I went to bed past midnight and woke up before the alarm.The boy had asked me to be his backup for getting up at 7.30 and I had agreed. My plan was to write morning pages from 7 to 7.30 but when I had finished the first round of foot exercises in bed and had taken my thyroid hormones it was already too late for that.
He did wake up on his own but I barely managed to squeeze in yoga and meditation before my husband showed up for breakfast. I ate, I knitted, I went online.
Right when I was attempting morning pages for the second time my husband showed up again and somehow we agreed that installing his new computer in his studio was the thing to do. So we did that. Including explaining everything to him that is different from his last one. All files that he worked on since the backup ten days ago are firmly stuck on the old computer. Communication with the old one is a bit tedious. But my husband assured me he would miss nothing important.
I decalcified the bathroom faucet (and later realized that the part that comes off was full of tiny pieces of stone) found a new part and screwed that in.
Meanwhile my new pair of barefoot ballet flats arrived. I had high hopes but it turned out the shoes were pinching my toes and way too wide at the heel. And this is why we always buy Mary Janes instead of ballet flats, duh. So I figured out how to return the shoes, wrote an email that I want to return them, went in search of another email announcing a sale at the place where I have bought all my normal dress shoes and ordered the ones I already have, one size bigger and in red. Because I love red but also because the red ones were 45 Euros cheaper than the others. Well, I could have bought blue ones instead but I really dislike the color blue and it would go with nothing I own. Well, apart from jeans, I guess.
By then it was again too late to do the breakfast dishes (past noon) and my husband made sure I knew all about him being displeased. I did the dishes as fast as I could and then went out to buy yogurt. (And chocolate.) When I came back lunch was almost ready. The boy came home from uni just as we were finished with eating:
Oh, and the other thing I did in the morning was that I had a sudden inspiration at breakfast for how to write my author bio. My hindbrain was working on it all the way through the conversation with my husband (The Rolling Stones and the Beatles, Putin, climate change) which made me somewhat distracted.
After lunch the boy and I talked about the usual stuff on Twitter, the weirdness of wearing shorts and how much better the cold is than the heat. I mean, I agree, up to a certain point. And then I asked him to help me with a math problem.
The mystery shawl that I’m knitting has two increases every other row, so on average on increase per row. One knits a certain number of rows and then does the whole thing again for the same number of rows as before. Now, I just had reached the halfway point and was amusing what fraction of the clue I have already knit. It’s definitely not half because the rows are ever increasing so the second half of the rows has to have more stitches than the first half. I thought it might be a third but I wanted to know more.
Cue the boy. He made me a very nice equation once I had managed to explain the whole thing to him (it took a while but became easier once I pulled the knitting out) and he got a bit hung up on the fact that one starts from 9 stitches and not from 1 or so.
While he plugged the numbers into his equation and started typing numbers into the calculator on his phone I kept looking at the knitting and thinking that it might be easier to treat this as a geometry problem. So I sketched the whole thing in my notebook and figured that half the rows means about a quarter of the stitches.
The boy reached a number that was closer to a hundredth of the stitches which was clearly wrong. He then found he had used 9 instead of 0.5 in one place and had another mistake somewhere else and in the end came up with half the rows being about 27.5 % of the clue’s stitches.
So the quick sketch had been a good idea. Only, I had to talk to someone at length to come up with it.
That whole thing made me almost late for teaching. Since it was extremely hot and sunny outside my studio was more like a greenhouse but I was happy to at least be inside. I taught three students, had a half-hour break that I used to do the dishes, taught another student and then ate an early dinner before teaching my last student of the day.
I did bodyweight training, ate all the Japanese crackers (note to self: stop buying crackers), started writing this post, took a shower, did Duolingo, contemplated the futility of it all and the question if it was too late for watching something or not and finally went to bed.
Today is supermarket day in the scorching heat. But riding a bike often feels less hot than walking.
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