Eeeeeek!

Hannah has always been squeamish about certain things*: Don't talk about body parts! Change the channel when the lion eats the antelope!

*She reminds me of her uncle, Mr. Jooge, back in the days before he married into a family with a physical therapist in it.

Recently we saw a tv show that briefly covered the lungfish. This fish can breathe on land in the time it takes it to flop from one puddle to the next. It is totally slimy and floppy and gross, but still cool somehow. Hannah is (half-jokingly) convinced that our floor is infested with lungfish. Despite my repeated assurances that lungfish are unlikely to make it up to our fourth-floor apartment and through the tile floor, and that the only things on our floor are hair, crumbs, and dust, she won't put her feet down on the floor at least once a day, whenever she thinks about the lungfish.

Of course, this leads to Games You Can Play With Your Squeamish Child. Dropped something on the floor? Watch out for the lungfish!! heh heh heh

Bowels R Us

Today I visited the ladies' room on the same floor as the classrooms in the English department. I usually don't even bother and climb at least one flight of stairs up to find suitably appointed facilities. I was cutting it close before the start of class--the one I was teaching--so I stuck to the first floor toilets. And boy was I pleasantly surprised. Ok, it did smell like pee, but there was toilet paper, soap, towels, and an unclogged toilet, so I was able to overlook that minor annoyance.

Later, I took Hannah to the movies because she got out of school early. We were the first ones in the theater (Hannah really had to go, so we bought our tickets *early*), so we got to enjoy the aroma of a lost diaper while we waited for the movie to start. Every time we dropped something on the floor and had to feel around for it in the gloom, the search was accompanied by a cry of despair: Oh, no! Loooooost diaperrrr!

With my luck, the bus will smell like vomit to complete the trifecta of gross for me today.

For John: During the trailers for the movie, Hannah said, "That Werbung stinked!"

So silly, so true

Hannah wanted some of John's chocolate, and he told her she'd have to put away her laundry first. "Screw it," she replied. She couldn't resist the chocolate for long, though, and put away the clothes about 5 minutes later.

John has been very hard on Missy cat lately, claiming that my mom gave her to us because she (the cat, not my mom) was not very classy. That's right, a low-class cat. John says I'm allowed to tell my mom as revenge for her frequent commentary on the state of his butt.

He also seems to think that Eliza cat is classy, just because she has fluffy fur. This is the cat that won't jump up on the bed when I am in it, just sits there whining until I wish there *was* a monster under the bed to eat her.

It is sometimes difficult to convince Hannah not to do things. For instance, she wouldn't stop whacking me with the oven mitts the other day, even though I repeatedly told her that mitts are not meant for violence, they are tools of peace. Instigator.

Sitting on the bus today, I had front-row seats for some extra-special craziness. First, this young woman got on who was extremely loud and friendly; I marked her as drunk and foreign right away. She sat across the aisle from me, and her low-key talking to herself was pretty noticeable from my vantage. At first I thought she might have a wireless phone*, but then I realized that, no, she was just talking to herself. Talking morphed into a noise that was either crying or laughing, I couldn't tell. Then I realized she was singing along to an iPod *and* crying. She must really take her music seriously, I thought to myself. Then she started flipping out--she tried to climb out of the window, or at least stick her head through, but it was too narrow. She climbed up and stood on the seat and shouted out through the window how much she hated this town and the people in this town--but naturally only the mean, bad ones. The whole time she is crying and crooning bits of this song in French. I was very happy to get off the bus and away from her. She smiled at me as I got off.

* The last time we were in the States, I saw a lady who could have been the twin of my mom walking around with one of those bluetooth thingies attached to her head. I don't think I had ever seen one here in Germany, and I still haven't seen many since then, but you know something has reached market saturation when the middle-aged set is using it.