With one foot forward
Dec. 30th, 2022 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It's always a very satisfying feeling when you're able to make a connecting train you'd assumed would leave too close to your previous train's arrival time. This situation yesterday meant that Matthias and I arrived back from Germany before midnight, rather than closer to 1am, which would have been the case if we'd had to take our originally planned connecting train home.
Yesterday was the hinge point between the two sections of our winter holidays, a demarcation line spent travelling on trains/hanging out in railway stations for twelve hours, separating the (fun, but exhausting) part of the holiday spent with my in-laws in Germany from the burrowing-in-and-relaxing stage that we will now spend at home until we start work again on Tuesday. International train travel delights me, and we are particularly fortunate that our journey to and from Germany, crossing five countries, only requires three trains from door to door.
As you've possibly gathered, spending Christmas with Matthias's family (his sister, her husband, their three kids aged six and under, plus his two parents) is quite full on. We stayed with his sister and her family, and the kids are a lot of fun, but also quite a lot of work — the older two are not particularly independent, as they are happy to play alone but want constant observation and interaction with an adult while this is happening, and the youngest kid is a one-year-old baby who obviously needs fairly hands-on attention most of the time. I have now learnt far more about Minecraft than I ever wanted to know, I spent close to seven hours assembling an unbelievably over-the-top Playmobil princess castle, and I — who find babies extremely calming presences — hung out with the baby while he burbled around the house playing with whatever fleetingly captured his interest. This is the first time we've been with my in-laws for Christmas in three years, and the first time in Germany with them in four (in 2019 they came to us), and it was rather like being hit with by a train in terms of exhaustion!
For obvious reasons, therefore, I haven't had much time to work my way through Yuletide (or really do anything that wasn't looking briefly at social media), and other than commenting on my own lovely gift, I haven't done much with the collection. I wrote four fics this year (I'll be astonished if anyone can guess which ones), and so far the treat that I wasn't sure about seems to be getting the best reception. I hope those of you who participated had a successful exchange this year, and that those of you who read the collection found stuff you liked.
Due to all the above, my reading time has basically been limited to international train travel, and I deliberately kept things fairly simple in terms of the books selected. During my trips into and out of Germany, I managed to reread the second two books in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch), which I have written about several times here and which remained as lovely as ever. Other than that, I stuck to novellas — a seasonal reread of Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night (Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma), Volume 2 of the Lore Olympus webcomic (a Christmas present), and three novellas best described as regency romances in fantastical alternate versions of Britain (Curse of Bronze and Tea and Sympathetic Magic, both by Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis). These latter had been given away as free ebooks as part of a end-of-year promotion, and although I enjoyed them, I don't think I would have acquired or read them if I had had to pay. But they were perfect low-energy train reading.
This time of year, particularly the days after Christmas, is a weird one for me. I don't much enjoy New Year's Eve — it makes me morose and melancholy, although I've found ways to counter that in recent years — but I really love New Year's Day, and the sense of energy and purpose and clarity that it brings. I'm trying to spend these last few days of holiday getting into the right state of mind — swimming every day the pool is open (today's laps were the perfect way to clear the travel cobwebs away), long yoga classes, setting up my new bullet journal, cleaning and re-inking my fountain pens, reading cozy books, meal planning, cleaning, and just generally doing the things that will get me in a mental state to start as I mean to go on. Every day is getting lighter, and it feels as if the world is slowly waking up.
Yesterday was the hinge point between the two sections of our winter holidays, a demarcation line spent travelling on trains/hanging out in railway stations for twelve hours, separating the (fun, but exhausting) part of the holiday spent with my in-laws in Germany from the burrowing-in-and-relaxing stage that we will now spend at home until we start work again on Tuesday. International train travel delights me, and we are particularly fortunate that our journey to and from Germany, crossing five countries, only requires three trains from door to door.
As you've possibly gathered, spending Christmas with Matthias's family (his sister, her husband, their three kids aged six and under, plus his two parents) is quite full on. We stayed with his sister and her family, and the kids are a lot of fun, but also quite a lot of work — the older two are not particularly independent, as they are happy to play alone but want constant observation and interaction with an adult while this is happening, and the youngest kid is a one-year-old baby who obviously needs fairly hands-on attention most of the time. I have now learnt far more about Minecraft than I ever wanted to know, I spent close to seven hours assembling an unbelievably over-the-top Playmobil princess castle, and I — who find babies extremely calming presences — hung out with the baby while he burbled around the house playing with whatever fleetingly captured his interest. This is the first time we've been with my in-laws for Christmas in three years, and the first time in Germany with them in four (in 2019 they came to us), and it was rather like being hit with by a train in terms of exhaustion!
For obvious reasons, therefore, I haven't had much time to work my way through Yuletide (or really do anything that wasn't looking briefly at social media), and other than commenting on my own lovely gift, I haven't done much with the collection. I wrote four fics this year (I'll be astonished if anyone can guess which ones), and so far the treat that I wasn't sure about seems to be getting the best reception. I hope those of you who participated had a successful exchange this year, and that those of you who read the collection found stuff you liked.
Due to all the above, my reading time has basically been limited to international train travel, and I deliberately kept things fairly simple in terms of the books selected. During my trips into and out of Germany, I managed to reread the second two books in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch), which I have written about several times here and which remained as lovely as ever. Other than that, I stuck to novellas — a seasonal reread of Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night (Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma), Volume 2 of the Lore Olympus webcomic (a Christmas present), and three novellas best described as regency romances in fantastical alternate versions of Britain (Curse of Bronze and Tea and Sympathetic Magic, both by Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis). These latter had been given away as free ebooks as part of a end-of-year promotion, and although I enjoyed them, I don't think I would have acquired or read them if I had had to pay. But they were perfect low-energy train reading.
This time of year, particularly the days after Christmas, is a weird one for me. I don't much enjoy New Year's Eve — it makes me morose and melancholy, although I've found ways to counter that in recent years — but I really love New Year's Day, and the sense of energy and purpose and clarity that it brings. I'm trying to spend these last few days of holiday getting into the right state of mind — swimming every day the pool is open (today's laps were the perfect way to clear the travel cobwebs away), long yoga classes, setting up my new bullet journal, cleaning and re-inking my fountain pens, reading cozy books, meal planning, cleaning, and just generally doing the things that will get me in a mental state to start as I mean to go on. Every day is getting lighter, and it feels as if the world is slowly waking up.