“Between the Years”

Early in December I spent a few days on Lake Constance, trying to relax after two and a half weeks of working in ICU. I went to the thermal baths, tried to ignore that I had chosen an apartment completely sub-standard (ugly and cold!), and just tried to relax. Participated in two interesting zoom sessions, read books in bed, knitted... 

Since then I have returned to the operating room, but a total of three weeks away also meant that I had to reorient myself. After only four weeks since beginning I hadn’t been acclimatised enough that this is an easy task. This pandemic is posing an additional strain on my phase of introduction to the new job.

However, I have taken myself back to the sewing maching, if only short periods so far, but I am getting back into a bit of a sewing mood. Since I challenged myself about wearing the purple pants vs. finishing the quilt, I took the purple monster off the design wall and have resumed stitching the letters.

 

I have already worn the purple pants, too, so I guess I have declared myself officially an old woman, according to the statement of Jenny’s poem. The strange thing is that in this short time in the operating room I have repeatedly seen people on the operating table who, by sheer numbers, are just a very few years older than I am – or my age even! – and I look at them and think, “this is an old person!” I am shocked to see them, appearing a lot older (to me) than I feel about myself. Gives me a lot to think about every time it happens. Am I much older than I think?

We have had terrible weather in terms of low fog, lack of sunshine, and ten days ago my husband and I just took off on Sunday, driving south, until we would – as pre-determined by a weather app – find sunshine. There we took a long walk along the shores of Lake Chiemsee, trying to jumpstart our vitamin D production. 

 

Christmas has come and (almost) gone, 

 

mother-in-law is staging a personal show to attract attention, my husband is working as always, and next year I probably will be working at least one of the days, too. 

Germany is going through a lot of discussion how to deal with the new virus variant, and supposedly we will end the year similarly as it started, with restrictions and/or lockdown... So it’s good to be able to sit down with knitting, or work on my contribution to SAQA Europe/Middle East’s project of the “Orient Express”.

The thing under the text is supposed to imitate this: 

I hope to be able to make it more recognizable through quilting.
 

And I want to take up again a regular schedule for exercising. Even in weather like this.