for Wordless Wednesday, the pattern is Elijah by Ysolda
Jan 162008
Nov 252007
because the craziness of National Novel Writing Month is over.
At least for me:
And this is what a NaNo winner looks like after writing 8,413 words in two days. And yes, I didn’t even put in my contacts today.
The exceptional panic that is speed novel-writing is over. I will now return to my family to celebrate. We have had a bottle of champagne in the fridge especially for this for days.
Normal panic mode will be resumed in short order. I may even read the 150 unread blog posts in my feed reader. Or sleep, who knows.
To all of you who still are in the grip of NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo: I’m cheering you on. Keep going!
Nov 212007
Nov 062007
Well, I already feel very geeky having gotten my very own domain and server space and having installed my blog all on my own. (Interestingly this feels more geeky than having installed my husband’s blog. Weird.) Also for my birthday I got a couple of ThinkGeek tees and how much geekier can you get than that. I have been running around in t-shirts with jokes I had to explain to everyone by the way. And then they didn’t get them anyway. Jokes like, “There are 10 types of people in the world…” But maybe one only gets this when a) being involved with computer programming and b) having started working with computers at a time when everyone had to learn binary.
To prove my geekiness I can proudly tell you that I almost had followed a career as a computer programmer. Really. Just when I had earned my MA in music education I was offered a job as a programmer. I chose to become a college professor instead and, well, that didn’t work out as planned.
But. Geekiness:
My beloved PDA had shown signs of heart battery failure for some time. It started about a year ago but with a hard reset (and the loss of all my financial data) his health was restored if not to its old height then surely to an adequate level. A couple of weeks ago it started again. I had to recharge it once or twice a day. Well, I knew what to do, hard reset again (this means wiping the whole hard drive of the PDA and restoring all programs and data), but – nada. The problem persisted.
I talked to one of my students about it, a teenager who collects PDAs and small computers and who put a screwdriver to his sparkly new cell phone, and he told me to change the battery. Easy option one would think but, to be frank, one not encouraged by the manufacturer of that PDA. He advises you if ever your battery should be faulty you should send the PDA to the company to get a replacement. That would have been an option if it hadn’t involved a) being without my PDA for days, maybe weeks, and b) paying at least half of the price of a new PDA.
I would have opted for buying a new PDA but then they aren’t cheap and the new ones don’t come with cameras or microphones. Well, to cut a long story short (and you thought I couldn’t do that), I ordered a new battery and – tada! – put it in my PDA, and – tada again! – it still works beautifully.It was all very exciting. First I had to wait for the battery for ages. Long enough for the original battery to fail completely so that I lost ten days worth of data. (Always do backups, always do backups, especially if you already know that your machine is having battery problems.) Thankfully it was a slow week and the main thing I lost was the record of how much I weighed that week. Because I weigh myself daily and put the weight into my PDA which then shows me a little graph. It had been going up anyway and so I didn’t care that it was lost.
When I wrote an e-mail to inquire about my battery I found out that while they had recorded both my order and my payment the had then mysteriously failed to connect the dots and to ship anything. Ah, German customer service! I received a reply saying, “We have received your order. For mysterious reasons the battery wasn’t shipped. It will be shipped today. End of e-mail.” Now, this is why I love ordering overseas. While I hadn’t expected the PDA parts store to wrap their goods in pink tissues paper and include a handwritten note like HagRags or u-handbag or (there are exceptions to German customer service) Woll-Sucht I would have appreciated a “Sorry for the wait.” immensely.
Well, my battery arrived on Saturday. I demanded quiet and peace and while my son and husband were occupied with soldering new electronic parts into electrical guitars (Really, I kid you not. Well, my son wasn’t actually soldering anything, he is not quite five after all.) I spent about thirty minutes prying the label from the back of the PDA. If I ever plan to do that again by the way I won’t remove the whole label but only cut away a tiny part of it. (There are instructions here and here. They are very helpful, especially when you read them both through before starting.) The next problem was finding the right screwdriver. Since we inherited something like a whole electronics workshop from my husband’s father I was sure we had the right screwdrivers. But I was wrong.
That day I was very grateful that nowadays shops in Germany are open on Saturday afternoons too because just ten years ago I would have had to wait until Monday morning. So I bought three tiny screwdrivers and some wood for our stove. Came back and spend about an hour or so trying to open the casing without breaking the whole thing. This is how the inside of my PDA looks like:
The other thing we didn’t have was double-sided tape. So if I ever open that thing again the battery will clonk out. But I doubt that I will. The life of a PDA is short. I have learned that it is supposed to last for three years if used between 20 and 40 minutes daily. Mine has been used much more than that because I used it to listen to MP3s and play games on it too. By the time the new battery gives in there probably will be something else wrong with it. But maybe not. We’ll see.
So. Are you a geek? I’d say everybody who is into blogging qualifies. Or not? Discuss.
Speaking of discussion I’d like to remind you of the Just Post roundtables for October. If you have written or read a post about matters of social justice, please send me the link to diapersandmusic at web dot de until the 7th. On the 10th Mad, Jen, Hel, and I will be putting all the links up again.
Nov 022007
It’s that month again. National Novel Writing Month.
And I will be participating. I already did it last year, and so I have a feeling that it is do-able. I’m a hopeless optimist and so I’m convinced that of course this year I will be very disciplined, I will write 2,000 words every day without fail, in the morning.
Well, yes, I find that funny too. My husband? Not so much. You have to remember that I didn’t only do NaNoWriMo last year but also FAWM (February Album Writing Month), and Script Frenzy. And while I do have a note from Script Frenzy that entitles me to an open-ended sabbatical from all housework, really, that would be a little too much to ask of my husband. Especially since he teaches much more students than me, and does more housework too. (And has a blog or two and music to make.)
So, there has been a bit of a debate going on whether it is a good thing for me to write a novel in a month again. I was all committed though I start to regret it already. I have had great plans of writing thousands of words in the first few days and so far I have been struggling to write anything. See, that is so typical of me. Instead of being proud that I wrote 3,790 words of my new novel, I’m disappointed because I had wanted to write 6,000 words until today. Which was a bit of a silly plan because while we have vacation again there also is no kindergarten. No kindergarten means less productivity. Add to that my attempt to do housework, and a major procrastination tendency… And you end up with enough words to write 50,000 in November but not enough to be ahead.
Also I’m not caring about my characters much. This year I’m writing about a 40-year-old mother in midlife crisis. There are definite resemblances to me but she isn’t me. Not at all. I decided that after last years drama with aliens and psychics and teleportation, and my screen play about evil witches killing off female drummers, this year I’d write something real. Maybe even with feelings. Who knows.
Of course I had planned to prepare myself. Last year I prepared food in advance, I bought all Christmas presents, the only thing I didn’t do was an outline or any character planning. I meant to but I never did. Well, this year I prepared nothing since all that preparation last year only mad October more stressful but didn’t help much for November.
The only thing I definitely wanted to do this year was thinking about my novel in advance. Maybe even outlining it. But I couldn’t. I wrote to Sofia about it:
For my next book, I will be making an outline and Susanne , a toytown writer, doesn’t know if she could use an outline… but the thing is she uses an outline for everything else why not her writing. she uses one everyday and her writing should not be any different. For each thing she sews and knits there is a pattern and even though she may not follow it, the pattern allows her to see where she is going.
That made me think (I know it doesn’t take much for that). She is right. I’m using outlines and patterns and such all the time. Even in music I play songs that already exist. But there is a difference, at least for me: knitting and sewing and cooking all start with a vision of the finished product. I see that in my mind and then I think about how to create it. Writing to me is more like musical improvisation. I just start singing somewhere and see where it takes me. I repeat things, I do something new, it shapes itself as I do it. I’m not much interested right now in telling a story I already know. And my reluctance to outline has to do with the structure of NaNoWriMo too.
You’re not supposed to write parts of the novel before November. The whole thing has to be written in those 30 days. Otherwise it would be cheating. If I were to start writing about my characters or an outline or something, I’d end up writing parts of the novel before starting. So I need to write about the characters and the novel to find out about them and, well, there you are.
Of course that’s quite exciting. I don’t know anything about my story yet. Well, not much. The only thing that I’m ding this time around is end the writing day by starting a new chapter and writing a synopsis of it on top. Like, “Chapter two, in which Iris gets a new job and makes a list.” That is my starting point for the next day.
Oh, and this year I’m writing in English. Which means that I have to have my browser open all the time to look up words. Ahem. Very productive. But still I’m afraid I won’t be able to comment and read as much as usual. Those 2,000 words a day have to come out of somewhere.
Are any of you doing NaNo too? Or NaBloPoMo? National shoe-whatever? Naknitalong (there is something called NaKniSweMo on ravelry, but I am not on ravelry so I can’t tell you about it)? National drawing? Or are you level-headed like my husband and don’t partake in silly competitions?
Oct 222007
I’m so behind with blogging that I don’t want to do it at all. You probably know this feeling (otherwise it is hard to explain). Still I will write those posts. Only slowly. Sorry.
Though I haven’t been blogging much I have been busy as usual. Mostly knitting and a little sewing. To blog about the “psychedelic bag” now feels a little weird because it has been completed for a while now. I started thinking about it months ago, made most of it in August and finished it weeks afterwards.
For ages I have been thinking that my husband needs a bag. In fact, I’d say he needs a purse, only men don’t get to wear those without getting funny looks. But a messenger bag seems to be acceptable, I’m seeing men everywhere with bags that I’d call purse if they were for me. And it’s a good thing because I don’t know why a man is supposed to be able to carry everything in his pockets. Otherwise he has the choice between briefcase and backpack. My husband owns an enormous backpack that really works well if you want to take your laptop, your knitting, a book like the fourth Harry Potter, a notebook, and everything you happened to pick up while running errands, plus all the contents of my purse. At least that’s what I carried around in it the last time I borrowed it.
For everyday use my husband needs something to hold his wallet, keys, maybe a cell phone, and something to read. So I decided to design a bag for him. He was game and we went to the fabric store. Those of you who have checked out his blog psychedelic zen guitar know that he loves all things psychedelic (not psychedelic drugs though) and so his fabric choice holds no surprise.
finished bagBefore that I had literally spent days thinking about this bag’s design. It had to be big enough to hold a magazine, it should have interior pockets with and without zippers, everything should be easily accessible and at the same time safely kept inside. And there shouldn’t be velcro. So I made a sketch and I measured the magazine and the wallet and the cell phone and I almost wrecked my brain thinking about how everything should come together at the zipper. The main one that closes the bag.
So you can imagine that I was mightily pleased with myself when I almost finished this bag (for those of you who are new to this blog, “almost finishing” is a specialty of mine). Only to find that a) the flap is too short, b) the shoulder strap was fastened too high up and so c) it was impossible to sew everything together at the zipper. (Note to self: when making last minute changes such as adding strips of fabric to the top of the bag better take the time to think about which other parts of the design will have to be changed because of that).
So, of course, I decided to leave it as it was and sew everything shut by hand. That was very nice until I lifted the bag by the straps and with a horrible srrk-sound all the hand-sewn seams opened up again. Disgusted I threw it in a corner and put a heap of laundry on top of it. But then, eventually, I finished it. And I’m now quite pleased with it, also very happy that nobody will ever see the inside of that part with the zipper in it ever again (hopefully!). But every time I look at it there’s a little woman in my ear whispering, “But the flap is too short!” I’ll just go and tape her mouth shut.
For those of you who are interested in sewing details:
first time zippered interior pocket following Lisa’s tutorial
first time interior pockets
construction
the dreaded “sew everything together with too small seam allowances”-zipperJul 162007
First download Amy Butler‘s yoga bag pattern. It’s free and so you suddenly find that you always needed a bag for your yoga mat. Never mind that the yoga bag travels only from the right of the computer desk to the front of the computer desk once a week. Besides, hanging the mat up on a hook would certainly lend a more professional look to your teaching room.
Read the pattern about a thousand times, decide that it’s really easy to make. Convert all the inch measurements into centimeters. Measure your yoga mat thrice to ensure that the bag will be big enough. Start looking for fabric.
Find the perfect exterior fabric only to find that it’s a) silk, b) 50€ per meter. Think about making a 70€ yoga bag for about five minutes three times daily. When your mother-in-law throws the sheets out of the window that she has used to cover the floor for some renovation work, think about whether those sheets might be perfect. Decide against the colorful turquoise-and-orange-and-red-striped with elephants pattern. Go and look for the sofa cover that you put away when you threw the sofa out. Think that you have found the sofa cover which then turns out to be leftover fabric from the making of curtains last year. (That, by the way, might have been the lowest I ever sank in my “sewing career”. I was so fed up with sewing and my machine that I had them custom-made.) So, in order to keep the budget low, decide to make a red yoga bag instead of an orange one like you wanted.
Resume quest for suitable piece of lining fabric. That has to match the exterior. Go on several expeditions eyeing expensive fabric and – this is very important – leave the exterior fabric at home. That certainly helps with the matching. Finally buy a scrap of fabric that’s on sale for 5 € with the rationalization, “Well, if it doesn’t match at least I haven’t spent much money on it.”
All the while look for interfacing. Think that you have very bad interfacing karma. Look for at least a package of thin interfacing. There used to be dozens of these in every fabric department, but nowadays you might go to a store three times without seeing even one. When at last you see some, buy every scrap of it. Vow to buy at Lisa’s store next time. A place where when you say, “I’d like some interfacing because I’m making a bag.” the salesperson won’t look at you with a very puzzled frown and answer, “So, do you need it for appliqué?” “Um, I want to make a bag out of light fabric and I need it to strengthen…” “So, you want this then?” You, meekly, “I guess so.” Just saying. And the bonus: I wouldn’t have had to spend money on three trips to the big city. Paying the shipping from London to Germany would have been cheaper. And you can bet that if you told her what you wanted she just would have known which interfacing to use.
Interfacing. I never know how much to use and which kind because, well, I lack experience and then, due to my shopping woes, I only have used the flimsy kind up until now anyway. But there is something to say for the department store I bought my fabric in because last time, when I left the store clutching my packages of flimsy interfacing and went to have a look at the sewing patterns, I caught a glimpse of interfacing on bolts! Interfacing of different thickness! Wow! Not quite the holy grail, but close.
Next decide to be sensible and put your bag project aside for a month of script frenzy. In July start agonizing about it again. Think about how to cut out something that’s 121,92 cm long. Will it all work out when you round it? Should you make a pattern first? Or not? Then remember that you own a tape measure with inches on it. Decide to make a pattern. Look for some old newspaper because you’re too cheap to buy real pattern making paper.
First day: Cut out paper pattern.
Second day: When a student cancels a lesson, start cutting out the lining. Note that the scissors that came with your new sewing machine (more on that in another post) might be worth 47 £ to someone but not to you since they don’t exactly cut. Get out the old sewing scissors of your husband’s grandmother that you have been using as kitchen scissors for the past ten years. Sigh. Lust for a roto-cutter. Look at pictures of roto-cutters on the internet. Discuss the merit of such cutters with your sister. Decide to be sensible and frugal and use the kitchen scissors instead.
Third day: After waiting for this moment for six days, tell your family that come what may, today’s the day you will cut out your DAMN BAG PARTS! Cut them out on the floor because you don’t want to occupy the kitchen table and your writing desk is too small. Get really distracted by reading the ads on your pattern. Remind yourself to use real pattern paper next time so that you don’t have to look at disgusting “sex on the phone”-offers for hours. Find that not even one angle you have cut out is straight, nor anything. If every single bag part is crooked, will the bag turn out okay? What if the exterior and the lining bag are different sizes? What if the lining bag is bigger than the exterior bag? Calm yourself down so that you won’t have a nervous breakdown with the thought that it isn’t woodwork or rocket science. Since you can’t sew a straight line anyway it will all sort itself out somehow in the sewing. Wonder if this is like when you’re recording something that you just can’t get right and then you just leave it at that, telling yourself you will “fix it in the mix”. (That never works by the way. You can make things better but you can’t make bad things good. Better to start with something good and make it better…) Tell yourself that this is only a practice bag anyway. Stress out about your really complicated dress project that you want to sew after that. Take out Liesl’s backpack pattern, carefully study it and decide that you’re never be able to make it. Then think about altering it because you don’t like magnetic snaps. (I didn’t say I was logical, didn’t I?)
Find that you still have a little time before dinner and start ironing the interface parts to the fabric. After all you decided to use flimsy interfacing on both the exterior and the lining. Find that you have just about enough flimsy interfacing to do this if you practice “patchwork interfacing”. Since you lost all patience when cutting out the interfacing and just did it by rule of thumb and where the scissors hit since it doesn’t really matter if the interfacing isn’t as big as the fabric, everything looks a little, um, sloppy. Remind yourself to next time turn the interfacing right side up before cutting. So when you iron your uneven and crooked pieces of interfacing to your uneven and crooked pieces of fabric at least they pretend to fit. Congratulate yourself that at least you haven’t ironed interfacing to your pressing iron. Find that you can pull off already fused interfacing from the ironing board quite easily. Use the quickly cooling iron to iron a tablecloth and a napkin.
Fourth day: After realizing that two students in a row canceled their lessons plan to start sewing the bag. Meet husband for lunch who then reminds you that the berries are ripe. Sigh. Gather berries, clean berries, don’t finish this because it takes so long, lose hope. When another student calls in sick, find that your husband has prepared all the berries and start pinning and sewing. At the end of the day you will be very tired, have severe neck and back pain, an outer pocket pinned to the main panel of the bag and rows of jam glasses:
Fifth day: Promise yourself to go on slowly and careful, start sewing in the morning, and become quite confident and optimistic. Though everything is quite crooked, it is starting to look, well, like an actual bag. Though very small. With bulging and wavy seams. Like the following:
(Yes, I know that seam allowances shouldn’t look like this.)
Manage to somehow put it all together. A little hint: having uneven and crooked pieces doesn’t really help with the alignment. Spend some time with your son and his friend. Cut your son’ hair when his friend is gone. Find that you still have about half an hour before dinner. Put your son in front of a DVD. Finish bag. Keel over. Write a blog post. Take pictures of finished bag.
Jun 292007
Well, at least for me. All the participants who still haven’t started their scripts can try to reach the goal of 20,000 words until tomorrow evening. But for me the frenzy stops.
My heroes are celebrating, they have won, the bad witches are defeated. Or so they think. Though I have reached 20,000 words, the story isn’t finished yet. Just when everybody thinks it’s over the bad guys will realize that something has happened, the good guys will be captured, and then…
Well, I’m not entirely sure yet but I’d like to blow up the mad professor’s house thereby destroying all of the bad warlocks with my heroes just barely escaping.
But for now I’ll take the weekend off from script writing, have some champagne, and watch a movie with my husband. Something sensible. Like maybe “Hogfather“.
Jun 262007
I already told you that my husband has become a blogger too. Over at psychedelic zen guitar he pairs gorgeous photos with breath-taking guitar improvisations. Recently he started collaborating with Elspeth Duncan who blogs at now is wow. They have teamed up three times so far. Their first collaboration doesn’t really have a name yet. If you want you can choose one since it’s still showing at a blog near you. Interestingly the video and music were created independently of one another. But they match perfectly nonetheless.
The second one, “magic” started life as a piece of music my husband had recorded. Then Elspeth did the video. (And it is filmed with the iSight camera of a macbook. Which goes to show that you don’t need much equipment for being creative. See. I told you so.)
With the third project they turned the process around. It’s called wind:
Here is what Elspeth wrote about the process of making it:
Collaborative music/video/spoken word project between Trinidad and Germany. The video was created first in Trinidad and edited with ‘silence’ as the soundtrack. Without seeing the video, Susanne (in Germany) was asked to say something in English about the wind – 20 seconds in length. This narrative was added to the video which was then sent to Gary in Germany who viewed the video and composed the music. The music was then sent back to me to edit into the video.What is interesting is that Susanne had no idea that the location of shooting (Temple in the Sea, Trinidad) is a sacred site where Hindu people are also cremated outdoors on a large open-air pyre. Her words, about the wind taking bits and pieces of her to the sea, reflect what happens when ‘bits’ (smoke, ashes) of the cremated person are carried on the wind to the sea around the Temple.
Video – Elspeth Duncan
Voice – Susanne Fritzsche
Music – Gary WinterLocation: Temple in the Sea, Waterloo, Carapichaima, Trinidad, W.I.
This is what everybody keeps talking about. You start a blog and suddenly you are doing a creative project with somebody halfway around the world.
(For those of you interested, my script stands at 17,200 words. Four more days and 2,800 words to go. Normal blogging will hopefully be resumed soon.)
Jun 072007
Firstly, please remember that today is the last day of nomination and contribution to the Just Post roundtables for May.
Secondly, the good weather has hit us. So my husband and I are deep into sanding and painting the porch now. The first coat of paint is up. Due to a severe paint shortage (I recommend to actually think about how much paint you’ll need before starting a renovation project. And then go and buy as much as needed. Just saying.) and due to today being a very catholic holiday here in Bavaria (so all the shops are closed) I won’t be painting today. My poor husband though is just heading towards our tallest ladder so that he can apply the second coat of paint to the outside of the balcony/porch. This will be especially uncomfortable for him since he has a newly developed allergy to some pollen or other that causes his eyes to itch and turn all red and inflamed.
husband with protective spectacles while sanding
husband on ladder with more protection gear (wet towel)
The porch/balcony sanded:
and with the first coat of paint:
The script has been going nicely up until the day before yesterday. Today writing feels like I’m squeezing water out of desert sand. I have written 4,852 words so far. Only 15,148 to go. Right now I’m writing a scene that was inspired by Mary Wigman‘s mask dance. I couldn’t find a video of that but there is one of her witch dance here.
The stove has been installed.
If you’re somehow new to my blog and don’t know what I’m talking about, please read the post before this in which I announced my current projects.
Oh, and to those of you who wondered when I’m doing all this stuff, and if I’m like manic or something? Well, just for scale, knitting half a cardigan has taken about two months. I’m knitting while watching DVDs. The Buffy-watching so far took about half a year. Only six more episodes to go. Apart from “Buffy” and an episode of “Deep Space 9″ about once a week I’m not watching any TV. Nor am I going to the cinema or reading newspapers. The bag-project will have to wait at least until July, maybe longer. And, most important: We have yet another two-week long vacation. No students for the last ten days, and five days without child, because my mother-in-law took him to visit my parents.
And here’s a bonus:
our son banging loudly on the pianoAnd sorry that I haven’t visited any blogs. I still read yours and yours and yours… I hope to catch up on Sunday.