gone fishing

We’re on vacation, and although I had every intention of posting regularly, it turns out it’s just too hot in my parents’ computer room to get anything more done than checking email. Ah well, that’s what vacations are for, right?

titanium man

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another part falls spectacularly to pieces."

This quotation from Bridget Jones's Diary (an homage to the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice) has been rattling around my brain the last few days. My pregnancy symptoms have lessened in severity, I have been able to sleep at least half the time and Marie's sleep has also begun to improve a little. And then, on Monday, I got a phone call from Toffi.

He was supposed to be playing soccer. If the game had been canceled, he would have called earlier. But it was too early for the game to be over already. I instantly knew something was up.

"Yeah, hi. I think I just broke my arm. I'm on my way to the hospital. Can you text me my health insurance info?"

Three hours and change later, Toffi came home with a cast on his arm. But I hadn't even heard the real news yet. The fracture is very complicated, and it won't heal properly unless he has surgery and a titanium pin implanted. And for reasons that I still haven't completely managed to understand, he needs to stay in the hospital for 4-5 days after the surgery so that he can be under close observation in case his body rejects the foreign object. Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. So for the next five days, Marie and I will be making daily trips to the hospital to visit her papa. I hope it doesn't freak her out too much.

two years

Remember this bundle of joy?
Can you believe this is the same little girl?
I can hardly believe it myself, but we've been blessed with her smiles and infectious laughter for 2 whole years now. Happy Birthday, Marie!

nuthin' to say...

Just thought I'd let you know we're all still alive and well. I haven't felt inspired to write much lately, but be sure to check out the new photos I uploaded to Flickr.

polite calendar dance

I just read this post at Simply Stated, RealSimple magazine's blog. This resonated with me so strongly! Toffi and I just had a reeeeeally long, serious ... ehm ... discussion about this very topic last night. I'm one of those people who says what she means and means what she says. Toffi is a bit more casual with language, and it sometimes leads to huge misunderstandings. Which category do you fall into?

cooking and baking cheat sheet

This isn't really about anything; I just thought I'd share. We have a big shelf of all sorts of cookbooks in our kitchen, and although I have my standard references (The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Spoon), I use a variety of books for the dishes I prepare. Some of the books are American, others are German. While I can approximate a lot of measurement conversions in my head, it's really annoying to have to do lots of mental math while following a complicated recipe, and whipping out a calculator doesn't necessarily make things any easier. You see, in the U.S., we measure mostly in cups, by volume, while in Germany, ingredients are measured in grams, by weight. So not only are you converting from U.S. to metric measurements, but you're also converting volume to weight for everything other than liquids. And don't even get me started with converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I've memorized a lot of equivalents, but I have never been able to remember the damn formula. So part of making cooking and baking more pleasant experiences has been to create a conversion table for quick reference. So here's my little reference card, put together over the years*:

* Yes, it really did take me years. My old conversion table included all sorts of temperature and measurement increments that are pretty much never used in cooking, rendering them useless visual clutter. So this is really the streamlined version of the table I first made about 4 years ago.

repurposing beautiful things

I've been super crafty recently, but I've neglected to post photos (or even take photos in the first place in most cases) of my projects. So here's a little peek into my wild and crazy life as a quasi-housewife.

I recently saw a tea towel from Green Gate that I simply had to have, but it was far too pretty to actually use as ... you know ... a kitchen towel. So I decided to make it into stuff. My first project was a tea cozy for my small teapot, which I use every morning for a personal portion of tea before moving on to the hard stuff ... er, coffee. I made my own pattern, inspired by Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing:


There was still quite a lot of the towel left, but I didn't know right away what I wanted to do with it. So I slept on it for a week or so. Then it came to me: an oven mitt and potholder. I already have a cute oven mitt with a rooster on it, but it's been singed a few dozen times and is starting to look worse for the wear. This time, I had no pattern or directions or tips, but it seemed like it would be simple enough to construct my own pattern. And it was: I only had to rip out one seam!




The pink trim is bias trim, and the red "loop" with the polka dots was actually part of the original tea towel. So I can't claim responsibility for that detail, although it was kinda tricky to work around the red loop so I could keep it. That'll stay my little secret.