creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Random Monday

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  1. I have a kind of blogger’s block because I still think I should have started the year with a “How my year of happiness went”-post, and a “My big goal for 2011”-post. I will do those some time before 2011 ends, but it is starting to get ridiculous.
  2. I also promised to make an English podcast episode, and I will, as soon as I find some space in my head.
  3. We had a very nice weekend, and went to some family brunch thing where we met other gifted families, and it was a lot of fun. But, very pricey, and no housework got done for the weekend.
  4. Which is why my husband have spent the day so far, furiously cleaning all the things. Floors where mopped. With water. Laundry got washed. There is still one load in the washer which I will have to hang up in the next 25 minutes.
  5. I’m typing as fast as I can.
  6. I got a new spindle, and I love, love, love it. Still, to show it I would have to take a picture, and it’s started to snow again which means – no light outside.
  7. I am also a bit grumpy because so far I’ve had my period not once but twice this month. In fact since the beginning of the year I’ve only had a week off.
  8. I went to see a specialist on menopause, and she thought it might be early-onset menopause. Then she asked me if I were okay with that. And what about if I couldn’t have any more children.
  9. I would be totally okay with that if I could please reach some hormonal equilibrum in the near future. Interestingly I’m totally done with having babies, and I don’t think it would make me feel old, and undesirable.
  10. I am quite sure that I have asthma after all. In addition to being triggered by allergies it might be triggered by exercise as well. Fun times! I already have a doctor’s appointment for that the week after next.
  11. I haven’t managed to write much this month either, and that makes me grumpy as well.
  12. It’s snowing like crazy, and I should be shoveling right now on top of everything else.
  13. It was my husband’s birthday last week, and we had a fabulous day, having lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from us, and in the evening we went and had some beer, just him and me. We almost never do this because whenever we go to Munich we think we should be doing something really special, like seeing a concert. But this very low-key celebration was exactly the right thing to do.
  14. I’ll leave you with a bad picture of the spindle. One day, when the sun will come back I’ll take a better one:

threadsthrutime

Monday blather

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Interesting day so far. I had a bout of “doing all the things I had meant to do weeks ago”, resulting in a hung calendar (pretty if it weren’t for the nail I had to rip out three times … now there are a few “interesting” holes in the walls at eye height), an almost fixed wash basin (well, one can use it, it only drops a little, ahem), and me ordering yet more ebooks, and updating my librarything. Then I went to check my bank account, and after that I’m far more motivated to stop buying ebooks for now.

Three of my students didn’t show up, one re-schedule. My son is completely over-tired because he spent Saturday night at a friend’s house, and so he had had three tantrums already. He found a carnival costume he likes, and that I don’t have to sew, and had to buy it now, this minute. I made him do his homework first, cruel me.

Yesterday I spent five hours watching “How I Met Your Mother” while knitting my husband’s Lotus Leaf Mittens. I start loathing them but with the one hour I knit on them today they might get finished until his birthday on Thursday.

And I made an appointment to talk to someone about my peri-menopausal problems.

I think tonight I should go to bed early; this sounds suspiciously like overdrive.

Handgemacht – Folge 9: Gute Vorsätze

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Ein gutes neues Jahr wünsche ich allen und nun zu den guten Vorsätzen:

Gute Vorsätze allgemein:

  • flylady
  • word of the year (Das ist ein Link zu einem Post von mir, in dem ich über meine Wahl eines “Wort des Jahres” für 2009 schreibe und der Post enthält auch Links zu dem Blog von dem ich die Idee habe.)

Terminplanung:

Die nächste Folge wird eine Spezialfolge auf Englisch sein, aber keine Angst, das wird “Best of”, diejenigen, die nicht so gut Englisch können, verpassen nichts wesentliches.

Was ich gerade stricke und spinne:

weiter wurden erwähnt:

Pictures from the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich

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Yes, I will write a real blog post at some time in the future, but this week I’m still in holiday mood. Yesterday I went to the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich and took a gazillion pictures. Mostly of textiles since I was there to look at their Mayan textiles exhibition. Since that only filled one room I went and saw a bunch of other stuff as well. Most of the brightly colored stuff is woven on a backstrap loom, something I’m a bit fascinated with at the moment. In fact I’, thinking about making one for myself. Then there are African things as well, made from tree bark, and something called Raffia (I had never heard about that before but I bet it’s some sort of bast fiber. (And I looked it up, yes, it’s some kind of palm.))

And I haven’t forgotten the blog or my readers or listeners, and I will wish you a happy new year properly next week.

I know Christmas is over

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and I’m really enjoying the quiet time we’re having.

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:

Weihnachtsessen

the food

weihnachtsbaum

the tree (a bigger one this year)

weihnachtsengel

the angels my mother gave us.

I hope you have a quiet time as well.

Tuesday

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A little meh day for no apparent reason. I seem to be a bit exhausted and overwhelmed. (I typed “everwhelmed” at first, a very fitting description.) It’s already 4 pm, there was a bit of sunshine earlier but now it’s gray again. I did manage to send away the Christmas package to my parents and another one to my sister, and now I’m done with getting gifts here and there. It seems that the gift giving has reached a critical mass, this year there were half a dozen packages already. (My sister had to order my parents’ gifts for us from online because while my father has been owning a computer for about 40 years (early adopter) he somehow isn’t able to do it on his own. So my sister ordered All the Presents, said she wanted them in one package and then every little book and CD came on his own. We had a fun time sorting it all out. If the postman has to ring our bell one more time I have to give him a present too. (He already told me (when he rang on Sunday which is his day off) that he was too busy to go to the doctor for his ear infection, eye infection and the dog bite he got.)

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.