So Many Fluffies, so little time

After flying through the socks for my aunt, and then working at consistent and fairly rapid pace to complete TheEnablers’ Zauberballe socks… I am working a bit more slowly on my own pair. I’m getting a few rounds done here and there, and they aren’t sitting idle for more than a day or two at a time.

After finishing the first sock, I’m still only on the leg of the second sock. And while the photo below was taken a few days ago, not much has changed.

This is in part work related – it’s been busy and will continue to be steadily busy for at least a few weeks yet.

It’s also in part because we are finally planning to go home! Once we knew we had our vaccination appointments lined up, we started talking more seriously about our timeline to get back to the United States. We have enjoyed our time in Germany, but we miss being close to family and friends (and someday AwesomeE will want me to collect the fluffies she’s storing for me – or to use them herself). We also miss our stuff – blankets, sweaters, and furniture from family, photos, artwork, and more which was all left behind in storage. The yarns and rovings I left behind…

So we’ve begun looking for apartments in the US, investigating plane tickets (and cat-friendly airlines), and making a plan of what we need to wrap up here. Our goal is to leave around mid-August for home. We’ve ordered boxes to start packing up those items we’ll ship home. All the furniture and generic household items will stay here to be sold, donated, or frankly, trashed. We think we’ve found a company which we can hire to remove everything we leave behind, cancel our utilities, do cosmetic repairs, and turn in our keys. We have no desire to have to live somewhere short term in Germany while clearing the apartment, or to have to make two trips home, one to take the kitties to the US, and another after closing up the apartment here. I’d rather put those extra plane tickets and rental costs to somebody else doing the work for us.

This does mean I’ll need to soon face the reality that I’m not going to use most of the yarns, fabrics, and fibers I have here in the next two and a half months. So when the boxes arrive, I’ll start sorting and packing away my craft items. Which means I also need to start selecting a handful of projects to take me through the rest of the summer. Agony! I like planning and preparing, but when it comes to my crafts, I also like variety and a little spontaneity. Based on my general busyness, and lack of dedicated crafting blocks of time, I feel like needle felting art is going to be set aside until we’re home and settled, much as that makes me sad. I also foresee lots of socks in my future and perhaps this is why the socks above aren’t getting the most attention just now. I must work on EVERYTHING ELSE while I still can.