It's Day 4 of my Christmas project of giving myself one 'intangible' present per day. First day: sleeping in until noon. Second day: not feeling guilty about waking up too late for Greek class. Third day: washing some of the dishes that need to be hand-washed and had piled up. Now I don't really know what to do for the fourth day...
The weather today is atrocious but appropriate for November: grey, few leaves on the trees but admittedly not as bleak as January through March, and now that it's nighttime quite brisk winds and dripping rain.
A glimpse of light is in the news: the ceasefire agreement in the Middle East.
Today I cooked fava beans and zucchini fritters from a Mediterranean cookbook, as I haven't eaten many vegetables lately, and for fruit have focused on apples, oranges, and pears. It was nice to have something fresh again, but it was definitely enough work that I don't consider it a present.
Tomorrow I'll resume cooking recipes from a Christmas book: after a delicious but very boozy glögg (I flambéed it twice but I still felt slightly floaty after drinking only one glass), I'd made a 'Hot Mexican Chocolate' yesterday of dark chocolate melted with cinnamon and whisked up with warm milk. But I thought it would be best to let a day pass before moving on to mulled wine.
Altogether I've had cabin fever these past days. It was a huge relief to get my bicycle back from the shop where it was being repaired, so that I can go out and about more. The impediment to full mobility is that the bicycle has a subtle leak in the front tyre: cycling about an hour today was fine, but the tyre does deflate in a 2-3 day time span and requires pumping up again.
And I'm a little anxious that I'll be somewhere in eastern central Berlin in an exciting protest only to find myself rolling on the wheel rims all of a sudden. I can fix this myself, of course, and didn't want to ask the bicycle shop employees to look at it. Ge. sagely and firmly advises buying a new tyre. I could also try the trick of inflating the tyre under water and seeing where air bubbles appear, then patching it.
Anyway, once I'm outside more regularly, I'll be quite happy not to be stuck with my own circular thought patterns any more!
For my former work team, on another topic, I'm admittedly worried. Only one of us has been asked back to the re-formed company, at least for the foreseeable future; the effect on morale is correspondingly depressing. Of course everyone is a grown, independent person and I shouldn't fuss when they're finding their own paths and survival techniques as we all have to do sooner or later. But... It's especially tough I think for people who have been with the company a very long time and were very dedicated.
In the meantime I'm sorting through National Public Radio's list of the best books of 2022, and seeing which ones have ebooks I can lay my hands on. It's absorbing, and I'm already looking forward to their lists of best music albums and singles, too. But as for the best books of 2023, I'll leave those for next year.
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