Archives for April 2019

I woke up at six, forgot to meditate and still didn’t have the headspace to write. And everything still hurt, most of all my knees.

My husband and I had breakfast together, then we did a few things around the house and talked and then it was time to go back to the hardware store. On our way we went to the specialty beer store because it was almost on the way which was nice. My husband had been going there for ages and I had wanted to see it for myself but never went.

We got some nice beer, including some of what I drank all the time when I was in London in 2017.

And then it was time to brave the hardware store. We got some LEDs and a new lamp for the living room. We bought one that we both found okay, there were none that we really loved. I kept going for lamps pretty similar to what we have in there now, no idea if that shows lack of imagination or just a very particular sense of style.

But the lamp was the easy part, the harder part was finding something to prevent the leak on the balcony. That took us some time. I always get into acute overwhelm in there, with all the music, and the smells and all the people and those huge shelves where you never find what you want and then there are all those small screens advertising some product or other on full blast. Shudder.

But we did get a couple of things that might work, spent another fifteen minutes trying to find wood filler and the right type of glue for what we wanted and while we did find some filler the glue search was a failure.

We came home around the time that we would have wanted to eat lunch and my husband started cooking. While I was using the bathroom the doorbell rang. A man that I first didn’t recognize. It was the guy who had built the new garden gates. The locks on those gates aren’t working anymore so he came to change them.

I was so exhausted by then that I stumbled going up the stairs and almost fell flat on my face. For real. I was lucky to catch myself with my hands and got him the key he wanted.

There was lunch. Rice and dal and fresh cilantro that my husband had grown:

Then I had just enough time to do the dishes until my first student.

I taught my three students, thought the boy would accompany me for grocery shopping but my husband wanted to install the water retention on the balcony and needed help so I went alone.

I even got a new BRITA water filter because our old one had developed the second case of something green growing inside, not the water I’d like to drink. Then I went to a grocery store I don’t like and only got half of what I wanted bought the rest at the health food store, shlepped it all home, unpacked it and put it away, and then I got the new water filter ready for use. And decalcified the kettle, as one does.

The boy and I watched the last two episodes of „The Big Bang Theory“ and finished before the soccer match was on. Poor husband had worked away while we were watching TV.

Then I realized that the bed for our overnight guest wasn’t ready. My husband had put a mattress in my studio and I fetched the bedding my mother-in-law had gotten ready and put some sheets on. Then I did the dinner dishes, finally finished packing and read a bit before turning the lights off.

I am a little miffed that I can’t fit everything I want to take into the daypack, I need to carry the purse as well. I had been hoping to fit the purse into the backpack as well.

And that whole thing is heavy. I’m only a change of underwear and socks, pajamas and one t-shirt besides what I’m wearing but there are the toiletries and the bullet journal and the ebook reader and the iPad with the keyboard and a bottle of water and some almonds and some chocolate and an extra pair of glasses and the knitting project. Lots of stuff.

I will spend most of today on a train to Hamburg. I’ll leave around 9.30 and arrive at 4. There should be lots of time for writing and knitting and reading on the train but experience tells me that I won’t write much. Then I’ll check in to my hotel, get my conference stuff and then I’ll see. I have dinner booked and will have to navigate public transportation on my first night there. But that’s alright.

I’m really excited. Have been looking forward to this trip for more than a year. And I don’t have to work on the balcony while there!

Woohoo!

Unfortunately we still need to find a solution for the new balcony floor making all the rainwater cascade over the side which resulted in a halfway rotten main weight bearing beam.

I woke up at six, tried to make myself do something and failed. Had just finished making breakfast when my husband showed up at 7.30.

We were both a little reluctant to don the working clothes again so we only got started at 9.30. By 12 we were finished with coat of paint number two. Then we had to wait for an hour until it was time for lunch, so I started packing some things up that I wanted to send in the mail.

My mother-in-law had been cooking all morning and made us a very nice lamb roast with mashed potatoes and green beans:

Before hand we had several lengthy discussions about the fact that my husband prefers lactose-free milk and that we’d rather not have any onions in anything, thank you very much, because they contain a lot of fructose.

Everything tasted great, I could have done without the extra bacon topping the mashed potato in addition to the bacon in the green beans but was very grateful that she left off the extra onions on top of the other onions.

Unfortunately the food didn’t sit all that well with me, I am a little suspicious of the sauce. One of the problems with my mother-in-law is that we have the exact same discussion about the exact same menu every year and she never remembers. „What? You don’t want onions? I didn’t know that!“ Also, she makes a lot of fuss to make sure that every component of the meal is piping hot and ‚fresh‘ whatever that means and keeps dashing between the kitchen and the dinner table with the serving dishes, never leaving anything out, not even on the warming platter she had sitting on the side.

After lunch I finished my two packages and mailed them and then it was time to get back to painting again. We were determined to do a third coat of paint on the same day. At one point my husband was even talking about a fourth coat which would have meant going to the hardware store today and painting some more today as well.

We painted the whole thing a third time (well, fourth if you count the primer) and it only took about two hours. And then we were done.

Only, my husband had another look at the hole in the wood where he had excavated some rotten, damp wood that was behaving more like a sponge and the hole is getting deeper and deeper. Which is bad news.

So we are discussing plans to stop the water from going over the side, and of putting a support beam underneath the weak spot and of filling the hole but only after it has been properly treated. Meh.

So. Today is almost a day off, there will be a trip to the hardware store for more supplies, I will be packing and I will be teaching three students.

I might still be a little exhausted, funny that.

I slept until six and still didn’t quite get enough sleep. Found that I hadn’t read the „Daily Stoic“ for four days in a row.

I waited with breakfast for my husband because I wanted to have a proper Easter breakfast together. We ended up not boiling eggs because there would be quite a few in our lunch. But I did have some more Osterzopf.

Then I started making the dough for our Genovese Easter pie. Making it took all morning and we had to resort to eating an appetizer beforehand:

While lunch was late but it was worth it:

This might not look like much but it’s homemade puff pastry (I hope that’s the right term, had to look up Blätterteig with a filling of spinach, ricotta, parmesan and eggs.

And here you see the inside and also that I should have left it in the oven a little longer:

And my husband’s grandmother’s cake plate.

After that we took a little break and then suited up again to paint the balcony white. Only when we went upstairs my husband’s brother and one of his nephews were there and so we talked and my husband got to tell his brother all about the balcony crisis with the water streaming down the sides since the new floor was installed.

So we only started painting at five. And then we tried to paint the new paint evenly and thickly and failed. And it took ages. Not quite as long as the sanding but longer than we thought.

We did find our rhythm later but it took a while and then it was time to meet the boy at the train station.

I had spent all afternoon peaking at my phone because I knew he’d have about four hours to kill in Tübingen before stepping on the train and then I was a little worried he’d miss his connection.

But he didn’t text. I heard nothing until he asked if it would be okay to take a different train back home from Munich than the one specified on his ticket. It was totally fine, especially since that train didn’t exist anyway.

I painted racing the clock and managed to sloppily stain the last beam that was accessible without a ladder just in time, threw on some clothes without paint stains and when I rushed to the train station he met me halfway. He had taken an earlier train than I thought.

Meanwhile my poor husband was still perching on the ladder, balancing the bowl of paint in one hand and the brush in the other.

We all had another piece of Easter pie, my mother-in-law included, and since my husband had put it back in the oven again the egg in the middle was cooked all through this time. And it was delicious. We will certainly make that again.

The boy actually told me things about his trip. The youth hostel in Tübingen is rather picturesque and sitting right next to the river there, he was learning things about China and drinking all the tea in the morning and they had the afternoons off.

He looked rather tired but it seems his trip was fun. He insisted on unpacking immediately. Which means I taught him well.

Eventually my husband finished painting too, we each had a beer and then I got ready for bed.

Today there will be – wait for it – more painting. While the paint I bought is white it only stains the wood lightly and we are both thinking that three coats will be better than one. And we should have enough paint for that left.

But. That means we need to paint the balcony two more times.

Ugh.

We are thinking we should start real early today and then paint again in the early evening. You’re supposed to wait twelve hours between the coats of paint but I’m thinking the paint won’t explode if we cut it short. Also, it’s really warm and sunny here right now.

So. Painting, eating lamb at my mother-in-law’s and more painting.

Everything is still hurting, only a little more so. I’m still pretty stoked that I am physically able to do all of this. I mean, after the work we did the day before I didn’t expect myself to be able to roll out twelve layers of dough for the pie. They needed to be as thin as strudel dough. That’s the one you’re supposed to be able to read a newspaper through.

Phew.

One more day and then we should be done. Wish us luck.

I woke up at 6 after not quite enough sleep and just didn’t want to get out of bed. I finally got up when my husband showed at 7.30. There was breakfast. I did not eat Hefezopf but instead my usual muesli. I knew I would need to be well-nourished for the day ahead. Here is a picture of it anyway.

We started working at 8.30 and went back to the electrical sanders. We worked like mad with only minimal breaks and managed to finish the machine-sanding until noon. And this is how the balcony looked afterwards:

So we took our lunch break and ate leftovers:

Perfect white wine to go with fried spaghetti with eggs, bacon, cheese and hot ketchup. Classy.

We started working again at 2.30- I knew that my husband wanted to do more sanding, this time by hand, but was a little shocked at how thorough he wanted to be. This is something we often have different opinions about, by the way.

So we sanded. And swept the dust off the cardboard we had put on the balcony floor, and sanded some more. My mood became a little sour at that point because I had been hoping to start painting at maybe four o’clock. I became so cranky that my husband sent me away to take an extended break while he would finish the sanding on his own.

The fact that everything was taking so long was not the only thing souring my mood, the other thing was that apparently I’m not strong enough to sand efficiently by hand. I sand and sand and sand with all my might and in the end the wood looks exactly as before. I find that rather frustrating.

While I was taking a break I finished reading a novel, ate my first piece of Hefezopf, got a message from the boy about his return trip tomorrow afternoon and another one from my mother.

At five I changed into dusty work clothes again, swept the cardboard again and the porch and put the sanders away into the garage and vacuumed part of the balcony floor and swept the balcony itself, you know, as one does.

My husband had promised me that we would start painting at six which I found uncomfortably late. But we were both completely determined to get the primer on. We both are really set on getting Tuesday off. And once the primer is on rain won’t be a catastrophic event anymore.

We painted and painted after that, my husband painting everything twice because he thinks that’s better for the wood, me painting everything just once but thoroughly because I think if you want to paint with primer twice it would be much better to actually do it once a day for two days in a row, and that a thicker coat of primer doesn’t really help anything.

By eight I couldn’t find anything more to paint because I don’t do ladders. Which is rather unfortunate if you’re working on a balcony. My poor husband has to do all the ladder-work by himself. He continued working for half an hour more while I was taking a much-needed shower.

I started writing this post, wrote in my journal, read a bit and turned the lights out.

Today there will be more painting, this time with white. I’m thinking we might do the Easter pie after all. There will be Easter breakfast with the Hefezopf and eggs.

And we might get Tuesday off after all.

I slept for nine hours or so until after 6. No writing, no meditation, no morning pages. I was just too exhausted.

We had a leisurely breakfast with some talking and planning and I spent most of the morning making a packing list for my trip to Hamburg next week and made a pile of things I want to take with me. I even washed a bra by hand.

We did need that time off to lick our wounds. On top of my full-body soreness I also had painful wrists that felt like I shouldn’t do anything with my hands at all for at least a day. Since I can’t stand doing nothing I did try plying more yarn and managed to finish the first half of the sock yarn I’m making. Which is very good because I will need a travel knitting project. Plain socks from handspun would be perfect. But for that I will need to ply the second half as well. We’ll see how that goes.

Then we had shrimp risotto:

Afterwards we took a short break and then it was back into the dusty, paint-stained work clothes for a round of hand-sanding. Fortunately that didn’t make much noise and so we did that all afternoon. We accessed all the little crannies where the sanders don’t reach. My husband also excavated a patch of rotten woods right in the middle of the big weight-bearing beam that holds up the front of the balcony. We will have to shore that up eventually for safety.

The depth of the hole and the sanding that felt completely futile – I was sanding and sanding with hurting fingers and the moss still remained on the wood – I promptly broke out in tears right there sitting on the balcony floor. I knew that it was mostly exhaustion but still.

My husband took pity on me and sent me downstairs so I could bake Osterzopf after all. Baking that is basically the only Easter tradition I follow and it had looked as if that wouldn’t be possible this year. My mother-in-law had already gotten some store-bought Zopf and wanted to give us half anyway because she can’t eat a whole one by herself.

Still. I changed into cleaner clothes and washed my hands, made the dough and went back upstairs to do another round of sanding.

By 7 I had enough, just after my husband had declared that he would sand for as long as it would take, until it was dark, or even by lamplight. I almost burst into tears again but instead we just went downstairs for dinner.

Meanwhile the dough hadn’t properly risen. That had never happened before. My husband thought the kitchen was too cold. So we turned the heating on, placed the bowl with the dough in front of the heater and just an hour later it looked much better.

Dinner was had, then I made the Zopf and baked it and did all the dishes for the day.

I went to bed too late because of the baking and such but it was totally worth it.

Today there will be – wait for it – more sanding. This time with loud machines that make your arms vibrate. Yeah!

We are hoping to finish the sanding by lunchtime and maybe even to start painting with primer.

Best case scenario would be that we finish priming today and paint the first and second coat of the actual white paint on Sunday and Monday. It would be perfect if we could also make the special, planned Easter lunch and be done with painting before the boy comes home Sunday evening.

Right now the prospect of just using paint brushes feels like vacation but I’m sure we’ll think otherwise in a day or two.

If we could finish everything on Monday I could take Tuesday off (with only three students to teach – piece of cake) and go on my trip all rested and energetic on Wednesday.

We sanded from 9.30 to 12 and then again from 2.30 to 8. So I spent my day sitting or kneeling on pieces of cardboard on a nubbly stone floor pressing the sander against the balcony railing. At least I was in the shadow a lot of the time.

There was spaghetti bolognese with red beet salad for lunch:

The boy sent us a picture of some Chinese calligraphy he had done. I guess that means he is fine.

I had a beer and an ibuprofen (and yes, I know you shouldn’t mix the two) and went to bed.

Since today is Good Friday we might do a little lights sanding by hand because we didn’t get finished yesterday and we still need to tackle the spaces where the sanders can’t reach and there will be even more sanding on Saturday.

Somewhere in between I want to bake the annual Osterfladen, no idea when and how.