Phew, fall break

I went to bed almost on time and then woke up too early again. No, I definitely don’t love the time change, thanks.

I did my complete morning routine including opening the manuscript and did the 30th day of yoga for the month. I only missed once, I say that is a major win.

Husband and I had a great conversation over breakfast but then had to get going because we had another busy day.

First, an unexpected task, the rolling shutter in the kitchen started acting up a few days ago and then the evening before I couldn’t lower them anymore. I opened the window and tried pulling and shaking and it feels like something is lodged inside but they wouldn’t budge.

So I started looking up how to open the mechanism in the morning but didn’t do anything and after breakfast my husband fetched a stepladder and we tried a bit around but came to the conclusion that this is a job for another day after some research.

There were dishes, I changed the sheets on my bed and then I started the weekly cleaning routine. That isn’t all that routine. I was very determined to not start fall break with a dirty house. So I cleaned the mirrors and touched all the surfaces with a duster.

In between I played around with my new powerbank and adapter that I ordered and found that I can charge my phone, watch, eReader, headphones, keyboard and iPad with it. The iPad was slow as molasses but, hey, I take it. So I guess I’m all set for my next trip.

Meanwhile my husband went running and then started making lunch. I interrupted my cleaning and folded a load of laundry and then it was finally time to eat:

I ate two, a bit of chocolate and then one of the mini bags of Haribo that I had bought for the trick-or-treaters.

After lunch I played a quick round of Genshin Impact and vacuumed the house. I briefly thought about doing the washbasins and toilets as well but would probably not have finished before I had to teach.

I had a little more time after lunch because my first student canceled.

I taught my three students, all very nice, then succumbed to the draw of social media. I then started a new project that I had conceived in the morning. I have decided to learn a new piano piece and document it. Because I have students who get very disheartened by their lack of progress and who think if they just play the piece over and over they will somehow magically reach the point where everything flows smoothly, they don’t make mistakes anymore and that stage will then continue forever and ever.

Sure.

So I played some exercises for warm-up (badly, I had to slow the metronome down considerably) and then I filmed myself playing the Chopin Nocturne by sight. Very slowly with load of mistakes. And I found that these days I don’t actually start a new piece by playing it all the way through, if I hadn’t wanted to document my first fumbling attempt I would have stopped after a few measures and actually practiced stuff. Played first one hand and then the other and figure out fingerings and grouped parts together but no, I spent 16 minutes fumbling.

It’s a gorgeous piece of music, though, and I’m looking forward to playing it well at some point in the future.

Anyway, I really want to document my learning process. This will be interesting.

After that I finished cleaning and found that I was completely wrung out.

And then it was time for bodyweight training with the boy.

We only used the back part of the house because we didn’t want to be interrupted by the doorbell every other second. In the end the doorbell rang three times and every time I had reached the door with my bucket of gummy bears no one was outside. So I made the executive decision to just turn the doorbell off and hide.

Then I could finally eat dinner, I played more Genshin, started writing this post, did Duolingo, made a list for today that included all of the days dishes because I was too exhausted to tackle those in the evening, decided I was too tired to watch TV and went to bed after reading for a while.

And now it is time to switch gears to a week off teaching. Well, mostly. I want to do all the things, naturally, maybe including sewing but we’ll see.