Archives for May 2025

I never quite know how to measure these things to be fair.

I had gone to bed too late again but slept well. And in the morning I decided to get a grip and did my complete morning routine. Only 15 minutes of writing but, well, that’s what I get for going to bed too late, I always am super sluggish and slow in the morning.

My husband and I didn’t talk for long and I did not knit after breakfast. I read a little, did my online rounds and then started with chores. And Duolingo. And I finally synced the Hello Chinese app between my phone and tablet so that it will be easier to use it. (The app is very good, it just needs to be synced manually every time.)

I also ordered yarn for a second stripe-y cardigan that will go with my brown skirt and the baggy pair of jeans. I want to use Ysolda Teague’s Stockbridge pattern and make something along the lines of the Desperate Housewife cardigan.

There were dishes, I tried listening to the classical pieces for the past few days but there was one that I just couldn’t get into. I’ll try again another day, I guess.

I helped cut up things for salad and then we had lunch:

My new wrist rest and laptop stand came and I tried them out:

Sorry for the awful lighting, it was evening when I took the photo.

The plan was to finish cleaning after lunch but I was too exhausted and didn’t do much. When a student canceled I used that time to finally send a newsletter out to the people who said they want to hear about the book.

(Psst, my first book is getting published today!)

The newsletter is not pretty and I have no idea what I’m doing but, hey, at least I did catch that I wrote the title completely wrong in the headline. I’ll figure out how to send a free story to subscribers soon, I hope.

My last student of the day canceled as well but by then I was all done with the day. I also reached a kind of milestone because I spent the whole day up to dinner without orthotics and it seems my feet are fine. Phew.

I ate dinner, stopped myself from diving into the big box of salty snacks I bought (because that one is for tonight) and started writing this post. Then I did Duolingo, knitted while watching C-drama and went to bed.

And that was basically it for the day.

I had gone to bed late, always a bad idea, and when I checked my email first thing in the morning (as one does) I saw that „Copper Script“ by KJ Charles had come out which I had on pre-order.

So I made the executive decision to start the day by reading instead of journaling and writing. I did do yoga, mostly because my husband said, I should while he was making breakfast but right after breakfast I was back to reading.

I did the dishes and Duolingo and then went out for a walk/run:

I came back and lunch was ready:

After lunch I remembered the extra big box of chocolate I had gotten from a student the day before and ate half of it. While playing a silly game on my iPad and then reading some more.

I had all kinds of plans for the day, write a newsletter, get a sewing pattern ready, press some fabric, write some new words, finish that short story cover and do laundry.

Well, my husband started a load of laundry, at least.

The student my husband was supposed to teach in the afternoon didn’t show up, I finally took a much-needed shower and did the dishes and then the whole family met to watch an episode of ‚Columbo‘ („An Exercise in Fatality“). The episode was fun in a way but very, very slow. And afterwards all three of us sat in the living room bowed over our shoes trying to figure out which way we tie our shoelaces. And it turns out that my husband actually ties his left-handed. (It’s never quite clear. Since he didn’t know he was left-handed for decades there are quite a few things he does right-handed.)

And then I finished all the chocolate and also read the book all the way to the end.

Great book and a wonderful day but it does leave me a bit meh, I guess only consuming all day was a bit much.

I guess I’ll have to make up for it today with some extra students.

I went to bed on time, woohoo! Slept well and then an alarm on my smartwatch went off asking, „Is the boy awake?“ I went into a mild panic, texted him and, yes, he was awake.

I started doing the usual morning things like opening all the windows, setting the table for breakfast, thawing blueberries and taking thyroid meds.

I wondered when the boy would have to leave the house. I filled his water bottle. I texted him but he didn’t answer.

So more panic and I climbed all the stairs.

He was very surprised and asked what I was doing on the third floor.

Well, turned out that alarm must have been from months before because it was set to go off on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Also, that Tuesday lecture in the calendar? Not happening for some reason.

The boy had apparently fallen asleep right after coming back home from uni the day before and by 1 a.m. had woken up after a full eight hours of sleep.

I went back to bed and tried focusing on writing morning pages but the boy came downstairs as well and wanted to ‚just quick‘ tell me stuff. And then he took a shower.

I opened my laptop to write new words of fiction but somehow couldn’t focus and did my online rounds early.

I did yoga meditated and measured my blood pressure while my husband was making breakfast. Blood pressure is still a bit hight even with medication. Yes, I need to de-stress. I’ve been focusing a lot on my breathing again lately, no idea if it makes a difference.

Husband and I talked over breakfast and I knitted a few rows on the cardigan in progress. I ordered yet another pair of workout gloves. My wrists are hurting more and I’m still figuring things out.

I thought I’d open the manuscript after breakfast but the boy made himself lunch at around 11 because he needed to be at the lab around lunchtime. Husband started a pot of beans and I did the dishes. I managed to listen to three of the classical pieces I had missed the days before. There were really nice things in there but one I tried twice on different days and gave up 6 minutes in.

Then it was time for an epic errands run. I walked to the place where I get my orthotics to make an appointment. The next one they had open is four weeks from now.

I went to the bookstore to drop off a return package, the pajamas I ordered for the boy don’t fit, and then I went to the health food store.

The list looked really short so I just took a basket instead of a shopping cart, yeah, that was funny, I could barely lift it with one hand in the end and I had to carry the laundry detergent in the other hand.

While out and about I listened to the „Word of Honor“ soundtrack and really enjoyed it. I don’t know why I am enjoying mainstream pop so much right now but I am. Well, maybe not quite that mainstream with all those Chinese instruments put in but still.

When I came back home lunch was already on the table. Husband and I put the groceries away and ate:

Yum, beans!

After that I ate too much chocolate again, and then finally opened the manuscript and wrote some new words. Things are happening!

And then it was time for teaching.

I had two breaks between students which was very good for my energy. It’s funny because I had felt completely exhausted all day just thinking about the long teaching day and in the end it was way easier than expected. I should really stop doing that.

After work I ate dinner by myself, then went on social media for an hour, started writing this post, finally did Duolingo (the owl was already mad at me, I forgot to practice in the morning), made a list for today, watched a bit of C-drama and went to bed.

And now grocery shopping. Again.

No, I did not get enough sleep. I still did the whole morning routine complex, this time including writing new words of fiction. Yeah!

My husband and I had breakfast and talked about friends and music. Before I did my online rounds I cut his hair and then I did the dishes and listened to most of the pieces of classical music I hadn’t gotten to the past few days. I’m still missing one.

Then I went walking/running:

Those clouds you see behind me are the rest of the very heavy rain clouds that had covered the whole sky before. I got lucky that it was sunny and dry when I was out.

When I came back home the package with my new keyboard was on the doormat outside. Which was okay because I had given the mail person permission. I didn’t want to wait for them endlessly.

But before I could unpack first there was lunch:

Unfortunately, we had a bit of a grocery shopping fail, there was no sugo and no tomato paste in the house so my husband and I tried putting some dried tomato and ricotta pesto on our pasta. Well, we both agree it would have been better without.

Then I took a break, unpacked the new keyboard, then I took a shower and it was time for teaching. I had a very short teaching day but I did see a potential new student. It would be nice if they would start lessons.

Afterwards I briefly checked the ebook file for my upcoming release (have I reminded you that you can pre-order my book lately?) and uploaded it and then it was time for yet another Zoom call that I had been looking forward to a lot.

Only the call didn’t start. And didn’t start. About half an hour later I tried again and there it was. Apparently the host had been late. There will be a replay so I guess I’ll see why that happened when I watch that.

While listening to Zoom I tried my cardigan-in-progress on, decided on a length and started the next part. There is a nice small motif with cables and twisted stitches at the bottom flowing into the ribbing and that’s where I am. Once again I did the magic chart thing in KnitCompanion.

I ate dinner, finding that I had forgotten to thaw bread for me (the rest of the family likes to eat white bread while I am more of a sourdough kind of person) but since I had cut it into slices before putting it in the freezer I was able to thaw my bread in the toaster.

After dinner I spent too much time playing a silly time management game and then I started writing this post on my new, shiny and bright keyboard:

I didn’t expect to like the lights, right now I have them set to slowly ripple through all colors of the rainbow. It’s easy to turn them off, though, and I do so often.

I’m still getting used to it. Not only is the action of the keys very, very different from the Apple keyboards I’ve been using for years at this point, the keycaps also show a QWERTY layout when I am actually using QWERTZ. I’m used to it and I need it when typing German because there are no umlauts on the QWERTY layout.

I have been using a silicone cover that shows QWERTY on my laptop for many years now but if I want to know where, let’s say the apostrophe-key is, I could always just lift the cover. Well, not any longer. And since the new keyboard is so compact they put that key actually above the ‚enter‘-key. Weird.

This also shows me that I’m mostly touch-typing these days which is cool. I learned at some point when I read in a book about how to become faster at writing fiction that the first thing you should do is to teach yourself how to type by touch. I downloaded an app, practiced for a few weeks and apparently it stuck.

There was a cup of tea, my foot exercises, writing in my bullet journal, watching half an episode of ‚Word of Honor‘ and then to bed.

Today will be a long day but then that’s just a normal Tuesday around here.

My smartwatch thinks I slept for eight hours. I’m not quite sure but, well, whatever. I did do most of my morning routine but decided to write the daily blog post before breakfast instead of opening the manuscript. Guess who did not open the manuscript yesterday at all?

Yep.

Husband was venting again, we both seem to be constantly stressed for no real reason. I think I need to meditate some more. As we often do on weekends we ended up talking longer than we wanted to and then were late for everything else. Again.

I did call my mother and we talked for 45 minute about everything that happened the last week. It was a pretty nice conversation. And then I went back to the kitchen where my husband was right in the middle of doing the dishes.

I keep being surprised by this but I should really adjust my expectations. After we stopped talking he had gone outside to pick herbs and such, had seen all the slugs and taken care of them and on the way he had folded some clean laundry.

So we finished the dishes together, then sat down to chop all the salad ingredients and then we started transforming the dough my husband had made after breakfast into actual pizza:

This is the dough my husband usually makes by feel but we used our new pizza stone. For the second time. The good news is that we ended up with three pizzas that were actually pretty good. The bad news is that the kitchen was absolutely trashed after, the whole oven was filled with burnt flour and most of the pizza was already cold by the time we sat down to eat.

There will be some more research and experiments. As of now the minimal improvement in pizza quality doesn’t really feel worth the hassle but we’ll see.

Then I took a break, and then I decided to un-trash the kitchen. I had wanted to spend hours and hours on publishing stuff but my husband wanted to finally repair the guitar amp that has been sitting in his studio, disassembled and waiting for many months. There was a point where he had finally put a new part in, tried it out in hope and it was – still broken. He was just about to throw it away when he realized that actually a different part wasn’t working properly. So he fixed that, hurray, the amp was back!

Then he jostled the small table with the amp while vacuuming, it fell to the floor and – was broken again. Including the tubes, of course.

(I actually don’t know if it’s working again or not, I only know that he finished it last night, I haven’t heard about the result yet.)

Anyway, we ended up doing the dishes together, then I finally went to my studio to figure out Affinity Photo and the intricacies of putting a bit of text on top of a picture. And I actually found the mistake I made and I did make a workable version of a cover for my reader freebie. I still have to see how it will look on an ebook reader and in black and white, the text is not as readable as I would like and there are a lot of things not quite as I want but, let’s be honest, this is a cover for a freebie. I really shouldn’t spend any more time on it.

By then it was time to meet with my husband again because he wanted help booking an apartment for his trip with a friend to Italy in June. He had thought things through beforehand very well, and I am familiar with the booking process, so we managed to find something within twenty minutes, it is booked and done.

Then it was time to do bodyweight training with the boy. We both felt like we were making backwards progress. I don’t really think that is true but it’s not an unusual feeling.

We both ate dinner, I folded a load of laundry and hung up another load, started writing this post, finally planned the week, did my foot exercises and managed to get my Duolingo in with just minutes to spare.

I watched an episode of „Word of Honor“ and went to bed.

I’m reading „The Seven-Day Stress Prescription“ by Elissa Epel and so I’ll be practicing to embrace uncertainty starting today. Again.