Not Very Focused

Those of you who follow this blog can probably guess why my concentration is all over the place today. To my surprise, I actually slept last night, and while I didn’t sleep very deeply, and woke up a few times, I don’t feel like a total zombie either.

My lizard brain hasn’t caught on yet – every time I get up and walk away from my computer, I catch myself walking down the hallway to check on Fritzchen. I swear I can hear her distinct „Eeow“ all over the apartment… I know this is just me processing, and I also know it will stop, eventually, if maybe never completely. What will change over time is that after a while thinking of her will make me smile, rather than feel the cringe-y sensation of loss. This is not yet how it is today.

Trouble is, I have a really urgent website translation I need (want) to submit by end of the week. It’s for one of my long-time, dear clients, a renowned portrait photographer who also has a few prestigious advertising clients. (Good for him, because obviously, all of his shoots are cancelled for now.) So, writing about luxurious, beautiful handcrafted leather goods. But since my attention span is like a teenager’s today, I thought I’d pop over here and chat every once in a while.

So, we’re all socially isolating ourselves like good little citizens, right? Right. How is that going for you guys? What are your coping strategies? I imagine it must be truly painful for the extroverts among us – some of the people from the entertainment industry I follow on SM are posting regular gems, sprung from their need for contact. It’s really touching to see how they tell us about recipes they tried, chicken they burned, or the correct way to clean a pan after they did (hot water ;-)!). Skincare tips, pet videos, admonishing the public to #staythefuckhome. I watch Jamie Oliver’s IG videos, which are always inspirational.

It may sound weird, but my own everyday life has not changed all that much. Really! I do miss seeing my friends, but for now, I’m actually quite content living in the little bubble of our nuclear family. It’s more people _all the time_ than I’m used to, after all, what with my husband home officing and my kids being home from school. And I have work, so I’m lucky.

Walking Charlie has been a welcome respite from all the noise at my house. Cabin fever would be a problem, sooner or later, and I sympathize with people who want to be good about sequestering but have tiny apartments where it’s virtually impossible to stay out of each other’s business… domestic violence is real, and while I certainly don’t condone it, I can see how it would spike under these circumstances. Add impatient young children, or alcohol, to the mix, and bam, it’s not hard to imagine the fights erupting. So, I guess, #staythefuckhome is important, but #gothefuckoutside is, too?

It’s my first spring with my own dog, ergo taking daily walks and literally watching nature wake up a little more by the day is new to me. Shrubs and trees budding and blooming, and the green of the moss gradually being outshone by the chlorophyll-laden explosion on the tips of the branches … it’s a gift, enjoying that with my four-legged lil buddy.

Home schooling has been happening, and I confess I’m more than a little surprised at how well it actually works, considering how new and different it is. My 6th grader is attending tel-cos with team mates and teacher twice a week, and my 12th grader is working on assignments by himself and with classmates, submitting papers and solved math problems via Email. Maybe experiencing mom working her butt off from home has set a good example?

The extra cooking was one thing I did not look forward to – providing, like, two cooked meals a day, in addition to dog duty and work? It scared me, and I said no, not happening. So the kids are getting smart. My son can do really good French Toast. My daughter has successfully graduated to frying eggs all by herself. Of course there have also been trips to the Kebap shop, and a few instances where lunch consisted of a burger and sundae after a walk by the dog lake, and of course lots of yogurts, bowls of muesli, carrots and apples and avocado sandwiches in between. We’re adjusting.

I’ve been assigned a new book, for a publishing house I applied to more than a year ago – and I’m greatly looking forward to this one, because it’s about outdoorsy, escapist people living on the fringes of society: Live-in vans, Winnebagos, houseboats, Tiny Houses – the works. Surfers, bloggers, drifters, environmentalists. Of course, they all have their own ingenious solutions for just about everything from bio degradable toilets to storing food, interior design, solar showers, and finding electricity when needed. It’s amazingly topical, and I applaud the editor in charge for choosing such a book in a time like this.

So, I have managed to translate a few pages of luxury leather items. Some of the nerdy terms I already learned (and forgot, because who needs to know the difference between pit tanned and vegetable tanned cowhide, on a daily basis? Not me!) when working for Manufactum more than a decade ago – their business is popular in the UK, also, and I was in charge of translating this particular product range for their catalog for a few years. Funny how this stuff came back like a boomerang so many years later. Still, my mind is like a bag of fleas today, so it’s been slow going.

My husband and daughter are on a mission to catch her up on James Bond – which is happening next door in the family room. She seems to like Pierce Brosnan, who definitely was my favorite of all the 007s, even though Daniel Craig may be the most unusual actor who ever played him. Here’s an odd story. I stopped watching the franchise after Casino Royal, after leaving the movie theater both shaken and stirred (sorry, could not resist). For the first time, James Bond had a soul. The beautiful love story ended in tragedy – and then, I didn’t want to know any more. They lost a customer by making an unusually good movie, how absurd of me, right?

While grief-binging Star Trek TNG yesterday, I managed to knit half a color block sock. I’m using daffodil colors for this one, a very spring-y color sequence, chosen by my daughter, la Chefesse de la Couleur:So far, I’ve made three pairs like this, four if you count the tiny ones that stayed with baby cousin K in Frankfurt.

They’re fun to make, and perfect for binge knitting because you don’t have to pay a lot of attention to patterns and such. Also, temperatures have not gone back up yet, so I’d say we’ll need them for a bit longer.

Thank you for reading this rambling post about everything and nothing.

A Black Monday

Hey everyone. I’m not even going to get into Covid-19 and the various ways it has impacted all of us over the past few weeks, that probably deserves a post (or several) on its own. I just hope all of you are staying sane, as well as healthy, and I hope to see you guys as soon as we’re not required to socially distance ourselves from each other. It has been weird, but we’ve had a shit sandwich of quite another sort to deal with, as we were accompanying our sweet kitty on the last leg of the last of her nine lives.

As our wonderful vet pointed out today, death can go on and on if you let it. He supported our decision to let her go now, rather than keep her going as a miserable, shaky, pained shadow of herself, just because we weren’t brave enough to make a decision.

So, we went there as a family, and were handed the obligatory Corona face masks. We were given time and a room to ourselves, and the sedative was administered. The lethal shot came when she was fast asleep. Her death was awful, and without fanfare, just like the other times I had the sad job of accompanying a pet on their final journey. Fritzchen stopped breathing around 2 p.m. She would have been 15 in August.

To be honest, I’ve been saying goodbye to this cat ever since she and her sister were diagnosed with kidney insufficiency years ago, trying to brace myself for this bad day, but of course you can’t prepare for this shit. It hurts, and all of us are heartbroken, despite having been well aware this day would come.

But even as I’m crying bitter tears of loss, I mostly feel grateful for the privilege of having lived with her, prickly personality, beautiful black coat and adorable white blaze on her forehead. She was a gorgeous animal, and much loved by all of us, most of all by my boy whose heart I can hear breaking all the way from his room down the hallway. It was he who bore the brunt of caring for her over her last weeks, as she didn’t really leave his loft bed much anymore, and he spent many, many hours there with her, sleeping and awake. He held a night vigil for her yesterday, not wanting to waste her last hours with us. I joined them for a while between 4 and 5 a.m. It was time well spent.

In closing, I’d like to give heartfelt thanks to all of you who thought of us, and prayed for us, and asked after Fritzchen so kindly – we are grateful for each and every one of you. You are making this easier, truly.

And finally: Pet lovers, and especially those who consider adopting: Please do not let this sad tale deter you from taking in an animal. I can’t find words to describe how much great happiness, love, joy and laughter mine have given me over the decades. It’s not even a question for me: I’d never ever want to live without them.

Be safe, everybody, and take care of yourselves.

Carbohydrates

People frequently complain about gaining weight over the holidays, and that makes so much sense, given the general notion of joy equaling rich foods, heavy with butter, sugar and meat – all very customary around Christmas time. It’s also cold and dark in the mornings when we get up, and it’s cold and even darker when we come back home from work or school, so it’s understandable that we resort to comfort foods (few of which, unfortunately, seem to be calorie light-weights) to give morale a much needed boost. But it is unsurprising we feel it later on the scale or at the waistband.

I guess I must be some sort of freak, because it’s not really the holidays but the year’s darkest months, January and February, that get me in trouble. Eating for comfort is one aspect, but my working longer hours because of my lunch breaks spent at the park or community forest now, instead of at my desk, is another. Working late means eating more. Simplest of math.

To me this means carbohydrates. I don’t do well on a protein-heavy diet, such as Atkins and keto, especially not in the winter when I crave something comforting and filling. Over the summer I might be fine eating salad and a piece of meat or fish for dinner. But in the winter, I need to have carbs. Rice, pasta, polenta, potatoes, bread … Any of those will do the job, but to say I can easily resist freshly baked goods would be lying. I’ve gotten better about cake, because anywhere that’s not a hipster organic bakery, this automatically means wheat flour, which I try to avoid. Unfortunately, I know how to bake cakes, too, and I use other types of flour.

It might be a losing battle. My solution for now is restraint, and to have less of the stuff than I would have done when I was young. (Spaghetti Carbonara plus the contents of a bread basket for lunch?! Yup, that was me, and I was still skinny. Youth metabolism, sigh.)

So, if you have any solutions for a methadone program for carbs addiction, please let me know, but don’t come at me with eat more meat, that just won’t cut it for me. Legumes are not a solution for every day, but I like them, I can live with eating more of them, and I am.

So much about the food conundrum, which I’m so very well aware is a luxury first-world problem. We are very lucky to be able to be this picky, also neurotic about our weight, and I know that.

Moving on to crafts, which keep my hands busy, my mind at peace, and if all goes well, give me (and you, I guess) something pretty to look at when I’m done.

This yarn was an impulse purchase at a cheap store, where the motley colors and fluffy softness strongly suggested to be used for making a new couch cushion, which I hadn’t done in a long, long time. I tried out a few stitches and made my daughter choose, who decided for this:

Knit two, purl two, repeat. The end. That cushion took only a couple of hours to make, but I had to take breaks in between. My fingers get tired really fast when I’m forced to work with anything thicker than a 3 or 4 needle, and this was probably a 7 or 7,5. Charlie promised to leave the cushion alone, and so far he has, despite the suspicious demeanor displayed in the pics.

I’m also steadily knitting new color block socks on the side, whenever I’m just sitting and doing nothing else, playing with colors as I go. The blue ones will be for my daughter, and the yellow ones I will probably wear myself. Few people really like yellow, even though it’s such a happy color. Not easy to wear when you’re light-skinned, but I suppose on my feet it will be just fine.

And now my dog feels I really need to stop writing and take him out to pee:

Gotta run, thank you for reading, lovely people, bye :-).