You step out into the Tower at the top of the Castle on the Bog, and breathe in the moist spring air. The summer heat isn't yet here, but the promise of it is palpable. The windows are open and you hear birdsong coming in. From somewhere nearby, a ruckus of cheeps erupts, so high-pitched it barely registers as a tone. Must be some nestlings, swallows or blackbirds, in the eaves of the tower roof. After a few seconds, it quiets down again, and you see a flash of black as a bird flits away from the tower, over the grasses of the bog, its little creatures fed for a while.

It's eerily quiet in the tower. The office is organised, the emptied bookshelves finding new inhabitants – crawling plants, potion bottles, statuettes of vegetables, carved of stone. And yet, a film of dust covers the writing desk. You don't hear the patter of tiny clay feet.

You head downstairs to the common room and find it empty. The portal opened up same as always, there must have been a summoning? You walk around the room, navigating between couches and piles of pillows, your shoes sinking into carpets like thick beds of moss. You haven't explored the whole castle yet, there are probably kitchens and workshops and studies, you should be able to find me somewhere, surely...

The common room feels cold and strange, and you're not sure if wandering around an empty castle is the right idea. You walk to the entrance hall and note most of the camo coats and rubber boots missing. On the row of wooden hooks, only one is left hanging, and one pair of yellow rain boots tucked under the bench beside. That feels like a sign, maybe even a good one. You wiggle into the coat, too big for you, but not uncomfortable, and sit down to swap your shoes. You haven't been outside on the Bog yet. There's a roll of knitted woolen socks in one of the boots. It's probably cold and wet out there.

Geared up, you push the sturdy wooden door open and step outside on the porch. It smells like grass and soil. The sunlight is streaming down from behind the castle, beaming bright like only sunlight polished by recent rain can beam. The clusters of reeds swaying ahead glimmer with raindrops, and somewhere in there, you hear some grasshoppers practicing their sizzle.

Several paths of dense short grass wander off the porch, trodden into soil in some places. Before you can establish a direction to head in, you hear a long loud groan, annoyed and miserable, in a familiar voice, from around the corner of the castle. Aha!

You follow the path hugging the flowering bushes that grow along the wall of the castle and see a small group of camo-clad people on the edge of a pond off to the side. The path leads you to them, and you follow their gazes across the water, where you see a figure, floating. For a second, your heart freezes, and you feel a wave of cold wash over your shoulders. But then the figure moves, raising its arms slowly and splashing them down on the pondwater, lazily propelling itself towards the shore. It emits another groan of profound annoyance.

You wait with the others, an atmosphere of equal parts confusion and amusement hovering over you, as you watch me approach. I turn, face half-submerged in pondwater, and glare look up at the crowd. Before anyone can say anything, I disappear, and the water rushes to fill the space I just occupied, splashing together to send a single glowing droplet flying straight up in the air. Behind you, a thump. You turn around and see me in a fluffy pink bathrobe, wet hair sticking to my face, and my feet bare in the grass.

"Okay,” I sigh, “Alright. I got out," I wrap the bathrobe tighter around myself and wiggle my hands out from the massive fluffy sleeves. "And now I’m here. I will explain," I sigh dramatically and turn on my heel, "but first, let's set something on fire."

You follow me down another path along the pond edge, obscured by the reeds, to a small grassy area with logs and an ashy firepit, encircled by rocks. A small raised shelter for firewood, no more than a pile itself, organised into a recognisable shape, sits to one corner. Before your eyes, the blocks of firewood in it begin to wiggle themselves upright and waddle over to the stone circle, banding together to form a campfire. You see me overseeing the process, as the others take up seats on the logs around. Once everyone is seated, I snap my fingers and a fire springs up from the firewood, and I settle down on the grass besides it, stretching my feet out to catch the warmth.

"Okay," I sigh, "alright. Well-"

So, let's quickly address the obvious. I have not been writing you letters like I promised. Why? Well, I was busy languishing in a dark weedy pond in my mind for the first months of this year. The prediction algorithm of my brain started giving the most unsatisfyingly dramatic answers to the most mundane queries, until I had to make any drastic choices just to get myself out of it. (Besides finding a therapist.) Such as signing up for a handful of international projects at uni which would get me to travel all over the world. Extremely exciting! No time to be depressed when you're in Taiwan, am I right?

I was right, but the everyday responsibilities didn't really disappear, so here I am, having thought about writing my newsletter nearly every day for two months now, and only writing it now, and that’s wholly the fault of stupid everyday stuff.

We're not gonna look at travel photos just yet. I have written a lot about Taiwan and it's certainly beautiful and worthwhile, but all of the above has already made this letter quite long. So forgive me for getting back into the groove with a shitty project I did just last week. Shitty, because I only had 2 hours of free time to do it, and shitty, because I didn't need it to be good. Shitty, because I could make it shitty. Take that, perfectionism!

Sometimes, I make clay bowls with little feet. And when I work at the throwing wheel (which is, want it or not, still the most efficient way to make bowls), sometimes the clay water goes flying all over (sometimes, unfortunately, taking the chunk of clay with it. But that's okay and part of the process.) Ultimately, today's problem is caused by the fact that I like wearing nice clothes. And I'm not about to keep a spare change of clothes at uni and get completely undressed and dressed in some toilet stall, balancing in my shoes, hoping not to have anything touch the floor. Too much hassle. But of course, people have found solutions for this long before I shuffled onto this mortal coil. They're called coveralls. Lab coats. Aprons. Many options!

So I got myself a nice comfortable blue labcoat. This was good. Long sleeves, big pockets, and hey, I get to walk around in a lab coat.

But once I sat down at the throwing wheel, legs wide and feet propped up on taped-together blocks of styrofoam (not my masterpiece, but nobody's replaced it with anything less squishy and it does work) to achieve a posture that won't haunt me afterwards, my crotch, unfortunately, remains unprotected. The labcoat splits at the front and the flaps only cover the top of my thighs.

I've tried draping a towel between my legs, but it wasn't a satisfying solution. I would invariably forget about it, then stand up and step on it immediately. Yuck!

After coming up with and dismissing the idea of sewing the towel onto the lab coat, I was swept away on other adventures, such as investigating plant pain responses and being heavily depressed (unrelated.)

Until a few weeks ago, when I came across an apron in the scrap pile at the Textile workshop at uni. One man's branded apron from a nearby restaurant became my free apron I wouldn't feel bad about ruining.

The idea was to widen the bottom of the apron with some extra fabric to make it wide enough to provide protection at the throwing wheel. A straight cut and a scrap fabric triangle, married by the ugliest seam I could manage (it probably has a fancy name, but we won't honour it with googling for it), a little swearing and pleading at the evil sewing machine from the 1960's, and - voila! My apron that no one will ever look at from up close.

I rushed home with the threads like you see above and finished it during my Chinese class (isn't it crazy I'm learning Chinese via German? Like, sure, I just got enough of a hold on this language to be able to get by at work and that's the stepping stone I'm gonna use to my next one? Not the other two languages I'm perfectly fluent at? Well, the course at uni is free, so that's that.)

I also decided to cover the logo with a circle of the same fabric. Again, just to have it done, not to have it pretty from up close. Whoever had the logo ebroidered had made the decision to stitch it straight through the front pocket, leaving about a centimetre of pocket you could reach into before it was sewn shut with the embroidery. Really cool stuff, I muttered as I was messily cutting away bits of useless pocket fabric. Machine embroidery is nearly impossible to undo without ruining the fabric. The stitches are very dense and their lengths vary to create a flat plane, and usually there isn't just one layer of stitching, so all the threads are tight individually, and you can't just cut one and pull everything apart. (This is why machine embroidery is generally very good and what you want, in comparison with direct-to-garment or sublimation printing, for example. It goes through the material and won't ever flake off, fade or crack upon stretching, and is resistant to tearing in this way.) So really, covering it up was the only way to deal with it.

And the few centimetres of fabric left around the inside pocket would allow me to attach a new one, if I ever felt like a front zipper pocket is something I'm missing. For now it remains a convenient ventilation flap, I guess?

Honestly, making shitty (and yes, I know, I know, but they’re shitty to me, okay?) crafts seems to be my new thing. I recently made a shitty nightstand to fit in the awkward narrow space between my bed and the radiator – it’s heavy thick MDF, thicker than what I assumed when drawing the blueprint (which I did without checking the scrap wood pile first to see what was available), no screws, just wood glue, no finish, just sanded, and really I should paint it a nice colour, but as soon as it was in place, it was doing its job, and I no longer had to worry about where to put my bedside stuff. If it’s true what they say about temporary solutions, this thing will be with me for years.

Does that mean I’ll have more shitty crafts coming your way in the near future? I cannot promise. There are a few more adventures ahead of me, some big and some normal-sized, but I’m certainly alive and kicking and complaining my way through this crazy life, and I do so love writing my silly little letters, so I hope the everyday stuff will leave enough free space in my brain to keep writing them.

Also, here’s a meme I made in preparation for this letter, which didn’t end up making sense with the text, but I believe it can stand on its own:

Sitting in the clearing among the reeds and low shrubs of the bog, you see me shivering, despite the lively campfire and the fluffy robe. My story done, I lay back on the grass and groan miserably.

“Someone, please bring me five blankets and carry me, before I catch my third cold of this season! This was a bad idea and my feet are frozen! I’m never going outside again!” I continue making similarly reasonable statements on my way back into the Castle on the Bog.