Lost in transition

 

This photo was shown me by my phone a couple of days ago asa memory from the cloud. Nice. That happened during a week straight from hell at work, even nicer. (The hell aspect of work has resided a bit, but I do feel rather unappreciated by the employers, and that is not a fun-enhancing factor when going to work and you are supposed to be nice to patients.)

For a while now I have been trying to transition from one laptop to another (the while is going on to a year now, bear with me), procrastinating, because that transition includes the loss of my photo editing software. I have been trying to find something new that's satisfying, but somehow have not been very successful in that. I really only need a bit of color adjustment, size adjustment and prettying up the pictures so I can post them here on the blog, but my most recent attempt at getting acquainted with Gimp is not proving satisfactory. It keeps getting hung up, I don't find it intuitively easy and I am getting a bit grouchy about all this. 

Add to this last night's experience that my online e-book library is transitioning and the new version is getting hung up on me, too. Is this a kind of digital Bermuda triangle I am caught up in?

Last week we had winter. 

This is actually one of the photos Gimp let me do before 
clogging up on me - it is the balcony at my husband's
 place, whereas now I am up north again.

 

Germany hasn't had much of any kind of winter in recent years, so this took getting used to. Virtually impossible to buy stuff to put on the sidewalk to prevent people from slipping, everything was sold out - but you are not supposed to throw road salt for environmental reasons, but you are obliged to put something as the owner of a house. I reverted to throwing ash from the oven to dull the ice. Now it seems to be melting but they are announcing more cold... I do like winter, although it makes going places by bike harder. I actually resolved that I would be going to work by car (after slipping on an icy road with my bike, fortunately no broken bones or anything.) The down side of winter last week was that it was so cold that the lake was frozen and I could not go for my daily cold-water-dip. That has improved, two days ago it was possible again and I feel much better.

While I was at my husband's place, I learned that "Legendary Blue NuDenim" was indeed selected for Patchwork Gilde's Tradition bis Moderne exhibition, which I was very happy about. I started working on my next piece for 20 Perspective's "Femina" challenge, reverting to my technique of custom-made paper templates.

 

It's been so long that I made anything with this technique that I was a bit out of practice and may have been not thorough enough about adding marks for joining and adjustment. But it is only a small piece, I hope to get it finished nevertheless. I did go for a couple of rather small curves that make sewing tricky, but one grows with the challenge. Unfortunately I can't show you more pictures right now because see above...

When in the north I do knitting and am currently working on a Spot-Sweater after a pattern by Anne Ventzel which I have been waiting to do for several years. Unfortunately her instructions completely DON'T fit my body and it has taken my three starts to get it somehow to fit - not completely happy with the neck region either, but hoping that it will work out after blocking. That taught me once again something I have known all along: knitting after somebody else's instructions is not for me. I hate the way these instructions are written up these days, and I would rather work after my measurements and change stuff as I go. So further knitting projects will at best take an idea from somewhere and adapt them without sticking to any kind of written instruction. Again, you will have to wait for a picture here, sorry.

Hope to be back with a more cheery approach to posting than this one - but I have been procrastinating this post due to all the difficulties with the photos although I have been thinking about what I could write about.. 

 

Cold Swimming in Difficult Times

It’s been a little over a year since I started a new chapter in my life by moving to the city of Ratzeburg in northern Germany, 

Ratzeburg, view of the ancient cathedral built in the times of
Henry the Lion

 

part-time. I started a job, working full-time for two weeks, going back south to be with my family, (now only my husband, the son has since moved to Amsterdam to study at the unversity there).

It started off great, I felt a lot of enthusiasm and thought everything would be good. Unfortunately, the job situation turned out rather more difficult than I had expected and is still not quite settled. (But as of today, it looks as if it will be more settled starting March 1.) Add to that the various crises of last year in the family realm that I don’t want to talk about here (anymore), and one could say that I would have been prone to fall sick due to exhaustion after overburdening. However, one, if not the major reason why I moved to Ratzeburg, of all places, is the fact that it is situated in a lake region. 

 

Family history and childhood memories had long ago anchored a deep yearning inside my soul that I wanted to live in a lake area, with easy access to water. It might well have been a Bavarian lake, but those somehow were always out of reach (and realty prices there are extremely high) and my husband did not want to apply for a position there. So when we had agreed that we would want to move to Ratzeburg for his retirement, a combination of circumstances led to my decision that I would go ahead and start putting down roots.

It was clear to me that I wanted to go swimming in the lake a lot, and I also knew that I wanted to swim (or rather: dip, in the winter) all year round. But I had heard that it is the ‘proper’ way to start in the summer and just keep going, never stopping when the water gets colder, to make adjusting easier. After I had moved in January, I spent the first two weeks getting acclimatized by wading in the water for a few moments, up to my knees, or a bit deeper, depending on the outside temperature and my clothing equipment. At that point I thought I would start going in for good in March, assuming the water would get slightly warmer then. In February, when I returned for my second round of work, I went to the lake on the evening when I arrived and waded – and when I went home, I thought “what the …, I can start immersing now.” And I did the next day.

 

Yes, it did feel cold. Especially cold around the neck, I thought. Yes, at first it did take a few breathing exercises when doing my swim strokes to avoid hyperventilating. And yes, one does feel numb when coming out of the water, and it takes a while, sometimes even a rather long while, to get fully warm again. But walking home takes care of that part, at least a bit, a kettle of tea upon returning home helps to warm up from inside, and the feeling of elation and completeness that occurs every single time is just unbelievable. Indescribable. Unsurpassable. Inexplicable. After three times, when I still had minor doubts whether I was being insane, I was completely hooked.

 

Going for a swim every single day that I am in Ratzeburg has grounded me securely, given me a structure and, I think, has kept me sane throughout the last year. And healthy – I have not had a single cold during the last year. So I want to sing a little praise for my lake. Very few people understand what I am doing, but I have found a good friend who does the same, and sometimes we go together. But most people also don’t understand that I came up with the idea of living temporarily apart from my husband and commuting back and forth with a now six-hour drive. I just must embrace my otherness - perhaps I would even qualify for being an ‘audacious woman’ in the meaning of Anne Boyd who writes a substack with that title, although I didn’t pack up quite as thoroughly as she did?

I have recently joined the rowing club, world famous in rowing circles, where my father used to be a member and train when he was young (and where my parents met many years ago).

 

What remains to be seen is how this move and change of life circumstances can positively affect my creativity, which it hasn’t done so far. But now, with a new start ahead of me, I hope it will eventually develop. And I will keep going for a swim in the lake every day that I am here.

On trying to save a bit of money

One of the woes of May besides continued lockdown and cool and unpredictable weather was the fact that the open-air pool did not open as usual at the beginning of the month. Pandemic regulations. This pool is the biggest highlight of the city, it is what keeps me sane in summer.

Last summer they had set up a strict regime of separated lanes which I found much preferrable to the usual open pool where people just tended to swim in groups, usually making it hard for lap swimmers like me to just swim straight who do not chat with neighbors. So everybody was eagerly waiting – we have experience in swimming under pandemic conditions! And numbers of infection are going down, the map looked much better recently!

 

Then rumors appeared they would open after all, perhaps, then rumors sounded terrible about having to preregister well in advance and stuff like that. But on Monday last week we could go and buy season’s passes at a slightly reduced price. In other years this would be possible for the whole month of April during opening hours of city hall because the pool is owned by the city. This year, only on one day, and only two hours, twice. The line was outrageously long when I got there just after the beginning of the second set of opening hours in the evening.

 

For quite a while it seemed as if the line wasn’t moving at all, certainly people were not coming out who had finished their purchase. Then people in line started to give up, which was the first ‘progress’ felt. About every 8 to 10 minutes one person would come out. If you have 15 people visible ahead of you, and you know you can only see up to a corner after which you may as well assume another 6 to 8 people waiting you can calculate how long it will take. I started writing an email message on my phone, it got to be a long message and I stopped way before I was getting nearer to the top of the line. The worst thing about it was the complaining going on around me, though. Germans can be so negative about things, and when it is rather disconcerting to be waiting in a slow-moving long line, it is even more so when the people around you are constantly going on about how awful this all is. I wish I’d brought my earplugs to drone it all out. I waited 1 ¾ hours. If you give a bit of value to your personal time spent like that and compare it to the amount you ‘saved’ by getting a season’s pass at a 10% discount... it wasn’t worth it. But having gotten a season’s pass is definitely worth a lot. Right now we don’t even need a negative test to enter. Life has become a good deal better with the pool being open.

And it is strawberry season. 

I have been a big fan of strawberries from very early on in my life. Some good things never change. 

 

Abstract & Geometric in Heidelberg (Diary of Recovery no.5)

Last week I spent quite a lot of hours on trains. Due to uncoordinated planning a family issue took me to Würzburg and back on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I had planned a trip to finally see the SAQA exhibition "Abstract & Geometric" at the textile museum in Heidelberg.

I have a piece in there, but could not go to the opening in March. Then, before I could make plans, the virus hit, travel was not permitted, and then the museum closed. Now I was happy to find out that it reopened, and the exhibition is extended, too. So if you get a chance to go to Heidelberg before July 12, make sure you go on a Wednesday or on the weekend, because the museum is not open every day.
Agreed, it was a lot of hours on the train, with mask, to see this exhibition, going back and forth in one day, but it was definitely worth the trip.

In the middle of the room: one SAQA box

The museum is an old parsonage and has a special feel to the exhibitions room.

And it felt good to see my quilt "Play of Lines VIII" hanging next to big names in the quilting world, including many favorites of mine.

I don't want to single out one particular artist in the show - you have to go see it. But I do want to give an idea of the impact of Else van Barle's piece "Letters from a friend" that can be seen from the back in the picture above, and in a detail shot right here:

But all the other pieces in the show are just as impressive. The catalogue is available via the SAQA store, or you can pick up a copy in Heidelberg! Or at one of the following venues.

That day, all the trains were on time, and I arrived home early enough to catch a good night's sleep. And today our open air pool opened up! Lots of restrictions, and only a certain number of people allowed in the pool, swimming in lanes, not passing each other, and Germans' understanding of freedom is that they can swim in the pool in whatever manner they like, why should they stay in lanes, or heaven forbid, abide by a regulation as to how fast you should be able to swim in this particular lane... But getting to go to swim is better than not at all. So I feel much better now after I have come back from the first visit. And perhaps there will be some rainy days when the others don't want to go to the pool, then it will be my time.