Hi everybody,

these are terrible times all over the world, and I do hope that you and yours have all managed to get through that atrocious pandemic without being infected so far.

I had planned to write this message already months ago, but Maha was (and is much more now) very badly off and I didn’t have the time - yesterday she had to finally go to the hospital and I am more than just
concerned.

I haven’t been to the forum (that really meant and means so much to me) for many months, and I just want to explain in a few words, why that is so and why it will also be difficult for me in the future to be here regularly

Some of you already know that my vision is very poor. In fact, I’m blind on one eye and due to glaucoma I have only a very smal slot, about 2 letters wide, left in the remaining eye, and everything I see is blurred due to nystagm. All in all my vision is distinctly below 10%

Those of you who know my videos often wrote that they must have taken a long time to be put together; you will understand that they take even very much longer when you don’t see much and are working with a magnifying glass even in front of a giant monitor. So I used to spend very many hours working on my PC, 8, 9, 10 hours day in, day out..

In February that eye seemed to totally go down the drain, but it could be saved by eye surgery. So it’s working (well...) as before, but the doctors gave me the urgent advice to cut down ‘display hours’ drastically.

So I’m trying to get along with 2 hours a day, but that’s almost nothing. I used to spend about one hour on the forum every day alone - reading and writing aren’t easy anymore, and since English isn’t my natural language both are taking even more time. There are e-mails to be read and written, the normal administration stuff and, of course, I don’t want to give up, no, I simply can’t give up, writing my music and producing those videos, because that is what really keeps me going.

So I had to make a decision: forum vs. videos. Although I love to be here, not only because of many incredibly great songs, but also because of a bunch of very fine people I’ve met here and partly became friends with, I went for the videos. Even more so as I had (and still have) some videos to be finished (partly already begun in 2019 or even earlier).

So since February we managed to finished just one song / video, also because Maha hasn’t been in good health and was incapable of mixing and/or playing in the video. She finally took the chance when she had a few better days, so that one video is ready for roll-out now and I will present it here soon.

But I am going to do this with mixed feelings: I always hated it when I saw that people presented their stuff here in order to get some compliments but gave a damn about the other forum members’ work.

As long as Maha is still that ill it will be double difficult for me to finally keep up with the forum on a regular, i. e. daily, basis but I promise I will try my best in the future to at least show up whenever I can. And I will have to concentrate on the ‘beef’, the songs - if I do not comment on every song and if my comments will be much shorter than they used to be in the past: Please don’t misinterpret this as disinterest - it definitely is NOT!

I am afraid that there won’t be much output from our side in the remainder of this year - Maha’s illness dominates every hour, and my creativity has almost come to naught. But we are trying to keep our optimism - 2021 just has got to become better!

Well, folks, stay healthy - we all know that there is no guarantee, but acting rationally and reasonably has always been a good advice, I think: Wearing masks, keeping social distance and washing hands will definitely save more lives than Hydroxychloroquin or drinking disinfectants.

All the best to all of you,

Stefan