creative.mother.thinking

Another one of those in-between days. Which is normal for what we Germans call the ‚time between the years‘.

I woke up stupid early again after having read until 11.30. I might have been a little tired throughout the day. I wrote my morning pages and worked on the novel for ten minutes before getting up slightly late. Breakfast, five minutes of meditation and another eight minutes of writing before my husband showed up.

I wasn’t the only one who was a little late and so I didn’t manage to finish the cleaning before it was time to start making lunch. I still need to vacuum the old part of the house and I need to clean washbasins and toilets. I did get the potatoes ready in time, though. Pity that I didn’t give them enough salt but everything did taste fine eventually:

By then my mother-in-law had called twice. First to say that she wouldn’t come home that day and then to say that she might come home that day after all.

So there was more waiting.

After lunch when I was sitting around trying to make myself do the dishes the doorbell rang. It was a neighbor. It’s the 90-yo. neighbor who is a friend of my mother-in-law. She wanted to know how she was doing and if we knew anything. Well, I couldn’t tell her much.

Five minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time it was our direct neighbor with an old, broken guitar. If we could use it? He’d throw it in the trash anyway. Huh. We now have a broken guitar sitting in the annex hallway waiting to be looked at.

I spent some time with the book cover design course after that and I might be almost finished. There is still a little more than an hour of material but I’m thinking that that might be stuff that’s covered in a much better way in the other book cover design course I have. The one I want to go through a second time. We’ll see.

Then I finally did the lunch dishes and my husband and the boy were outside. They wanted to finally take care of the vines on out garage. There are wine berries still hanging there that fall to the ground all the time and my husband wanted to cut those back and clean the whole mess up.

And just when they started a car pulled in front of our garage with my mother-in-law and her sister in it. She was coming home after all.

We talked a bit, she told us what she needed, lots of errands for the boy, and we’re happy she’s back home. Her first load of laundry is already washed and hung up (by the boy) and some salmon is defrosting in her fridge for today’s lunch.

While my husband and the boy were working against the setting sun outside the annex bell rang. Two of my husband’s students were standing outside. They had confirmed their lesson by email but my husband hadn’t gotten it in time. Luckily I was in the annex at that point so I could fetch my husband and he could teach them.

Then the boy and I had dinner and watched Star Trek. Both episodes were a little meh. But I finished plying the advent calendar yarn!  Now I only need to make sure I remember which of the three skeins belongs at what point of the yarn, and then I will be able to knit something with it.

Today there will be running and grocery shopping and all the things for once. I hope.

That’s what we call it in Germany. Today the shops will be open again but yesterday all was pretty quiet.

I did sleep until six, wrote my morning pages, read a bit and got up. Had breakfast, thought about my Owligan-dilemma and decided to rip the whole thing back and start over.

Ripping it back took two hours while my husband was building a fire, making coffee and tea on said fire, having breakfast and got ready for his run:

Before:

After:

I did a few calculations based on the swatches I had done with a single strand of the yarn. I think I will be alright with making the third size with a 6 mm needle, mostly. I will have to adjust the length, especially of the yoke because while I almost have stitch gauge my row gauge is way off, 19 rows per 10 centimeters instead of 14.

I re-started the sweater after lunch and I have to say that knitting with just one strand of bulky yarn is much more comfortable than with two.

Since I was late for running I peeled the potatoes and set the table before I left. And then I only did a lazy 5 k. Tsk. It was pretty crowded out there, the weather was gorgeous:

When I came back home there was bresaola for an appetizer:

And then fish, broccoli and potatoes for the main course together with a very good Blanc de Noir:

Then the boy and my husband got into a lengthy discussion of microphones, capacitors and loudspeakers as one does while I was knitting. There might have been more chocolate truffles.

Then I did the dishes with help from both of them, knitted some more, worked on the book cover design course, folded some laundry, did another load and hung that up and decided to move the podcast preparation to the next day.

Then it was time for watching Star Trek and spinning,

Today there will be an epic grocery run or maybe not so epic, I still need to make a list. I also would like to record another podcast episode and move the yoga pants project a little forward. Maybe my mother-in-law will come home today as well.

And I will knit, of course.

I woke up at the civilized time of 5.30 which was really good, after having gotten enough sleep (phew!). I wrote my morning pages and failed to write anything on the novel and made breakfast.

The boy got up early as well because he had promised to tag along when I would buy the sacred bratwurst for Christmas for the first time.

So we set off around eight and when we arrived at the butcher’s there was a long queue but I have to say, it wasn’t as long as I had expected.

The funny thing was that we met my husband’s cousin and she was standing in the queue right in front of us. Which was a very good thing because on the way there I suddenly realized that I had no idea what the sacred Christmas sausages were actually called. „The sausages“ as my mother-in-law keeps calling them could potentially refer to dozens of kinds of sausages, even half a dozen kinds of bratwurst that they had in the shop.

It turned out that the cousin was there for the first time ever as well and only slightly better informed than I was but through keen observation I found out that what I wanted is called the „Christmas sausages“. And the distinctive characteristic is that they are with milk and veal. So I learned something new again.

We were victorious and while the sales woman was a little overwhelmed by my order of 45 „Christmas sausages“ and it took her some time to count them out and squeeze them into plastic containers the boy and I felt rather accomplished afterwards. We did a quick detour to the post office and then went home again where my husband was building the fire in the wood stove and ready to have breakfast.

I dawdled quite a bit but managed to eventually go on my Monday run. I even did the whole 6.4k and I ran more than I walked:

Running that much (after walking all the way to the butcher’s was a good thing because I might have eaten quite a bit of cheese for my second breakfast.

The we had spaghetti aglio e olio for lunch:

Then I had my usual afternoon slump. I was basically waiting for my mother-in-law to come back home. I hate not knowing things for sure.

Well, it turned out that she had called late in the morning and because my cell phone had acted up I hadn’t received the message before 3 pm. She had called to say that she would be staying in the hospital until Thursday or so because she was still not feeling all that good.

Since I was too fuzzy for writing I decided to get back to my book cover design course. It’s funny, I’m watching the videos and keep thinking, „Oh, that’s easy, no problem.“ And then I start doing things myself and find that I have no idea how to even select a box and move it around on the screen. I have to say that GIMP is about the most un-intuitive program I have ever used.

Well, there’s no way out but to go back, watch all the videos and do all the exercises myself. And the next time I think, „Oh, that’s easy, I don’t need to practice how to draw a box and fill it with color.“ I will have to eat my words yet again. Better to just go ahead and try to draw the box and fill it with color myself. I’m usually pretty competent with computers. This software is really humbling.

Then it was time to take care of the sacred Christmas food. My husband had started the sauerkraut right after lunchtime and was pretty irritated when I was sitting in the kitchen most of the afternoon failing to look after the wood stove and said kraut. Well, let’s say it was only slightly burned and there was still some left over in the end.

I did manage to start peeling the potatoes in time and we had our Christmas dinner rather early:

You should take note of the placemats and cloth napkins because this is really the only time of the year I will pull those out. This year everything was even clean and ironed. Woot!

The food was wonderful. Gorgeous.

Then I basically had to force the boy and my husband to open presents. I was very happy with the presents I got from my sister, namely the Neil Gaiman and Chris Ridell book „You must make great art“ which is wonderful and moving and which I read straight through right away and another one about making cloth from wild nettles. That one’s pretty cool too.

The boy and my husband were happy too, The boy got a „Tool“ t-shirt (yes, that’s an actual band) and quite a bit of money, and my husband got two CDs he had been wanting.

Then we did all the dishes and then I realized that I still needed to spin my advent calendar fiber. And that I still hadn’t written any fiction words.

So I spun the fiber and I wrote very few words and then I went to bed.

Today there will be the teaching of one student in the morning and some strength training and then the mounting of the smoke alarms (because it’s been a year that we got them and we should really mount them before my brother-in-law visits us next) and more fiction writing. Also, I do have a list.

Even though I went to be after 10 I totally slept in until 6.30. I had turned my alarm off.

And the rest of the day basically went the same.

I got up at the time I usually have breakfast, I knitted, I meditated, I decided on how to proceed on the Owligan, I ran a lazy 4.8 k:

There was kale for lunch. But before there was a little kerfuffle with my MIL’s sister. MIL apparently had forgotten her meds so she called her sister and asked her to take them to the hospital. Sister arrived at our place while my husband and I were both out running. The boy can’t hear the doorbell (any of the three doorbells) while up in his room, especially since he is usually wearing headphones.

So I cam back from running to a note at the door saying that we should call her because of the pills. Also, there was a message on the answering machine. So I called her back and she said she’d be here in thirty minutes.

So I couldn’t take a shower until she arrived. An hour later. We did get the whole thing sorted just before having lunch, so that was good.

Then kale. From our garden from 2017:

It was very good. We did a load of laundry.

I had started uploading the video for the podcast the night before but it took all morning until 3 pm for it to actually get uploaded. Then I could finally publish the podcast.

Then I crossed ‚baking‘ and some other thing from my list. I didn’t want to. My new bullet journal arrived. I really wanted a new notebook which is silly because there are still forty pages left in the old one and that will be enough until the end of January or so. I mean, I know there are people who always start a new bullet journal at the start of the new year but I usually don’t. Forty pages are forty pages.

So I just hung out and enjoyed not having to do anything. Then the boy and I watched some Star Trek and I spun my daily advent calendar fiber. Only two more days to go. Sigh. But I have another spinning project lines up afterwards. Or two. And since I’ve read the ‚Ply Magazine‘-issue about sock yarn I have been wanting to spin all the sock yarn again.

In the evening my brother-in-law called to tell us that my mother-in-law is fine. He saw her in the hospital already.

Today there will be yoga. And writing. And we will take the bus that only goes once per hour on Sundays to visit my mother-in-law. There was talk about a Turkish restaurant on the way.

I’ll probably spend the rest of the day doing nothing again…

So that was interesting.

I had gone to bed a little later than usual but still around 10 pm and then I woke up around 4 am with a bad case of the brain weasels. Not the anxious, panicky ones, fortunately, but the excited, over-motivated ones. Still, more sleep would have been really nice.

And then I was basically too tired to do anything productive for the rest of the day. No writing in the morning, nothing. I did look through all my bullet journals from this year to find out what I had originally planned for the wardrobe project (nothing, it seems) and then I sat down and drew up a plan to follow next. And if I manage to sew two garments per month for the upcoming year I’ll get everything done. Says Ms. One-t-shirt-the-whole-year.

Everything took ages. Nothing got cleaned. I did the breakfast dishes, hurray.

I also got my contact lenses from the optician and tried buying a new bullet journal at a local store. Yeah, no dice. So I ordered online yet again.

Came back home, met the boy who had just lugged an old computer home all the way from school. The school was getting rid of it and the boy took the remnants.

Then we went out together and had lunch. Sorry, no picture today but I had duck with cashew sauce. It was pretty good.

When we came back home my mother-in-law was already waiting for us to tell us she’d be going to the hospital to get a pacemaker. There had been talk about pacemakers just a week or two ago but her doctor thought it wasn’t necessary yet and now she was packing up and getting a taxi.

The boy helped her. And she called later that day to say that she will be getting that pacemaker today. I really hope that that will help her.

Then I started to get the podcast ready, taught a few students, ate too much chocolate, (by the way, you guys have opinions about chocolate and licorice; I’ve been told that I need to try Scandinavian licorice chocolate), worked some more on the podcast, did not listen to all of it, watched some Star Trek with the boy and called it a day.

Today there will be running (I hope) and maybe a little baking, we’ll see.