WE ARE DUMB
When we moved here, we brought an international VCR to watch videos on, DVDs just then making inroads into the movie-watching media. John got a laptop for work, and we sometimes used the disc-drive to watch the handful of German DVDs we had bought or borrowed. The drawbacks were that we couldn’t watch any of the American DVDs people were sending us, and John had the nerve to want to use the laptop to work—when we were requiring entertainment, sheesh! Jooge and Mr. Jooge took pity on us and sent an American DVD player. Shortly after that, the disc-drive on John’s laptop crapped out on us, so I bit the bullet and went out and bought a German DVD player.
Kept up so far? At that point, we had a VCR and 2 DVD players, and we had to keep switching around cables depending on which DVD (American/European) we wanted to watch.
Just recently, while wrangling cables and settings, Hannah accidentally put an American DVD in the German DVD player. And it worked! I had to dig to find the weensy print in the manual, but it turns out I had managed to buy a remarkably cheap international DVD player that *didn’t even advertise itself as such*. Weird, eh? So we packed away the American player for later and have spared ourselves a lot of effort in our pursuit of entertainment.
Of course, we still have an incredibly ancient television set that doesn’t even have a remote control, and the on-off button is broken, so we have to plug it in to turn it off. And the volume and channel buttons are starting to wear out, so you have to press extra hard when you want to scroll though the channels (UP and DOWN are the 2 channel options). But it came with the apartment, so at least we didn’t have to buy a tv to go with our million video players.
WE ARE GASTON
Remember that jerk from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast? And how he sings, “I use antlers in all of my decorating!”? I bet he didn’t have one of these:
That’s right, it’s a dining-room chandelier made out of antlers. Every meal, we sit beneath the partial remains of multiple German deer. They match the patterns on the chairs:
And the tile oven:
And the outside of the house:
I mentioned that I need to recover the cushions on the dining room/tile oven bench, and I finally got around to ordering the fabric:
It’s not exactly the same pattern, but it’s not bad for a replacement (and if your taste runs to Bavarian kitsch). Now I just need to let it sit in the storage space under the couch until I finish a metric buttload of school work, and then I’ll need to figure out where I can rent a sewing machine.
IN OTHER CRAFTY NEWS
Since my brain basically calls it a day as soon as dinner is done cooking, I dug out the quilt project I’ve been working on since *cough* 1996 *cough* to have something to do in the evenings. Even though I’m only quilting an hour or two a night, I’m making a lot of progress. See?
And the back:
Maybe one day I will be finished, but for now, it is keeping me out of the crack dens and other low places.
MRS. GREEN-JEANS
Now that it has finally turned warmer, I am having a little more success with my apartment gardening. These walnut trees have totally taken off just in the last week:
I’ve got 2 pots of Lemon Balm going upstairs, and it is heavenly:
Hannah even had some pepper seeds going, but then the cats ate them, but then some more seeds came up. I was so pleased, I repotted them in a big old container and even showed them to John. Five minutes later, I saw that one of the goddamned cats had eaten several leaves off them:
I just planted you some cat grass, bitches! So I moved the baby pepper plants onto the balcony, but only after locking the cats out of the sunroom for a whole day. The nights are not getting below 50 now, so I think they’ll be just fine.
