren’t they?

In my case I have this feeling that I already slimmed my life down to the essentials. I can’t really do less. Of course there are quite a few things in there that I don’t like doing but the consequences of not doing them would be quite unpleasant. Taxes, meetings with relatives, kindergarten organizational stuff (I just spent three days looking for my son’s recorder that got lost, for example. Three days of mentally being tied up with a dumb piece of plastic. I’m glad to say that I found it in the end, but still.)

So, most things that I could do less of involve either things that are really necessary, or things that are really pleasant. The only thing I’m sure I want to have less of in my life is procrastination. It takes a lot of my energy and time, and it’s neither pleasant nor necessary. And I might be able to streamline my time at the computer a bit, and my housework and such. But other than that I’m at a loss. I also know that I will be thinking about this for the next few decades so there is no need to rush it.

What’s with you, what do you want more of in your lives, and what do you want less of?

Not even at the computer much, I basically spent my last two days spinning, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I’m waiting for Easter break to feel like days off but I have the faint suspicion that by the time I feel like I had free time it will be over.

Of course I had great plans, I wanted to sing, and play the piano, and write a bit more on my beach story, and tomorrow there will be writer’s group meeting again, I wanted to take a bit of time to think about my life, and what I want to change, and I wanted to write about the epiphany I had on Saturday, but all I find myself doing is things that don’t require me thinking, quiet things, restful things.

In a way I feel like I need a year off from everything but I really hope that I will feel better after a few weeks of sleeping enough and going for walks, and getting into meditation again.

I feel the need to apologize that I don’t read your blogs, or twitters, that I don’t answer letters, or phone calls, or e-mails. That I haven’t opened twitter the whole day.

I also haven’t done the monthly or yearly taxes, haven’t vacuumed or cleaned the bathrooms, I haven’t made the best of fair spring weather, haven’t gotten groceries for Easter, and can’t be bothered to look up the ingredients for our traditional Easter bread.

While I’m tired I have been good with sleeping, every day since April 1st I have slept eight hours or more. Except for the night my son was sick.

Life is good, my son is calming down a bit, my husband is happily recording drums to new songs, and tomorrow we will make pizza from scratch.

So, the only thing I have to show for the past days (and weeks and weeks before) is this:

Now, I understand that not everyone is as book-addicted as I am but slowly I’m starting to see why some of my students (or of the people visiting our home) are asking, “Have you read all of these books?” or “You sure do have a lot of books!” when they enter the room where I teach. This always leaves me confused because, well, the books in my room aren’t really “the books”. Most people who ask me if I have read all of these books are actually looking at the comic section. And yes, I have read all of those.

And this ties in with something I saw on somebody’s blog in 2006, and have been wanting to do every since, taking pictures of the books in the house. Also I will tell you a something about them to add a bit of extra interest. (I looked up what I remembered about that blogger and her blog, and here’s the actual post.)

So we’ll start with the room most of my visitors see first, my own room, the room where I’m teaching, surfing the net, doing my office stuff, write my morning pages, meditate,make music, and spin:

This bookcase is placed behind the door so that students coming to me for the first time don’t really see it. It holds my comics (a lot of DC comics, especially Green Lantern, Bone, Sandman, Blankets, Cages, a jumble of graphic novels and plain superhero comics). On the bottom two shelves are my new age books, astrology, tarot, self-help, Julia Cameron, Feng Shui and my books about writing. On top of this shelf are my knitting and sewing books, and there are also a few books of sheet music crammed in between. (Today, when a package from Amazon arrived, my husband asked me if I had ordered new shelves with them, or better, a new room. Notice that the crafting books are threatening to push the box off the shelf.)

Left of my desk is a bookcase with more “respectable” books:

In the middle of the top shelf are the books I bought but haven’t read yet, a book on html next to one on Buddhism, under that there’s the “biographies and memoirs”-section that holds Rita Mae Brown, Bill Bryson’s books (that I really loved reading but I can’t stand re-reading them, maybe I should get rid of those), artists’ biographies, and much loved, the letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, one of my very favorite authors ever. Anne Modesitt’s book “Knit With Courage” about the year when they found out her husband has cancer, and “Eat, Pray, Love” are obviously the latest additions. I loved them both. And, coming to think of it, I seem to be drawn to memoirs by either artists or people with cancer.

Under that you see miscellaneous music theory textbooks, and remnants of the days when I still was very interested in academic research. Books about Robert Schumann and his wife, books about female composers, about the “Matriarchy Myth”, cutlural anthropology, the almost complete works of Howard S. Becker, books on jazz, music theory, Brazilian music and such.

Of course books aren’t confined to shelves only:

I often have the feeling that this corner of my desk shows my life in one glance. There’s a plastic Buddha next to the phone, a couple of knickknacks, a wooden box that my great-uncle (whom I never met) made for an aunt (whom I never met either because she died of tuberculosis when she was only 20), and that was a cherished possession of my maternal grandmother. The box holds my tarot cards. In the foreground is a pile of official papers, knitting and sewing patterns, magazines and books. There is “The Idle Parent” a book I love with a vengeance, and one of the few books I read in the last months that made me nod my head constantly, and then there’s a book called “Zum Buddha werden in 5 Wochen” (Becoming a Buddha in 5 weeks) that’s probably more of a joke than anything else but it looked entertaining in the book store.

Now to the last bookshelf in my room:

It’s right next to the piano and holds most sheet music, an anatomy book for showing my singing students how their voices work, Tori Amos songbooks, Dresden Dolls songbooks, four or five tomes of Jazz standards (middle shelf), and my practice journals.

(I’m beginning to think I should have made this into a series. I didn’t know I had so much shelves in just one room.)

I’ll spare you a picture of my husband’s books in his teaching room/office/studio but there are about two shelves holding books about music, and musicians there. Also a nice little pile of what he is currently reading.

The next room would be our former guest bedroom. Since we have removed the bed from there, and are using it as a TV room we probably should be calling it a living room, only it’s so small that we don’t even have a sofa in there, only two chairs.

It holds books that don’t fit in anywhere else, like our bibles, the ephemerides, my husband’s astrology books, fairy tales, children’s books that we don’t want to get rid of, things like that. Under that bookcase is a table that has my knitting basket and a pile of my son’s books that I don’t want to get rid of yet but they don’t have a place either. Books in transition:

Now we enter the old part of the house, the room that once was our living room, and will be again some day, but for now it’s my son’s room. Where we also cook on the wood stove, dry laundry, and keep most of our books:

First, the actual in-use children’s books. There is a very good series of non-fiction books called “Wieso? Weshalb? Warum?” about the usual topics, dinosaurs, Native Americans, space, the earth, numbers, letters, and such. There are a few treasured stories, classics like “Pippi Longstocking”, or newer ones like the “Drache Kokosnuss” (Dragon Coconut) series. The lower left shelf holds the books we got from the library.

This one mostly holds my husband’s older books. The complete works of Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Adorno, Benjamin, Trakl, some Proust, a lot of philosophy books. On the top shelves are our art books, most of those also belong to my husband. The thing above the tea kettle is our encyclopedia, by the way, my husband gave it to me as a birthday present, and it has got art by Udo Lindenberg, a German musician. the art is a bit weird, and I have frequently found myself in a position to explain to my son why there are aliens, and nuns, the devil and all these women without much clothes on there. That’s what you get when you keep pulling out the encyclopedia to look things up all the time, I guess.

Next you see the “wall of books”:

This is where I keep my “real books”. (There’s also a guitar, I know. I could easily have done a post on “guitars around the house, too. this one belongs to my son. No, he can’t play it.)

Top left is fiction. In alphabetical order you’ll find authors like: Rita Mae Brown, John Irving, Tom Robbins, and a few others that I don’t remember at the moment. (In case you’re wondering, I did start to read “Ulysses”, and rather liked it but then I lost the groove and never finished it.) Under that are two shelves of detective stories, again Rita Mae Brown, Amanda Cross, Diane Mott Davidson, and my all-time favorite Dorothy L. Sayers. If I ever get rich I’ll buy all her novels again, this time in English. I only own the German translations to most of them because I started reading her when I was 12 or so. Recently I bought all the Miss Marple-stories, those are the fat books lying on top of the others. (Maybe I really should stop buying books.) Under that are spy thrillers. I especially cherish the original James Bond novels (which I can’t seem to find in English, what a pity, so I have to content myself with translations) and the “Modesty Blaise”-series which I can’t seem to find in English either. Weird.

The lowest shelf holds all of the cookbooks we use. There are more in a box in the garage but these are the ones we’re using. We’d still like to have one on Chinese cooking but we don’t really cook much from recipes. Mostly it’s my husband starting out with whatever I brought home, and a vision. He’s a fabulous cook. Mostly we pull them out on Sundays and drool over the pictures.

The middle and right bookcases hold all of my science fiction and fantasy novels: Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Alan Dean Foster, Neil Gaiman, Robert A. Heinlein, Terry Pratchett (a lot of Terry Pratchett, in hardcover), J. K. Rowling, Stephen Donaldson, Cailín Kiernan, Tad Williams, a bit of Marion Zimmer Bradley, and then the poetry section. Emily Dickinson, Wilhem Busch (not exactly poetry but it rhymes), Christian Morgenstern, I’m not much of a poetry reader.

Then there’s another shelf of comics, mostly Ralf König, and some indie comics from the 80s, a shelf of self-help, and medicine books, books about weight loss and such, and on the top most shelf that you can barely see, the parenting books.

Next room: the kitchen. You might ask why we have books in the kitchen (and those aren’t cook books). Well, there’s this:

And this:

The magazine rack is for storing current reading, magazines and books, and I installed it to prevent the kitchen bench to look like the picture above. It looks untidy and things keep falling off the bench. Mostly through the crack where you can’t retrieve them without crawling under the table, and contorting yourself, and getting dust all over you and the books.

In theory each family member has a place for his or her stuff on the rack. As you might have thought, the top rack is mine. There you’ll find: “The Writing Diet”, “The Mindful Way Through Depression”, “Was glückliche Paare richtig machen” (What happy couples are doing right), and “Outsmarting the Midlife Fat Cell”. All of those have bookmarks in them which means that I’m in the process of reading or re-reading them. All of them haven’t been opened in weeks, too. None of them has been returned to it’s proper place because I still think they’ll help me. (Come to think of it I could really put the marriage book away. I read it through and it did help.)

The books I am currently reading are laying around on the kitchen bench. You can’t see them properly because I opted for realistic shots but there is “Drawing With Children” which I love, “No Idle Hands” a history of hand knitting in the US, “Custom Knits” which arrived today, and I already love it, and “The Creative Family” which I pulled out because I wanted to show my son what children are able to sew and make. There’s also a spinning magazine, and knitting bags.

Now we are going down into the basement:

Travel guides. I threw most of them away because the information in them gets dated. Also I doubt that I will be going back to places I already visited anytime soon. You can tell that we aren’t big on traveling.

More ethnology and cultural anthropology, and music education, and sheet music, and books on African and Brazilian and Indian music. Both my husband’s and mine. Also all the papers I wrote in university.

And books about teaching music, “Mr. Nice”, and back issues of “Gitarre & Bass”, a guitar magazine my husband has been reading and collecting for decades now. We shouldn’t be storing these down here because the basement gets very damp in summer. All the books down here have a musty smell, and if you put anything on the floor it will get moldy. But as you can see for yourself, we’re running out of storage space here. And I’m actually going through the books at least once a year, and give some away.

As I said before there are still boxes of books in the garage (books that we don’t really use anymore but do want to keep anyway), boxes in the attic (books that I once wanted to sell but never got around to).

If you’re still with me you might be wondering about the books in the bedroom. And I thought to myself that there aren’t any books in the bedroom because I gave up reading in bed some time ago. When I do read in bed I’m always staying up too long, but then I remembered, and I had to get back and take yet another picture:

This once was the place I kept the diapers, and my son’s clothes. Now it holds dictionaries. And the hand-dyed sock yarn. There’s a French dictionary, and Italian one, several German ones, a book of names, some grammar books, two Portuguese dictionaries, and two etymologies. By the way, which English etymological dictionary would you get? Or would you look on-line? We have two german ones, and I’m not really happy with those. I always have the same problem with dictionaries and encyclopedias, they are too small, and don’t hold the things I’m looking for.

On the other hand I might have just enough books for the moment…

I also distinctly remember that the reason for me to move my blog from blogger to my own domain was that blogger no longer allowed me to play my music on my blog because it didn’t accept the code for the player anymore.

So, since music seems to be so important to me, why is it that I don’t make more of it, and don’t post any of it on my blog?

At first I thought I was lazy. And that I’m fooling myself by telling me that I want to be a musician when I grow up. Then there was this day, two weeks ago, when I suddenly felt a bit better than the months before – you know, with the on-going flu – and I sat down and played my piano and sang, and improvised a bit. Something I hadn’t done in months. I did sit down and play during those months but always other people’s songs. Never my own thing.

And then it hit me: I hadn’t been lazy. I had been in constant turmoil, health crisis after parenting crisis, after another. Since fall. It hit me that I took one of the first moments I had, a moment when I felt a bit more myself, and I sat down and made myself some music.

Of course I only sat down twice since then but there might be more space for that in the near future. I hope.

I’m not quite ready to record anything yet, at the moment I feel like someone who hasn’t rode her bicycle all winter long, and now it’s the first time she gets up again. All wobbly and insecure. Nevertheless.

For those of you interested in my music, however little there is, these are the posts where you can hear me sing.

I know that I have subscribed to too many blogs, I really know, only I don’t know which to unsubscribe from.

This week was supposed to be a week of rest after months of sickness, and hectic life. It’s carnival break after all. Well, it started with – yet another bout of sickness which was thankfully brief, and now I find myself sitting lethargically at the kitchen table, knitting frantically without much enjoyment, drinking tea or beer, reading a book that I don’t particularly like, while the dirty dishes are staring at me, and dust bunnies accumulate in the corners.

Family life at the moment consists mostly of me and my son fighting over things like putting on clothes, or going to sleep. He isn’t good with transitions (is there anyone who is good with transitions?), I know that. But it’s really no fun that getting him to change his clothes is a 30 minute drama twice a day, complete with yelling, tears, howling, and tantrums.

I am a teacher, I know my pedagogy, and I have tried all the tricks and strategies I know. I have given up, sometimes, and dressed him myself only to have him yell at me because he wanted to do something else instead. I have tried the “do what you want, if you’re still in your pajamas by 8.15 you’ll wear those to kindergarten”-approach only to have a howling 6-year-old scrambling into his clothes at the last minute. Sometimes he has to go without breakfast because of the dressing debacle but he never went without his pants.

We have the same sort of conflict in the evening. Asking him to put on his pajamas, or any clothes results in him pulling down his pants, and then standing there staring into space for the next twenty minutes or so. The funny thing is that I remember being the same as a child, only I don’t remember any conflict. I remember that in third grade I realized that it often took me so long to put on my socks that my feet were ice-cold by the time I got around to it. Also I finally realized that taking such a long time to dress made me late for breakfast, and then I decided to learn how to dress myself faster.

So I totally understand having difficulties with transitions, and being slow in things like dressing, only the transitions don’t get easier by procrastination, they get harder, and more hectic. When, for a short time, using a timer my son had to beat was an effective method to remind him about the passage of time while dressing oneself, we found that it took him less than six minutes to dress himself. On any given day it takes him between 20 and 30 minutes while two adults nag him, and he whines, and we all get angrier by the second.

The other thing is his falling asleep, or better, his lack of falling asleep. Sleep has always been an issue with him. But there have been times when we could tuck him in, turn off the light in his room (not in the corridor, never in the corridor, and the door has to remain open), and go off to watch TV, or play music, or talk, or read blogs. Not anymore. For months at least somebody had to sit in the kitchen until he fell asleep. Which may take more than an hour. With him getting out of bed just when you thought he’d surely be asleep, asking you something, and then needing you to guide him back to bed because he is afraid to go back into his room even though the light on his nightstand is on.

To minimize anger throughout our family we devised a new tactic yesterday: I’m helping to put our son to bed but my husband will be the one sitting in the kitchen. So that I have the feeling of not being on duty 24/7. We only remind him once about changing into his pajamas, and such, and then he’s on his own. When he isn’t into his pajamas by 7.50 there will be no story-reading. Likewise I talked to him yesterday, and reminded him of the conflicts we used to have about washing hands before meals. At some point he just gave in, realizing (with a bit of help) that we always insist on washing the hands, and that if he just did it life became much more pleasant. I made a deal with him about the dressing and undressing. In the mornings my husband will stay in bed until we are finished with breakfast. He’s not a morning person, and having to eat breakfast while two people yell at each other ruins the day more effectively for him than for any of us. So he gets to stay in bed a little longer, and I get evenings off.

This morning my son fetched his clothes, and dressed himself without any conflict whatsoever. It took him 11 minutes. I felt an intense happiness. Until we started to fight about the “cutting of the fingernails because of recorder lessons” half an hour later.

Yesterday evening, by the way, ended with my son falling asleep next to my husband in our bed while watching soccer an hour after his bedtime. We’re working on it.

You might think that he needs less sleep, and that’s the reason why he can’t fall asleep but against that stands that a) he falls asleep in about 5 minutes when he’s sleeping in our bed, and b) on weekends he always sleeps at least half an hour longer than on weekdays even though he goes to bed at the same time.

Life’s not all confusion and conflict, though, on Tuesday I met a friend and we went to this very special sauna. It was very nice to meet my friend again, since we hadn’t seen each other for months, and the sauna was very relaxing.

I also finished a lot of knitting which I will get around to show you eventually, and finishing means that I can start new things. I made a hat, finished a shawl, a beret, a pair of mittens which make me very proud because I learned how to do two-handed stranded knitting for them, and two pairs of socks. Oh, and a cardigan.

And who knows, maybe my son will learn to dress himself without drama like he learned to wash his hands without drama. He’s an intelligent chap, he’ll figure it out eventually.

What are your middle names?

My middle name is Ursula. My husband doesn’t have one.

How long have you been together?

It will be 15 years on May 1st.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?

Define dating, please. We first met on April 12th 1994 when he played a gig with a friend of mine. That friend had told me about this great musician he played with and I wanted to see them. A week later we met for a walk, and talked and walked until late in the evening. On April 31st he invited me to his apartment for pizza. Fresh pizza from scratch.

(I asked my husband to read this before publishing, and he said that he wanted it to be made clear that we didn’t need something as formal as a “first date” because everything with us was just flowing naturally together. Also going for walks, talking for hours on end, cooking and eating are completely typical and fitting activities for us.)

Who asked whom out?

As is often the case with my husband and me, it was hard to tell. We just agreed that we liked each other and that we wanted to go dancing one day. He gave me his card, and I said, “I won’t phone you, you have to phone me!” because I am too shy to phone people I don’t really know. He was taken aback but took a beer mat I had written my phone number on. As a revenge he waited two days before calling me. The beer mat still lives with our honored keepsakes.

How old are each of you?

I’m 41, my husband is 48.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

His because his brother lives nearby.

Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple?

Everyday life with housework and parenting. We do better in almost every other situation.

Did you go to the same school?

No.

Are you from the same home town?

No. I moved here almost 23 years ago to go to university.

Who is smarter?

Huh? I can’t really say.

Who is the most sensitive?

Him. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

Since my husband has found out that he is lactose intolerant we have mostly been going to the nearby Asian restaurant. Before that it was the nearby Indian restaurant which, sadly, closed some time ago.

Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple?

Brazil, where we spent two months in 1999.

Who has the craziest exes?

Huh? I can’t really say.

Who has the worst temper?

Me. It doesn’t take much to make me explode. Which isn’t to say that my husband doesn’t have a temper.

Who does the cooking?

Mostly him. Which isn’t to say that I can’t or won’t cook.

Who is the neat-freak?

Him more than me but I won’t call any of us a neat-freak.

Who is more stubborn?

Definitely both of us.

Who hogs the bed?

Since we have a nice big German bed with two mattresses and two duvets nobody has to hog anything.

Who wakes up earlier?

The alarm goes off for all of us at the same time.

Where was your first date?

Since I don’t really know what to count our “first date” I’d say either all over Munich, or at his home.

Who is more jealous?

Jealous?

How long did it take to get serious?

Um, after the pizza we went for a walk, and then I stayed for breakfast.

Who eats more?

Can’t say.

Who does the laundry?

Both of us. Mostly it’s him putting the laundry in the machine, both of us hanging it up, and me folding it.

Who’s better with the computer?

Me. I started working with computers in 1979, he started after we met.

Who drives when you are together?

Him. We both don’t like to drive but he is a more competent driver than me.

My husband has been fighting the flu with a vengeance, and successfully, until last night. Now he’s the one spending the day in bed, which I did yesterday. While I feel much, much better today, I still would like to spend a bit of time in bed today for recovery purposes. Which I will, just after I have cleaned up the kitchen, done the monthly taxes, and have written this post.

My son is the one who feels worst right now. After a week of flu, fever, coughing, not being able to sleep because of coughing, and then finally feeling just a tiny bit better on Thursday; he has been feeling worse again. Starting Friday afternoon, of course, when all doctors are closed.

After a bit of debate my husband and I diagnosed him with a secondary bacterial infection and gave him a bit of penicillin that we have had around. So far it’s not working. It will be big fun when, on Monday, I take him to the doctor again and tell that I thought it was a good idea at the time. (Don’t worry, we’re not foolish, it’s a completely new and unopened bottle of children’s penicillin, still fresh, and there’s enough to give it to him for five days. Chances are that the doctor would have given some to him anyway, only I think it should be working faster.)

Also, my father comes to stay overnight tonight. I’m still contemplating how to make him comfortable while avoiding actual contact. I don’t want him to get sick too. My mother-in-law offered to have him sleep in her guest room. Maybe that’s the best solution.

And? Thank God my mother-in-law is still feeling well because she has to babysit again next week.

I didn’t want to sound all whiny, this is just to tell you why I have been almost incommunicado for the past days. I hope to be well again tomorrow or the day after, and will send both my son and husband to the doctor tomorrow morning.

• I spent the whole weekend dreading the dolphin costume (you know, the one I’m making for my son for carnival), and then cutting and sewing. The good news is that the body of the costume is done, and it looks great so far (after I had erringly sewn the dolphin’s back fin to the inside). The bad news: I still don’t know how I will make the head, I’ll figure that out next weekend.
• just when I had the feeling of almost recovered health my son has a cold – again – with fever and everything.
• my son having a fever equals him sleeping next to me, or rather him tossing and turning, and rousing me about every fifteen minutes (no kidding) by tickling my nose and asking, “Can we get up now?”
• after the second night of this I was a bit, um, irritated today; also I can’t seem to stop eating
• the Finanzamt send me a letter claiming that I hadn’t paid my tax for December, and it turns out that I indeed did pay it but I, myself, was stupid enough to label it “January 09″; argh. Of course something like this has to come up now of all times, not last week or the week before – and of course they can’t just think about it for a bit like “Why is she sending this in when a) she hasn’t paid for the month before, and b) the month she is paying for isn’t over yet?”; I know there aren’t many people who get paid to think on their job
• for once I wanted to get grip on my monthly story deadline, so I had planned to write my monthly story – which is due next Thursday – today; then all of a sudden I was on 24/7 mommy duty (on the other hand I get to write this because my mother-in-law is having my son right now)
• while having a sick child is bad for things like blogging, writing, and making music it’s really good for knitting; I’m finishing things right and left
• at least I’m really happy that I had the brilliant idea that I can watch DVDs on my laptop in the evenings while I’m waiting for my son to fall asleep; he falls asleep earlier because he knows I’ll be there for a while, and I don’t have the feeling of being on the job forever; also I can watch two episodes of Farscape at night instead of just one
• now I have to sign off because I have an unexpected feverish kindergartener sitting on my lap.

See you in a few days, I hope. How are you?

I started the whole thing almost a week before by buying all the ingredients. I found a recipe online (only German, sorry), and substituted the whipping cream with lactose-free whipping cream, and the chocolate with yummy dark chocolate that has no milk in it either.

I was completely nervous beforehand because I never made a cake like this in my life. I started on Sunday (after my son had gone to bed) and made this:

My cookbook was not entirely helpful with this because it said to bake it until it felt like “cotton wool”. When I first pulled it out of the oven it did feel right but further probing with a toothpick revealed that the insides were still liquid, so I put it back, and the next time I looked it was starting to turn too dark.

The next day I cut the cake into three layers by means of sewing thread, borrowed some equipment from my mother-in-law, and went looking for the rest of my baking equipment in the basement. At about six in the evening I had this:

After whipping enormous amounts of cream, dumping one layer crosswise onto the other, smearing the whole kitchen with cream, and another hour of work the cake finally was done. The next morning we ate some of it for breakfast. It tasted delicious, and my mother-in-law has declared it to be “better than store-bought”. Ha!

I’m happy that this went so well, even if it was a bit wonky, but then it’s a cake, not a sculpture. My husband was duly moved and said that it was one of his very favorite birthday presents. I also gave him a knitted hat with the needles still in it ( a very traditional gift), and a set of Monty Python movies to take his mind off the unfinished hat, and he liked those too.

I only fear that I might have started a tradition of handmade birthday cakes around here…

It all began last Thursday, when I realized that since my husband, who is lactose-intolerant, seems to be okay with lactose-free butter, cream cheese, and such I would be able to make a lactose-free Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (“Black Forest Cherry Cake”, I assume) for his upcoming birthday. I have never done such an elaborate cake (three layers, lots of whipping cream, chocolate batter, cherries, and decorating) in my life. So I had to make it into a project, complete with research, lists, the purchase of supplies, and a timetable to get it ready on time.

Then, on the same day, my mother-in-law approached me with a newspaper clipping of a fabric sale. Because my son had told her that he wanted to have a dolphin costume for carnival. Um. I really had hoped he had forgotten. I have tried to steer him towards nice pirate costumes, and books, and stories for months now, to no avail. Because the moment somebody told him the motto of this year’s kindergarten carnival party (above and under the sea) he wanted to be a dolphin. Now I’m stuck with the task of constructing, and sewing a dolphin costume. I thought I had found a clever way to make it easy when I found a how-to in a blog, but that costume was immediately rejected by my picky son. He wants one that looks like this. Which is for adults, has fans and ventilation and costs somewhat about 1,000€.

I spent most of Saturday researching dolphin costumes, thinking about construction, picking out fabric, and ordering some. Both my son and my husband told me they’d help with this but then, none of them can sew.

The third project was another upcoming family event. We have been invited to celebrate the birthdays of my husband uncle and aunt with them This shouldn’t be a problem at all, only I found myself worrying about every aspect of the whole thing on and off. What to wear? Will we go by train or car? (They’re living a little more than 100 km away.) When we go by train, how long would that take? Would they have room enough to take all four of us in their car from the station? How will the weather be? They are living in a place where people go to have skiing vacations. Our car isn’t exactly up to that. When we go by train how will we take the car seat with us? And on and on.

For once I decided to accept that I am a person who will worry about these things way too early. That telling myself not to worry doesn’t work. So I sat down, researched timetables, routes, printed out maps, ordered a lighter car seat for our son, discussed everything with both my husband and my mother-in-law, and now I’m set. I asked my mother-in-law to ask her brother-in-law if his car is big enough, and otherwise to please ask her other son if they could pick up one of us at the train station. Now I’m much more at peace with the whole thing, I have done all I can, for now.

I thought these projects were enough but then I got an invitation on ravelry to join a group planning the first ever German raveler meeting. I looked at it, and I could go because it’s the last weekend of summer vacation. Then I took a look at the workshops they offer. I wasn’t interested much. Then I saw that they are still looking for people to lead various workshops. And then I volunteered to hold one on sock construction according to Cat Bordhi. Then I started worrying again. Trains, hotels, workshops, what to wear (it’s in September, mind you). How to do the workshop. I even started mapping out a plan for the workshop, and again I found that I probably will continue doing this over and over again, until I write it down. So, today I might be doing just that. Sit down and plan a workshop I’ll be giving in September.

Seriously, my brain feels like it’s bursting. I’m longing for the promise of “mind like water” but I’m doubtful if I can achieve that in any amount of time. Everywhere I look in this house there is something screaming “do me!”, “clean me!”, “put me away!”. We’re slowly getting there but then there’s still the other things I already started like: the knitting projects currently on the needles, the knitting projects I just ordered the yarn for, the stories I started writing that aren’t finished yet, the finished knitting that still needs taking pictures of it, the 1,047 things I have to remember, people I have to call, e-mails I have to write. Things like “fill out this slip and bring it to kindergarten on Thursday”, “ask so-and-so about this”, “remind so-and-so of that”, buy this, take that away, go there, do this, and don’t forget anything.

It’s not so much about time management, it’s about brain management, and about emotions management. I have written about this in a post titled “How to be creative when you don’t have the time (part 3)“. Time to revisit myself maybe.

When I took the test it also said that:
0% of the 36086 people who have taken this quiz are like you.

Get that: no one out of 36,086 who have taken the quiz is like me. I wonder what my husband’s results would be…

The holidays also weren’t the problem when on Christmas day we decided to have goose leg with red cabbage and my husband said that we needed to have potato dumplings with that. I keep forgetting because in the Northern part of Germany where I grew up people don’t eat dumplings much. Usually when we make dumplings we buy them almost finished, you just have to boil them, but this time I had to try and make potato dumplings from scratch. They didn’t taste that awful but the next time I try this I will put more flour in so that they actually stay dumpling shaped when cooked.

I don’t exactly know why but this year’s Advent was the most stressful I ever had. First there was my husband’s pneumonia which left him weak for weeks. Since he didn’t have a fever, and since my son and I had been coughing for weeks too we thought he just had a bad cough, and he didn’t went to see the doctor until just before Christmas. Of course he didn’t stop teaching (that’s the joy of being self-employed, you never stop working if you can stay upright, and still possess all your limbs). While my husband was mostly out of commission my son had the ongoing waxing and waning coughing-sneezing-tummy aching-fever having-malady. That added a bit of excitement to the last two weeks before Christmas because we never knew if he would be fit to go to the kindergarten Christmas thing, where the children did a play, or his own birthday party.

I didn’t feel that well myself, I had been coughing for six weeks at that point, and just when I felt almost human again (and hoped to maybe be able to sing again some time in the future) I got the next cold. On top of that I had to be Santa’s little helper and organized all the presents we gave anybody for Christmas, and all the presents anybody gave my son for his birthday and Christmas. I also wrapped them all, baked three batches of cupcakes, and organized my son’s birthday party which left me totally drained after having spent the entire afternoon thinking that now I knew why everybody always tells me that my son is so well-behaved and quiet – it’s the truth. And that doesn’t mean that my son really is that quiet, it’s only that all the other children are less well-behaved and much, much louder.

The party seems to have been a success with everybody, except for me and my son who told me that he doesn’t want to have a party next year. He was suffering from the noise and chaos almost as much as me.

I can tell that I was stressed out beyond what I’m used to at this time of year by the fact that my period was ten days late, something that never ever happened before. (No, never, not even when I got pregnant.) Of course that just added another layer of stress to these days, the whole panicking if I could be pregnant in spite of birth control, the buying of pregnancy tests, and the wondering if the tests could be wrongly negative, or what I should do if I were pregnant. So that in he midst of thinking about what games to play with my son’s friends I wondered if I knew anybody who wanted to get rid of their baby stuff, and whether my marriage would survive a second child.

As I said before, I’m not really sure what stressed me out so much but I think that it might have been the sheer amount of tiny organizational detail. I promise that I haven’t been a perfectionist about Christmas. This year I didn’t even put up the Advent decorations. I didn’t bake Christmas cookies.

The only things I might do better next year is:

• Next year when I order my son’s presents in mid-October I’ll wrap them right away.
• Instead of baking the cupcakes four to five days in advance and freezing them I will bake them at the beginning of November.
• I will buy the special birthday candles sometime in January and put them away for next year.
• I won’t volunteer to play guitar at the Christmas party. (That was my way of avoiding to have to act in the play the parents did for the children. Instead of meeting with the other parents three or four times I only had to play the songs through once before the event.)
• I will make an appointment for my husband to get a flu shot in September.
• I hereby give up the notion of baking Christmas cookies. Not even the ones I bought all the ingredients for in December 2007.
• I will make hair dresser and beautician appointments in November.
• I will make a list of games to play, and what to do at my son’s birthday party in November too.

Since Christmas I have been sitting and recuperating. At first I was at a point where I was too tired to knit but since the weekend I have been improving, started a new intricate shawl project, and might even do some housework. (Well, I already cleaned a bathroom for the first time in ages but I have great hopes for the future.)
I still don’t have to teach until next week so I hope to get some time for contemplation. I hope your holidays were peaceful and happy.

(I just re-read my list of things to do next year, and you know what that list means? It means I will have both a stressful November and December. Or maybe not. I’ll give it a try anyways.)

As usual with these things I was very nervous beforehand, and also couldn’t stop thinking about what to wear. As usual I wore the same thing I always wear, in this case the new turtleneck I had made (sorry, still no pictures), jeans, and boots. And lipstick. And perfume. Also, as usual I left home way too early because every time I ask my mother-in-law to look after my son for something in the evening I feel weird staying at home after she fetched him from kindergarten at 4 p.m. It is as if everybody is just waiting for me to leave.

I had vague plans to sit in a café and write a bit but ended up wandering the streets until I was only half an hour too early for the meeting. The cafè/bar/bistro where we were supposed to meet is located in a part of town where I only have been once before (for a job interview 18 years ago; I didn’t get the job and was glad about it). I left the subway station and immediately was confused about where to go. Interestingly the house numbers weren’t progressing in any logical way. So I went first in one direction only to end up in a place that didn’t look like there would be a café, and when I turned back to look elsewhere there was Frau Kaltmamsell walking in the direction I had just abandoned. I wasn’t entirely sure if it really was her (what if I had approached a total stranger asking “Are you Frau Kaltmamsell?”) so I chickened out and let her pass me, only to follow her. Because that’s entirely not weird, letting strangers pass, and then follow them, ahem. At the next corner she came to the same conclusion I had reached before her, that this was the wrong direction, and turned around. I think you would be proud of me because at this point I approached her saying; “I’m Susanne.” I’m still happy that it really was her. So both of us looked for the café and found it in the direction I would have looked first if I hadn’t been so concerned with street numbers.

(If you wonder why I knew her but she didn’t know me, I happened to attend two blog readings where she read something. Usually it’s easier for someone in the audience to recognize a speaker on the podium than the other way around.)

The bistro/café thing was medium nice, we only chose it because it was near the hotel were the bloggers from Berlin stayed. There were seven of us: Frau Kaltmamsell, Creezy and Wolf from Berlin, Sabine, Nicole, and Volker (sadly without public blog as far as I can see). We talked and talked and talked until Nicole reminded us that some people have to get up in the morning (well, me too but then I’m used to sleep deprivation by now).

We talked about the difference between German and English-speaking blogs (Germans comment less and think they are very clever, English-speaking bloggers comment more, mostly “Awesome!”), between Munich and Berlin bloggers (there is no blogger community in Munich), language (why you shouldn’t say “Pölter” when speaking to a Bavarian (Pölter is Westphalian and means nightgown), wine (there is Chinese wine, apparently, and it’s good, only I didn’t catch its name because at that moment my beer arrived and there was no more wine talk (I was the only one drinking beer, by the way)). It was a very nice evening, all in all. I might have talked a little too much but then I always do, there seems to be no way around it. (As you might already have noticed.)

So, I went to the blogger meeting, and had a lot of fun (and will write something about it soon), and since then I have been a bit overwhelmed by real life.

I just wanted to add that you should please send me your links for the Just Post roundtable but then I realized that the deadline was yesterday. Oops. If you have a link to an interesting post you wrote or read, though, I’m sure we’ll be able to squeeze it in anyhow.

1. Link to the person who tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Write six random things about yourself.

4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.

5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, I’ve followed rule 1 and 2 already. So far so good. (Ha! I’ve managed to use the word “so” three times in two sentences without making it extremely awkward!) I had a feeling that I already have done some “random things about me”-posts, and a quick search tells me there seems to be a “random things about me”-inflation going on because it was 8 random things about me in August 2007, and 7 random things about me in December 2007. Now it’s only six. And I always love reading what people are writing about