It is BOOK CLUB time again - we are meeting on the 28th of March and you are very welcome to join us! Just send a message to mail@wsake.com and I´ll set you up with the details!

We will be talking about MIDDLESEX by JEFFERY EUGENIDES, a novel having celebrated its 15th birthday last year. Being very late to a lot of things, I just discovered it over a year ago and I was so blown away, the inferno of Smyrna is still haunting me - one of the events in recent history I had no idea about, but then I am not very fluent in Greek/Turkish history, or a lot of the other themes in this wonderful (Homeric) book. 

(Thank you so much, BRIGITTE, for featuring our SILVER RECYCLING NECKLACES amongst other sustainable fashion ideas - we have some BRACELETS now, too!)

(March is apparently endometriosis awareness month so I joined #1in10 - there needs to be better education and more research, the lack of knowledge even shown by medical professionals is shocking and harmful, physically and mentally. Endometriosis is an invisible disease, no ultra sound or MRI scan is able to show it - but my hot-water-bottle-induced skin damage might give you a clue.)

The temperature drops below zero and a piercing icy wind from the North-East picks up. It hits quite close to the ground, behind the knees, sometimes it drifts higher, ripping the hood already drawn close from the head. Biking in this kind of weather is an ordeal. The colder it gets, the more I slow down. My movements become leaden. The grease in my joints becoming goey. I take a walk by the river in the sunshine to the discounter who offers by far the best deal on fair trade, WWF-approved, organic bananas. I fill my backpack and trod home again. The bananas start to rot before ever getting ripe.

I meet a jogger, she is so beautiful and when she comes up to me, her smile is full on.

And then the temperatures drop even further. I stare at a lot of weather reports, but the digits just won´t change. I am scared to go out and put on a third pair of underpants, which have belonged to my grandmother, the nude coloured woollen knee length kind.

For their book project I charge my sister and her boyfriend the exact amount of money I need to buy these SHOES.

I haven´t seen my friend in more than half a year since she has moved her family to the countryside. We finally meet up in our town´s French restaurant. I order some "Good luck" tea from the very cute French waitress (I have a thing for the French currently) and a few sips in, we reach territory we never had - we talk about our mothers. We go deep. Down to the roots of our greatest fears that made us what we are now. The tiny seemingly insignificant events that shaped us so irreversibly. I don´t manage to finish my galette with ricotta and spinach and hand it over to her. When I get up from a chair later that day, my right leg has gotten slightly numb and I can´t shake it off. My back has started to act out again. There is no connection, but I had missed my FRIEND a lot.

My workshop and garden helper tells me he feels depressed, so I agree to go out with him at Fasching. It turns out no one is around and when he tells me about his troubles, I have three instructions for him: stop smoking weed, eat a lot instead and staying clear of his father. A week later, he lets me know his life has already improved greatly by following those simple rules. I share my white chocolate bar with ground espresso bits in it with him, I am not supposed to eat it anyway - there is milk powder in it.

Last winter I got a pair of woollen pants on sale and wore them only once. I had already considered them a waste of money but now I put them on every day, they have an elastic waist, some kind of harem style and enough room for Heattech underneath. They need to be dry cleaned though, which is the only downside, so I will try putting that off until the end of winter. I am not a dry cleaning person, the last time I had something cleaned was when a mouse lived between two of my woollen scarfs for a few days. A dark red and a light blue one, the droppings I found were also coloured that way. I have some other good mouse stories up my sleeves, but I am keeping them up there for an other time.

The first time I taste miso is in an edamame salad I pick up at REWE to go before my train ride home from LEIPZIG. I also have two Dunking Donuts. And it is also the first time I have edamame, which I still haven´t found for sale anywhere, so I still like to get this salad sometimes. Can´t wait to make WALNUT OLIVE MISO SAUCE, even though soy products are considered very un-clean. I have never had a PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICH, too, but I have been dreaming about that combination for so long.

I long for my sisters, someone to eat dinner with, to talk to at night. I am pondering getting a little poodle. 

I call E and tell her to coarsely grate two huge salad potatoes and roast them in a non-stick frying pan in olive oil with caraway and salt. They stick to the pan a lot so she needs to make heavy use of her wooden spatula. Almost at the end she has to add some sauerkraut - it is a divine meal, she agrees. I have mine with lots of our local mustard.

(Gluten-freeing these DATE BREAKFAST SQUARES by using buck wheat flour turned them into such a crumbly mess, they have to be eaten straight from the pan.)

(Considering the amount of tiny Madeleine moulds I found on the flea market, you might think I finally found all that Lost Time Proust was looking for... but they were produced in West Germany, so they could also be used for "Bärentatzen" - a German bear paw shaped cookie - and we would have to start looking all over again.)

(That golden version of our ARROW RING had quite an exciting journey to its new owner in Hungary, but eventually arrived in the end - now let´s hope she says yes and likes the ring!)

The sheep and cattle are rotting away on their pastures these days, so my sister tells me. After the wettest months in history the fields in Northern Germany are not only drenched but flooded, mud baths. It sounds like a biblical plage, a punishment for a great sin. She is constantly on the line with the veterinary office to get a few of those poor beasts moved to dryer grounds, probably making enemies with every farmer around.

I crush the chickpeas so they might soak up their tomato broth (you could also call it "red water"), hoping I won´t throw up afterwards - my belly is in excellent shape these days. The next day I place an order for a juicer (a slightly damaged model from Amazon Marketplace) and a lot of supplements - I am going to jump on the CELERY JUICE train in full speed. When they arrive, the packets of barley grass powder, ashwagandha and spirulina smell like incense sticks. I have to figure out some of the combinations, so far ashwagandha and l-lysin gives me an unpleasant dizzyness that must be avoided in the future. Before my first green smoothie I am really scared, but then the mixture of baby spinach, avocado, pear and the juice of a blood orange tastes unexpectedly lovely and afterwards I feel pumped at first and then vomity, then good again and surprisingly full - after I had a few "Energy Balls" and a scalding hot golden milk to warm up again. Smoothies do make me freeze a lot, I could never add ice chips to them since this would make me probably turn completely blue. I have no idea how to address this issue so far, I did however figure out the vessel-problem - since regular large glasses being to small for these quantities, I switched to my BEER MUGS. This has not been a satisfactory solution due to their un-spoon-ablitly, so I am doing bowls now - yeah, that´s how late I am to every fad around. To speed up the ripening of all those smoothie-bananas, I drape them around apples, it kind of looks like a banana-nest filled with apple-eggs. The ceiling above my Vitamix is blue berry splattered by now. I brew my fresh sage and thyme tea in the almost empty jar of my favorite local HONEY, so nothing gets wasted. There are jars filled with seeds and beans in every stage of sprout on my counter, including mold. At least I think it is mold, unless they have grown very furry roots (a quick Google search later I have to admit I was wrong about the mold, it is fibrous roots instead). My mum sometimes busted out some mungbeans when we were kids and I loved their taste and crunch, so there is a Weck jar filled with those too. Broccoli simply won´t work in my environment, they turn to a smelly mush no matter which sprouting technic I use. The "Spicy Sprout Mixture" gives me heartburn in the end, so I am down to alfalfa by now. My favorite tastes these days are MUSTARD (still have to try the sprout variety), vinegar (please try that BROCCOLI WITH RAISINS and soba noodles) and salt, probably all very un-raw and un-clean.

This goes quite well for a few days, then I start feeling queasy by just thinking about that green stuff and I move on to making pestos (with raisins, of course) instead of smoothies, to be had with roasted vegetables. I usually do a huge batch with my farmers market loot, so I have lots of left overs to use up during the week. Also I think I should stay clear of legumes, the verdict is still out on (totally not raw) sauerkraut - how can something supposedly so good for your gut give you that much gas? This is a fact however: Vitamixing and juicing means so much cleaning up - I think my diet so far is a huge waste of water.

Also in my shopping basket: a JADE ROLLER. You can definitely expect a complete transformation of myself and I will soon present you the new and depuffed Anna!

There is a construction site on one of the four bridges I cross everyday, so they shut down one bike lane and I have to use the other side - after a week I am still thrown by that fact. I am such a creature of habit with such set ways. Each morning is a struggle now, since I have changed my own feeding routine and I have to concentrate very hard to get everything in line. Flexibility is not my forte, but I never said otherwise. In the hands of a psychologist I would very likely be diagnosed with an adjustment disorder within seconds, but I rather go with astrology and call this my stubborn Bavarian taurus streak. And it was probably the blue super moon that made me realize so many things about myself lately, strangely enough a few of them surfacing while talking on Skype. The discussion had nothing to do with anything, it was just seeing myself behaving in certain ways on that tiny screen in the right upper corner of the screen. I do not know how to change these habits but I feel it is crucial to do so, so I am watching myself rather closely now.

Yes, I am new to Skype, but the screen sharing option is pretty great, so we´re using it a lot while working on a book project. In between my sister and her boyfriend show me their kitchen re-enactment of a German gold medal winning free skating lift. We move on to doing Aljona´s fist-shake-morphing-into-an-arm-glide, which is basically the only thing we´re able to do somewhat gracefully.

It´s BE YOUR OWN VALENTINE´S DAY which means you get 14% off anything in our SHOP by applying the code TREATYOURSELF (including pieces already on sale) for today only!

And while our HOUR GLASS EAR STUDS, which look like cute tiny bows when turned sideways are on discount, custom made orders are excluded from this offer. 

(As you can tell, we are really fond of our space heater - these 35€ were basically the best money we ever spent. That box full of jewels is all for a bride getting married this February in Italy and it is such a lovely selection of FAKE CRYSTAL RING + EAR STUDS (there are still some left in the SAMPLE SALE), HUGE DROP BRACELET, custom WEDDING RINGS and a ZIG ZAG NECKLACE.)

I couldn´t sleep so I ordered three hairbands on Ebay at one o´clock in the morning. Five minutes later I remembered that they do give me headaches and will probably collide with the temples of my glasses anyway. But I had just seen Leandra Medine wear one while sleeplessly scrolling through Istagram stories and thought hairbands might just be the thing to go with too long, very uncut, split end hair.

Usually my cat has to lick my face to finally get me out of bed, which I consider a wet way of dry brushing and those germs might just give my immune system something to work on to keep up to date, but the next morning something happened that I am most definitely not used to: I "hit the ground running". I always wondered what that might feel like and was sure I would never use this sentence but I basically rushed to work, cleaned the bathroom and some kitchen shelves, wrote lists of things to tick off and couldn´t wait to finally leave the house, go to the workshop and get some brazing done! And I should have stayed with brazing indeed, assembling all those tiny chain pieces and creating bracelets - the little sisters of the RECYCLING SILVER NECKLACE. But no, I was so high spirited I moved on to a heavy dose of gold work just to realize that this is and probably will always be too much at once.

A few days after I wanted to eat a really awesome cake, I had this blurry idea in my mind of it being so tasty and cakey and divine, it felt like remembering something glorious I had actually never tasted, so I paged through Ottolenghi´s Sweet (skipped the ALNATURA BUTTER this time) and made the seemingly unassuming Raisin and Rum Cake (without the rum caramel glaze) since I had both in the house. Soaking the raisins in rum over night already smelled a lot like my favorite Ritter Sport Rum Traube Nuss chocolate and baked with sour cream it just turned into everything I so vaguely wished for. Ate it while catching up with an INTERNET FRIEND being in town for a few hours. Also it was the perfect good bye to sugar, eggs, dairy and gluten since I´m about to embark on a fruit and vegetable diet any day now - all those oranges are just the beginning. Afterwards I went to a Dizzy Birds concert I had gotten W tickets for this Christmas and felt completely destroyed the morning after. Woke up after a nightmarish sleep with a sore neck and hellish back - went on to messing up the inscription of an ARROW BRACELET and then got into a weird funk of self-loathing that had been building up for a few days now. It is a bit about not feeling good enough and therefore rather going for second best, hoping I won´t disappoint this way and not get disappointed myself. It probably started when I was working on a graphic design project and remembered how frustrated I often felt  doing so, fearing never to be able to please the customer since my way of doing it is never the one but only one in a million. Setting out doing a job that is based on pleasing people is quite something, for example I am often asking myself why I am still hoarding all those BARRETTES, DOGS and funny LITTLE GUYS. But for real: why don´t you like our barrettes? Is it the pricing? Don´t you wear your hair up? Will I ever go to the GLORY LAND? The night of the concert I did however find an answer to the question if Swing dancing would be something I´d like to try - it certainly is not. Male lead couple dance gives me an odd degraded feeling and I am embarrassed of my sweaty palms - I actually choose my dance partner in 10th grade dancing class based on the fact that he had too, so we created a very salty concoction between the two of us. Also if I would have had him actually lead, we probably would have gotten quite hurt, so naturally I took over and I still don´t think he minded a bit.