Rearranging

Since watching way too much Aladdin as a kid, I've wanted a colorful house full of Eastern patterns and giant pillows. I'm slowly moving in that direction. Last week I put up the new tapestry. Sure, it doesn't match perfectly. And yes, maybe it makes me look like a pot-smoker, having tapestries all over my house. But whatever. It's my place! and I'm probably going to make a pillow to tie all the colors together.

 

As a matter of fact, I've done a lot of rearranging this week. When big life changes are around the corner (e.g. my first visit home since moving to Germany), I tend to get a little restless. Sometimes I get a haircut. This time the nervous energy burst out of me in the form of creativity. In the past three days, I've redecorated the living room, rearranged the bedroom and turned a pair of $7 jeans from Goodwill into stylish, modest shorts. (Unlike the hotpants I've seen in Stuttgart lately. So many teenage butt cheeks. So many.)

At the moment I'm sitting in my dark living room like Dracula. All the shutters are closed. It's the only way to survive without air conditioning here - blocking out the source of the heat! After sunset you open every window in the house and hope that the wind will cool things off, but as soon as you wake in the morning, you turn your apartment back into a bat cave.

 

Summer is in full swing here, but I have this odd feeling that everything is winding down. Friends in the Kleinbottwar group are graduating and starting their professional lives, I'm counting down the days until I see my family again in Sullivan, wedding planning is about to intensify, and August will begin this week. In the U.S., August means back to school. Though it's the opposite here (school breaks are just beginning), I think my internal clock will forever register August as the end of summer, the beginning of a new cycle. Funny how much I still measure my life by semesters! 

 

On a side note, tomorrow Fabian and I will be together for three years! Time flies when you're chewing the branches off dogwood trees in Großbottwar.