Most Boring Post Ever

(Don't say you weren't warned about the high boring factor of this post.)

I was quite a slug while Lovely Husband was away at his conference. I've finally gotten around to having a mild cold this winter, so that was my excuse. Actually, I probably could have fought off the cold with my amazingly anti-illness powers, but I stayed up late reading the first night L.H. was gone, and I've been dragging ever since.

We've still got some snow on the ground, but I'm ready for spring now. We had a little early-springish sunshine yesterday, but Mother Nature is a tease. The forecast says there's an Arctic front on the way for all of Germany. Blech!

L.H. brought gifts from Cologne: Darling Daughter got a pink canvas make-up bag thingy with red sequins on it (tres chic!), and I got a bottle of the original eau de cologne. We were trying to decide what it smells like, and D.D. figured it out—bug spray. Very citronella-ish, but not unpleasant. I've just now put some on for the first time, so I'll have to report back on whether or not it ends up smelling like sweet pickles on me. Stupid body chemistry.

Speaking of weird smells, when D.D. and I started working on the Valentine's puzzle from L.H., we almost choked on the overpowering stench of patchouli (not my favorite scent) from inside the box. L.H. says the gift shop where he bought it was full of incense, but I suspect it was assembled in a drug den in Amsterdam. That might explain the way the pieces don't fit together correctly.

I'm starting to wonder about the pattern of scented gifts—cologne, scented candles, stinky puzzle. And that isn't even the first patchouli-scented gift from L.H. Before I went to England in the summer of 1996, he bought me a sunflower umbrella. From a head shop. It took forever for the smell to fade.

Random observation from our village:
The florist near D.D.'s school regularly puts decorations outside her shop, usually holiday related, but she's lost me with the latest: plywood cut-outs of *shoes*. What do shoes have to do with selling flowers? Is this her way of announcing that she'll be adding shoes to her inventory, because flowers alone is just not lucrative enough? Or maybe her shoe fetish is spilling over into her business. I have never heard of a shoe-themed holiday, and the cut-outs seem to be firmly attached to the beam where she displays her hanging plants, so I have to assume they are a permanent addition to the decor. Weird.