End of summer vacation

This morning – last day before school starts back – I managed to severely bump my left foot when exiting the shower. Of course it hit the biggest toe, which has been having a hard time anyway since I badly injured the toenail between Christmas and New Year’s when taking the inventory of my fabric for the business. Puss, aches for several weeks, then a few weeks of relative quiet and the doctor’s pronouncement that the nail would come off certainly, but it wasn’t certain whether it would grow back at all or, if it did, how screwed up it would look. It did come off indeed – relatively painless, for a change, and it has been growing back, in a rather lopsided way, but it looked like it might make up its mind to sort of go back to normal eventually. It was half way there. This morning’s incident, however, has definitely caused a severe setback because everything is blue now, the pain is back, and although I am pretty sure the toe isn’t broken it will certainly be a lot longer until my left foot is worthy looking at. My son had been giving disgusted comments already, and he being in a pubertarian state with little empathy or kindness towards mother these comments haven’t been of the kind that they can be repeated here. What a way to end the summer vacation. Nevertheless, I am going to Alsace on Thursday, and before that I have my first day of work teaching German to the refugee pre-class at the nursing school on Wednesday.

Yesterday I spent all day selling fabrics at the fair in Erding and was pleased enough with the results. Other vendors were rather dissatisfied with the results, and it’s true that there were noticeably fewer people at the fair. But they seem to have been the right people for my fabrics, and so I came home satisfied.

I have also started work preparing an article in the magazine Patchwork Professional, which I had been invited to by the editor when she talked to me at the stand in Karlsruhe in June. It will be a demonstration of how to include special effect hand-dyed fabrics, such as my snow-dyes, in quilts to their best appearance. Unfortunately somehow I had missed to take note of the real deadline, and thought I had one month more than I should have had... which would have really made it stressful to get it finished on time. Luckily she graciously offered to re-schedule my report for the second issue of next year instead of the first, so I have a bit of leeway.

Tomorrow school starts back, and it is high time. The little boy needs a schedule to keep him occupied and channel his energies and pubertarian outbursts ...