creative.mother.thinking

Another packed day. I didn’t sleep well again and woke fifteen minutes before the alarm. After turning the lights out too late, of course.

I did manage morning pages, meditation and some writing but felt myself nodding off while typing so I cut the writing a little short and got up. And then I found that I had forgotten to take my thyroid medication which meant waiting thirty minutes before eating breakfast.

Then I started weaving in ends on the knitted t-shirt I had been working on. Boring and tedious work but it needs to be done and I’d rather not leave it until the tee is done. I’m about to divide the body from the sleeves so this felt like a good time.

My husband got up and had breakfast while I was doing that. I did the breakfast dishes, cut my husband’s hair, made a doctor’s appointment for the boy and went for a run:

It was drizzling which was a good thing (still with the lack of rain) and I enjoyed the run a lot. Found myself thinking how nice it was to run after two days of rest until I remembered that I had been running both days. What can I say, my excuse is lack of sleep.

I came back home and helped to make lunch:

Penne arrabbiata with salad and extra bresaola. I’m drinking water because we’re out of alcohol-free beer and no one had time to go to the store.

My husband started teaching early and when the boy came we both managed to overlook the pot full of veggie tomato sauce and instead he took the rest of our sauce. There was no bacon left, only tomato sauce but the boy said that it tasted funny. Oops.

Well, nothing we could do. And he had a nice big portion of penne with tomato sauce ready for dinner.

For once he didn’t have to go back to school after lunch which meant more time to spend on preparing the presentation for his German class.

I taught all the students and everything went surprisingly smooth. The six-week old baby of my first student slept all through the lesson and everything else went well too.

Then the boy and I did some bodyweight training. He was complaining that there were so many classes where he wasn’t sure how to prepare and I offered to help him but he decided to head upstairs and study on his own.

I got ready for bed, ate too much cheese and chocolate and for once turned the lights out early. Phew.

Today there will be grocery shopping and writing and teaching and another early bedtime. At least I hope so.

I didn’t sleep all that well and woke up before the alarm. This might have been due to the champagne and a beer the night before. Drat.

I was all set to start writing but the words weren’t there. In the end I compiled what I had into a file that I could put on my ebook reader and spent twenty minutes just reading. Sometimes things just move slowly.

My head was all filled with the topic for the podcast and I did preparation for that after breakfast. My husband got up late and I plied some yarn on a spindle during his breakfast.

Then there were dishes and a quick trip to the health food store (I didn’t really have time for that but we were in dire need of bananas.) and the bakery and then I went running. In the rain. Husband is feeling much more optimistic because it is raining again. (He had these visions of the apocalypse arriving right this instant where we were stuck in a perpetual draught that would leave a desert behind. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.)

Running was meh, my whole body just wanted to crawl back into bed all day to get more sleep:

I hopped into the shower instead of helping to make lunch because I needed my hair as dry as possible for the podcast. Lunch was black beans and rice:

Then I put on makeup, did my singing warmup, set up the microphone and lights and recorded the podcast. The mic disconnected twice which was making me grumpy. I will look into going back to the old laptop for recording the next time because this is ridiculous. And all because of that thunderbolt socket which calls for using two adapters to connect it to FireWire.

But. I did get the podcast recorded before my first student.

I taught the students of the day, signed up for a webinar about finances for women on the same day, started this post, did some planning for the second quarter of the year, watched the webinar while plying more yarn and went to bed almost on time.

Today there will be a short run, teaching from three to 7.30 with loads of breaks during which I will probably work on the podcast and then strength training. Okay, I admit that that is unlikely to happen that late. We’ll see.

I also signed up for yet another webinar about money and mindset at midnight but I won’t watch that live, there will be a recording. I’m only a little crazy, not completely off the rocker.

I woke up from the alarm but did not work on the novel or so any of the things that make me feel good. It’s funny how I keep skipping the happy-making stuff for indulgences that ultimately don’t do anything for me. I’m working on it, though.

I had to get out of bed a little earlier than usual because the boy had to leave for a math-lab-thing at university. We had breakfast and he got ready at 7.30. When my husband came over for breakfast 45 minutes later he looked into the bag with the lone pastry saying, „There’s only one!“ Yeah. „So, what is the boy supposed to have for breakfast?”

He had forgotten that the boy had already had breakfast and left.

We talked about climate change and how people are behaving in a way that dooms us all for the rest of the morning which didn’t exactly cheer me up. Meanwhile I was in a bad mood anyway because of the not-writing. I did the dishes and the usual morning chores while my husband went for his run and I was feeling so down that I almost skipped my run.

Then I decided that skipping the run would not make me feel better at all and went outside. The weather was nice and my podcast was great and everything was fine and I met my husband who was on his way back home:

That was my turning point after 4 k. (For those of you being jealous of the idyllic landscape remember that there is an Autobahn behind me, one to the left and a highway going across and the place I’m running is the only piece of woods and fields around. If you pass that church you see a big area that used to be fields but is now warehouses and high rises as far as the eye can see, right up to Munich.

Still, I don’t dwell on the highways, I feast on nature as much as I can while running. I passed trees in bloom on my way home, feels like spring:

When I came home my husband had just started cooking lunch, and we were a little late with that but it was delicious:

We had bulgur with tomato sauce (lunch was late because my husband initially forgot to make the sauce), hamburgers, fried eggplant, tsatsiki and red beet salad. Pseudo-Greek food. Yummy. Especially if you haven’t eaten for five hours and have just come back from an 8k run/walk.

Then I did fall into a bit of a slump which I used to do some research for my upcoming Hamburg trip but I managed to pull myself out again around four, did the lunch dishes, a load of laundry, changed the sheets on my bed, and then my husband started to mount the new lamp in the kitchen.

Drilling holes into the walls of our house is always tricky. Usually you end up with a hole three times the size that you intended to make that sits nowhere near where you started drilling and is full of pieces of gravel and sand. Same with the lamp. Also, we have these fabulous aluminum wires in the old part of the house. Not only are they not grounded, and aluminum, they also have a textile coating that is starting to disintegrate. So as long as you leave those wires alone everything is fine. But the minutes you start moving the wires around, say, if you want to mount a lamp you’re screwed.

Getting the lamp up involved 2 1/2 hours of work and a lot of swearing. It still isn’t properly fixed, the screws need to get tightened later today but it is up there, pretty level all things considered and is working.

Interestingly the socket we used to power the drill initially worked and then stopped. No idea if that one broke or not. Since the wiring in this part of the house is so ancient there is just one fuse for most of the basement and ground floor but there are weird exceptions. So the washing machine in the basement was still working through all of this. The wifi repeater didn’t which was not the best thing for the poor boy who was talking to his friends over Discord because they have yet another presentation for German coming up.

I did solve that problem by moving the boy over to my laptop in the annex that still had electricity and internet access.

While my husband was swearing and working and needing my opinion and a little hand-holding I did manage to clean the bathroom. So now things are looking pretty good. I also moved some of the yarn back to the bedroom and got a new rug for the bathroom yesterday, one that I really love.

Let’s just say that it might be a good idea to get a new rug if the old one starts disintegrating. I’m not quite sure how old it is but I’d say we bought it some time around 1995.

It took my husband until 7.30 to put the lamp up but then the boy and I watched an episode of „Deep Space Nine“ (a very good one) and then I called it a day. The boy was looking rather pale by then as well.

Now I only need to sort through all the yarn including the one that I moved back into the bedroom yesterday, deal with all the mending and the unfinished knitting and weaving projects and then we’ll be good.

Today there will be yoga, I hope, and writing and my mother demanded a phone call and then I will probably prepare the podcast, write the newsletter (finally) and sort through the yarn.

I set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier in an attempt to be more productive before breakfast but that didn’t work out. Then I told myself that I could work on the novel later in the day. (Spoiler: I didn’t.)

I was a little anxious about my gynecologist appointment even though it was only the yearly check-up but I wanted to talk to him about not being able to get the pill a week ago and about trying to not take progesterone anymore.

So I got up a little late while the boy was early and came down before his tea was ready. I was still in pajamas when he showed. We had breakfast nonetheless and he left for school on time and my husband was a little later. When he showed up it was time for me to take a shower so we didn’t really talk much. I did sit a little after I had gotten ready and knitted while he was finishing his breakfast so that was nice.

Then I went to the train station and took a train and then a bus to Munich for my appointment. I had to wait for an hour, unfortunately, while being drowned in easy listening music that was driving me up the walls. (I’m pretty sure that most people find that music soothing and nice.)

I was still out of sorts all day, partly because I had an appointment at all and partly because of still being exhausted and discombobulated from the whole renovation thing. Still, everything was fine and I got praise for having had both a colposcopy and a mammography last year.

We decided that I’ll leave the progesterone off and see how it goes.

And I apparently have moved from „When was your last period?“ to „Did you have your period since we last spoke?“ I am giddily looking forward to menopause, especially since right now I’m not having any symptoms. I hope it will stay that way, let’s knock on would, shall we?

I came home in time to help t make the salad. My husband had been busy all morning. He started fixing the shelf over the bed that has a loose bracket and cleaned even more things and ran errands. Lunch was very good yet again:

Then I sat and read for a bit, did the dishes, vacuumed and mopped the bathroom, kitchen and part of the living room and then got ready for teaching.

Teaching was nice as it often is and afterwards I did more dishes, helped my husband decide that the hole he patched for the shelf bracket was still not looking dry and couldn’t be drilled into yet, got ready for bed and spent the rest of the evening holed up there with a nice book.

Today I should get into a more productive mode again.

There will probably be pizza for lunch, I have plans to deep clean the parts of the bathroom that haven’t been done yet, and I will probably mount the new shower head. There will also be teaching. And I need to write the newsletter ASAP but that needs the kind of headspace that is hard to come by in all that chaos.

Since it’s Friday I’m also looking forward to watching some TV with the boy. Maybe not a whole movie tonight, something shorter.

And then I’m hoping to spend the weekend putting all the things back again. Or I might fall into a massive two-day slump. Either one or the other.