Picking up hundreds of fallen tiny fallen apples before mowing my lawn is my most despised activity in the garden these days.   -   Since the growing cycle is completely off this year, my mum got a bouquet made of dried stuff for her birthday, I even put lettuce seed pods in there.   -   After I gluten freed these already vegan CHOCOLATE WALNUT COOKIES by using buckwheat and oat flour, I have to bake them at least once a week.   -   I got W´s hot shirt at the first Mädchenflohmarkt here a few years ago, he looks so dapper in it - maybe I should become a stylist, just like everybody else. At flea markets I am always on the hunt for outrageously coloured Ralph Lauren sweaters several sizes to big for him. The only designer he knows by the way is Karl Lagerfeld, since he used to dress up like him for Fasching 30 years ago. All he ever wanted is a workshop the size of a huge hall and I tell him it looks exactly that way in those pictures. 

It seems unreal now, but exactly a year ago I had a crush on a quite young Dutch guy I met a few times. Once we went to an antique fair, where I showed him a DRIP BLOWL I really liked at the booth of an older couple, selling beautiful things acquired at auctions in England. He suggested this might be something grown up people would own, so instead of saying "But I AM grown up! I AM 34 YEAR OLD!", I bought it. We got some imported peppermint chocolates with it and when I was marvelling at this odd but somehow working combination, his remark was "Does it though?". And even though the painfulness stunned me at that moment, I am amazed by how fast a broken heart can heal - it puts the rest of my broken body to shame.

At first I turn up at my physiotheraphy session with bits of my blueberry smoothie stuck between my teeth and a few splatters on my upper arms. The next time I am covered in scratches made by my evil hop plant, looking like a flagellant. A week later I go all out and show up with arms red with sun allergy, photodermatitis caused by a touch of common rue down my neck and lips bruised painfully with oral herpes. Why can´t I ever be put together looking?

My sisters is currently renovating a little house far, far away from where I live, so sometimes I send her inspirational pictures of kitchens, gardens and kitchen gardens. She doesn´t use Pinterest (neither do I), or Instagram, or blogs, so they have a disturbing effect on her. She asks me in what kind of fairy tales these people are living, if places like that are actually existing. Sometimes I am afraid they do, making everyone without access feel miserable. She then ponders it might also just come down to the camera angle, when even I can make my place look much prettier than it is in reality. Still, lately I am considerably worried that I will never live in my fairy tale and I am pretty sure it is not because I don´t use Lightroom and can´t fix my camera´s lens distortion. I will never be hard at work creating beautiful things, capturing it all even more prettily. There are no impeccably ruffled grounds I might live on, no kitchen door opening to a shady walled garden. I will not appear dressed exquisitly in attire looking like it just sprang from the earth. At 7.50pm at my local supermarket I am just one of the sad creatures in the check out line, cradling three mangoes, a Lion bar and a bag of gummy bears, both of which I will regret a lot later on. I guess it is not only the pain, it is also being lonely. I am good at being lonely, I have worked on this for over 10 years now, so you could call me a professional loner. But sometimes I just want to hop on a bike in the evening light and watch someone eat ice cream or share some fries with. Or just walk by a river, without having to make a date out of it. Or someone to just sit with. Until then I do reverse RETAIL THERAPY, which works even better than the real deal - you can find my stuff HERE (if you are on Instagram) or HERE (if you are not on Instagram).

A thunder storm with heavy rain fall has damaged almost all my grapes, they look split up now, but they don´t seem to care and keep on growing plump and plumper. The next one a few days later kills my internet connection and I bite my nails for the first time in years. It is the only way I know how do deal with unsolvable technical problems. I also finally meet the mouse that has been dragging my cat´s kibble into my shoe rack and shoes for three weeks now, refusing to get trapped with cheese, chocolate or stock cubes. I can think of nothing else but mouse trapping and calling the technical phone support, so the next morning while I prepare breakfast in this preoccupied state, I forget to put the lid on my Vitamix. I shred the pestle into my smoothie and splatter myself and the ceiling with a mixture of fennel, bananas, blueberries and various supplements. I ponder for a minute if I should lie down and cry, but start cleaning frantically instead. The bucket of left over wall paint turns out to be dried up, but since I have to do something about something I get out a bottle of cheap acrylic paint from art school. It takes more than four coats until the blueberry splatters don´t look down at me that accusingly any more. I order the new pestle on my phone even before I throw the broken one in the recycling bin.

For a while now, I have been so impressed by anything I come across from BURROW bakery in NY - the label, the embroidered CURTAINS, all those COOKIE CUTTER SHAPES, the baked SHOP SIGN - I feel almost humiliated by that display of thoughtful genius. Their INSTAGRAM FEED makes me want to cry. I feel like I am just putting stuff out there, mindless and dumb - why can´t I be blessed with IDEAS LIKE THAT? There is a little story about them on BON APPETIT, too.

I wanted a birthday party and I wanted pictures of it - I got both. My sister´s boyfriend took most them, but he was too shy to point the camera at the faces of the guests he didn´t know, which is actually great because of GDPR. My god daughter however always takes the cake or is is the cherry on top of it (depending which saying you like better, as long as it involves cake you´re good, I´d say), so I am really glad her privacy officers let me use hers. Everyone else is looking slightly distressed, just as it should be - it is a birthday party after all.   -   And yes, I did go to the 1€ store and bought myself some highly poisonous looking and smelling candles to put on top of a cake. For safety reasons we made sure to never light them. 

While watching the royal wedding, we make a filled bread for my birthday party. I have been making this one based on an early Jamie Oliver recipe for special occasions for more than a decade now and this time we put in arugula, green asparagus, toasted almonds, dried tomatoes and olives. It says "denocciolate" on the jar, making my sister giggle. They are the bland kind, perfect for a baby´s palate, perfect for us. There is thunder in the air, right up until the first guests arrive, then the weather switches to blarring sunshine.

I tell my sister about an ARTICLE I read on The Cut (a website I really like), about how an income over 75.000$ can´t make you happier money wise. Since this number seems to abstract to us, we break it down to 6.750$ a month. We ponder this for a second and then start to laugh hysterically. There is no way we will ever be happy "money wise", so we decide happiness is overrated anyway. It is probably a myth, possibly made up by CocaCola. Just like Santa or Mother´s Day, an opportunity to make a lot of money. We conclude therefore, we don´t need happiness after all - it´s so capitalistic anyway. We also think that the wavy Ikea mirror is going to be a democratic design icon soon, maybe the hugging heart cushion, too. Not too gross species will score high prices at future auction houses and I am wondering if I should start prising off those mirrors off the hallway and bathroom walls in every student flat share I might come across, before they get too baldy chiped. The income from auctioning these off might increase my happiness in later days. Problem is, I don´t know any students anymore. My sister says she feels misrepresented by this account of our conversation, since I did most of the talking - I just thought you should know.

FREDMINUSERIKA did a post about what not to tell the internet, how she uses English to distance herself from her feelings and how her therapist wants her to use German instead. This might very well be true for her - I have been accused of the same thing. But I on the other hand still insist that this is not what I am doing - it is one of the things I call "therapist´s talk" I had to distance myself with a lot of force. By talking and writing in English I finally found a way to express what I feel, when the words given to me by way of where I live, were always feeling slightly wrong. I am never "wütend", I am "angry" instead and this anger has no stiff and pointy ü-sounds in it. And while it would have been accepted by the medical professionals to use my regional idiom and say "wuadig" instead, just very few people would have understood. And to share your feeling you have to be understood I am told, so I went with the most understood language there is. And how can I give up that significant pause between "a" and "lot" when saying "a lot", when there is only "ganz schön viel" in German? It just really is not "a lot" and sweetly "ganz schön viel" makes me "wütend" in an instant. Telling me I can not use English in my writing and discussing things with my sisters, felt a bit like telling an artist that her/his work is all wrong since the only way to express love is by painting red hearts. I am not an artist, but last year I decided that my whole life is an artistic practice, a decision which made me very happy and my sister - who actually is an artist - very annoyed. I also got advised to not get glasses when I started to get shortsighted - a 20cm distance between your eyes and the workbench can cause these things over the course of a few years, but it was considered a psychosomatic issue instead. When half a year later I couldn´t recognize people in the street anymore and ran around squinting all day, I went to an optician, got glasses anyway and have never looked back ever since. I am shortsighted, that´s it - no mystery reason behind it. And I always wanted glasses anyway. I do however use retail therapy a lot, that is probably why I never talked about that with my therapists. Maybe because I am ashamed of it, but maybe because it really works and I don´t want to give it up.

I have never painted my toe nails sitting in a bus stop. When I see a girl doing so I realize this to be one of the millions and millions of things I have never done, nor will do. I have however returned to my routine of GERANIUM red toe nails, since it has that blueish hint in there, complimenting red feet so well and I really like a geranium.

Even though it is probably hight time to wash it, I like it when my hair starts to smell like my cat.

Listen, I cannot stress this point enough: everyone should have a BIG BONE BARRETTE, preferably the glossy version. Amongst other things it goes very well with vintage Comma, jackets found on flea markets.   -   I figure all my financial troubles are over now, since there is a huge pile of marten shit right next to my front door, which basically means "der Teufel" started shitting "auf den größten Haufen", AKA money makes money. Now I just have to wait and see.   -   Since I am really into sentimental bavarian songs, I inscribed two BUBBLE PENDANTS with lines of the "Erzherzog Johann Jodler" and the "Isarmärchen": WO ICH GEH UND STEH TUT MIR MEIN HERZ SO WEH and WENN ICH DICH NUR SEH SCHWINDET LEID UND WEH (these are not listed in the shop, so in case you want one of those, just let me know)   -   You are going to see so many pictures of all that enameling going on in our workshop, soon you will be sick and tiered of it. I know that I posted some of those pictures up there twice, but I am suffering from decision-fatigue and couldn´t decide with combination I liked best.

The linden trees are in bloom over a month too early, their smell makes me most sentimental. It smells like the Summer holidays are about to begin, there is an ease creeping into the days and excitement, too. It also makes me feel slightly lovey-dovey, without knowing for whom or what, maybe in love with light sticky nights and heat induced dozi- and dizziness, having to put my stiffly swollen feet in a bowl of ice cold water to keep me from sticking to the keyboard. Probably I just #lovesummerhateeverythingelse. Now everyone wonders what might be left for August then, July even. 

One Saturday I come across another hen night, as usual during the weekend even in our small town, and I am thinking this one might be different than all the others after all, since all girls are holding up those matte pink menstruation cups. Then I realize those are actually just champagne flutes.

I can´t stop blogging, I can see how anachronistic that is, but who can time their needs to all those current trends. I did go with the begonias, succulents and cacti, and on the food side bee pollen, chia, turmeric and now hemp seeds, all pretty and delicious, but apart from than that I am not very on trend. Something I am really good at by now is that so called "self-care" - I am doing it very much my way however. The term makes me very queasy, since a lot of the advice is just downright selfish, which should be very alluring to me, since I am a really selfish person myself. Maybe it stings a bit because I am indeed feeling guilty because of being that way. For example I am really good at saying "No", saying "No" is basically the story of my life now, I say "No" so often it isn´t even special anymore. I won´t bore with all the things I say "No" to, it would be a long, tedious list. Also basically all the time is "Me Time", there is so much me time, it drives me nuts. Whenever I hear and read about someone taking time to "curl up with a book", my intestines curl up, too - reading is not something special for me, but an escape, a way to kill time until my eyes start to flicker or my neck gets sore. Or this thing about having a cup of "steaming tea" by themselves for a treat, it makes me steam, too, thinking about those endless pots of tea, making me get up at night at least three times to pee, since tea is all I do, all day long. I even vividly dream of having to pee and then peeing for the longest time, all because of all that tea drinking. Also I do not have to "carve out time for myself", I am trapped with myself, always and forever. The way I "provide" for myself is by making sure there is always a good stock of essentials at home, so I never run out of toilet paper, gluten free rolled oats and cat´s favorite food, since there might be times, when it could be a bit complicated to replace it. I also have a cup of GREEN MATCHA TEA every day and on a hot day, or basically all Summer long, I prepare a pot of green or herbal tea in the morning to drink cold when I return home in the afternoon. Later on I do a bit more peeing. There are a lot of double batches of roasted vegetables made in this household to spare me one round of cooking, eaten with spicy peanut butter sauce made with orange juice, pepper flakes, yeast powder and vinegar. Of course I do at least a triple dose, I have been a fan of peanut sauces ever since I found a recipe on 101cookbooks.com (simply can not find the recipe anymore, sorry!) when still a student and have been tweaking my version ever since. And I do a lot of PICNIC BREADS, too, probably because it is just an other opportunity to use mustard. On a quest of using up everything in my drawers before it needs to be thrown out, I am now doing a lot of precooked grains. I have now come to like salads made with millet (and cucumber, paprika, spinach and basil) so much, I had to restock it, so the whole endeavour was in vain. And to feel on top of things: constant obsessive tidying, tidying on the go. It might not look like that, but the heaps found in my flat are there on purpose, for decorative reasons. Everything else gets put away all the time, punctuated by some local deep tidying once in a while. The one thing I am not suffering from, is putting off dealing with little things, those get done in a flash. Bigger stuff deserves a bit of procrastination, but I have realized by now, that some of my projects just need a lot of stewing. It actually does them a lot of good. Like when I looked at those fancy stones for over a year, drawing up version upon versions of ear rings to make with them, starting work on those and deconstructing them again, twice, to turn them into something completely different. So worth it, all the lost gold dust even - you just wait and see (and save money, those are going to be quite pricey). Everything else however just gets churned out at once. Riding my bike home after leaving the workshop, I feel a rush of happy-high flooding through me, it has always been that way, working there makes me just so glad. And despite the fact that I am not able to actually do that much anymore, this still works. I am wondering if it has something to do with the fumes, since working on the computer can never achieve the same results, but I doubt it. One day I almost double over in pain after such a bike ride, but there is still that elating feeling. Work IS my self-care, no matter what anyone says. So, this trend I kind of get, but then it has been around for awhile now. So to cut this long story short: I am still into blogging. Too slow for things like Insta-Stories.

My holistic orthopedic sizes me up for insoles and has me take 50 steps with my eyes closed, hands stretched out in front. When I open my eyes again I have taken a turn by almost 60 degrees during those steps and I feel utterly embarrassed by this. I am so ashamed by this failure he tricked me into displaying. He then tells me a story how, with closed eyes, I would end up at the wrong table at the coffee place if I had been walking up to my boyfriend sitting there - this irks me even more. According to him that boyfriend would also know if I´d snore or grind my teeth at night. Why should I walk up to a boyfriend and why should such a thing lie next to me in bed? So all I say is "Ok, toll." The last time I went there, he chuckled because my legs are so short. I am not sure if I will go again, but he is the only one still willing to try things. Things after his own bible, but still.

I want to read everything on that WHOLE LIST - they had me a the line by Anne Truitt, which sounds so common to me: "All told, I now have available about one hundred dollars in ready money. It´s too low an ebb. Yesterday my heart pounded all day and my left eye is jumping and jerking." And I am very much into those cover designs, too.

On a dark winter night I met RICARDA (auch HIER) on the historical stone bridge for a few very delightful minutes (I was just recovering from a stomach flue and didn´t want to drag her into it, too), she seemed like such a nice sprite, emerging from the misty darkness (and wearing the perfect trousers and jacket). I told everyone how glad I was to have ventured out that night, still feeling sickly to meet such a lovely person. Now I am a GIRL CRUSH and reading her words made me blush quite a bit.