Monthly review: February 2017
Summary
* We had our monthly evening with board games.
* I met for eating sushi with former colleagues.
* I bought a Hogwarts knitting club button.
* I stopped working in the Dunkelsüß comunity and had my account deleted.
* I attended the last lession of the Bollywood dance course.
* I ordered from snackberries.com.
Our monthly evening with board games was very quiet this time.
One guest arrived earlier and played "Isle of Skye" with my boyfriend.
We ordered Indian food from a delivery service:
I had paneer pakora as a starter (4 €) and Shabshie - curry with vegetables (9,50 €).
The curry was a little bit hot for me, I had to add yoghurt. ;)
The two other guests arrived later due to an appointment. They played "Arkhum Horror" together. The game was still packaged, they had to assemble all the parts first.
I did not play any games, I was not in the mood to keep all the rules in my mind...
We tried Baileys - pumpkin spice, a limited edition from autumn 2016. Well, it did not taste like pumpkin at all. It tasted more like Indian chai tea...
One of the guests had printed pictures of red panda for me. I had already prepared a frame for them ^_^
I met for sushi with two former colleagues in the middle of February at Sushiya Sansaro.
We did not talk much about the job, we talked mostly about private things.
We shared the food and the bill.
Sharing the bill is quite uncommon in Germany, most of the time people want to pay separately. But still most waiters are not prepared for paying separated and then go to pick pen and paper to calculate all items by person...
I bought a Hogwarts knitting club button from my friend Kaninchenherz for 3 €.
You can buy it from her etsy-Shop and see it on her tumblr.
A knitting club is mentionned in the Harry Potter books. Kaninchenherz founded a group for it on Facebook together with a friend in November 2016. The members can share their Harry Potter-related knitting and crochet projects.
I had my Dunkelsüß account deleted.
Dunkelsüß is a German lolita community. (The name means "dark sweet".) It was quite big many years ago, when Facebook and Instagram did not exist yet.
The number of accounts was limited due to server capacity, so I was very glad when I could create an account back in April 2010. Soon after joining, I became part of the team. There are several teams: editorial, gallery, flea market, events. I joined the editorial department. I regularly added lolita meetups to the calender for some of the German communities, created event overview pages with international events and tea parties, checked the list of locations with lolitas for deleted accounts, posted on the startpacge and helped in the background.
There had always been drama around Dunkelsüß, e.g. people accused the community of being "elitist" and members where often unhappy with the unlocking mechnism for uploaded outfit pictures.
Over the years, lolitas moved to Facebook, Instagram and other communities and Dunkelsüß became very inactive. In addition, many members of the team did not have so much time for the community because of real-life.
I still liked creating content, but I felt more and more that it was a waste of time. The ratio between "amount of time that I invested" and "the benefit for the small number of active members" was bad. Some of the other team members had very different opinions on the future of the community and transparency towards the members and I found some of the discussion really stressful.
The editor-in-chief Quini announced in October 2016 that she would step back from her role due to her busy new job. When I as the second editor-in-chief was offered her position, I decided to turn down the offer and quit my work for the community as well.
This was my entry on the team page:
The Bollywood dance lessons that I attended together with Kaninchenherz since October 2016 ended in February 2017. Both of us did not want to continue the course.
The description sounded great: Bollywood dance classes by an Indian teacher and learning dance moves from Bollywood movies.
But it was not as we imagined:
- I had expected to learn a set of hand and feet movements, but we learned choreographies for specific songs.
- The teacher had trained two choreographies per year to the other pupils and would train a new choreography in this course. The choreographies would be presented at a dance show at the end of the course. (The other pupils had wished for this as a motivation.)
- The other pupils did not attend very regular and often showed up towards the end of the course to rehearse some of the older choreographies or did not show up at all.
- I did not like the song for the choreography of this year. I liked the songs of the previous courses more.
- In general, I am good at learning dance steps, but I really struggled with some of the moves. I would have needed more repeats.
- For my German mind, the teacher seemed a little bit chaotic and unorganized. She seemed to lack a concept for the course.
We learned a choreography for Maahi Ve from "Kal Ho Naa Ho" / "Lebe und denke nicht an morgen" that is similar to the dance shown in the "official" video with Shahrukh Khan.
We also danced to Payal Baja Ke / "My lips are waiting" by Ashanti from "Bride and Prejudice"
The good thing is that the course helped both of us to find out what we wanted to do next: I will attend ballett lessions, Kaninchenherz will learn pole dance.
I did my first order of dried fruit and nuts from snackberries with Kaninchenherz at the end of January and received it at the beginning of February.
My order for 14,90 € (without shipping);
250g dried mangos - 5,80 €
250g hazelnuts with cinnamon- 5,20 €
100g wasabi peanuts - 1,70 €
100g cashews - 2,20 €
Everything tasted really good! My favorites are the dried mango.