September...

Two days ago: The first. Not a good date in history, but this year it’s not a ‘round birthday’, nobody is talking about it.  Today is more worthy of being mentioned in the media: 50 years ago the Four Power Agreement on Berlin was signed. (in German: Viermächteabkommen ) There are enough other topics around these days, too, I would say. Still in a kind of shell-shock about the mess that this troop withdrawal from Afghanistan turned into, but my attempts at educating myself on this topic during the last few weeks have muddled my understanding of the situation to such a degree that I have arrived at the conclusion that it simply cannot be understood through an ordinary mind as mine. These troops just never should have been there to begin with, and the Western states’s interference seems to have made everything so much worse. I remember a few conversations with Afghan refugees when I was still in the midst of trying to help refugees find their way through German bureaucracy which were very explicit about the resentment the invasion had caused. On the other hand, a number of Afghan refugees I had contact with were the ones who were most difficult to deal with, their very high expectations completely out of touch with the reality of German refugee politics, and their arrogance and continued hostilities amongst members of different Afghan tribes has taught me to stay away from them if at all possible. I wonder what the future will hold for us in this respect. How will the withdrawal of troops be remembered in thirty or fifty years?

 September of course means that summer is over. That is not a feeling I like, especially in a year as this when we have had so much rain that it just doesn't feel as if we had any serious summer at all.

 

Supposedly a few nice days ahead of us, so that is good.

I had surgery – supposedly minor – on my left wrist two weeks ago and have progressed from a thickly covered splint to bandage to kinesiology tapes. 

 

 

They are off now. Movement in the wrist is still very limited and physiotherapy should have started two days ago but was canceled, so the first session was yesterday. It will be a while...

My textile activities have been reduced accordingly, but a bit of spinning and knitting was possible pretty early on. 

 

By now I have been able to return to the sewing machine, at least for short periods of time, too, and  typing is possible again, too. I joined the SAQA ‘reboot’ group on facebook to get myself back to sewing, searching for a bit of quilting mojo. The good thing about this surgery that I am not working right now because it would be too much of a strain on the wrist, so I do get to do a little bit of textile work. Very limited, though, and the mojo doesn’t really feel like a flow yet. 

 

Several stages of development of the project, which consists mainly of putting scraps together, happened, while I was waiting for some illumination as to how to get structure into this whole thing. I have zillions of small scraps and sewing them together is very soothing, although trying to arrange slightly larger pieces so that they fit is not exactly easy. I kept pondering as to whether I would come up with a way of getting some structure into it, until I finally decided no, it was just going to be scraps. No attempts at developing a block structure or such. Let the color speak for itself. I will be interesting to see how this works out. And how my wrist comes back to life.

My husband and son are enjoying themselves in Berlin. As this was planned when we still thought I would be working this week I did not go with them. I am enjoyinghaving  the house to myself. Made myself a very delicious dish of roasted tomatoes, an improvisation on a recipe I had read a while ago. It's been ages since I had something as good as this. So simple - or was it my talent at cooking after all?