Saturday, February 17, 2018

keeping my head above water...



The past two weeks were extremely unnerving.
On the one hand the coalition talks in Berlin. They still haven’t resulted in a functioning government and it is annoying to see how one of the parties involved is delicately dissecting itself with people grabbing for power and fighting within the ranks, with a scheduled vote of members of the party that seems to be highly unconstitutional that could make everything go down the drain after all.  Germany is not immune to many dangers on the European floor right now. We have such a lot to lose…

On the other hand, much closer to the personal realm, I witnessed a very unpleasant and disconcerting ‘relocation’ of three Senegalese friends of mine which has left me completely shocked about the way that authorities deal with these people. Not that I was expecting much anymore after various experiences I have had during the past two years, but there is always room for worse, it seems. I don’t want to go into detail about all this, but in the wake of that I spent several days in meetings that took a lot of strength. In the end an agreement was reached that this relocation would be repealed, which was at least a success of some sort. Nevertheless one does get the impression that one is fighting a losing battle, and what is a small victory in the context of a losing battle…? 
I also accompanied one person to a court hearing that dragged on forever, is not finished yet and has been postponed once again because the lawyer is in hospital. 

I had one week of a double teaching load, including a severe case of conflict management in a class that I had only taught six lessons before this came up.. I had agreed to the double teaching load in advance, but I had not anticipated that all of this would come together… By the last weekend I was ready to drop, and I am more than glad that this week no teaching at all was scheduled because of a week of school holidays. 

I also quilted for the 70,273 project, sorted and arranged another top that had to be sent out to be pieced, distributed several other tops to be quilted or finished. We are preparing a show of some of these quilts for the German Patchwork Guild’s AGM in June, in Celle, and by now I am getting to be pretty positive that we will actually fill all the wall space we got. At first I was a bit nervous that we might not have enough quilts that were made in Germany because it was taking a little while until the whole thing started to roll. But meanwhile I know about so many quilts out there still that I am more relaxed about it. It would have been embarrassing to have a show in Germany with nothing to show!





I also took action in working on the next piece for the “12 by the Dozen” group which will be due by the end of the month. This time the challenge is to work on the inspiration of works by Vilhelm Lundstrøm, an artist whom, I admit, I had never heard of before. It took a while before some idea came, and now I am putting in hours on the machine, when possible. Although I don't want to disclose too much before the reveal date, a teaser picture can be shown here without giving too much away:


 I hope to get finished in time…

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