a short hike to the hotel (172/365b)

lovely morning, starting with apple strudel in the tree-house with mama, and then a church service for erntedankfest where the kids were singing in the choir.

felix slept in

morning routine of reading while henry dances

henry wants his picture taken

our alpine guide called this morning to make sure we knew the weather forecast for tomorrow is very bad. apparently very bad. he gives us permission to cancel but no, we are all for it. besides, who really knows how the weather will actually be on the mountain? we were off to our base camp before the dachstein today. ingrid got to the bus at about 3 minutes before take off. 

the bus when we got there took us not quite up to the hotel. another 3.5 miles or so to hike before dark, pretty steep and short little climb. the busdriver was very funny - gave me the number of a taxi, offered to call for us, reminded us we could call a taxi on the way, and somehow didn't seem to have faith in us making it before dark. we made it just as the sun was setting, followed by glorious light the whole way. brian sent me text messages explaining the best shortcut through the woods so we wouldn't have to be on the roads.

we had views like this from the bus

how could one not stop and look?

we watched the stars: perfectly clear night. big dipper directly over the dachstein peak while we were watching, and slowly setting behind it. the milky way over-head. i did not get any nice pictures at all of the stars although i tried for a while. i got locked out of the hotel by accident. mama let me back in, by chance walking by as i banged on the door. nobody else was staying at the hotel, no other guests. we decided to get to rest early, so we can have an early start before rain or snow.

that's where we're headed tomorrow.

mama arrives! (171/365b)

papa left on the 5am flight from vienna but mama came to graz. she didn't tell us what bus she was on so she just showed up on her own with all her luggage. the first thing she did was inspect the windows. she was mostly happy except now the rollos seem extra ultra shabby in comparison.

steps for making a strudel:
chop hundreds of apples in the cold until your fingers are numb
find strudelboard - oh it's in the very back of the towels cabinet
take all towels out of the cabinet
take strudelboard and arrange it on the floor
watch mama work magic with her very thin dough

meanwhile brian is running the x-trail race on the schoeckl which includes him running down and up the schoeckl in each of four cardinal directions. the race starts and ends at the top of the mountain. most people drive/cable up. actually all people except brian. the announcer (who had recognized brian running to the mountain along the road by his hair) announced each time "brian roberts, who ran here this morning from graz...." very impressive. let's see how his legs feel.

ingrid cz came by to test our still warm apple strudel and approved. she brought us extra grapes from a very heavy harvest and we somehow convinced her to come with us on our trip up to the top of the dachstein tomorrow. well, the day after. tomorrow we just take the bus and the day after we have to go alpine climbing if the weather is decent enough for the alpine guide to take us.

vienna! (170/365b)

found out that my mom is coming *tomorrow*
today we decided to see my parents on their last day in vienna. off we went to flixbus, right after school. finished my running book by murakami - i've never been able to read on a bus or a train but somehow it didn't bother me.

first stop the hotel room to unpack the bugle and the pogo stick that henry had wished for in a very funny letter to grandpapa. mama's checked baggage contained 3 things: an ice pick (for climbing the dachstein) a pogo stick and a bugle. went to the schroedinger institute to see where the conference had taken place.

henry and theodore presenting arithmatic findings

a Viennese restaurant
Felix's first menu
eierschwammerlsuppe fuer alle

solo cello suites played by Koh DaeSun in the St.Paulus kirche

exhausted after a long game of slap the hand

it was such a delightful day of just walking around everywhere. we had icecream and saw some very  beautiful sites and also some not so typical places. we nearly lost everyone when mama got distracted by a chandelier in a window and ducked into a shop with theodore and henry and papa. brian and i were not paying attention and we got all the way to the opera house a few blocks on (where they were live projecting the opera outside on the wall) and then went back and still couldn't find them. no cell phones to call so we just went back to the last place we saw them and waited and that worked. 

we saw a random concert of this guy playing solo cello, and he was quite good. 

downtown, looking up at the stefanienplatz

beautiful and very sad poem at a fountain

i didn't want the day to end but we took the flixbus back and arrived at home soooo late.

so much cleaning (170/365b)

today was a day i didn't feel like recording. stuff organizing and discarding.

"everything" broke (little things like the fridge was leaking (brian fixed it) and the dishwasher threw an error code that wasn't in the manual(i fixed it)) and of course everything needed attention. vaccuum cleaner needed unclogging, coffee machine needed descaling etc etc ad nauseum

kids back and forth to everything. (i did give ronja and zorah an eierschwammerl i found walking with them which they were SO excited about, that was nice!)

basically a necessary evil. a full and not so fun day. - we did have fun watching the old gulliver's travels though :)

mushroom hunting during kindergarten (169/365b)

out the door bright and early, this time with nina too, so we could hunt for mushrooms. we may have been a day or three too late, since the last rain was before the weekend. but generally the fungal situation was a bit weird, lots of young already dried out eaten mushrooms. we found some though, and we were happy.

dropping felix and foersters off at kindergarten

we got home hungry. while nina cleaned mushrooms i made some fast waffles and oh so much coffee. by the time the older kids got home we had cooked up the mushrooms and all of us just ate them out of the pan. they were so yummy.

after nina did all the hard work cleaning with her cool mushroom brush/knife combo: 

Täublinge, parasol, eierschwammerln, reizker, semmelstoppel

i picked up the kindergarten kids (time goes by so fast, i had to rush right out) and made even more waffles, and took them to chorus. jackie came too, and we went for a nice walk and chat while the kids were singing. it was a very nice chat. i even took the time to stop at fink (a very hippie store in the very swanky shopping district) and bought myself a gigantic scarf like i've wanted for a while. it's thick enough and warm enough to be used like a blanket, and it's not wool so i can wear it!

i'm a little stressed about getting thing ready for my mom arriving on next week, and since i'm gone this weekend i spent tons of time trying to get things organized, throwing away or selling stuff, and cleaning. my blender died completely yesterday (shocking me for the last time, this time slightly too near my heart because i wasn't careful unplugging it... before it just shocked my fingers from time to time when it was cranky and i just ignored it) ..... so i decided to buy a new one on willhaben. when brian picked it up it was HUGE. i'm not even sure it's very effective. it gave up trying to purree fresh pumpkin pieces, but i'll see if the learning curve evens out and i keep it. it's gigantic though. brian couldn't even carry it home a km without stopping to rest.

tara's last day (168/365b)

well, tara and shawn's last day is today, but really they were trying to get on the 10am train so there wasn't really a lot of time to do anything any more. tara went with brian to the kindergarten and shawn and i drank coffee and fixed the world's political problems. nina came too to say goodbye.

brian and i biked them to the train station by way of roseggerhaus so they could get packing tape. that worked out nicely, and we said our goodbyes and then biked home the slow way past all the thrift stores until we found white t-shirts for theodore and henry's "africa project" at school. i couldn't in good conscience buy brand new t-shirts at the h&m made by some kids in some sad factory situation in bangladesh for them to print on. we couldn't find any blank white t-shirts in thrift stores either. one thrift-store owner explained that they just throw them away because nobody buys those second hand because they are so cheap new.

for only 2 hours in the afternoon (3 if you include transit) our quintet made a video to welcome marielis. first we recorded klaus' brand new (12 hours old) arrangement of Also Sprach Zarathustra, then we shot the whole video from start to finish, then we went on our merry ways

our video setup

i tried to buy lampshades for our old chandelier in our living/dining/children's bedroom .... but nobody has the right size, i walked all over the city with my viola case. also tried to buy some shoes (again) but didn't find the right ones (again). shopping is such a waste of time.

monday blues (167/365b)

a long achy headache today.

unfortunately it's tara's very last full day in austria, and it's a monday which means totally full of stuff to do. we got to see elke again today, theodore and i each had our first lesson since the end of the summer, and the room she was in had a terrible mold problem so we moved to another room. it was a very disjoint lesson - the most productive part was spending about 25minutes on the first 3 notes of my newest piece.

i was too tired in the evening to really want to do anything. tara played board games and card games with the kids in the other room and then brian read them good night stories. meh monday.

helmet pancake day (166/365b)

made pancake batter early in the morning before leaving for my first gig. everyone else got to do helmet pancake day, but i had gig after gig. part of their helmet pancake day included getting to see our performance after the bishop inauguration.

we played fux's Missa St Joannis Nepomucensis at the dom, and nobody was prepared or interested. it was disastrously badly played and sung and nobody cared. i was a little sad. also we had rehearsal at 8:30, the mass started at 10 and went till noon, and we should have had a break but we really didn't. 

meanwhile without me, helmet pancake day was going very well:

one of us is *always* moving.... Henry, of course!

i went right to the other church where barbara did my makeup and we hung out waiting for the event proceedings to begin 

me and barbara in the window light

Tara was our official photographer to capture us being captured.

orf cameras all over us

nina and centa and tara and brian all listened and watched us and watched our kids and there was plenty of wine and food.

one lady listener even came up to me while i was playing and waited patiently for us to finish the piece. then she told us the soup was very good. "it looks good," i said neutrally. "do you want some?" she asked, holding her bowl and spoon towards me. "no thank you," says i. "i can get you some of your own," she offers. "no, i'm ok, we have to play our next piece now," i say a bit confused. "it's
*very good* though," she counters, holding her bowl towards me again... "do you want to try?" ... i stare at her, and klaus says, saving me from any further response "let's play"

we played well, ate, then we waited a long time before things were ready for us to get our car in and our gear out, and went out for some celebratory pizza and watched the live feed (not live anymore, haha) to see how much they filmed us... 2 and a half pieces long the camera was just on us! not bad! happy with the way that turned out for sure!

live rehearsal (165/365b)

teaching her some inside jokes

are you going to be nervous tomorrow?
(can i have another question?)

the amount of planning and effort that goes into an event like the inauguration of the new lutheran bishop in styria is just staggering. orf is doing a live feed of the entire event tomorrow, which means they have camera crews and everything setting up all day today, and already filming the preparations in preparation.  we were there from 2-7 hoping for a few seconds of their time to do a sound check. we were moved in and out, waited till it rained, moved back to somewhere else, asked to hold things, asked to pretend to be people so they could check seating placement, and finally 15 minutes before 7 they did our soundcheck, which took a minute and a half, and then we went home. hope the livefeed doesn't end before we even play tomorrow, that would be a little disappointing.

michi's abschlussfeier was today: she finished all the stuff she needs to be a therapist officially and is celebrating by renting a restaurant, selecting a huge dance playlist, and inviting all her friends, wedding style. i got there as the party was winding down, and helped them clean up. there was at food *leftover* for at least double the people that she had invited. packing it all up was difficult. she wanted to do one dance with me, but her kids kept interrupting or getting minorly hurt somehow or shooting soccer balls across the restaurant. i ended up taking a bicycle basket full of bread home because nobody wanted it. 

i felt a bit sad i hadn't spent really any time with tara and shawn today but we ended up chatting with centa and tara (shawn was already asleep) well into the wee hours of the morning. telling nightmare stories of times we got nervous, and reminiscing with laughter at silly failures of the past. 

lots of rehearsing - we're gonna go live soon! (164/365b)

planning our next rehearsals
breaktime on the floor

found out that our gig next sunday is going to be live streamed on regional/national tv. well aren't we special. we're playing for the inauguration of the new lutheran bishop. should be an interesting gig - they chose pieces they thought looked interesting on youtube. i'm not sure they are the correct choice, but we have no choice but to practice them well.
8:30 am rehearsal (mostly because i thought brian would still not be back, but he was) ... not exactly fun after staying up till past 4. my sleep deprivation saga continues.

after that i was severely out of it. have my period nearly a week early, am angry anxious and annoying. needed chocolate. tried to read but was too tired.

the best part of today was playing gypsy music with theodore. his idea and it was very fun. my piano part is just umpa-umpa and i get to be all silly and get faster and faster when i feel like it.

look ma, no pants (163/365b)

this morning felix and i were ready to leave 15min before our usual time. i was quite surprised. outside, in helmet, hiking boots, rain jacket and backpack, felix suddenly looks down at his legs and said with a surprised voice: "Oh! I think I forgot to put on pants!" In he went to remedy the situation while I laughed and laughed and laughed. We still got to jackie and andi's in record time. I went hunting around for mushrooms again but found nary a single one, but I also didn't get lost at all, just stuck to the paths and was boring. I got back just in time to make coffee for myself and nina and drink it in 10 minutes before she left again.

we spent the afternoon at singschule and standing in line to get tickets and walking to the library which was closed, and the evening very cranky. i had to yell theodore a few times. at i think we all need more sleep.

manuela was here for dinner, and that was most nice, although we didn't have a very fancy dinner. sometimes you don't need much. we didn't have much food in the house. i read the kids to sleep and then we kept centa company while she made cake downstairs. and guess what, brian said he was coming back tonight, and i had gotten mixed up and thought tomorrow night - win for me! he said i shouldn't wait up till 3am when he would arrive, but how could i not? i missed him so much!

its important to get lost sometimes (162/365b)

up at 4:30 this morning for no reason. that means everything was easy getting ready in the morning. so organized and calm! I had all the lunches laid out and ready before anyone was even up. After dropping kindergarten kids off i thought i'd try my luck at mushrooms. I was actually completely lost in the woods when I received a phone call from Barbara saying that she was at my house waiting for me. Oh! better get back then... somehow. I ran through some bushes, up some stony non-paths, kind of up, kind of around a huge rock cliff, and through probably the most beautiful, really, MOST beautiful beech forest i have ever seen.

start of a webpage in slovenian

we worked on pictures, instagram and website for a few hours. meanwhile the window workers kept going in and out, asking questions, making noise, making dust, and then actually telling us, guess what, we're all done! woohoo! impressive.

andi took felix to chorus and i tried to read with henry. winnie the pooh put me to sleep, and supposedly henry took my nap time to practice. i literally couldn't keep my eyes open. the big kids headed to the playground together, and when felix got back, we saw maria and gabriel walking down our street and had them over. we adults sipped wine sitting on the grass. the two little ones got hammers and nails and made signs to point to where panama is. it started to drizzle and rain a bit and maria held an umbrella over us. it was a tiny bit magical. when we were all over tired we went in and demolished the bag of mushrooms i had found (after cleaning them chopping them and frying them of course)

the day we ordered all the coffees (161/365b)

it was a very strange day. it started off totally cool and easy and normal. i just had just a nice mild coffee in the morning with nina, and boy was i glad it was mild! she dropped me off in downtown for coffee date with irmtraud and barbara and we ordered ALL the coffees... 11 of them.

The waiter was surprised... you want all of these... all at once? ok!

11 coffees for 3 people - we can do this... or can we?

in the end we basically had to give up. irmtraud had to get to her next appointment and there were still some coffees left over. i mixed them all into a glass, a "doppelter velaengerter fiaker mit milch" i called it, and it was slightly worse than drinking dishwater. barbara and i are already punchy as a baseline and now were were positively bonkers. 

before all the caffeine

after all the caffeine

then eventually, the caffeine rush, and then the crash. so so so tired. i fell asleep 3 times. i took the kids to the playground having run out of ideas. there, there were 2 boys that were so mean, and so poorly behaved. i disciplined one of them when he was hitting another kid for no reason, while the mom was standing right there not saying anything, and afterwards she asked me vapidly "what he had been doing wrong?" .... 

spontaneously i asked isabella over and she read stories to my kids after they stopped running around screaming and hyper. then i talked way too much, hopefully i didn't scare her away forever. 

I hate "max und moritz"
and isabella didn't mind reading it. she reads aloud so beautifully

some things just don't work out i guess (160/365b)

actually got a good night's sleep last night, and my early start this morning didn't feel that early - -i was even up before my alarm. perfect. that's the kind of habit i would like to cultivate!

Monday was a lot easier that it should have been. Our lessons were cancelled because elke was sick, and the workers were working on the windows so i didn't really go anywhere. i did try to screw the bench together. and when it was all back together, one of the old boards on the back broke spontaneously and i almost cried. annoying. i also vacuumed ... twice. a plant got knocked over dirt everywhere. then i cleaned it all up, and when i putting the vacuum away i knocked the newly watered plant back over and got to clean it all up again. annoying.

Eventually it was barbara, irmtraud and my instagram coffee date for the week, which i scheduled at the same time as chorus. theodore is starting his independent singing thing - 3 kids who are learning to sing 3 part harmony in a regular sing lesson, so henry and felix and i got ice cream. i gave theodore a coin to get himself a kugel of icecream on his way home for later. cafe luis is not really my favorite, but we had a nice time, us three adults and three kids. henry went off on his own into town to join theodore, and felix and i got ourselves home, just in time to say goodbye to the workers for the day.

walking together

a few minutes later, i was doing a wood project of my own, trying to make the ostrich egg lamp shade fit on the lamp base. after 1 failed prototype, the second one was the correct size, but even worse, even uglier, and the process took a long time, and i eventually took my scarf and purse off. sometimes you just gotta stop what normal boring stuff you're doing to go do something else.

on the way in the door.

henry took that picture. he got home very early, because he couldn't figure out where to go because of a construction detour, and was crying and sad when he got back. i told him i was proud of him for having the wits to take himself home.

 

more hobbit for bedtime. when i read a chapter of the hobbit, even when it's really long, nobody falls asleep until i'm done. that's actually kind of cool, it means that we are all following the story together. it does mean i have to field weird questions well into the nighttime about whether goblins will snatch us in the night or why it was a "good thing" to burn the head warg.

how many engineers does it take to fix a bench? (159/365b)

A gorgeous morning, and I couldn't sit still, so I grabbed the other person in the house who can never sit still (Henry of course!) and took him for a run along the Mur. Rather, he biked and I tried to keep up. We went pretty far, and we stopped and looked at things too. It was a very nice day, lots of joggers out. Only problem was that we didn't have any water with us. We stopped at a public water spout on the way, but the water pressure is so high that you soak yourself and your shoes and barely get any water in your mouth - really it is intended to fill a bottle - which we didn't have.

We got back very hungry, and I made a cauliflower tumeric stir fry to die for - sooo good. And this is how I know: Even HENRY liked it! 

Then, although Brian had a bus and a flight to catch we started the fix-a-bench project. He cut, I painted. It took lots and lots of time to get everything just right. And I had extra paint and extra waiting for the paint to dry time so I took care of that by painting every other kind of board in sight. It looks so pretty. The paint is stuff I found in the basement that was "best before" 2007. Well. I cracked it open, stirred it for a few minutes, like, a long time, and then it was a gorgeous glossy red color. Score!

Everybody helping

Little helpers in construction brand shirts ("strauss")

red men playing cards
blue man hula hooping

using up expired paint

brian rushed away and just caught the bus. he'll be back in a few days. meanwhile it's bath time and story time and music time, and early bed time. alarm is set alarmingly early for me so that we have plenty of time in the morning.

the sound of music at aufsteirern (158/365b)

ingrid gave us gigantic tons of beautiful beautiful grapes today. we ate lots, but the rest i made into fresh grape juice, and some of them we decided to make into "sturm"

austrian culture lessons for today:

*sturm is something that you can only get at certain times of year in this part of the world. it has different names depending on where it is. (except brian and i bought some sturm kits on amazon in the us and made our own sturm from grapejuice whenever we felt like it all year round)

*nobody here knows the sound of music or the music from the sound of music

*eurovision is bigger than america's got talent

i wanted to bring my kids to do some art at the atelier, but they didn't have enough kids (minimum three, "bring a friend next time")  - instead we wandered around the museum of natural history and saw lots and lots of taxidermied animals. henry gravitated to all the dumbed down games and electronics and screens and short movies they have. theodore gravitated towards the weirder animals. i gravitated towards the displays of hundreds of one kind of animal - like hundreds of butterflies side by side.

we wanted to go see the singschule sing at aufsteirern, the big festival of styrian culture, mostly full of accordion music, dirdls, and really drunk people in leder hosen. this was an event in the main square where the orchestra and kids choir from the opera were playing. and their main headline soloist was conchita wurst, the winner of the 2015 eurovision song contest who opened with "the hills are alive with the sound of music. too bad the orchestra was bored! Our feet were glued to the floor. She was pretty incredible. The kids were very tired with the nearly 2 hours of standing that we'd done so far, but we stayed for a whole hour watching her sing and then left before the end so we could carry sleeping felix home and beat the crowds. 

#kitsch

The hills fill my heart

With the sound of music

My heart wants to sing ev'ry song it hears

My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds

That rise from the lake to the trees

My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies

From a church on a breeze

what makes my heart glad?

*snuggling with felix in the morning, he was pretending he was wearing an invisibility ring
"are you the only felix in the world?"
"no, there are lots of people named felix, and henry and theodore."
"are you the only felix s::: in the world?"
"yes, I think so."
"are you sure?"
"no. i'm not sure. i said i *think* so."

days are for doing things i like (157/365b)

what better way to start the day than with an early morning hike. well, one starting around 8. we went up jakob's leiter, with the side intent of looking for mushrooms, but it's been very dry lately, and that's a well traveled path anyways and there were none. as brian asked "what if we were out for 2 and a half hours and all we did was spend time together and hike?"

my alone time was very short, but that's alright. i picked up theodore and henry from school and took them to the museum of locks and keys. a very interesting place. one thing they had there was this old box of game pieces. i took a (crappy cell phone) picture of it because i asked the museum curator what the game was that used these pieces and they said nobody knows what game it is. i thought i would be able to figure it out. but it turns out it's extremely difficult to search for games by piece without knowing anything else about it. when we got home i spent a little too long looking up ways to look it up.

four colors, white, yellow, blue, red
in disks, long rectangles and short rectangles

of course, as soon as it suddenly started to pour i had to leave for quintet rehearsal. it was a high energy rehearsal where we taught our new cellist lots of little ensemble inside jokes. 3 1.5 hour sessions. i got home to find centa dremeling our ostrich egg with some very strange machine seemingly intended for feet (?) ... sometimes we find things and have no need for answers. anyways, her art came out well.

art on a non-flat or smooth surface

what i think about when i think about murakami (156/365b)

Brian and I decided to BOTH take over kindergarten drop off this morning so that we could go for a walk and do some shopping before his work day started. When we got there it seemed the kindergarten has to get rid of the beautiful old grand piano in their new indoor space (the city requires an indoor space, which has been the subject of a few years of fighting) which has adequate floor space for all the kids, UNLESS you count the floor that the piano stands on as negative floor space. I guess the kids can't technically sit there, but they also can't sit on the tables, or the bookshelves. I don't get how bureaucracy can say with a straight face that a piano is not worth the floor it is on.

Anyways, since they have to remove the thing, they wanted somebody to play on it for the kids and since i happened to be walking in the door that moment with brian, they chose me. so our walk was cut short to 20 minutes, which is how long i had before they wanted to start their kids circle. in that time we collected a bag full of mushrooms and bushwhacked a path that started out very nice and very quickly fizzled out. Then I played that piano, and the kids liked it quite much, although barely a song did i get through without forgetting something.

The hardware store we stopped at next  was typical hardware store frustration. They have always close to what you want, but not exactly. They don't know how to help or answer questions. This time I was told they couldn't cut lumber to specifications, only "in half" .. I thought they might mean widthwise not lengthwise, but they meant only exactly in half.

At home I pressed the coffee button with brand new home-roasted beans and it wasn't bad! Good crema, and nice flavor. A tiny bit of bitter aftertaste, but not as bad as some upscale coffees i have had.

Henry didn't want to go alone to his first singschule at the opera, so I took him there with felix. We went for a nice walk to a playground where I fell asleep reading in the sun, only to have a very judgmental mom explaining to her kid that people weren't supposed to sleep on benches, they were supposed to sleep at home. I continued my classy chic appeal when I stole a plastic produce basket from a trash can on felix's request and carried it all the way home.

I changed my reading material to a murakami memoir about running, which inspired me to get out and run instead of sit inside and read a book. i got back and everyone was clean and bathed, and we played gypsy music with centa and read the hobbit. what a wonderful evening!

it was not over yet though! as soon as the kids slept, i remembered our bag of mushrooms. i cleaned them, cut them up and fried them. then brian and i stood near the hot stove and burned our mouths eating mushrooms right out of the pan.

steaming hot: fette henne, steinpilze, eierschwammerln

bad day gone good (155/365b)

today started out not my favorite. i felt sad and stressed still from yesterday. Poor brian got a lot of anger and frustration directed at him, but he had better plans: a nice hike in the Weinstrasse (heiligengeistklamm) for the day. I hid from the world as long as I could, and then I went to pick up kindergarten kids. After that, although i was so very tired, and the workers were at home alone, i took felix to choir and stayed with zorah for a while so jackie could do some phone calls. after that i felt much better.

musical evening

then i roasted coffee for the first time, in the oven, and the kitchen filled with smoke, and nothing smelled like coffee. at first i thought it was ruined, but it turns out that's pretty normal. i'll see how it is tomorrow.

then a nice long evening at jackie and andi's playing carcassone. i "won" (because jackie gave me the very last card, and that card finished a very fancy city for me and if she had played it any other way i would have lost by a large margin)

good day gone bad (154/365b)

nobody took any pictures today.
the workers came to work on our windows, starting at 8am. it was a terrible terrible noise and dusty until well onto 6pm.
it was a nice enough day in the morning and such but by the time school got out everyone (including the grown-ups) were tired and cranky from our two early mornings in a row. i picked them up from school and took them to the library and every step of the way there was whining or bickering. (but they were happy and reasonable while we were there at least!) brian had lots of work to do, and my patience was wire thin. everyone was fighty and bitey and by the end i gave up and just went to bed alone and didn't even say good night to anyone. grrrr.

first day of school and other stuff good too (153/365b)

first day of school went off without a hitch. 3rd grade and 2nd grade, and the school day was short. felix was off to his first day of the last year of kindergarten.

ik bin ein bearlinner

Henry growing up

it was a perfect day for being outside, but we were all tired from getting up so early so bedtime was also early. before sleeping we went through old kids' papers for *3 hours* deciding what to keep and what to throw away. they had a lot of patience and endurance. finally i read to them from the hobbit. felix said it was scary, but when i said i would stop reading he said no, he wanted to know what happened next.

one of the found things: a very logical set of words

brian's back! (152/365b)

new record for me, getting up out of bed fully awake at 1:30am. 2 coffees before 8am. curious how the day will progress from here.

most of the day we were in rettenbachklamm walking slowly and mushroom hunting. spent hours just "building a dam" in the middle of the brook. building boats with sticks tied together with ferns. we found dozens of parasols, and were very happy with our harvest. some person (we called he/she "crazy mushroom lady) had walked not too long before us, and had picked all the edible mushrooms and knocked over all the inedible ones. like, every single one.

except for these ;)

we had no water with us at all (we drank it on the walk to the bus station when we left) and towards the end of the trip we thought it would be fun to roll down a hill in the sun. i rolled 2 turns and was very very dizzy. but they rolled down, ran back up, rolled down again etc.

rolling

before we even got home we stopped and got water. everyone drank at least a liter without stopping to take a breath.

brian got home late late late from his bike trip, sweaty and happy. well, it wasn't *really* late, it just felt late because we were trying to get to sleep extra early because school is starting tomorrow.

momo moments (151/365b)

MOMO

Late last night we made a list of projects we wanted to do today. We didn't have 100% but we did quite a few. On my list was this photo. I saw this sticker on a window... [lots and lots of time will soon be saved here] and since we all just finished the book Momo about a little kid who saves the world from evil grey time-sucking ghost things, who advertise to the human race that they can help you "save" time, i HAD to capture this. I carried my coat and hat and this puppet all through our walk through the city, past the openhouse for the firedepartment, past the farmer's market, past the book festival in the city center and past the designer flea market in the city center where we saw Irmtraud and Barbara manning a table for charity.

Henry took a photo of our coffee and macaron moment

they walked back alone, and i ran to the spar for dinner stuff

We have a new cellist in our quintet and we got to play together for the first time today (in quintet context - we had played gigs alongside her) It was a longish rehearsal, with promo pictures again. Starting as it were from scratch. She has all the stuff to learn but it's easier than last time, since we four are pretty well glued together - except for my occasional memory lapses. Centa manned the fort at home with card playing. It was bedtime when I got home, and I read the hobbit until the goblins jumped out and it got too scary. I was too tired to keep reading anyway and the four of us conked out like sardines in a row.

rettenbachklamm with 3 adults 6 kids and a dog (150/365b)

memories!
I was mad when i took this photo originally
but now it's my favorite of the day, by far

we three kindergarten driving group are reunioning today for fun. a nice hike up to the old (moved out of kindergarten) with all our kids on this perfect weather friday was just the thing. it just took a little while to get moving. "morning" turned into leaving at 12:30. And when jackie came to pick me up, i was just getting into the shower.

our hiking clothes

we found mushrooms, we walked slowly, had snacks in some light drizzle, were dazzled and scared by the sudden onslaught of very near thunder, and came back soaked from sudden rain. all in all, pretty good hiking.

im always a little sad that mine are too big to carry around
but also i don't envy the job of actually carrying around a sleeping child over slippery rocks and up steep hills

when we got back we were briefly locked out. it was no big deal. the kids had packed my backpack, and my keys were not something they thought of and neither did i. we used our few minutes to do some yard work. there are worse ways to spend time. dinner was just an egg on some leftovers, "that's all?" said the kids but then there were even leftovers of that. we don't eat nearly close to as much when brian the mega-runner is not here. 

preparing for school for a change (149/365b)

we spent so much time shopping and organizing... the two older kids both have long specific lists of school stuff they need before monday. lots of it we already have, but that meant specifically figuring out what we needed and going to the places that have those things. (not like the last two years where we got back from trips jetlagged on sunday night, when everything's closed, and winged it monday morning) it's not like we're very fast right now, with felix's foot healing and all. we didn't have to buy very much at all, but it just takes *so* *much* *TIME*. [i hate shopping]

since we were getting ready for school we might as well do haircuts too. they all wanted a haircut and i did the honors outside, and they sat on the broken bench that we keep intending to fix.

manuela visited us in the evening, and played games with us, some old, some new.

the nearly unending game of snakes and ladders between manuela and felix was somewhere close to 40 minutes
here's the put put boat i bought in berlin.
we put some beeswax in for fuel because the parafin stinks so much

theodore showing off his new game: "Border Patrol"
it's kind of cool actually, though, of course, the rules need work (to say the least)

Henry showing off his new pencil sharpener

the day in a nutshell:
school stuff by the ready in the back
lots of laughter
enthusiasm
closeness
lots of floor time