I'm fine, he said

"First of all", my husband started his phone call, "I am fine, nothing happened to me. But I had a car accident." Just a little crack in the rear bumper. A truck tried to stop behind him at the red light, but couldn't, due to the ice. In a way, I was prepared. I don't trust car traffic in this kind of weather. Still around 26°F. I have a lot more confidence in the metro. But his way to his office is not practical at all; by car, he can just cross over from the north east to the north west of our town; by subway, he would have to pass the city, there is no northern rail connection. God knows why not.

Town admins have decided: We'll be getting streetcars again.
Car drivers hate that. But I believe this is the only way to solve traffic problems in European towns. We just don't have room enough to build highways as wide as cornfields. I love streetcars.

Still cannot please you with fiber art. My left hand is hardly getting better. I saw my doc and he said, "the joint is okay" (good news), "you just strained that hand." I'll get some electric treatment next week, no idea how and if it will work.

Sorry if I miss some of your postings and/or commenting them. I have to be quite busy with the memorial project in the weeks to come.
Today I photographed a load of documents which were hidden in a chicken shack roof for 40 years. Communist party books and papers. This will be part of the project. The man who owned them was executed in 1944. The documents remained hidden in the shack until it was torn down long after the war.

Looking back

Hamburg in the early Fifties was a place full of ruins. On the right picture, you see me sitting on giant ship chain links. The second view is taken from the tower which you can see in the 1st picture.
Ruins must have been a familiar sight to me. Children take all kinds of circumstances as normal, they are incredibly flexible.
I only remember one of these ruins because it was half a kitchen, it was in a house right opposite to where my grandparents lived, and I kept wondering what happened. The table was still there, an old coal stove stood at the wall, and rain and snow came in.

At the moment I'm working on a picture performance as part of a memorial project for our district parliament. The intention is to commemorate names, faces (if possible) and facts about the lives of murdered neighbours.
You may have heard of the project "Stolpersteine" ("stumbling stones"), brass plaques with the names of victims of the 3rd Reich. It is the idea of a German sculpturer, Gunter Demnig, who has undertaken this gigantic work of placing one plaque with name and life dates for every victim in the pavement near his/her home of the past. It is like these pledges people take in fairy tales in order to free someone they love from bondage or as a work of expiation. A task that seems to be too big to ever be finished. And this is what Gunter does, on his knees, in any kind of weather, day by day, year by year.

WIP: Courts and Towers

Another miniature, 5x5" at the moment. I used a method invented by Kandinsky: I chose a scale of colours and mixed them before starting. The rule is to use only these -- I have a china palette with 12 little bowls which is good for this method. -- This will be another version of the sea bridge, but more elaborate, and better material. The sea bridge was painted on the reverse side of a cardboard piece in a clothes pack I recently bought. Warm underwear for the snowy weather. We don't have to suffer much in town, it is snowing, but not so heavily, and the temperatures are around freezing point (pic: view from my kitchen). In the country, many villages are cut off, and the snow reaches as high as a man in places.