The Funny Farm

Me: “Why does the kitty need a truck full of [Playmobil] swords?”
Lego-master: “Should I know?”
Then she explained that it was in defense against all the thousands of kids who want a cute little kitty. And then when the kids run and tell their moms about the cat with the truck and the swords, the moms say, “Oh, my kids! So young! And so drunk!”

John is not so good with the aphorisms: “Remember, honey, that which doesn’t kill you will probably maim you anyway.” Whatever happened to “Buck up, little camper?”

John also has a hearing problem. For instance, this morning he thought I was singing “Take this cat and shove it” (*insert bizarre mental image*), when in fact, I was singing “Take this food and shove it” to the cats in response to their incessant pestering about their breakfast.

One of the videos John bought in Texas was Labyrinth. He asked Hannah on several occasions if she wanted to watch it, and she turned him down flat (her usual m.o.). I thought it might be too scary for her, but he finally talked her into it one dull evening around the house. I kept waiting for the devil to appear. “That’s Legend,” said John (but you could hear “Dummy” from the tone of his voice). Hey, you know I’m bad with names, but I guess no Tom Cruise and lots of Muppets should have been a tip-off.

The bad part about Hannah seeing Labyrinth is that she now has an aversion to David Bowie. “Pants...too tight! Hair...too big! Make-up...too gay!” Anyhoo, there’s a really popular band here in Germany called Tokio Hotel. They are all about 18, so they have quite the teen and preteen following, all across Europe. The band is on the cover of a recent issue of Stern magazine, so we were all checking them out when we got the mag. The lead singer, Bill, is mighty androgynous, as well as being a big fan of David Bowie. Can you tell?


Hannah claims to be put off by Bill’s feminine mystique, but I know for a fact that at one time, she had some Tokio Hotel postcards/trading cards that she bought with her own money, and she had written “Sweet!” on the back of all of them.

Don’t you hate it when you pick out a new shower gel, and then you actually use it, and it smells like upholstery cleaner?

Organization is not my forte, so needless to say, keeping up with assigning Hannah chores and paying out allowance in a timely manner have never really worked out around here. We have switched to the pay-as-you-go system; Hannah isn’t necessarily doing more chores, but she’s not hounding me about late allowance money either, because I paid her on the spot. One night I was telling her that when I get old, she’ll have to take care of me, kind of like a baby, feed me, wash me—“I’ll just Swiffer you off,” she offered. So guess who’s now in charge of dusting...

I got through my student-teaching practice run (I have no idea what you would call a one-time, one-hour session of teaching by a visiting teacher-in-training) and felt pretty good about it and got mostly positive feedback afterwards. And I found out yesterday that I got a really good grade on it, so the day started off good. Then I took a final I was not fully prepared for (bad Nee! no biscuit!) in a class that no one was really sure what was going on in anyway. *Seventy* people enrolled on the first day, and *eleven* took the exam. Add to that the fact that I thought I started my period halfway through the test (false alarm), and you can see that the second half of the day took a steep nose-dive.