4 easy goals

New Year, new goals?

As 2013 is coming to an end (I know it is another two months, but that seems like nothing, doesn’t it?) I am reminding myself of what I wanted to achieve. I definitely improved my knitting skills, still have to practice a lot of sewing. I started running on a regular basis again and am pretty satisfied with that.

BUT: I haven’t started learning Italian yet and haven’t taken Burlesque lessons. As I will have half of December and the first week of January off (yay!), I thought about starting then, but surprise, surprise! No one offers lessons in December or at least there is no course starting at the end of the year. But I will definitely do some research once I am on holiday and book the classes, so one could say I have accomplished that goal even a bit in 2013. 

While reading through my feedly I stumbled across the “Four simple goals”-post by Elsie and Emma from www.abeautifulmess.com. It is a great idea and I am definitely joining.

As everything is more fun when you share it, why don’t we do it together, so join in, think of four simple goals and take part in the challenge. The good thing, if you write it down, you can always remind yourself of what you wanted to do and get motivated by readers and followers.

So my goals for 2014:

beer-seat

... or alternative lemonade-seat of course.
Who does not know the situation? There is more people than seats at a party and finally some people take a cushion and sit down on a crate of beer. Highly uncomfortable, true. We have a solution.

Here you can see the cushioning I used.

Eva-Melina and me went to a housewarming-party of some friends and wondered about what to bring them. Weh thought about painted flower-boxes or homemade jam, but we decided to make a beer-crate seat, as this is a handy gift for a party, bringing your own beer and seat. A frozen joghurt shop beneath our apartment  uses these for their guests, but only with plain wood, so not very comfotable.

As you can see, we put four pieces of wood unter the seating area in order to prevent it from slipping from the beer crate. Then we took the staple gun and connected the oil cloth and the wood.  Be careful with your fingers, they are freakishly strong, those machines. 

So this is how we did it: We used a crate of beer we had all bought together in our holidays and which therefore is a reminder of this time. In a hardware store we got several pieces of wood, a staple gun and I had bought cute oil cloth on dawanda. To make the seat more comfortable, add some sort of cushioning.

Et voilá! Here it is! As you can imagine we filled it with beer before we brought it along to the party.

Knitting Season 2013 has begun

The last two weeks I have been on holiday, mostly visiting friends in various German cities. And as a lot of them have kids or will be having kids soon and as I happened to have a lot of time suddenly, especially on our long cross-country car-rides, I found great inspiration in all those small feet and heads to start serious knitting again. I am easily frustrated, so being done with a sock within an hour is making me very happy. So I started with socks. 

I proudly present the first sock I ever made (which look really odd):

I always thought they are too much work to knit, but it is actually a lot of fun. And baby socks are also so very cute. Next bigger project is a baby blanket. I am so much in the flow that I will be able to finish it soon and not make it another UFO. Plus the baby I am knitting for will be born in November, so there is a deadline. Creating all those little things in no time got me to thinking. And no, not about having a baby, but about a project I read about last year: knitting for preemies in hospitals. Baby clothes often don’t fit premature infants, as they are so very tiny. I bet parents, who are probably worried about their little ones, will be a bit happier, knowing there are people creating stuff for people they don’t even know. As soon as my baby blanket is finished, I will look out for hospitals that take donated clothes and will animate my friends to collect mini-socks and –hats. With fall approaching fast, time for knitting will increase for all of us, so if you feel like it, start such a project yourself, motivate your friends to help you and let’s make the world a tiny bit better.

Two heads, socks and I especially love the teeny tiny gloves

Fall is coming...

I don’t know if we can agree on that, but to me, every season is connected to a very special feeling and I could never understand those people who only love summer. (Although working fulltime now I can see why people care about all the darkness in the mornings and evenings, it can get depressing.) Summer is carefree, but also very exciting, busy, the feeling to have to be everywhere at the same time. Fall is wilder, winds and rain, great colours and also quieter, melancholic, great for deep thoughts, crafts and cuddling at home, cooking and watching series. I have to admit that after a summer with great weather like we had during the last weeks, I am looking forward to staying home more, being creative and lazy. Being lazy without feeling bad about it, that is fall and winter for me. And a feeling of slight sadness, which can be sweetly melancholic, as I said above.

Winter is similar, but also different, as there is Christmas. And snow (if you are lucky). Both tend to loose their magic a bit when you are older, but it is still there. Cookies, Glühwein, Feuerzangenbowle (I will post a great recipe, once the time is there. For some supermarkets, September seems to be the start of the Christmas season, but nope, not for me. Give fall some credit before winter comes.) gift-wrapping, gift-making…. I love it. 

Christmas markets can be magical, I like the songs. Bells ringing, glistening snow, cracking under your shoes. Coming home from the icy cold into a cozy warm home, drinking tea or taking a long bath. Taking baths is one of my major free-time activity in winter. (When I am not in the sauna, which is another perfect winter-activity).

Spring is romantic, everything comes to life, blossoms, buzzes. Now, outdoor activities become more appealing, think of feeling the warm sun on your skin, hearing the birds sing for the first time and realising how much you missed them. Smelling all the flowers, blossoms. You feel motivated for a fresh start. So does nature.

As you see, every season has it’s charm and every season can be your favourite, especially in the beginning. After a while I always feel tired of one season, looking forward to the new one, which is a great thing.

Here are two projects fitting into the coming fall:

Rumtopf (Fruit in Rum)

 I started a Rumtopf. Fruit in rum, leo translates. It is a rather old-fashioned tradition, I think in my grandparents’ generation it was quite common. You need a high pot you can close, best made of clay, like the original ones in the 60s and 70s. I got a vintage one on ebay for 4 Euros, so have a look if you’d like to have the original Rumtopf-feeling. Then you buy rum, dark rum with at least 59% alcohol, brown sugar and fruit. I don’t like how berries get slushy if you put them into liquid, especially strawberries, so I decided to use only stone fruit (except for the red currant my mother in law gave me, but I guess they will keep their texture. So far I used apricots, I will buy cherries, use the peaches from my terrace and plums will also be a great add I think. Every time a fruit is in season, you take the stones out and put it into the pot, adding rum and sugar, till all fruit is covered. (To prevent floating, you can put a plate on the fruit into the pot). It is important to only use clean fruit and put the pot somewhere cool, best solution is the basement, to make sure it doesn’t turn bad. In the last phase before Christmas you can add Christmassy herbs and spices and then drink it with good friends around Christmas time. You can eat the fruit along with pudding, or bake a cake with it. I don’t even know whether I will like it too much, as I am not a drinker of heavy alcohol, but I just liked the concept of making it. And I am sure that my friends and family will be glad to help.

Another project is connected to the first: if you take the stones out of your cherries, don’t throw them out, use them to make a cherry-stone-cushion. That means to eat and prepare a lot of cherries, but it is totally worth it, especially for cold fall- and winter-nights like mentioned above. Just put the cushion into the microwave for a short time or – if you don’t have one- into the oven and lie it on your feet / belly / neck, to enjoy the comfortable warmth.

To create one, you have to make sure the stones are really clean. Best is, letting them sit in vinegar for a night, then cook them for twenty minutes and afterwards, to dry them, bake them in the oven.

As fabric you can take anything that will not burst into flames in the microwave, best is cotton or another natural fabric. I have already seen all kinds of cushion-shapes, it probably depends a bit on what you want to do with it. I tend to create longer ones, that I can lie around my neck. For your belly you might want to sow a bigger one. Also a great gift for cold days J

Bouncing

The last two weeks have been great fun, Mr. Schön and me spent them travelling around Germany, visiting friends in Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen, we went canoeing in the area of the Spreewald and went to the Baltic as well as to the Northern Sea. Before starting the trip I did some research about what not to miss (including the Blutsgeschwister store in Hamburg, my moneybag is still in mourning) and found a store where you can try so-called Sieben Meilen Stiefel, I will call them bouncing boots, as bouncing is what you do with them.

My better half has been wanting to try them for a while now and I thought it would be a great opportunity to visit the store in Hamburg.

Zlatko helping me putting the boots on for the first time

http://zzet.de/

 I am really bad when it comes to sports done on anything other than my feet on the ground. It took me ages to learn how to rollerblade, I never tried skiing, for a reason and ice-skating for me means trying not to fall. So you can see why I was a bit sceptical about getting on the stilts.

In the shop a leaflet read that you need between 5 and 20 minutes to learn how to walk on them, so I thought, 20 minutes don’t sound so bad. Zlatko, the shop’s owner is a great, positive and interesting guy, who made me feel safe and comfortable from the first moment. The shop in Hamburg is ideal to test the boots, you can hold on to a ballet-like banister, a bit higher than in balletclass, as you are about 30 cm taller than usual and after a while, Zlatko takes your hands and winds them around to show you that you don’t need to hold onto anything. It is a great feeling. We spent two hours in the shop, learning to walk, to jump and to run, feeling a bit like kids learning to stand on their feet. It is a lot of fun, though very exhausting. Even when standing on one spot you are constantly moving a bit, which is a great challenge for you back and belly muscles.

Proud bouncers after two hours of trying

Now that we are back home we have used the boots almost every day and we get braver every time. The muscles are already getting used to all the training and it feels great to get fitter in such a fun way. If you happen to go to Hamburg, Zlatko’s store is definitely a good address to stop by, he is such a positive guy. Sundays hold a special treat: a long walk with other “bouncers”. Even as a beginner you can join them with rent boots from Zlatko’s shop and walk through the city of Hamburg. I guess with experience bouncers it is even easier as they have a lot of good advice and make you feel safer in the pack. You don’t need to buy them, Zlatko in no way urges you to, which may be a trick, as we bought them in the end, paying about 350 each. As we had our training on seven year old, heavily used boots, I am sure we will enjoy them for a long time. Try it! 

Running is even more fun than just walking. But twice as exhausting :)

Winning at losing Weight

… is the plan for this summer. Mr. and Fräulein Schön have a plan to get in shape for summer and as everything is more fun with a little bit of competition we have a bet going on: whoever is in better shape by the end of June / middle of July (we should really set a date here, shouldn’t we?) has to pay for a weekend trip for two. The one who loses can suggest the place, but the other person has to be ok with it. So just going to Cologne from Düsseldorf does not work. Although… could also be nice.

So far, sorry honey, I think I am a little ahead of you. Although we still have not the desirable middle-of-May-weather, at least it is not freezing anymore and the days are significantly longer, so being more active, doing exercise is much easier than it was during the horrible winter. As I cannot torture my peers and colleagues with a grumpy and hungry me, I definitely cannot do much of a diet. So plan 1 is: less sweet stuff, but other than that: eat healthy, not less but exercising more than before.

I installed a very nice app on my phone, shape up. The green design is refreshing and instantly makes me think of health and sports. You enter your personal data, plus the aspired weight and the program will calculate how many calories you can eat per day in order to loose weight. I know that it can only be a rough guide, as every metabolism differs hugely from another, but still it is a great motivator. Entering what you ate doesn’t take long, as everything is either there in the program or you can search it in their database. A plus is also that you can see how much protein, carbs and fat you consumed and can thereby decide what is still missing in your nutrition. Sadly, vitamins are not on the list, which should also be given some consideration. Every exercising shall be entered as well, which rewards you with a reduction of your calories, or leaves you with more calories yet able to eat. To be fair, I only started a few days ago, but I am always so motivated to put some nice food or exercise in there and see the effect, it is amazing. I don’t know whether I lost any weight yet, but I definitely feel better already.

One of the exercises I have been doing lately is Zumba. We used to do a lot of running and I still like it a lot, but I have to admit that I am a bit of a clear-blue-sky runner and as there is so little of that lately I am very grateful for my Wii-Zumba. I also considered a gym, but as I have very irregular office hours, plus always a full schedule of free-time activities as well I decided to at least start with the Wii game. And what can I say, I love it! Me, who has never enjoyed videogames or computergames. But dancing in front of the tv, hoping that no neighbours will see you, because it might look really stupid, is a lot of fun and very exhausting. I always knew with my background of ballroom and Latin dancing I would enjoy Zumba for sure, but hey, it is not only fun, but an even better training than running. Cardio, muscles, fun! Plus, you definitely improve your dancing skills, handy in your free-time as well. I sometimes meet up with Eva-Melina to dance and I don’t need to tell you that this is even more fun. Although I will probably never have a body like the zumba-trainers, for the obvious reason that I am not a Zumba-trainer, I am already looking forward to the next training. 

I have never been someone that uses new media excessively, funny being a media scientist, which is why I came to blogging quite late, I guess I am a bit conservative when it comes to digital changes. Still, I love digital innovations when they have a positive effect in what I like to call the Real World. So I love that Maps on my phone help me find my way (necessarily a lot of times…), the Shape Up app, that helps me eating healthy, Zumba on the tv that makes me sweat so many times a week and many more. I will let you know about the weekend-trip I am going to win ;)

books... the best way to forget about reality for a while

The joy of reading has almost always been with me and I deeply pity everyone who doesn't feel the magic of books. I might sound shallow, that they can take you anywhere you want, without even leaving you cozy bed / livingroom / hanging basket, whatever. But it is true.
Being able to read was a pretty early desire in my life, probably as my mom is a big reader, and I somehow managed to learn it by myself, by always asking which word meant what. Since then it has been a great journey with everything from Enid Blyton to the three investigators (apparently only big in Germany) to Agatha Christie (oh, how I enjoyed the Miss Marple novels) and Thomas Harris. You can see from this list that I have been a big crime-novel fan and am to this day. (Although I also enjoy autobiographies, travel-literature, historic stories and much more, I want to dedicate this blog entry to crime thrillers I have read and enjoyed during the last years.

During the years of my studies I always had to read so much for university, books piling up everywhere in my room and never enough time, that reading for fun was not as fun anymore. I still did it from time to time, but mostly while traveling (also not a lot of free time) and always with a bit of a bad conscience, as I should have been reading Niklas Luhmann instead of Stephen King or others.

My first action after the writing of my Masterthesis: buying a novel, sitting down in a cafe and reading for hours and I still know which novel it was:

The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett

For along time no novel had gripped me that hard, not letting go till the end of the last page. Beckett describes the single parts of Britain his David Hunter-novels take place with such an energy, I always feel like I was there, tasting the sea, smelling Dartmoor, listening to the rural speech. As I have traveled some of England I could of course go back in time and just memorize everything, but Beckett takes you to England and in one case, the U.S., no matter whether you have been there or not. Suspense to the end, with a more than Hollywood-worth ending, that is what Simon Becketts novels are for me. Due to the job of their main character (forensic anthropologist) the books might be too gory for the thin-skinned, but growing up watching The X-Files I guess I have been toughened when it comes to this. The other novels of the series are just as - if nor even more - awesome. I guess my favourite so far is "The Calling of the Grave", which was released in 2010. I hope there will be another novel soon. Does anyone know about it?

Coming from that X-Files, Enid Blyton and Miss Marple background, I seem to prefer detective-series (although this old-fashioned term does not seem too accurate for Simon Beckett and the following:)

Due to coincidence I started reading novels by Mo Hayder: 

Birdman by Mo Hayder

Gruesome in almost the same way as the David Hunter models, if not more so. Detective Jack Caffery reminds me as well of the lone wolf, David Hunter is, although Hunter is maybe more likeable from the beginning. Hayder is also less shocking due to her visual desciptions, but I would say more due to her pervert ideas, playing with the emotion of characters and readers alike. Like the above series, Mo Hayders' novels are not recommended for people of a too sensitive kind. Plus they differ from Beckett's novels in depicting more of straightforward police work as Caffery works as a DI. The beauty of England again, I seem to go for these, as also my reading-biography suggests. The South of England seems to be a very dangerous place...

A much more American approach to the term "thriller" you find in the following series, which is already quite old, but I just discovered it about a year ago (A few months before the movie came out, with one of the worst castings in cinema history, which is why I haven't watched it till this day. Movies based on novels is a tricky chapter itself, probably worth a blog on it's own.) The Jack Reacher series by Lee Child consist of stunning stories, well researched and always of breathtaking speech. It is almost impossible to stop reading the novels. Characters aren't depicted deeply and all in all it feels a bit like Fast Food, but sometimes this is just what you need. Usually Reacher would be too much of a superhero for me, but the stories are so cunning, surprising and well written that I do not care much about his strength, height, power, skills. 

Killing Floor by Lee Child

Start with "Killing Floor" if you are interested. It is the first one and it makes sense to do so. My favourite so far - though I haven't read them all - is "Die Trying" the second one.

I like blogs with the one or other reading recommendation. Especially if you read blogs and you happen to have the same taste as the author in many things like fashion, food, decoration, a.s.o. taking reading advice probably is not a bad idea. So I might share some other great novels I love. As I infected many people with watching Louis Theroux's docus and as I consider this a very good achievement, why not bring the joy of reading into lifes of others as well... Any recommendations?