our new pet (22/365a)

sinbad the snail

I have thrown this snail in the compost so many times, and he keeps climbing up and out and seems to kind of like living with us. we haven't named him, but today he came to visit me during a wine evening and seemed to ask for some affection. i kind of like him/her/it.

this is what we saw at klanglicht. around 7minutes is a cool optical illusion.
we swing-danced / lindy-hopped with the family, with kids in lederhosen.

and our wine looks normal

right? yum!

well, unfortunately, we noticed something about the bottle. do you notice? please comment if you do. brian posted on a forum and everyone noticed. do you think it's intentional? whyyyyyyy? how is this ok?

puppets and pennyless players (21/365a)

morning was puppet show time.
felix threw a tantrum on the way out of the puppet show, for various reasons, and i waited around until he was done screaming. finally he managed to breath in, and kind of smile. we walk along together
and i say: "Felix.... I love you."
and in a disagreeable voice he says "You don't have to say that! I already know that!"

Then i took promo pictures for the pennyless players' production of 1984. this is the only picture i got in edgewise.

over and out (20/365a)

before

after

after a day of rain and Arabische Prinzessin, and Agnes arriving, Peter und der Wolf, it's story time and .... well, that's it!

burned (19/365a)

sometimes you wake up, and you're so productive, and get all your chores done and of course exercise and are creative before 9am and feel terrific and refreshed. then there are days you think you're doing that, and suddenly its nearly 10 and dinner looks like this:

which means you have to open up all the windows in spite of it being very cold outside. so you quickly make soup for dinner, and because you're in a hurry, you put it on high and burn that too (wryly remembering a time in your naive youth where you thought the idea of burning soup was funny) and then, well, your morning's gone, and you have nearly nothing to show for it except for some compost, and you're hungry and cranky in addition.

that's ok, i saved the soup, and baked some bread and the kids got home from school and kindergarten and we had a relaxed cool rainy day thursday with some music and tea.

on the way (18/365a)

i have seen this "missing house" so many times, walked by it, intending to photograph it "later" and never doing so. now that i have, i guess there's nothing left for me to do, right? except that i have stacks and tons and dozens upon hundreds of little projects and ideas that i similarly never get around to doing. i won't say it's never too late ... because sometimes, i go back to photograph something, and that thing is gone, or go back to write something down and the idea has disappeared. but do it now, when you're thinking about it.

there are so many of these in the city, this one was just especially aesthetically appealing to me.

the rest of the day was spent at a concert where theodore played in an old folks home, where felix fell asleep, and after which brian and i shared a bottle of wine. then we headed to a strange rendition of peter-and-the-wolf played entirely on an organ.

asleep.

end of an "hair"a (17/365a)

Felix announced today that he wanted to cut his hair like a friend of his, "all off" and "like a baby"  - The first time I cut it he told me it wasn't right. "More" he said, so I did, as i wept a little inside.

He looks like one of the big kids now.

Then he wanted to vacuum before bed. Who am I to argue?

nothing (16/365a)

i took no pictures today.
it was a lovely spring day where i was privileged to be taught viola by a wonderful teacher in the morning, play with my kids in the afternoon, chat with friends, and go to a swing dancing class in the evening. i brought my camera along everywhere i went, but it had no battery, and i had no energy.

so here are two views of a spring flower from a hike i took recently with manuela.

 

bach h-moll (15/365a)

planned on a lazy sunday but instead i had another performance of the arabischeprinzessin, cooked, read the end of Sapiens like a crazed bookaddict, and then went to see a performance of the Bach B-minor mass (spontaneously invited by manfred), in a nearly 3 hour rendition, with only 2 short breaks (one so people could stretch their legs, and one so the 6 oclock bells could ring for 10 minutes) in the middle i had a terrible cough attack so i went outside and found this little study in colors. some adults couldn't sit through the entire concert, but theodore did and he loved it. it's quite complex music, so at the 2 3/4 hour mark i was surprised he wasn't restless, but about 10 minutes after he got home he was sound asleep.

Sapiens (14/365a)

didn't take any photos today since brian had my camera all day on a hike with henry.

but i had some nice time with my other boys, and am busy reading Sapiens where i get to mull the questions of what is life and why do we bother and what is the purpose of art?

a picture from 2012 in worcester

Ei! Wie schmeckt der Kaffee süße (13/365a)

Ei! Wie schmeckt der Kaffee süße

We already know how much I love spontaneous coffee time. Well, I also love spontaneous concerts, especially if they are about coffee. On our way home from an orchestra rehearsal for Thomas, at 7:56, we walked past a poster for a concert at 8, and decided, "why not." Theodore was close to falling asleep, then asleep about 2 minutes before the intermission. I woke him up, and told him he would really like the coffee cantata, if he could stay awake. to make it easier to pay attention i dragged him to the front row in the best seat in the house and we watched the lively opera singers. the father/daughter pair was played by a father/daughter pair in real life. the daughter is pregnant, and they did a little bit of slapstick pointing out the belly to add an extra layer of comic funny. finally an audience that dares to laugh during bach. Theodore yelled "bravo" at appropriate times and I was very proud of him. Brian met us afterwards to walk us home. Immediate teeth brushing and bed time.

On the tram today, we got controlled, and I didn't have my ticket because in my disorganization i had forgotten my wallet. usually that's a 70euro fine, but I just kept looking through my bag till the ticket-control-man got bored and left. i was then paranoid of getting controlled again so i went to buy a ticket  (i keep money in my viola case just in case for cases like this) and someone else had left a current hour-ticket on the ticket buying machine. how nice of them! i put it back when i got out of the tram.

movie night (12/365a)

all 5 of us hunkered around a laptop watching the 1965 made for tv cinderella in a rare movie night.

i baked a dozen banana muffins this morning and they were gone about 10 minutes after the kids got home from kindergarten.
another very windy day.
a pasta and tomato sauce kind of day. we were the only kids at the usually full playground kind of day.
a lets watch a movie and go to bed kind of day.

i finished my book today, so i'm going to watch the 1934 version of that (Babbitt) with brian tonight and also head to sleep.

a reading kind of day (11/365a)

Today was a reading and nap kind of day. Walked the kids up to kindergarten, which took about 2 hours from start to return, but the day was beautiful. My favorite weather on Earth was the sun shining and rain at the same time. But today I was quite enamored of sunshine and snow simultaneously on a (very little) mountain. At home I immediately fell asleep, and woke up at 3 minutes before noon, ran off to meet my friend who had said i should come by "before noon" ... luckily she has kids so she understands the concept of falling asleep whenever one can. Got home a few minutes before Theodore. He walked in, and started his homework on the stairs. 

cute when he's thinking, isn't he?

then we sat in front of the stove reading together for a while. he was reading On the Banks of Plum Creek, and managed to finish it on his own today. I was reading Babbit.

Two Peas in a Pod

before

after

Sinclair Lewis describes describes married women in his fictional town, in a way that made me bristle a bit.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the "young married set," there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their "wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas" in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back. (chapter 9, babbit)

but as i was doing nothing all day but sleeping reading and having coffee i guess i "deserved" my reprimand from 1922.

The wind outside was so strong that trees and hedges were knocking on our house today, and doors everywhere were creaking and flowerpots were falling off of balconies and many people chose to stay inside.

spontaneous coffees (10/365a)

Reading "another" book

If there's anything I like more than spontaneous coffee breaks I don't know what it is. There were two today, one was with Michi, and I didn't take any pictures. It was also in the late afternoon, when it was really too late for me to have coffee but I couldn't resist, because ..... spontaneous coffee breaks.

When Nina came over this morning, we shared easter bread and three (3!) coffees, and sat by the heater because it was so cold. Man does she ever have patience with kids who climb all over her, ask her to read more books, and friends named Irma with mild hangovers. She brought eggs with her that she had dyed with onion skins. Oh so beautiful. Here are just three out of the six.

just beautiful!

After she left the wind blew some of our plants over outside, and now some of our nice ceramic pots are broken. Windy and cold and more cold, but at least inside we could warm up with some spontaneous coffee....

a pretty nice day off from everything (9/365a)

Woke up this morning to find 5 people (including me) in my bed.

a 30 second exposure of us sleeping.

Some of them started flying
.

We "read" (i mispronounced) a slovenian book about animals which made the children laugh and laugh. 

We discovered some new animals in the process. Like the Tarsier and the Fennec fox.

Spent the rest of the day at Ingrid and Manfred's house. Saw Pauli and Gernot and Stanzi and had So Much Food and Wine.™

easter (8/365a)

i've been doing this for more than a week now! (cheers to me!)

we had an egg hunt and baked our easter bread and i played a church service and we all got home at 1pm for breakfast/lunch/brunch/dinner in one big meal.

This is of course all of us.

On the table are: easter bread, colored eggs, pumpkin seed spread, butter, marscapone and herb spread, big colorful salad (with radishes), avocado + sprouts, fennel coconut tart, spiral tart, oh yes and of course, coffee (top hat at 1:12:22)

Some bonus pictures today ....

our egg fights - whoever loses gets to eat an egg.

camouflaging the eggs using colors, hiding them in plain sight like this egg near the fig-tree pot

Henry wearing the bowtie from Manuela.

Theodore looking grown up.

preparation and fighting and fungi! (7/365a)

we found a morel in our garden. well, theodore found it, showed me, i squealed, he told everyone not to touch it or step on it and then accidentally knocked it over himself with his bike, but then we ate it - yes, we all shared one mushroom. I described our feast to my mama thus:

"ja, weil wir zu sechs waren, habe ich sie in sechzeln geteilt, in mehl hauchdün gestaubt und in heisem öl gebratten. sie war unglaublich koestlich, viel zu wenig davon, und nach dem essen haben alle leute das beduerfnis sofort nochmal unter den alten blätter durch zu schaun ob vielleicht mehr (more morels) zu finden waren, mit einem eifer die vorher nicht war. einfach unwiederstehlich. wenn mann eine morchel einmal geschmeckt hat wird der koerper diesen aroma nie vergessen. mmmmmmmmmmmmmm"

Other than that, our day was preparations for our Easter celebration tomorrow. We were mostly all cranky and woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed-y. We still managed to have a great time making our traditional easter bread (beating 20 eggs for an hour by hand, half a pound of butter and 2 pounds of flour later......) and painting our eggs. 

our easter bread recipe (on page 666.....hmmmm) from a book published in 1857

easter bread at beginning of 5 hour production (not including 2 overnight things)

snapshot, a rare shot of me

Theodore

Centa

Henry

Brian

Felix 

a day of games and crafts (6/365a)

It started with a model car that I let the kids play with. It's not really ours, it's a decoration that lives over our bed, a model of my grandfather's car, a Citroën 2cv, which until recently lived in our basement in pieces, until we finally brought it out and scrapped it over New Years. It was a quite bittersweet.

The kids have been facinated with car symbols and brands lately, and like to point out mercedes "sterne" (stars) and felix auto's (FIAT, I guess felix because it starts with F) and "zitrone" (means lemon, and sounds kind of like Citroën)

Brian took Felix hiking alone, and took my camera and brought back lots of beautiful pictures*

Then the lovely market where I bought 40 eggs, and lots and lots of colorful vegetables. Theodore and Henry were given carrots by the nice farmers (as is quite typical) and on the way home Theodore lost another tooth.

We had a surprise visit from Fritz (who had taken Theodore on that hiking trip) and he brought us vines and willow boughs to make easter baskets with. We had coffee and chatted garden and fun things.


*Bonus hiking pictures.

Looking out over our little city.

It's the time of year that these funny beetles mate.

A quick dslr selfie.

Steepness to scale.

Deer in the spring

board game night (5/365a)

Started with a quintet rehearsal. I went there with Theodore. To get there, on the other side of town, since there is so much construction, and the buses are on a holiday schedule, we had to switch from bus to bus to tram to bus, and got there 2 minutes late. Theodore laughed and laughed because we were practicing a Moricone Medley that includes us having to switch between our "real" instrument, and funny things like whistling, using a pick on my viola, or the pedal controlled high hat. During our Star Wars Medley, a real fun moment is when Klaus has to remove our mutes while we continue to play.

At home we had "traditional" spinat mit spiegel-ei, for green Thursday. Only in German speaking places (and parts of Hungary) is this day called "green Thursday" probably due to misinterpretation of some latin phrase, although there is some debate. In Austria it's traditional to eat green food, specifically pureed spinach and a fried egg. It's just the way it's done. So I did that. Well, the kids fried their own eggs. I'm pretty sure they let my nicest frying pan get too hot though, and it may herewith be ruined. So that's sad.

We finally had a board game night with Jacky and Andi (our nearly neighbors who's car we drive to kindergarten) ..... we've been putting it off for too long. Our kids all being asleep, they snuck over to our house for wine and aromatic bread with Za'atar. And some Carcassonne. Here are the pieces standing nice and calmly while we actively debate what to do next.

and here are how the board looks from below, since I have a glass table and can do that trick. :)