Yet another run where I can hardly stay in Zone 2. I talked to my trainer, ChatGPT, about it, and apparently it might just be accumulated fatigue from training. It recommended taking a week off from pushing myself too hard. That might actually make sense, so I’ll report back on whether it helped.
Every single time I’m brave enough to go outside and draw or paint in public, something happens that lifts my mood. It’s not that I particularly yearn for contact with strangers, but whenever it happens, I end up feeling a little more connected to my surroundings.
I ended up talking to that woman and her husband for half an hour. At first, I thought they were tourists because that part of the city is mostly inhabited by them, but they had actually just bought a new camera and gone there to try it out. Very cute!
I love that technology can still excite me. I haven’t been this hyped for an Apple product in years, but the iPhone Duo looks so good, and the interfaces feel so well thought out. October can’t come soon enough!
I’m currently figuring out how to survive winter without getting depressed, and finding a place to draw where I won’t freeze my butt off is one part of my preparations.
I wanted to try sketching people and artwork at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and somehow ended up joining the “Friends of the Kunsthalle.” I can now visit as often as I want without paying €18 every time, and I even got a cute little membership card to flash at the entrance.
Remember how I bought a PlayStation 5 Pro at the end of March because I knew the memory-related price hikes were just around the corner, and because I also knew I’d end up buying one later this year anyway because there was no way I was going to miss GTA VI when it finally comes out?
I remember, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. Have you seen the extended gameplay trailer? That is a video game I’ll actually be able to play in just a couple of months! It looks incredible. I genuinely can’t wait to get my hands on it.
These spontaneous walks have become less frequent since Ines moved to a different part of the city, and I miss them. It was great having friends in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, there's no way of finding an apartment anywhere else, so I'm stuck here in my absurdly beautiful Winterhude. Oh well...
Justine and Pablo offered "Hitschies" at Justine's party. I'd never tried them before, and they were delicious. Delicious enough for me to get weak and buy myself a whole pack. I really shouldn't have sweets at home because I know I can't control myself around them. I'm pretty good at controlling myself when it comes to not buying stuff I don't want to consume, though. So this was kind of a rare lowlight in my culinary adventures.
Hanna and Luis are in the process of moving from Glasgow to Venezuela and stopped briefly in Germany to take care of a few things and visit some friends. I was one of them!
Gigabyte is so hard to play with. She's always interested in theory, but then she doesn't actually interact. It doesn't matter what game I try. Millimeter, meanwhile, is easy to entertain. I dangle something in front of her, and she has the time of her life. Giga just... watches...
I bought a tube of white gouache to use for occasional highlights in my watercolor paintings and haven't touched it once since. Anyway! I'm very happy with this little hand gesture. It's dorky, funny, and reads well.
When Anna and I first met, she told me that her friends Simone and Pastu love cats and would very much like to see as many pictures and videos of mine as possible. Back then, I already invited them to come visit and say hi to Gigabyte and Millimeter.
That finally happened on this day, and at least Gigabyte showed herself from her best side. Milli is a bit shy, but she came around after a while.
Those cinnamon buns were the worst! But at least they were very expensive, so it hurt twice.
Do you know those people who buy a very dry and far too expensive cinnamon bun and then let it ruin their whole day? They don’t stop complaining about it, it wrecks their mood, and they can’t get over the atrocity they had to endure? I never wanted to be a person like that, and I’m happy to report that I didn’t become one.
I don’t want the quality of my life to be determined by how well I can circumvent every tiny inconvenience. It’s far more fun to just go with it and consider the worst cinnamon bun of your life not a personal affront, but a good story to tell.
The huge orange wall clock now hangs in my office and I love it. It's quiet, it shows the time, it's orange. It's everything I ever wished a huge orange wall clock would be.
Let me know when I start sounding like a broken record, but I love that my adult life looks like this. We’re having fun!
What a movie! What a soundtrack! What a story!
I of course knew what The Odyssey was about, but I’d never read it and had only absorbed the story through cultural osmosis. While watching, I couldn’t shake the feeling of how incredible it is that some human wrote this story a couple of THOUSAND years ago and we’re still out here telling the same tale, albeit in a medium nobody back then could ever have imagined.
Unbelievable!
It took me a couple of tries, but I got there in the end. It might feel like a small thing to those of you in the upper echelons of society who’ve always had a printer, but for me it’s kind of a big deal. I can just click a couple of buttons and suddenly something new exists in the world? Amazing.
It was such a relaxing day, and I was happy about it. The previous day had been taxing, so just hanging around, reading, painting, and snacking was exactly what I needed. Even though I underestimated the size of that sundae, I certainly didn’t complain, it was delicious.
Imagine inviting me to your wedding and all my comic journal shows of it is this self-involved bullshit. But I stand by that decision. The alternative would have been to try to capture the entire day of wedding-related activities and events, but... it’s a journal about my life, not other people’s weddings, if that makes sense. So capturing this little moment felt better than trying to create a proper representation of someone else’s day.
Travel day!
In Germany we have the saying “Was muss, das muss,” which roughly translates to “What has to be done must be done” and I think that’s beautiful.
I bought a second-hand table and set it up in my office as a dedicated art desk! It’s great and really cosy. Kind of like the Sheep Detective film we watched at the open-air cinema. Come to think of it, it was a great day overall.
Millimeter didn’t actually react like that. That was just my attempt to make the cartoon a bit less boring.
I ordered a printer! Exciting times over here!
I’m always a bit nervous about drawing and painting in public because I don’t always feel very confident in what I’m doing, and having someone look over my shoulder isn’t very conducive to my process. For the first time, someone actually stopped what they were doing, came over, asked me a couple of questions, and shared their art journey with me and it was... nice. I liked it. If you see me painting in public, say hi. But please don’t stalk me just to say hi, that’s weird.
Now I need to pack up 93 books and send them to the company buying them.
I’ll actually save money by switching to fiber. I just wasn’t interested in doing all the work (ordering it and making sure there’s access to the area where the thingy can be installed) to get it. Now’s the time.
In Germany, we have the saying "Man muss die Feste feiern, wie sie fallen", which loosely translates to "You have to celebrate the good times as they come". We tried. We failed. Oh well.
Busses are the worst kind of public transportation. Change my mind!
My reading can sometimes be a little too intense for Anna.
Days like this are the best.
I love drawing in this journal, but I’d love even more for AI to handle the scanning and editing for me.
This might be my absolute favorite comic from this year of daily comics so far.
Please don’t judge my apparently abysmal push-up form.
After that, I actively enjoyed the clean windows for two weeks. It was worth it.
We successfully built everything. Let’s just not mention how, a couple of days later, a real handyman had to come and bolt it all to the wall properly.
My journal entry from two years ago (just a classic text-based journal) ended with me promising myself I wouldn’t spend my birthday alone the following year. And I didn’t.
Last year, I invited my friends over on the evening of my birthday, and it was wonderful. Now many of them have babies, so this year I invited them over on Sunday afternoon for coffee and cake instead. It was great.
I went to bed blissful and full of gratitude.
I turned 37 on that day! That number doesn’t remotely reflect the age I feel I should be, but who am I to argue with Chronos?
This was the first vacation I never wanted to end. But I was also glad to be back with the cats.
We had quite a social day. Notting Hill is unbelievably beautiful.
Big Ben is far prettier than I expected. I thought it would be just a boring old tower, but it’s so detailed!
I later discovered that Waterstones is just the starting point. There are so many incredible bookshops in the UK. What a paradise!
Packing is the worst. I’m not even bad at it, it just isn’t fun. It’s like a puzzle where the result will never be perfect, and you just have to live with the compromises. Especially when you’re flying with only carry-on luggage.
Keeping up a long-distance friendship requires sacrifices. Mine is spending the last 30 minutes of Cecilia’s and my regular FaceTime session in agony because I drank way too much water while we were talking.
You can tell how often I cook by how long it took me to get these.
I’m trying, once again, to become a bike person. It’s easier to get to Anna’s new apartment by bike than by subway or bus.
I haven't watched a single episode of Naruto in my life.
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Millimeter sometimes misjudges her strength. She just wanted to tell me to stop petting her, and I didn’t recognize the signs. My bad.
Anna’s moving day is close. We’re still working our way through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I love how the story picks up in this book. It suddenly gets much more serious and dark.
Sant Jordi preparation.
This was a couple of days ago; it's still in my hallway.
It was the Long Night of Museums. You buy one ticket and can visit every museum of the city.
Bless you!
The spider crossed my “this is fine” boundary and was promptly evicted.
Give me a run, an exhibition and good company and I'm having a good day.
Catching up while walking 10.000 steps.
Sophisticated Saturday
Weather, am I right!?
This marks the end of our little Barcelona adventure.
Not even the very expensive tickets could lessen my amazement about Sagrada Família.
Preparing the way.
I kind of messed up the background. Please don't unfollow me because I'm not good enough at art.
Coding became a lot easier once I didn’t have to do it myself anymore.
