Follow along

I took a break from translating earlier to eat lunch and clean the stairwell. Normally, our house is as quiet as the grave, minus our cats meowing their heads off, but someone went into or out of each of the other 3 apartments during the 45 minutes or so I was sweeping and mopping.

The last person came out of the apartment directly below us. I thought it might be the son, who was a teenager when we first moved in here and is now in his early twenties. I don’t know what he does exactly, but I remembered that I’ve seen him with the ambulance service, so I thought he might be an ambulance driver, and thought that was pretty cool. But then I remembered that in Germany, young men have mandatory military service; if they object, they are allowed to do social service instead. So maybe he was doing the ambulance thing as part of his social service. Still cool.

This thought led to the memory of the members of Tokio Hotel getting their orders, but trying to get out of it because they were on tour in America. And then I realized that there was no situation I could imagine the German army being in where they would say, “Damn, if only we had Bill Kaulitz here!”

A little of this...

I am in a really good mood because I have a translating gig that is going really well so far. Except for the fact that the spacebar on my laptop is acting up. It was worse earlier, even after I used canned air to blow under it. Now it is just occasional, but not quite often enough to make me want to throw my laptop across the room.


Since I was working on the translation, John took Hannah to the orthodontist yesterday. And of course neither of them could tell me exactly what was said, just that she has another appointment in May and will indeed be getting regular braces. So I called today to ask if I should arrange to have her teeth sealed at her upcoming check-up/cleaning. And also, what is the deal with the braces? Long story short, the orthodontist will be doing the sealing on the fronts of the teeth when she puts the brackets on, sometime over the summer. I think Hannah will be in them for a whole year.


John wants to get through more of the songs on Rock Band at the "difficult" level, and when making his choice just now, he said, "This guitarist only has four fingers. It can't be that hard." He was talking about a Black Sabbath song. Looks hard to me.


I'm really supposed to be cleaning the stairwell since this is our week and it is my turn (we're so egalitarian). But John is my enabler, and he got me on my weak side: "It's already 7!" I like going to bed early, and my sense of duty couldn't overcome my love of lots of sleep. So tomorrow I will use a bit of the time when I'm taking a break from translating to do the cleaning.


The weather is super nice, and I really wish I could be spending my daylight hours out on the balcony, playing in the dirt, but alas, my work ethic has kicked in and I am trying to stick with it, damn the luck! But, I give myself little coffee or fruit breaks to get some fresh air and stretch, so I used the hand that wasn't holding my apple today to pull dead plants out of one of the planter boxes. Unfortunately, my bucket for collecting stuff for the organic waste can is full, so that put a crimp in my "gardening." I guess I'll drag it downstairs tomorrow when I'm cleaning the stairwell.

And with that, I will start rounding everyone up for bed. Night!