creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for March 2012

Random Monday

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  • I know that it’s most often Monday when I get in the mood to do a random post. I think that’s because every week on Monday I try to re-start my life. Get back on track with the things I want to accomplish, make time for the things that matter. I still have a hard time with weekends but I seem to be getting better at them.
  • I’m thinking about weaving a lot at the moment. That doesn’t mean that I’m weaving a lot, just that I’m thinking about it. I already own three weaving books so far, and I’m looking at the pretty pictures, and try to decide which loom I’d want to buy. Okay, to be honest, I know exactly which one I want to buy, now I only have to save the money for it. Until then I will make do with my homemade backstrap loom. Have I told you about this yet? Here’s a picture:

backstrap2

  • As you can see (and I think I actually posted this exact same picture before) one end is tied to our kitchen table, the other end is tied to me (hence the name backstrap). I made it myself out of a few dowels, and a broomstick from the grocery store. And a ruler. It works very well, and is not as limited as one would think. Also it can be rolled up and stored in a bag in my closet. Yesterday evening I warped it for a striped band.
  • I’m also looking at my new spinning wheel, which isn’t new at all, and slowly I’m learning about how to oil it, and put a new drive band on so that I can use it.
  • I’m still running and doing yoga, only I seem to do it a little less often, mostly once or maybe twice a week.
  • About two weeks ago I stopped using shampoo. I’m using baking soda and vinegar instead (not together, one after the other). My hair seems to like it. I’m still a bit on the fence about pouring cold water over my head.
  • I seem to be going out a lot more often than I used to. About once a week I find myself heading to Munich to meet people. This week it’s tomorrow morning, and then again next Sunday.
  • I’m still playing my ukulele every day. And I still love it.
  • On a related note, last Saturday my husband and I went to a friend’s birthday party, and we did play and sing a few songs. It was a lot of fun, and the people seemed to like it. When they wanted yet another encore we played “Corcovado”, a song that we haven’t played together for years, and years, and that we hadn’t played at all, apart from when we taught it to students which is not that often.
  • That song might have been the one where we didn’t make a single mistake.
  • I leave you with a picture I took on Saturday:

tulip

book or audiobook?

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Winterkatze did a meme-like thing a while back, and I thought it might be fun to play along. It’s an 8-things-to-1-topic-thing. And the topic is “book or audio book”. Now, I almost wrote audiobook or real book here, just so you know.

  1. I didn’t really know this about myself but I seem to not like being read to. I remember when I met my husband and I had these lovely visions of us reading passages of our favorite books to each other. Then he said he doesn’t like being read to. I was miffed. Then I found that I don’t like being read to as well.
  2. It seems that when I only hear something it immediately starts to slip my mind. Like a 3-year-old. Tell me to do this and that, and chances are I forget at least one of them.
  3. When I first found out about audiobooks I loved the idea. A friend of mine had just recorded her first novel as an audio book, and I put it on my iPod, and thought how brilliant it was to be able to knit and ‘read’ at the same time.
  4. Then I started listening. And found that my mind started wandering. All of a sudden I had missed a whole paragraph. And then another one. And then I tried listening really hard. And then it happened again. And again. It doesn’t have anything to do with that particular book, I tried several others as well but I could never follow, I had to wind back too often.
  5. While my attention often wanders, and I find that I’ve missed a passage in an audio book, at the same time they go way too slow. I kept listening, and thinking, “If this were a real, printed book I would have been two pages further by now.
  6. I also don’t like the fact that audio books are often abbreviated. I think it’s been getting better with MP3s, but I distinctly remember the very first audiobook I got. The very same Winterkatze gave me a copy of “The Fifth Elephant” by Terry Pratchett as a German audiobook. She said the narrator was really good, and that she loved the book. Now, I had read “The Fifth Elephant”, of course, because Pratchett is one of the authors I buy every single book from. In hardcover. As soon as it’s out. So I started listening to the audiobook – then still on CDs – while puttering around the room. Well. I didn’t like the fact that it was in German. I didn’t like the narrator. He was doing funny voices. I don’t like funny voices when being read to. I didn’t like the translated names. But all of that is not really the fault of the audiobook. Or Winterkatze, nope, not at all. And then there came this passage. And I realized that something that I had liked tremendously in the book had been cut out. That was when I stopped listening to that particular audiobook.
  7. I didn’t give up on audiobooks right then. Nope. I got myself a trial Audible-membership, and downloaded two more I think. I got something by the Dalai Lama on happiness which I’m slowly winding my way through, over the years. I also got “Getting Unstuck” by Pema Chodron, and two of the Yarn Harlot’s books, “At Knit’s End”, and “Stephanie Pearl McPhee casts off”. Plus a German book from the library. The happiness one and the German one were quite hard to listen to. The German one was abbreviated again, so it didn’t take quite as long. I still haven’t finished the happiness book even though I’ve had it for years and years.
  8. The audiobooks I like best are the ones that are either lectures, like the “Getting Unstuck” one, or shorter, humorous essays like the Yarn Harlot ones. So the nearer an audiobook is to actual speech the better I can understand it. I have no problems at all listening to podcasts, by the way, only audiobooks. Also radio plays work better for me as well.
  9. Trying to get used to audiobooks made me also realize that I often hop back and forth on the page when reading a ‘normal’ book. When I’m reading something I don’t find as interesting, I skip ahead, look how long it will be, and then go back to reading again. Also I’m a really fast reader. At my normal reading speed I just zoom along. Whoosh, and the book is done. Not so much with the audiobooks.

So, what about you? Book or audiobook, or both? I’m curious.

Handgemacht/Handmade – Episode 20: Second Ever English Edition

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

everything I talked about throughout the year. Beware of the two hour long episode:

Knitting:

Spinning:

topics:

  • colors: Tini’s podcast twinneedle, the book about natural dyes in German: Färben mit Naturfarben. The book is pretty extensive, covers a multitude of plant dyes
  • designing knitwear: the charting software intwined studio
  • the perfect bag: the bag that’s too small, namaste laguna, go knit pouches, crumpler dentist’s wife
  • knitting on the road
  • Tour de Fleece
  • operation turtleneck: custom knits (I told you the wrong thing about the ratio for picking up stitches. Usually, for a buttonband I pick up 3 stitches for every four rows, and for those sleeves the right ratio was 2 stitches for every 3 rows. Sorry.)
  • It isn’t you, it’s the sweater
  • what is this thing I’m spinning? Eiderwolle, Coburger Fuchs

other things I talked about:

I hope you’ll enjoy it. I also hope to be back with another German episode of the podcast (and the odd blog post) soon.