When does 21° C feel cold?

I'll tell you when 21 degrees Celsius feels cold: when you've just had five days of 33 degrees Celsius.

In the past, summer temperatures used to be in the low 20s and an extraordinarily high temperature was 26 degrees C. Now, for the last 19 years, we've been having heatwaves in Continental Europe that really are no fun.

In the first heatwave of 2003, 70,000 people died across Europe - 5,000 in Paris alone. The elderly just didn't know how to cope with the heat, drank too like and keeled over. Dead.

Thus, when I went to the outdoor pool last Friday, I shivered sitting on the grass in my swimming costume and beach blouse because the temperature was only 21 and later 22 degrees Celsius. What a shame.

Sitting on the balcony at 7 this morning, I was so cold that I had to go in. Sixteen degrees C now feels like freezing point whereas it would have been a heatwave in Denmark. (I used to have a Danish boyfriend. He found 16 degrees C so hot that he started shedding clothes.)

God knows how we're going to cope with winter - especially with rising gas and electricity prices. These high temperatures of over 30 degrees C are really messing with our inner thermostats.

I've "fallen off the wagon" - but it's not what you think

 Normally, the phrase "to fall off the wagon" means that you have started drinking after successfully giving it up for a while.

Well, a few days ago, I decided to buy chewing gum again. I had given it up more than a decade ago because chewing gum caused my fillings and crowns to come loose and repairing them cost money.

However, since my problems with staying asleep now has a name (sleep maintenance insomnia) and the cause of that is stress and one way to reduce stress is to chew gum....I caved in and bought some Wrigley's spearmint gum again.

I now chew the cud like a cow again, but I believe it has relieved some tension, so that's a good thing.

And fortunately, the packet sizes seem to be a lot smaller than they were in the 70s. Does anyone remember this advert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndS5_0MKWkM

I suffer from OCD - and it's not what you think

I have various hobbies and one of them is 'making things'. This broad category also embraces cross-stitching. I make cards, pictures and tablecloths using this technique.

"Oh," people exclaim, "that must be very relaxing for you."

Relaxing?! Are you kidding??

As I said in the headline, I suffer, really suffer, from OCD: obsessive cross-stitch disorder.

When I start something, I want to finish it as soon as possible, which means I spend all my free, waking hours on it - to the exclusion of everything else. 

Sure, I do any translation work that comes my way and I manage to send out invoices at the end of the month, but housework, keeping fit, going out, reading, meeting people...all such activities fall by the wayside. It is horrendous. 

Hour after hour, I sit and stitch. I forget to drink; I barely move - even if I'm in an uncomfortable position. And all over my home, little bits of embroidery yarn show up as I just let the bits that I cut off fall onto the floor or onto my clothes and you can then estimate how far from the table where I'm doing the work you are by how densely spread the bits of yarn on the floor are.

Last year, I sent my aunts in Berlin a tablecloth each for Easter.

When I went to visit them in January this year, I saw that one aunt still had the tablecloth on her dining table. I returned home determined that they should have more, so I found two designs for the summer and spent at least two months working on them in my free time. 

One summer design:

And the other:

Two evenings ago, I finally managed to finish the two tablecloths for autumn for them. Hundreds of hours again. And, as work has been rather sparse this year, this means I could start work on them at 8 in the morning and carry on until 10 at night. Thank heavens for primewire.mx. Without all the series I've watched through that website, I would not have been so well entertained.

This is one design for the autumn:

And this is the other:

If you want to buy a kit yourself, here is the website:

https://www.junghanswolle.de/sticken/tischwaesche?sortierung=favoriten&seite=2

But now I feel free! No more cross-stitch projects are on the horizon. I am free! Free! Woohoo! 

Now, there are just a few small blankets I want to crochet for Christmas presents this year....

Now I know why pensioners say they never have time

As I have little work right now, I took today off. Freier Freitag - as I call it. Free Friday.

All I had on my agenda today was a hair appointment at 11 and a visit to a cemetery in a nearby town. Easy, right? Lots of free time. A nice relaxing day.

I polished up a brief translation (a questionnaire) and sent it off by 9 a.m., made a social phone call and set off for my hair appointment at 10. Only back home some time after 12.30, lunch and off to the nearby town.

After waiting for the train for 20 minutes and wondering if there was any information as to why it was 5 minutes late, I did discover that the train I needed wasn't running and that there was a replacement bus service. Off I went in search of the relevant bus stop. Another 10-minute wait and, instead of an 8-minute train ride, a longer bus ride.

When I got to the station, the bus I needed drove off as I was getting off the bus I that had brought me there. Another 10-minute wait. 

After I'd finished tidying up an old friend's grave for about 20 minutes, I saw that the bus stop in front of the cemetery had been moved and I didn't know where to, so I walked back to the station. As I was waiting for the replacement bus service to take me back into town, the waiting time grew from 3 minutes to 8 minutes.

By the time I had got back home, the round trip had taken me 3 hours - instead of the usual 1 hour and 30 or 40 minutes. I was knackered.

All day to do two little things. Consider what one achieves at work in 8 hours: e-mails read and responded to, filing, translation, editing, paying invoices, writing invoices, chasing up unpaid invoices, research, queries... And as I work from home, I can add domestic chores to that list.

And yet all I did today on my day off was have a haircut and tend to a grave. And it took me all the working day. It's no wonder that the pensioners' mantra is "I don't know how I managed to fit in work - I'm on the go all day".

I never thought I would ever do that!

I like plants. My balcony is four metres long and is full of at least 20 species of plants. I admire the infinite variety of plants, which is why I even fill in the bare patch of ground around the tree in front of this building's front door. 

Over the years, I've planted all sorts of flowers in the street. In the last two years, I've gone for kalanchoe as it can cope well with the heat. 

However, despite my great love of plants, there has always been one kind that I have loathed: begonias. 

In the summer, the Germans are very fond of these kinds of begonias and plant them out everywhere, not just in gardens but in parks, too:

Personally, I cannot stand them. Firstly, the colour annoys me as does their appearance. There's also a red variety:

Don't they look untidy?

However, last Saturday, in a desperate attempt to bring more colour and variety to the small patch of soil in the street, I actually dared to buy some white begonias as I thought I could at least tolerate them:

Never before did I think that I would ever, ever, ever buy a begonia - never mind three!. Wonders can still happen in this world.