Archives for March 2019

I woke up early again, 4.45 from the alarm, meditated for five minutes, wrote morning pages and after a bit of reading and procrastinating worked on the novel for almost an hour.

I had breakfast, waited for my husband to get up, knitted a little while he had breakfast, did the dishes and then it was time to start preparing the painting of the bedroom, bath and hallway.

Well.

Let’s say I spent the whole day moving things and cleaning things and in the end there was still more to clean and we hadn’t started painting yet.

My husband thought that it would be a good idea to deep clean the wood stove, something we had never done ever before, and that basically took all afternoon and went on into the evening.

Meanwhile I moved all my textile things into the living room, also the dresser drawers, both dressers, moved the mattresses and the slatted frames to the porch and spent what felt like a decade vacuuming the bed and everything. Our bed is a closed box with a big drawer at one end and the last time we really cleaned under it might have been years ago.

The weekly cleaning I do is way too superficial and when you start moving furniture for something like painting the walls all that lack of thoroughness shows.

We had a quick chili for lunch, about half an hour too late:

Lunch was rather tasty and we did take a longer break but then we were at it again. I had had hoped that we could start painting in the afternoon but all the cleaning took so long that I hadn’t even started putting tape and newspaper and tarps everywhere before it was time for dinner.

By then I was pretty exhausted and we decided to call it a day, so I took a shower and watched some „Deep Space Nine“ and „Big Bang Theory“ with the boy.

When we came back to the old part of the house my husband was still cleaning that oven. Which was a bit of a problem because a) he should have stopped working around dinnertime as well, b) I really wanted to go to bed and since my bed was dismantled I had a mattress in the living room, right next to that oven and c) the whole living room reeked of whatever he was using to get all those years of grime off.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am really, really grateful that my husband is the one who usually tackles those big jobs and keeps at it until they’re done. But. In my opinion, cleaning the oven another time and spending more time and energy on preparing for the task at hand might have been a better way to use our resources.

I wanted to go to bed extra-early because of daylight savings time starting in the night but had to wait until he was done cleaning.

At least I had set my alarm to 5.30. Never mind that that is 4.30 in old time.

Today I am really hoping to get to the actual painting of everything. Since we did not paint the bedroom yesterday I will have to spend another night in the upheaval that is the living room at the moment but that can’t be helped.

After the painting there will be more cleaning (I am foreseeing a frantic cleaning of the tiles in the bathroom by my husband with copious swearing, he was barely able to leave those alone yesterday but I convinced him that cleaning the tiles after painting might be a good idea.) and then I’m hoping we will be able to move everything back to where it belongs in a swift manner.

This will be a fun Sunday for sure!

This was the day that I would have needed to get everything done that I didn’t get done all week, well…

I woke up from the alarm, meditated, wrote morning pages and worked on the novel for 25 minutes.

There was breakfast and reading and the boy and my husband had his breakfast in the kitchen again because making tea and muesli turned out to be a logistic nightmare in the annex. (Coffee and bread was easier, apparently.)

We talked a bit, then I did the dishes and we started planning the weekend painting. I started a load of laundry, sorted through the piles in the bedroom and moved them into the living room. I have an embarrassing mountain of mending that fills two trash bags. I did spot a t-shirt that the boy really loved when he was in kindergarten because it was striped like Calvin’s in „Calvin and Hobbes“. Ahem. I will throw that one away soon.

Then I went for a short run since there will be no running on the weekend this week:

The sky was blue, the earth is dry already and it was lovely.

Then I took a shower, put on makeup and moved the two weaving looms to the living room. (Small looms. A rigid heddle and a tablet-weaving loom.)

We went out for lunch this time and met the boy at the Greek restaurant:

Lamb for me and my husband and this is what the boy had:

That Greek is not very veggie-friendly, there is not a single vegetarian main dish on the menu. But you can make up for it with several appetizers.

Then we walked back home, I carried a bag full of old knitting magazines to recycling, wrote emails and almost forgot that I had to start teaching.

I wasn’t late but I had forgotten to hang up the laundry. I asked the boy to do it instead and he was nice enough to do it.

I taught all the Friday students and had a blast. I got to sing and play the piano and play ukulele and sing some more, lots of fun.

The boy and I watched „Star Trek: Into the Darkness“ and I knitted a bit and then I went to bed.

Today there will be all the preparing for painting and hopefully actual painting too. And not much else.

I’m really looking forward to having a nice living space again.

I woke up from the alarm, already a little tired. Meditated and read and wrote morning pages and worked on the novel for 25 minutes.

I made breakfast and the boy came downstairs and after he left for school I lounged at the kitchen table, wrote some more, finished the current novel („Pandora“ by L. C. Mawson, I really like the series and wanted to finish this novel in preparation for one that will come out today), finally managed to solve my planer-printing problem by drawing rectangles in my bullet journal to help me think through the print layout issue. I think I got it. I’m still not sure if I really want to print the pages out because I could also just use them as a PDF on my iPad like the last time I did this quarterly planning thing.

I really wanted to work some more and read some more and knit some more but instead I went over to the annex to great my husband. He was busy cleaning the sink there and we talked and I installed the new shower head and hose and we talked some more and then I procrastinated before biking over to the hardware store and the grocery store.

Came back home only to find that we had run out of: flour, parmesan, cucumber, clarified butter and almost out of rice which made me almost resigned to venture out again to get those things but then I realized that we probably wouldn’t need any of those things until next week and if we run out of parmesan it might be okay to use grated cheddar in a pinch.

Lunch was very tasty again, the boy ate with his grandmother:

It’s interesting how often we eat vegetarian when the boy’s not eating with us. Weird.

I did the dishes right away, sat a little longer and read and then I got the podcast ready for publication and started uploading the video. I’ll publish the next episode today after lunch.

Then I taught my students, wrote a few emails, made the boy practice piano for a bit, did some bodyweight training and went to bed on time for once.

Today there will be some cleaning and shuffling stuff around for the impending painting. All three of us will go out for lunch for Greek food, then I will teach all the students and then it will be the weekend! With added cleaning and moving furniture and painting and more cleaning. Fun!

I didn’t get enough sleep and it showed. While I did meditate and write morning pages I then was so early that I thought, „Oh, I can read for twenty minutes before writing!”

Guess who didn’t write?

Dumb, rookie mistake.

My husband came over a little before eight and started the wood stove saying, „Just do what you want, I’ll build the fire.“ So I started watching a video about book launches and 6 minutes later he wanted to talk to me. I might have been a little irritated. I shortly gave up on watching anything (which had been a bad idea anyway) and then my husband said something and I said something in return, and he had the feeling that I was exploding in his face, and I had no idea, and he was angry, and that basically was my day.

I did the dishes, I talked a little to my husband who was still angry, I waited for him to come back to the kitchen only to find out that he had gone running without telling me, I procrastinated, I went running myself, found that I had no grit, oomph or willpower left at all and cut my run short, walking all the way back home:

I came back home, asked if I could help with cooking (the answer was no), took a shower, went back to the kitchen, started making the salad, set everything up for the podcast, went back to the kitchen, folded a load of laundry and put it away, had another delightful discussion with my husband, ate too much chocolate, did my singing warmup and tried recording the podcast.

Lunch was tasty but a little tense:

I had to start the podcast three times because I was just not in the mood, and when I finally got going I had technical problems again. Still, I did manage to record a one-hour episode (apparently I have a lot to say about that topic). I got ready for teaching and then spent my time between students working on the podcast.

I had another potential new student come over, the son of a neighbor who is in kindergarten. That was nice. And I had an e-mail exchange that might eventually lead to another student returning. All very good.

As I said, I was teaching pretty late and when I came into the kitchen afterwards my husband and the boy had just finished dinner and were busy doing the dishes and talking. Which warms my heart because the two of them don’t spend enough time together.

I helped a little and after the boy had gone upstairs my husband and I sat down and talked some more. Turned out I was triggered and then he was triggered and the stress we are having and my lack of sleep made things worse. Since my husband is as sick of all the drama in the mornings as I am he decided to try having breakfast in the annex. We’ll see how that goes.

Then I wrote in my journal for a bit and read a little more in the novel I put aside for the paranormal cozy mystery trilogy I inhaled over the last few days and turned the lights out on time for a change.

Today there will be grocery shopping combined with a trip to the hardware store. And I will work on the video part of the podcast and teach some students and hopefully also do bodyweight training. Bonus points for starting to get the bedroom ready for painting.

I woke up from the alarm at 4.45. Ugh.

I did meditate and write morning pages but only after I had been awake for more than half an hour. I did manage to work on the novel and was planning for another twenty minutes but then my husband showed up. Since the weather was rather chilly we had decided it was a day for a fire in the wood stove. I thought he’d build that around eight but he thought he’d do us a favor and get it ready in time to make breakfast.

Which meant that a) I didn’t get my twenty minutes of writing in, b) I didn’t eat breakfast at 7.15 as usual but almost an hour later and c) my husband and I then had words because I had expressed my disappointment with the late breakfast in a less than graceful manner while he was pissed that the fire took so long and was passing the time with more cleaning (which irritated me as well).

So then we had to talk. And after that we talked some more because my husband was reading articles on friendship. Then I almost skipped running but decided to not give in to the lazy. I ran and it was really great:

My renewed prescription from my ob/gyn had arrived in the mail that morning which was a big relief because I’ll be running out of birth control pills shortly. So I went to the pharmacy. Unfortunately, not only did they not have the pills, they also told me the earliest they could get some would be the second week of April. Huh.

So I went back home and told my husband I’d go to a different pharmacy. That one was out as well. And the one after it the same. It was all for nothing.

Fortunately this is not something necessary for my survival. I mostly take it for the progesterone and since I’m seeing my ob/gyn next Thursday I’ll just ask him for just the progesterone. Still. Quite a bit of time wasted and some drama I could have done without. I did get 12,000 steps in over the course of the day, though, so that’s a plus.

When I finally came back home lunch had been ready for a while and my husband had had to wait for me to start. The boy was staying in school because one of the physics teachers had asked him to repair a photo relay.

Mmh, shrimp risotto.

After lunch I did the dishes right away (yeah!) and only lingered briefly before deciding that I really needed to print out this planning thing I’m using. I made two attempts to fit two A5 pages on one A4 one so I could use my Taschenbegleiter to house it because I don’t want to buy something new and I love that binder but – after first printing the backs onto the fronts and then printing things in the wrong order without realizing it I finally started really wrapping my head around the task and found that I would need a functioning layout program to get this done.

Then I finally got ready for teaching and taught my first student of the day. The second didn’t show so I started researching A5 binders again. (I’ve been faffing around with this for three months now.) There were more students.

The boy was back home and we talked briefly. Somehow he wasn’t interested in doing bodyweight training. His presentation went okay, he said, the repairs took way longer than expected and now the only thing he wanted was to go to bed.

I started writing this post and in writing about my problems with the planner printout I realized what I could have done differently, so I tried again. And again. And again. Way to spend half an evening.

I did give up in the end because when I finally decided to print the whole thing on A5 paper I had a massive jam in the printer. It seems I will use the planner thing on my iPad again, just like last quarter.

And yes, mercury is in retrograde right now,

By then I felt all spent and did not exercise anymore, once had to be enough for the day. Harumph.

Am hoping to do better today.

I want to go for another run and record the podcast, those are my two main goals for the day. There will also be a bit of teaching with a bonus late lesson until 7.30.