Patience... Solitaire...Banana Solitaire...

I'm not blessed with it. PATIENCE , I mean. 
At the moment I take "Patience" - that's how we call your "Solitaire" - literally, and try to learn the game.  
For a long, long time I regarded it as an utter waste of time - the voices of my late parents urged me to do "something meaningful" instead.(I still have difficulties to watch TV in the afternoon!). 
But better late than never I try to free myself.  
I take small steps, patiently. On my own.  
Though Bananagrams, which, after Amelia Bullmore (wonderful DCI Gill Murray in Scott&Bailey) mentioned it in an interview, I ordered impatiently (the English version of course - and please don't laugh at my humble attempts) is even more to my gusto: 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves" as our poet Rainer Maria Rilke said in "Letters to a Young Poet". 

I'll try. Have BUNCHes of them. Questions BANANAS!!! 

144 files for a Bananagram Solitaire. 

PATIENCE!! (Otherwise you go bananas)

Back to normal

On Three Kings' Day we had our wedding anniversary. Beautiful, though I had the feeling of living in an endless succession of feasts: Christmas, my birthday, New Year's Eve, wedding anniversary. 
Now every-day-life has us back. 

The Christmas tree had to go: Berlin's binmen are stern about that: on Monday, the day after Three Kings' Day, the Christmas tree has to be out - otherwise they won't collect it and then it might happen as in Heinrich Böll's short story: 'Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit' - ("Not only on Christmas' Days") - a satire on Christmas harmony, where a very obstinate little Aunt Milla always gets a screaming fit when anybody tries to touch the Christmas tree to bring it away. All relatives give in and sing every evening of the year with her, 

And on top of the Christmas tree hung a silvery cladded angel with red cheeks, who moved his lips and whispered 'PEACE'."                 

Husband took the tree when it was undecorated, schlepped it to the balcony (as you know we live on the second floor and the flats are high) - he imitated the Swedish shout "Knut!!!" - and down it went, unto the lawn, and then he had to run down and climb over the fence and pick it up, needles and all, and bring it to the curb. 
Now we can quote Rainer Maria Rilke: 

"One feels the splendour of a new page, 
on which yet everything is possible to come."                      (rough translation by me)