And here is the perfect picture to illustrate that in a f´reflective way:
When I discontinued the fabric club one year ago I thought I would be starting a job assignment within only a few weeks of the end of the dyeing. That fell through for reasons I still don't quite understand, mostly because I was never told why. I did not press to find out more, though, because in the weeks that I was working towards establishing myself in that community I had realized that the person I would have had to work with was an extremely difficult and narcissistic person, so in a way I wasn't too sad I did not have to figure out how to deal with him in a real working situation. But I had shut down the fabric club, and several other applications to various kinds of positions always received a similar reply: Your CV is extremely interesting, and you bring such wonderful qualifications with you - but somehow you just don't fit our scheme/expectations/you name it... Germany believes in report cards and diplomas and a goal oriented job education, so if you cannot produce a diploma for a job you want to work in you are not adequately qualified, no matter how qualified you are in other areas. By April I was getting sick and tired of that, and had to live through another phase where it seemed that some of my students would not receive the work permit they needed to start the course I was preparing them for.
The teaching job was fun, but paid by the hour, no social benefits or health insurance. And I realized that I could not take it any longer to be working hard to educate and motivate young refugees who wanted to work, and in a job for which Germany desperately needs people, who would then be refused the permit - and all that in a precarious work situation for myself. So I took a drastic decision, applied for a slot in the next nursing school class and resigned from the teaching job at the end of the school year.
On October 1st I started that new phase in life, and it has been a very interesting and busy time since then. My family is getting the knack of new routines. My son has at least admitted that my being out of the house quite a bit now has a drawback because the male food production is not comparable to what he was used to get to eat before. My husband is making somewhat more of an effort in joining in with household chores. I am also making a point of not taking pains to care for their provisions on days when I am not home at lunch time, and I cook considerably fewer meals than I did before. (With the consequence that indeed I enjoy cooking a bit more than I used to before - as I had suspected.)
And I myself, too, have to find new routines and change my time management. If I want to continue stitching. Which I do, of course, but it will be under rather different circumstances, with a lower time budget, and it might completely change my activities even more.
I have managed to add some scraps to A Scrap a Day, but I need to catch up a bit, too.
I am planning to fill up the remaining area within the next few weeks. Even if it takes a bit longer than December 31.
I will continue to write the blog, but it won't be as frequently as before. Perhaps I can figure out how to add that gadget of email-notification on the side bar if people are interested. I am not going to turn this into a blog on my experiences as an aspiring nurse, for sure. But it is very good for me to leave the house in the morning and know I am going to work. Haven't done a late shift yet, so I don't know how it feels to come back late at night. I would appreciate it if people kept reading what happens to me and my textile doings. They do remain at the core of my heart, but being a bad self-marketer I never managed to make enough money on that so that I would get the feeling I was actually making an income. So here I go - yet another radical change in my working life, after all it is not the first time I did that.