creative.mother.thinking

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

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

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

Lunch was a family favorite, pasta e fagioli:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a way it was a very good and productive day and in another it wasn’t. I got up at a decent time. Set a timer and found that it took me 16 minutes from getting out of bed to being dressed and ready to start yoga. Did yoga for 4 1/2 minutes before the boy showed up for his breakfast at 6.25. Um. I knew that he wanted to go to the climbing gym early but not that early.

So I made him tea, helped him look for his water bottle, fetched another one when it seemed the other one was lost. Almost started to work on the novel then waited for my husband to show up.

I knitted on a sleeve. It’s going super-slow. My husband decided to skip running again in favor of things to do in the garden. I did the weekly cleaning-thing. By the way I spent 1 1/2 hours on housework in the morning and another twenty minutes in the afternoon. Okay-ish, I’d say. That included making new deodorant. That takes 12 minuets, by the way.

It was only 11.30 when I was already done with the cleaning. I opted to skip changing the sheets, should definitely do that next week. Since there was still time and since I had been having a craving for potato chips since Tuesday I decided to go out, get gas for the lawn mower and buy some chips and chocolate on the way. As one does.

I really dislike getting gas. Since we don’t have a car I usually ride my bike over to the other side of town, lock the bike around the corner because strangely enough there’s no place to put your bike at the gas station, then walk up to the pump with my little canister, fill it, carry it inside to the cash register, pay, pack it on my bike and leave.

And I suddenly realized that I dislike the whole thing. And especially having to deal with the bike. The locking and unlocking and getting the panniers  out and all. So I decided to walk instead.

I like walking much better. I’m not as fast but I don’t have to deal with a heavy piece of equipment, I don’t encounter the cards as directly and I can listen to podcasts while I’m out. So I put the gas canister in my backpack, went to the health food store, got my snack foods, walked on to the gas station, behaved like an idiot because I only ever buy gas once a year or so and had completely forgotten how to do it properly, put everything in my backpack and walked back home again in peace.

My husband had just started cooking. Things weren’t going well. It had been one of those things. You start with, „We need to eat the chicken we took out of the freezer the day before that we ended up not eating because I got duck at the supermarket,“ throw in a bunch of Romana salads that need to get eaten as well and end up with the plan of fried Romana with goat cheese, fried chicken and bread. All very well.

If you’re my husband you then decide that since there is freshly harvested garlic and a handful of cherry tomatoes you will make bruschetta instead of just eating bread. Very well. You then proceed and find that you need two frying pans for the salad. And one for the bread. And that you’re all stressed out and have two handfuls of herbs in the fridge that need to get eaten as well. In the end you are super-stressed while your wife is frantically mincing herbs, slicing garlic and grating parmesan and keep saying, „I don’t have time to deal with the chicken!“ You resign yourself to having a vegetarian meal for lunch because now there really is no more time and put the chicken back in the fridge. And then you have to dice and fry the chicken after dinner so that it will keep.

And that gives you another challenge for your meal planning: what will you cook with the chicken the next day? Oh! Indian food would be great. Yes it would. Only the fact that we don’t have any spinach never made it onto the grocery list.

Fun times.

Here’s the obligatory lunch picture:

Don’t worry, I didn’t starve. I had seconds and two chocolate bars as dessert.

Then it was time to teach. Two students online with a short dishwashing break between and one student in person that I hadn’t seen in three months. That was fun. We had a lot of catching up to do.

Then I wrote a couple of emails, teaching admin, and then the boy and I watched an episode of Voyager and one of Firefly. Both pretty good. We pigged out on potato chips, caramel ice cream and beer in my case. The boy still prefers soda.

Then I started writing this post and went to bed slightly too late.

Today there will be the running, some folding of laundry, maybe the recording of the podcast (wish me luck) and the watching of TV.

So, lack of sleep is awful. But then, you all knew that. I only slept for six hours and the day was a bust. I did do the grocery shopping eventually but felt mostly down and meh. Lunch was good, though:

My husband has been talking about sugar peas with duck for two weeks or so. He grew the peas. But I couldn’t find duck anywhere. Well, there was this humongous whole duck I saw at the health food store but that was not quite what he meant. So instead we thawed some chicken breasts.

When in the supermarket I checked again, completely sure there would not be any duck to be had, but I was totally wrong. So I carried the duck home and we had it for lunch. Yum. Guess what we’ll have for lunch today? Yep. Chicken.

I taught lots of students, the two new ones and all my usual Thursday students plus a potential new student with her parents. Being able to teach singing in person is really much better. Both the student and I were beaming at the end of the lesson.

Then dinner:

My husband insisted on the photo. The mozzarella and tomato he made for the boy. Since I don’t like raw tomatoes I don’t care for it. I was reading a sample of „Fair Play“ by Eve Rodsky, by the way. I’ve started looking at books about mental load recently.

I did manage to go to bed almost on time, so that’s good. I also went through some of my yarn stash in search of yarn for a particular hat and found two unfinished projects from the 90s, yarn for a hat and a cowl and that there is actually some empty space in the hat boxes I stash my yarn in. Which is good news because there are boxes and plastic bags with yarn in them all over the bedroom floor.

So, it is Friday today and there will be some cleaning, some laundry and a lot of teaching and then the boy and I will watch some Firefly. I thought the next episode was the last one but when looking it up I could see there is one more. Still, I did get ice cream. Party on!