Monday, October 5: Note to self – don’t volunteer

I woke up pretty late, after six, and so there was no yoga, no writing, no meditation. That’s the result of going to bed way too late.

I made breakfast, read, talked with the boy a bit (he is not a morning person) and did all the usual things. Here is what the crochet blanket looks like at the moment. It does make me happy:

Then I went for my walk/run:

It was great but would probably have gone better with a little more sleep:

Ou can see that I like it better when it’s cool:

We were a little late in making lunch (well, I only helped with the salad a bit):

I did manage to take a quick shower before lunch and had a short break between lunch and the first student but dishes did not happen. And then it was all teaching until it was time for dinner.

After that I watched Becca Syme’s Facebook live, then I answered an email and went down a rabbit hole.

You see, the night before I had volunteered to check the German translation of a knitting mystery that I really like. The author asked if anybody in her Facebook group was interested and could read German and I said yes. I was curious and thought I’d learn a thing or two. I opened the document right after breakfast and found myself furiously copy-editing right away. And no, a „thrice cabled cardigan“ is not a „mit drei Fäden zu strickende Jacke“, it is a „dreifach verzopfte Strickjacke“. I still don’t know what a thrice cabled cardigan would look like but there’d be a lot of cables for sure.

Now, I don’t want to make fun of anybody for not being a knitting expert. But when you translate a knitting mystery you need to do your research. There actually isn’t that much knitting in the book.

And after watching the video I had to wait a bit because I can’t do dishes while the boy takes a shower and so I got sucked back into the translation thing and spent two more hours copy-editing. Which is madness. I don’t get paid for this. I don’t have time for this. It took me three hours to get through 33 pages. It might have gone faster if I did the translation from scratch. (No, it wouldn’t have. I would have agonized over every single word. (The same way I just looked up agonize to see whether it’s ‚agonize about‘ or ‚agonize over‘.))

So I ended up at 10.30 (an hour later than my ideal bedtime) hungry, with a headache and a huge pile of dirty dishes. I had to wash up because we couldn’t have made breakfast otherwise and so one thing led to another and to another day in the land of the sleep-deprived.

Today there will be all the teaching, a walk to the health food store and not much more I guess because I’m perpetually tired with a muddled brain. Fun!