Shopping and nature and more

While John was away in Rome, the biker boots he ordered from the U.S. came. He has been wearing these Doc Martens for several years with his dressy work clothes, but a hole has developed where there is a crease across the top of his foot. For some reason, he fixated on buying biker boots as a replacement (after determining that it there are no Doc Martens to be found here in HD), even insisting that they'll go with his work khakis. Riiiight. Anyway, he and Hannah are the clotheshorses of the family, so I guess they can do what they like. I just wish it wouldn't entail special ordering things like biker boots from the U.S. and having to pay the price of the boots in shipping.

We have a bat up under the roof of our upper balcony again. Or rather, we had one; I haven't seen it in the last week. I tried to take a photo of it, but our camera couldn't handle the dim light and extreme contrast between white stucco wall and dark brown wood ceiling, so I ended up with a blurry blob. I am actually not all that sad it is gone, because I just got around to cleaning up *cough* a few years' worth of bat poop off our balcony floor. Luckily, it was concentrated in one area under that crack in the wall, but still.

John was excited to find a salamander on the parking lot when we came home from lunch with one of his colleagues and a trip to the grocery store yesterday. He insisted that Hannah run upstairs and get the camera, even getting a bit shirty when I refused to let him put it in the cooler with our frozen foods to take it upstairs. He loaded the video Hannah shot on his computer, so I don't have it here to post, but if you are friends with him on facebook, you can get a look at it.

I pointed out several escargot crawling around in the weeds and along the wall edging the parking area, but I guess he didn't find them worthy of being filmed. If you're not bright black and yellow, you're nothing, is the lesson to take away from this.

John makes sure we have our queue at LoveFilm updated so we don't miss out on any classics like Nuns on the Run. He and Hannah had already started it when I joined them, right as Hannah was complaining about the lack of nuns when she had been promised nuns, right there in the title! She has pretty high standards, you see.

Today is Easter. As one of the high holy days (or whatever they're called), it has a special status around here; by law, public dancing is illegal. I think that may vary from state to state, but I saw a couple of different tv programs last week where dance club owners and others complained about what they saw as an out-of-date and biased law (museums, opera houses, and movie theaters are allowed to stay open and provide other forms of entertainment). Hannah is already planning to learn to river dance so she can dance in protest next year. I'm surprised she's not trying to master Dance Dance Revolution for this year, but she found it challenging and gave up pretty quickly when she got it for xmas this past year.

The lunch yesterday with John's colleague was nice. She is from northern Germany and made us a couple of specialties from there: Scandinavian-style shrimp soup, shrimp on toast covered with melted cheese, and pickled herring. Hannah is not a fan of melted cheese or chunks of fish, but she managed to eat enough or decline politely enough that our host's feelings didn't get hurt. I think Hannah was able to make the extra effort because our host had made a special point of telling her how displeased her own children were that we were coming on a day when they wouldn't be there (due to custody arrangements) and how earnestly they begged her to arrange a time for Hannah to come hang out with them. So Hannah is going to go over tomorrow afternoon to play video games and such. They are really nice kids, and I am glad they all hit it off so well when we've visited back and forth in the past.

--Nee in Germany promises not to let John buy chaps or a leather vest next, even if she has to hide his credit card