Thursday, July 15, 2010

For the first time in living memory,

...we are out of tomato paste. Please bow your heads before the enormity of that statement, because it means that the impossible has just become possible. John may not know how much milk, toilet paper, or coffee we have in the house, but he knows that civilization just may cease to exist if he doesn't come home from the store with a tube of tomato paste. Many's the time when I've fallen on my knees before him, shopping list in hand, "For the love of all that's holy--no. more. tomato paste." I was understandably panicky when I realized that the last 2 tablespoons of tomato paste in the house were stored safely in the vegetable crisper--just before I squeezed them into some carne guisada. Now I feel unanchored from reality, floating along on a tomato-pasteless tide. How will I survive until John is able to unleash his tomato paste-buying propensities on Saturday?

-Nee in Germany gets a bit emotional about tomato-based products

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

A little of this

Hannah is off on her class trip. She wouldn't let me help her pack, so she forgot the folding fan I bought her and her retainer. I hope 4 retainer-less nights won't cause a big setback in her dental progress; probably not. A couple of days before they hopped on a train for their 1-hour tip, there were a couple of instances where the A/C went out on some trains and caused some students coming home from a class trip to suffer heat stroke. That's *just* what a mom wants to see on the news while preparing to ship off her kid.

I also had to sign another form for her to be able to do the climbing wall [this was the thing we were fighting about in my last post] and email it to the place. The original one got misplaced between my signing and their arriving. *sigh* We haven't heard from Hannah since then, so I hope everything is under control. She'll be back about 2pm on Friday.

Yesterday it was hot all day, to the point where I had to move my computer downstairs closer to the oscillating fan, but then a delightfully violent summer storm blew in in the evening and pelted us with rain and hail. John had tipped the upstairs windows, and rain managed to blow in across half the length of the room, so I had to run upstairs to mop up. This is what it looked like outside afterward:

after the storm

At one point, we couldn't see anything beyond the tan house at the bottom of this picture because it was raining and hailing so hard.

It's been much nicer today. We've had just enough cloud cover and wind to make it comfortably warm as opposed to murderously hot. I wish I could paint. I would only paint clouds.

lovely summer clouds

lovely summer clouds

lovely summer clouds

-Nee in Germany doesn't know her cumulus from her cirrus