Archives for November 2020

The alarm went off at 5.30 and I – promptly fell asleep again. Got up at 6.15 and somehow moved so slow that all I did before breakfast was ten minutes of yoga.

The boy overslept as well but this time I was more vigilant and woke him up fifteen minutes after he had failed to send me the his ‚good morning‘-message.

My husband is pretty depressed again, hasn’t been eating much since Sunday and needed a lot of hand-holding and conversation. He is starting to look a little better, though, but there went a sizable chunk of my morning. I looked up resources for learning Chinese and ordered a phrasebook.

I walked to the health food store and picked up two spiral notepads for the boy on the way. Came back home and helped a bit with making lunch. The boy asked if I had already started the list of movies we want to watch together over Christmas break. He suggested a Google doc. I sent him a picture of the page in my notebook instead.

Because we were so late all morning lunch was late too:

Teaching was semi-chaotic as well and I didn’t manage to prepare today’s lessons and forgot to send another student some sheet music yet again. I did hang up laundry in between students and wrote for twenty minutes, so that was at least something.

Ate dinner rather late, helped the boy with some homework, talked with the rest of the family, procrastinated doing the dishes and only started doing the massive pile of dishes when it was already time to get ready for bed.

And none of this bodes well for today.

Today there will be running and all the teaching without a break from 2.30 until 7. Probably. It is that weird holiday where schools are closed but everything else isn’t so there might be a few students not coming. No idea. Four of them already asked, one probably has no idea that it is a holiday, we’ll see.

Is it the weekend yet?

I know a lot of people disagree with me but I actually did everything I had put on my list and I feel so much better than when I just hang around and do nothing.

I woke up at 5.30, didn’t spend more than ten minutes on the internet for a change, did yoga and meditated. Then forced myself to write for thirty minutes, made breakfast and ate it, changed a few words with the boy, wrote some more and then crocheted while my husband was eating his breakfast.

There were dishes and running. My 10k-app told me to run for twenty minutes at a time, twice. I did not run all the way through but I did better than usual. Maybe I will get there eventually:

At the halfway point:

I had to wait at the crossing until that thing passed through:

Back home I took a shower, helped a little bit with lunch but my husband was mad at me for something that happened on Sunday. That’s no fun. Lunch was eggs in mustard sauce:

One of the few things I don’t really like to eat.

I did some lesson prep, taught my students (including playing ‚Highway to Hell‘ on ukulele, that was fun) ate dinner, talked with the boy again, helped him with some emails, got into talking about fountain pens and pulled out every single one that I could find so I could show him, did all the dishes with the boy’s help, got read for bed and started writing this post.

No extra writing session after running. The first point in the day when I had the time was right around my bedtime. Still. I did get 1,400 words in, that’s good.

Today there will be the walk to the health food store and some teaching. By now three of my students are in quarantine. Four more have asked for video lessons out of caution. These are strange times.

I did wake up early-ish, did yoga and meditated and that was basically it. No writing in the morning. Had breakfast, read, surfed the web, had a dumb misunderstanding with my husband that reverberated all through the day – fun!

I did the dishes, wrote 267 words, did a load of laundry, tried helping with lunch but was rejected:

Did more dishes, contemplated writing some more, played a game on my iPad and got stuck, hung up laundry, changed the thing in the printer that I thought was making trouble, spent half an hour filling out the form for „Kindergeld“ because the boy will turn 18 soon, printed said form, found that the new part did not fix the problem, ordered some birthday presents, called my mother, helped the boy print something out (pro tip, when you print PDFs directly from Firefox you often get weird characters; better to open the document with dedicated PDF software and print it from there), started writing this post, answered an email, planned out the upcoming week and gave up for the day.

Then we watched ‚Eternal Love‘ while eating dinner, I started writing this post and went to bed on time. NaNoWriMo is a bust this year – again. Unless I managed to write 44,000 words in 15 days. I’d say that is highly unlikely. (That sentence just took me on a fifteen minute detour, the calculator widget is gone in the new Mac OS and I tried finding out more. Then I found out that I can just type into the search bar – interesting.) I would have to write 2,900 words per day, every day. Um, nope.

Today there will be running/walking, quite a bit of teaching, lesson prep, a little writing and some crochet. Can I have another weekend, please?

I had set my alarm for 5.30 but was too tired to get out of bed before 6. Did yoga, forgot the meditation. Oops. Since I was so tired and sluggish everything took longer than usual and there was not enough time to write before breakfast.

I did decide to attempt writing again after my breakfast at 7.45. My husband had been a little late all week and I figured I’d have 15 to 20 minutes.

He showed up at 7.53. At this point I had read through what I wrote the last time and had added – 31 words.

We talked, I crocheted, he had breakfast. I updated the OS on my phone and my tablet. The tablet promptly showed an error every time I tried looking at my email and the app that I use to track my weight crashed on opening. Interestingly, the phone app still works. Unfortunately, I hadn’t updated that one since August 8, so I spent half an hour going through my notebook and putting the data into my phone. Then I made a backup.

I’m pretty happy that I changed the sheets and did the weekly cleaning for the first time in ages. I also might have finally gotten rid of the horrible smell around the toilet and found out that the reason the bathroom sink was clogged is the new soap we were using. I threw the soap out, declogged the sink and went on to help with making pizza. Lunch was actually on time which is unheard of on pizza day but my husband didn’t build a fire yesterday and worked in the yard instead of going for a run. Pizza was excellent:

Then I taught a student online. I had great plans of writing in the break after but instead I installed a systems upgrade to my laptop. I don’t know why I can’t leave those updates alone, it’s almost a compulsion. Then another student, in person this time, and then another break. That time I was all set up for writing but then – the boy descended upon me and I didn’t extricate myself from the conversation in time. When I came back to my studio the systems update was still not complete. I force-quite the computer, re-started it and things were working again. Only a little different. I always have a hard time adjusting after those software upgrades.

I taught two more students and then met with the boy to eat the rest of the pizza and watch the new episode of ‚Discovery‘. I’m not quite sure what to think of it. There are many things to like and quite a few to dislike as well. We’ll see how that goes.

Then the boy and I did a huge pile of dishes and baking sheets, I tried to get some words written but was too tired (again), I started writing this post and that was it for the day. I went to bed a little too late.

My nice and shiny spreadsheet tells me that I need to write 2,600 words per day until the end of the month in order to win NaNo. That sounds highly unlikely. The next week won’t look much different from the last one. On the other hand I don’t want to have a life that has no space for writing. Seems I need to change things up.

Today there will be the running, lots of stuff like filling out forms, taking care of the misbehaving printer and some writing. And laundry. I am expecting a severe Saturday slump as well. On my list I also have ‚cut out fabric for t-shirt and leggings‘ but that’s mostly aspirational. As is ‚repair the boy’s roller blinds. I bought a new thingamabob that I need to install.

It looks as if things won’t be boring. Which is good.

Slept in until six, meditated by accident and did yoga.

The boy overslept and I only realized when it was 7.30 and he wasn’t down for breakfast yet so I went upstairs and found him still sleeping. I think he still got to school on time…

The kitchen faucet had been unruly lately and my husband changed the part at the end of the faucet, the sieve thingy (sorry, can’t even think of the German name for it right now). That was a great idea but then the faucet started sputtering and only giving us a trickle of water. Oops. We unscrewed and re-attached several times and yesterday morning I was so fed up that I decided to make an excursion to the hardware store.

I bought a new part (and two more, one that probably won’t help us in this house), went grocery shopping and helped a little with lunch. Which was most excellent:

Farfalle in mushroom cream sauce with fried bacon and arugula. Then I had all of ten minutes before my first student of the day. In the morning I had re-arranged my studio. About two weeks ago or so I finally realized that the new setup with the extra keyboard and such will probably stay up for a couple more months at least. The extra keyboard meant that I couldn’t get to the sheet music I used for teaching. So a couple of months back I had extricated the things I use most and put those on my writing desk. Which meant the desk was always cluttered (okay, more cluttered than usual) and it was driving me crazy month after month.

Until yesterday morning when I waltzed in, pulled out all the sheet music I will probably need until next summer, put the spinning and knitting magazines that I’ve already read behind the keyboard and the sheet music up on the shelf behind the door. Voilà, less than ten minutes of work resulted in a studio that lets me put everything away and get at it at the same time. Woot!

Then there was all teaching all afternoon and a nice liverwurst sandwich in the evening. The boy helped with the huge pile of dishes and then I started procrastinating the writing. I started writing this post, found that it was too late to work on the novel and went to bed.

Today there will be the changing of the sheets, the cleaning of the house, only a sane amount of students, some writing and in the evening I’m planning to watch the newest episode of ‚Star Trek Discovery‘.

Not a good day on Tuesday and not a single word written. On Wednesday I woke up too early, I guess I’m pretty tense again, it’s the whole pandemic and numbers going up where we live. Apparently it is the most important thing ever that schools stay open and so they cram all the students back into their classrooms. I just hope that the masks and the open windows will make a difference.

I did not write in the morning, yet again, but I did do yoga and meditated. I am still extremely stiff, skipping yoga for most of last week did not help. I do love the yoga in the morning, though, even when it cuts into my writing time.

I only had a bit of time before my husband’s breakfast and chose to spend it on formatting a short story that I had already written. I’m falling more and more behind with NaNoWriMo but reminded myself that the goal is not to write 50,000 words this month and then not write for the rest of the year but instead to move my writing projects forward inch by inch. Sometimes that means writing, sometimes it means bringing something closer to being published. And all in all sending that story out to my newsletter subscribers will be more important than those 500 words I could have written.

I did some crochet and tried being really efficient and productive but failed. I did order Cal Newports new planner at six in the morning, though, so that will surely help and make me vastly more efficient. (I found it funny that he claims time-blocking makes people twice as productive in his email and then turns around and in his promo video claims that it makes them two times more productive. Oops.)

In the vein of being productive, I did use the time when my husband was tending the wood stove to finally make an appointment for the boy to get the inoculation against HPV. Why yes, he was the one insisting on getting vaccinated against something he can’t catch himself.

I did some Duolingo Chinese lessons that took me longer than expected because I didn’t want to stop. I still don’t really understand anything, by the way, and get all the numbers mixed up. Also, I have reached the point where there are several words that transcribe as ‚shi‘ and I can’t tell them apart because I can’t remember the tones. (The boy assures me that that is perfectly normal because my native tongue (and all the others I have learned on the way) is one where tone makes almost no difference in learning. And just that morning I caught myself wanting to indicate a question by changing the pitch of my voice but that’s not how Mandarin works. It’s all very interesting.)

I eventually went running:

It was gray and cold and there were quite a few people out running and walking. It seems that closing all the gyms does make a difference.

My glasses kept fogging up. I didn’t wear my contacts because my eyes are sore and I maybe have a kind of bacterial infection. It’s clearing up already but glasses seemed the better option.

Then we cooked from one of my Chinese cookbooks for the first time:

Green peppers with tofu and rice. We had lots of green peppers from the garden and I had bought too much tofu. When we talked about what to do with the tofu I remembered one of m two Chinese cookbooks that I haven’t really looked at yet, „Every grain of rice“. It is specifically about the kind of food people cook at home and this has just the peppers and tofu with a bit of soy sauce. (Husband chose to do the variation with garlic and ginger because only using four ingredients is completely alien to him.) My husband is trying to learn how to cook things that are easy and fast and don’t require a million things to be chopped, fried and prepared in separate pots.

The whole thing was delicious and will enter the regular rotation from now on. Oh, and this happened:

Meal-planning! We have been thinking hard about possible things to eat and especially my husband has been making notes and asking me to buy certain foods but then we often forget what we have or I buy kale at the supermarket but we don’t have the sausage we like to eat with it. So this time I actually made a proper list before shopping and then put the meal ideas on the fridge and – this is making me really excited! – I put big exclamation marks next to the things we should eat before the’ll spoil. Which means we will eat something with mushrooms today, probably pasta with mushrooms in cream sauce because we have lots of mushrooms and some cream that won’t keep forever.

After lunch it was all teaching all afternoon. Because of my week off I actually enjoyed it and was patience itself.

Then I ate dinner, did the dishes with my husband and started writing this post but the boy came downstairs and we started talking.

Two hours laters I finished writing this post and gave up on writing my words for the day or on getting enough sleep. On the other hand I learned all about the two lectures the boy attended that afternoon, one about becoming an entrepreneur and the other about terms for students. As in ‚special words used at university that you might want to know‘, by the way. „Begriffe der Studienwelt“ doesn’t translate well.

So. Today there will be more writing than yesterday and the day before (too bad I don’t count blog posts), the weekly walk to the supermarket, lots and lots of teaching and something from the list. For the first time in ages I have made a weekly plan that includes some of the niggly small things and it is making me really happy to cross off things like the doctor’s appointment or re-inking my Waterman pen.

‚Put away wool sweaters‘ has been on that list for four days in a row but hasn’t happened.