Lighter times ahead

Things are finally starting to look a bit brighter again.

For one thing, the leak in or roof is fixed and we have electricity again. That also means I can finally start decorating our flat properly and feel "at home" - until now this thought was mainly connected to stressful thoughts about landlord, insurance, contractors, wet ceilings and full water buckets. But now I can start seeing the potential and all the possibilities of this flat. A blank canvas that we can now start filling up with (mainly my) stuff - long live the hoarding mentality.

We also managed to find a solution to compensate for the big holiday disappointment. After intensive searching for a few days we decided to go to Georgia and Armenia instead. As close as you can get to Iran without getting into potential trouble. Also, I'm an expert on flight searches and holiday planning websites now.

Work is still crazier than ever but I feel I can cope better. Maybe I'm just getting used to this unhealthy level of stress. Or I have grown into my responsibilities. Usually I'm too tired to find the real answer to this question and the only thing I manage to do in the evening is cooking dinner (I find this suddenly strangely relaxing) and watching stupid TV shows.

And lastly, another positive note: the days are getting longer again and even though I technically don't rely on it as much anymore since the electricity is back on it just gives a damn good boost to my mood. I definitely feel like going out more and a walk in the woods is long overdue. 

A knitting revelation

Going through my blogroll I recently stumbled upon this article by Andi Satterlund about twisted ribbing. I had noticed this in her "Miette" pattern but basically ignored the instruction as I couldn't figure out how to do it - I thought it was just regular ribbing. But reading through her post now, it suddenly struck me: I didn't understand it because...

... I have been purling the WRONG way all my life!!!! It was one of those moments when first of all you just cannot  understand how it is possible that I just didn't learn to purl properly and I haven't noticed for about 20 years. But when I started thinking about it all suddenly made sense. Why my stockinette always looked a bit wonky if I didn't knit in the round and my grandmother even said a long, long time ago: "It looks almost like a different pattern the way you knit.". And especially in my "Miette" I noticed the weird definition when stretching the garment which looked different to the sleeves that were knitted on DPNs.

If you look very carefully you can for example see it here:



I'm just completely baffled that I never, ever realized this myself and only when Andi described it so well in her post I recognized my own mistake. To be fair, I also knit most of my cardigans in the round so I only noticed it in certain garments (this is not an excuse but  maybe partly an explanation).

Just so you know, it might be worth checking your own purling technique and maybe you can still fix some mistake even after 20 years of knitting! 

The trip that was not meant to be

As you know I'm not only a passionate knitter but also a very avid traveler. Since my last trip  - to Montenegro - was now already more than three months ago (not counting Berlin because Germany is my native country so this is technically just a home visit) I was already looking forward to planning the next adventure.

For a long time we had already been  looking into visiting Iran and this has been one of my all-time favourite travel destinations. Now that the economic sanctions were being relaxed and the overall political climate seemed to have calmed down a little we heard from several friends that travelling in Iran was amazing and actually not too much of a hassle in spite of visa requirements and restrictions on dresscode, etc.

We did some research on the internet, talked to some friends, bought a guide book, started the visa application procedure and decided to go ahead with the booking when we find some ridiculously cheap tickets for direct flights to Teheran. I was super excited! Of course, there had to be a catch though...

Only a few days after we booked out tickets, Thomas sent me a link to a news article by e-mail. The headline was "US tightens visa rules for certain Europeans". I skimmed through the article quickly but didn't really give it a second thought. The US changes its visa policy. So what - I'm not planning on going to the US anytime soon and even if I do, surely it doesn't concern me?

But when we started discussing it in more detail it turns out that we were very unlucky indeed: The US's change in visa regulations  to "prevent terrorism" meant that anyone who has been to Iran (as well as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan) in the past six years or has double nationality of any of these countries cannot get an ESTA anymore. In practice that means that whenever we'd want to go to the US, even if it is just for a layover to travel to another country (as I did for example when I went to Peru last year), we would have to apply for a US visa including all the cost related to it and a personal interview at the US embassy with the risk that the application could be rejected.

Urgh!

While this didn't bother me too much personally, Thomas could get some problems because he potentially has to travel to the US and Canada later this year for work. It seemed like a lot of hassle with uncertain repercussions for "just a holiday". I was so angry!! Why this change in legislation? And why now?? Of course we didn't have travel insurance either so we knew that the money for the tickets would be lost if we decided not to go. After long discussions, we decided to cancel our trip.

Despite all this, there is a silver lining to it all. You're probably thinking "How's that possible after she has been going on about this for three pages?" but yes, we were in the end incredibly lucky in our misfortune. A couple of weeks after we decided to cancel our plans I received an unexpected e-mail from the airline, saying they had cancelled their entire flight connection to Teheran including the trip that we had booked. Would we prefer to change our booking or rather have a full refund?

In the end, this was the best solution we could have wished for: it basically confirmed our decision (as we would never be able to find equally cheap tickets for the same time period with another airline) and we had a full refund of the flight tickets that we thought we had lost! I'm still gutted that we don't get to go to Iran but we promised ourselves that we WILL go one day, hopefully without the harassment of the US authorities.

Now just to decide where to go next... and in the planning department we're back to square one.