First stint completed

And just like that the first two weeks of my new job in the north of Germany have passed and I have been back with my family for six days already. Things up north have developed nicely and I am beginning to think that it was indeed the right decision, despite the fact that many people (including my own mother) are more sceptical than as exuberant about the arrangement than I am.

I even found an apartment already - I agreed to take the first one I looked at because it was so absolutely convenient in terms of distance to the clinic and the lake and the town center and the bus stop for the bus to Hamburg that I would have been very stupid had I not taken it right away. It will be a few weeks until they have exchanged the windows, before I can move in. Until then I will stay in the nurses' dormitory, which is nothing to write home about, but a place to stay, and also very conveniently located in terms of distance to the clinic, the lake, the town center. The main question that is still open concerns the ease of commuting as reliability of the German rail system, once known for its punctuality that was even incorporated in a saying 'as punctual as the train', has severely deteriorated during the years since privatization of the organization, and that may be a special training in resilience. But we will see.

So far I have been enjoying the lake, and the long walks I take there after early shift.

Stitching has been limited to a good amount of knitting and I have finally finished (the body of) a shoulder wrap that has been years in the making, I am certain it was started before the big plague, and now there is only a long i-cord left to finish it completely.

When that is done I am allowed to start a new knitting project!

I took many pictures when walking along the lake and have decided to use one of them to make my personal entry to the current EQA-challenge on birds.

Although I haven't quite figured out where I am going to include the fabric heart that somehow came along home with me from FoQ last year, and Susan Vogel of PatCh Swiss and I had rashly said we would include those in our contributions...

Since I came home I have finished my entry for Brno, made a decision about how I want to enter SAQA's Wide Horizons (time pressure! deadline!) and made plans for my bobbin for the Swiss-EQA Round Bobbin that I had said I would participate in (but haven't done a stitch for yet - more time pressure!). Sleeves to be sewn on. Things to be sorted... But I am content with my decision and optimistic that things will develop nicely.

A full week

 This past week, inbetween jobs, years, with lots of changes coming up, has been a bit emotionally draining. Original plans to do the first commute by train were all worked out, but the German train engine drivers are threatening a major strike, plus we had one day when the local line we live on was completely without service as all their engine drivers were all sick. And I had already been receiving messages from the train people that my original connection wasn't possible, I should check the new suggestion. Two days ago I finally decided that I would go up by car, canceled the tickets, and have been feeling a bit better since then.

I worked on clearing my cutting table and made a lot of progress, even though the result is not completely and entirely satisfying yet.

 

I could stitch a bit, working towards a completion of the piece I want to enter at Brno Festival.

It has progressed so far that I can proceed to deeper layers of my design wall that were hidden.

And I started swatching for a new sweater I have been wanting to knit for about a year now, the Spot Sweater by Anne Ventzel.

But I am not yet allowing myself to take the yarn with me when going north, as there are two other knitting projects that must be finished first. 

Tomorrow I will leave, and it will be an entirely new phase in life.

I have used this heading before: Time flies.

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.