Archives for January 2024

For once I feel like I’m almost prepared for the weekend. I skipped changing the sheets for lack of time but did the rest of the weekly cleaning of the house, also my full morning routine, taught quite a few students and ordered take-out and picked it up.

We had lunch with my mother-in-law who insisted on inviting us to take-out because my husband couldn’t be at her birthday dinner. First there were spring rolls:

There there were fried noodles (at least for me):

My husband had duck with Thai curry sauce, the boy fried noodles with tofu and my mother-in-law spring rolls with meat.

It was a busy day, I filled every pause with cleaning and such. I taught a new student, ate dinner then too much chocolate because I was feeling low on energy, started writing this post, hung up the load of laundry that I had started, did the dishes, then Duolingo and watched the second half of the C-drama episode I had started watching the day before. I did a fair bit of reading in between other things. I’m reading „How to ADHD“ by Jessica McCabe (I love her YouTube channel) and „A Thief and Gentleman“ by Arden Powell. I really like both but am finding the fiction book a little dragging right now. Mostly because I didn’t want to get to the point of crisis, I could feel it coming a mile away but then I’ve been training myself to intuit story structure up to the point where I read along something, feel like there should be some big turning point ahead and then see that the book is about 80% along.

I’m hoping to get some rest today, also exercise and open the manuscript. Bonus points for cleaning the bathtub. I thought taking a bath might be nice and relaxing.

Still didn’t open the manuscript. I did get enough sleep, woke up from the alarm and did my complete morning routine. The plan had been to take a shower before breakfast but I was too late for that. Had breakfast and decided to take my shower then.

Well. Just as I stood there, all soaped up with my hair full of conditioner the water pressure went down. There was only a trickle of water left. I called out for my husband and it became clear that something must have happened outside the house. I did manage to use the little bit of water that was still dripping out to get most of the soap and conditioner off.

There were some workers digging the street up near our house. My mother-in-law went and asked them and it turned out it was a planned outage and they had put a note in our mailbox the night before. Oops. Water was supposed to be back around noon. So no dishes. I managed to coax some more water from the faucet so I could brush my teeth and then I stepped on the bus to the supermarket. The streets are still icy in places. Beforehand I had remembered the KT tape I had bought and taped up my poor painful feet. And what can I say, they feel much better. Fingers crossed.

I returned the socks I had bought for the boy the week before, went grocery shopping, caught the bus back where someone actually brought a lit cigarette on. The guy got off again at the next station but still. Lunch was late because it had taken ages to thaw the meat:

Goulash is one of my favorites but this one could have used a bit more cooking. Still tasty, though.

Then I took a break, talked a bit with the boy, did the lunch dishes, taught two students, did bodyweight training and foot exercises, another student, another break because a student had to cancel due to the train strike which meant I ate an early dinner, then one more student, I played the piano for a bit, found an old friend on Instagram, started writing this post, did some more Duolingo and went to bed.

It would have been nice to finally get back to the novel but with all the drama around having no water it didn’t happen.

And today already looks extra busy but we’ll see.

I ended up not doing any exercise or stretching but having a bit more time in the morning felt good. I tried talking with my husband about feeling I’m approaching burnout again and being cold from the inside all the time which led to a pretty spectacular row.

Every time I say I’m cold he tells me to move more and I try to explain that that’s not the point. Me being frustrated and angry didn’t help. We eventually talked it out in the evening but it made for a bit of an uncomfortable lunch. The food was wonderful, though:

I don’t usually care for meat with bones in it but this was really good.

I didn’t have much time until teaching. There was a one-hour break in the middle that I used to call two potential new students. I told one to call again in six weeks and the other will start next week. She had had lessons with me before and so she got preferred treatment. I ate dinner, taught another student and came back to the kitchen where my husband was doing the dishes.

I had decided to lean into my emotional eating by eating the ice cream in the freezer, so that’s what I did. There was a pause in eating and reading when my husband showed up and we talked and then again. What I really need is half-pints of ice cream. Though, to be fair, I should stop buying ice cream that often, I have a hard time not eating it all up, it’s not good for my voice and is too heavy to eat often.

And yes, I know how weird it is to eat ice cream on one of the coldest days of the year while shivering all day.

I started this post, did Duolingo, watched some C-drama and went to bed.

Today will be the usual extra busy Thursday including grocery shopping and all the teaching.

Not literally paralyzed, so that’s good.

I woke up from the alarm, a little earlier than the days before. I thought I had enough of a sleep buffer to make that possible. Um, nope. So I decided to start the day not with my morning routine, you know the one that I do because I want to feel better but with reading instead. I don’t regret it much but well, I also did not have much energy all day.

No idea if skipping the morning routine results in less energy or if I tend to skip it on days where I don’t have energy to start with. Oh, and the thing I was reading was „Old-fashioned cupcake“. It came recommended by Gail Carriger and I really loved it. Will probably re-read it soon. (And writing about this reminded me of another comic she recommended ages ago and then I had to spend ages to find it again and buy it. Of course. It’s „Our dining table“.)

So I had a whole list of things I wanted to do that I ended up not doing. No morning routine, no playing the piano, no taking a shower, no exercise, no novel revision, nada. As I said, exhausted.

I did start a new course, „30 days to better productivity“ and this is the result of my homework:

As a constant reminder that changing your behavior as an adult takes a lot of time. The homework for the next day was to read a book for 30 minutes but I had already done that. That is one thing I almost never skip. Reading is a given.

My husband is still hung up about people and is in that stage where he needs to rehash things that happened over and over and over. Unfortunately that said my energy big time. I’m still peopled out, talking about people with people in that state is not the best for me.

There was pasta with mushrooms and cream sauce for lunch:

I taught many students, including one I hadn’t seen in months that I promptly mistook for his brother and one who told me they have to stop lessons because they need the time for getting better grades in school. Poor thing. I don’t actually think it works that way but what do I know.

What I do know is that if you push your kid through the last year of elementary school so that they manage to barely squeeze in to gymnasium the chances are high they’ll have to drop out a year or two later because their grades aren’t good enough. But of course I can’t tell that to the students’ parents. Or that not getting into a certain kind of school is not the end of the world.

During and after dinner I had that limp dishrag feeling again, also was almost shivering. The outside temperature had dropped and that together with my lack of energy meant I was feeling like an icicle.

I did manage to go to bed at a reasonable time and am hoping that today will go better than yesterday.