Signs, signs, everywhere signs

In the German as a Foreign Language Department:
“Monolingualism is curable”

In the copy room of the English Department:
“Reading is hazardous to stupidity”

Best. Warning sign. Ever.

Speaking of "fiscal conservative"..

I just came across this video on Salon from the Wasilla Project--yes, Sarah Palin's hometown--about how she spent their city government into a hole during her time as mayor.



Personally, I think it shows not only that she has a weak grasp of basic economics and doesn't understand what an appropriate role for the government is, but also how she doesn't care who she craps on once she gets the next bit of power she craves.

Pissed Off

John and I have a pretty set morning routine. We get Hannah up and make her a snack for school, then once she's caught the bus, we drink coffee and watch CNN International until it is time to hop in the shower and gear up for the day.

Today, they had part of an interview with Sarah Palin. For once, she didn't sound like a complete moron, but that doesn't mean that the words coming out of her mouth were any more accurate. What finally pissed me off enough to say something political on here--which I generally avoid--was her assertion that the Democrats were tax-and-spend. How in the hell are we supposed to fund our government, if not with taxes? And as for those "fiscal conservatives", I think this comic by Steve Greenberg at the Ventura County Star says it all.



I mean, the fucking National Debt Clock RAN OUT OF SPACES. There are too many digits in our national debt to fit on the clock. It is now 10 TRILLION dollars and climbing. Who was the majority in Congress for over 10 years from 1995 to 2007? Not the tax-and-spend Democrats.

ETA:
There is a fantastic blog called War or Car that suggests other ways the 3 trillion dollars(!) that is the estimated total cost of the Iraq war could have been spent.

I Got Nothing

I’m having what I like to think of as “life block” right now. It’s like writer’s block, but it applies to everything. *sigh* Unfortunately, I have to start teaching tomorrow morning, so I have to gather up all my stuff, make a few print-outs, that kind of thing before 10 am.

I also have to make an appointment with my profs for my oral exams, which I think I have to complete before mid-November. **anxiety...rising**

Before I start having a psychedelic freak out, let me leave you with the wisdom of Hannah:

We were watching a commercial on tv for a sharing game for little kids, “because children sometimes have problems sharing.” Hannah said: “I don’t have a problem sharing. I just don’t like to.”

Hannah the balloon artist

No, not like a clown on the sidewalk twisting weenie dogs out of balloons. She likes to draw on inflated balloons. Here is a portrait of our family in balloon format:



That's John on the left, Hannah in the middle, and me on the right. Don't you like the forehead wrinkles and unfeminine lips? Hannah thinks it is a good likeness, but I think it looks like Hans Moleman. Don't you think?



Here she has two members of the Evil Wienie (her spelling) family:



Evil Wienie, Jr. is on the left and Evil Wienie Dada is on the right.



And to round out the family, Evil Wienie Momma. I like to see a Wienie Momma looking so evil.

Don't forget the family friend, Mr. Rich Italian Wienie.



All this started with an experiment she saw on tv that she wants to demonstrate for her Natural Phenomena class. You put some soda and vinegar in a bottle (like making a volcano) and top the bottle with a balloon. Depending on how much stuff you put in the bottle, the balloon will expand to varying degrees. See?



Anyhow, she was hoping that the balloon would float if she put enough stuff in, but we never got enough stuff into the bottle for that. She ended up with extra balloons, and we booted her off the Internet last night so we could hog up the Internet connection ourselves, and the above balloon art was the end result. It's nice to see her entertaining herself without electronics for once.

At Chez Nee

I kind of wish we were recording our home life some way—hidden microphones, live-in camera crew, whatever—because Hannah is constantly saying hilarious stuff, but my mind is too sieve-like to remember it. (Really. Just ask John how successfully I am able to convey the contents of something I just finished reading.)

Hannah seems to be overly concerned with the logistics of death recently. She keeps asking us about inheritance lines in our family, and we finally had to tell her we found it gruesome and to just stop. On the other hand, she has some elaborate plans for her afterlife. She has changed her mind about being “burned up” and thrown in the ocean; now she wants a double-decker casket with tv, internet, fridge, etc., etc. She even wants an international power converter to ensure that her power needs after death will always be met. She thinks of everything! This lead, of course, to a talk about theories of the afterlife. Hannah thinks it would probably be too crowded up in heaven. Anyhow, she seems to have a very ancient-Egyptian mind-set, minus the patience to wait for the afterlife in order to start enjoying her grave goods. I think she is leaning toward voodoo and zombie-ism in her conception of religion and the afterlife.

I don’t know if I have told this story here, but if I have, too bad—here it comes again:
Hannah is keeping a running tab of the various old-folks homes in town, so she can pick a nice one for us when we get old. I think she has her heart set on one near the city library; she keeps mentioning how convenient it will be for me. A while back she asked about how homes are funded. I pointed out that the people have to pay for it themselves with their savings or social security, or their near relatives, like their children. While we were in Italy, Hannah hatched a new and improved plan: if we let her live with us while she finishes cooking school and starts up her restaurant/hotel, she will buy a house and we can live with her until we are too senile to remember who we are or who she is, then she’ll dump us in front of the home and make a get-away. That way we end up well-cared for, and she doesn’t have to pay for it. Sweet, eh?

When we were in Texas, my mom noticed a mole on the inside of my upper arm and suggested I get it looked at. It didn’t look too weird to me, but I made a mental note to get it looked at over the summer. Luckily for me, German insurance companies were required to pay for a skin cancer check once every five years for everyone over 35. Well, what with one thing and another, I haven’t been yet, but I guess it has been praying on my mind more than I had realized, because I recently had a dream where I looked down at my arm and a grey-ish brown mole the size of silver dollar had formed on my upper arm, and it had *tentacles*. I slapped a large band-aid over it and made a bee-line for the doctor, but I kept getting intercepted along the way. (After I told John about my dream, he told me how weird it was to get these insights into my psyche. Thanks, Honey!)

Thoughts from yesterday

I am all hopped up on hormones and a severe lack of fat, salt, and sugar, which has lead me to raid the tiny stash of ancient, wizened Halloween gummies. Trust me, this is not satisfying when what you really want is something deep-fried and smothered in chocolate.*

John has been pestering me to make brownies, but 1) I have been trying to work on a huge editing job, and 2) we don’t have enough butter. So sad. After 2 international vacations this summer, we are reduced to a state of brownie-less poverty. John actually has some money coming in, but we are still waiting on it. So annoying.

*Yes, I am shamelessly stealing a line from Shrek 2. That’s just how I roll around here.

***

I came down off the hormone high yesterday evening with a crash. Today I've been on a little more even keel. *whew!*

Hannah, Temporary Cripple

Hannah’s first week of school was pretty hit or miss. We overslept the first day thanks to setting the alarm clock to 6 *PM* instead of AM, oopsie! The second day Hannah was in tears over the new note-taking training. On Friday during P.E., a kid kicked a ball that Hannah was making a mad dive for and drove it right into her hand, bending it backward. I ended up taking Hannah to the doctor, where she got her wrist wrapped up in a lovely hot pink bandage that she picked out herself. She made us sign it when we got home, then I had to help her make a sling out of a scarf, see?



The doctor had told us to go into the clinic for an x-ray if it was still hurting or swollen when the bandage came off over the weekend, but fortunately it was just a little sore and wrinkly from the bandage. That doesn’t mean that Hannah wasn’t going to milk it as much as possible: “Mom, would you get me a drink? I would, but my hand…”, said with the most pitiful crying clown puppy-dog eyes you ever saw. She also asked about how one would go about getting a handicapped parking permit. Well, first, you have to be handicapped. See how that works?

Of course, her "injury" didn’t stop her from playing with Legos all day on Sunday.



Then she wanted a note for P.E. today, which I was cool with, because I don’t want her re-injuring it just 2 days after we were at the doctor’s, but she seemed disappointed that I worded it so it only applied to sports. After she left for school with her note bitterly clutched in her hand, John said, “Why doesn’t she laminate it?”* Oh, the hilarity that ensued at our dear child’s expense.

Afterward, John confessed that that line came from Heaven Help Us. For some reason, I can never remember the name of that movie (even after typing it here and not 2 minutes later trying to look it up on the Internet Movie DataBase *grr*), or the word “fiberglass.” I can tell you who is in the movie and the general plot, and I can tell you about the composition and uses of fiberglass—tactics that usually allow me to associate my way to things I’ve forgotten—but there are apparently 2 big holes in my brain in the shape of those names. *sigh*

Brain Dump

When we left for Italy, I still had that cough, but it seemed to be improving. I don’t think I disturbed too many of our fellow travelers with my night-time coughing in our various hotel rooms. I do remember that one night before it completely cleared up, I rolled over in bed and there was this weird *sucking* sensation in my sinus, as if something were detaching itself slowly from one wall of my sinus and flopping down on to the other side. Think one of those gummy-toys that you slap against the wall. Yes, it was *that* pleasant.

The cough got better, and I didn’t think much more about it. Then on about day 7 or 8 of our trip, when we were on the Mediterranean coast, I bent over to pick something up off the floor, and it felt like someone had sprayed my sinuses with salt water. Wow!* I chalked it up to the salty sea air and tried not to bend over any more. But then, the salty sinus feeling never really went away, even when we went further inland and away from the sea.

While walking along the Reuss River in Lucerne, Switzerland, I felt a little dizzy, but at the time I thought that the water rushing by was giving me vertigo. Since then, I’ve had minor headaches, a slight sore throat, and a painful spot that I think is a swollen gland at the back of my throat.

As you can tell from all this whining, I do not like being sick. No sir, I don’t like it. I am hoping this laundry list of maladies clears up quickly so I can move on to complaining about other more interesting things.

*I can hardly write “Wow!” without thinking about that comic strip dog Fred Milton, the beat-poetry reciting poodle.


Hannah has been back in school 3 days, and it has been a mixed experience for her. On day 2, she called home in the middle of the day to inform us that her teacher had already brought her to tears. It wasn’t completely clear what kind of dastardly deed he had done, but she was hoping he would get hit by a bus. I fussed at her about saying that, but she wouldn’t budge on her position. This is going to be a long year.


While taking care of all our last-minute trip preparations, including cleaning the cats’ litter box and the mice’s cage, we discovered that one of Hannah’s mice had *something* sticking out around her mouth. Hannah thought she had a bit of hard, carroty food stuck between her teeth, but on closer examination, we decided it was her tongue. It wasn’t going back in, so we rushed the mouse to the vet, who was able to get us in. It turns out that it was some kind of swelling or growth on her lip. It had probably been growing inside her mouth for a while but got so big that it flipped outward. Somehow this mouse, who has been safely ensconced in Hannah’s closed room for 15 months, picked up the papillomavirus from somewhere. The vet said it would probably go down and that we should just keep an eye on it. Ok, but we’re leaving on vacation tomorrow, said I. We had a pet-sitter, but that seemed like too much to ask of him: Please observe our sick mouse, thx bye. So the vet snipped the growth off. Hannah was concerned by the lack of anesthesia, but I told her to let the vet do her job. Then I had to run out and buy another cage for a little mouse quarantine—a travel cage did the trick—plus another food bowl and water dish (and cat food, because somehow John overlooked that when cat-litter shopping earlier. Good thing I remembered, or we might have come home to a gnawed-on pet-sitter). The mouse survived her surgical procedure and our absence just fine and is now back in the big cage with her mouse friend.


Hannah keeps coming out with weird stuff. Part of it is her; part of it is her age. At the beach, she would get in the water, then run out to cover her feet in sand a little, then run back in the water. If John and I lay out on the blanket, she flopped down next to us in the sand and wallowed around. Because she was breading herself, you see.

Then while we were walking around in Siena in Tuscany, she asked about dieting. I explained about how food is made up of different components, and how those have different caloric values, etc. Then I pointed out that eating healthful food and exercising is the best way to stay in shape, not by restricting your food input. That is when she said that she wants to diet “so I don’t end up like you”. (Lil Sis—you can forward that to Mom, if you like. She’ll be pleased.)

I was offended for a few days until I realized that my fluorescent orange swimsuit, which I thought fit me pretty well, probably wasn’t the most flattering when I was bending over to wash off my hands at the beach. As a matter of fact, it probably looked like my ass had gone supernova. So if Hannah doesn’t want to look like me, more power to her. Fortunately for her, she seems to take after John’s mom in body shape. No ham-shaped calves for her.


Today was a deeply sucky day. I had to go into town for my student job, so I made a little list of things I could take care of while I was there. It was sprinkling when I got off the bus, and an hour later, when I got off work, it was raining lightly. And of course I did not have a jacket or umbrella, just a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt. So I walked through the rain to John’s department for a couple of things, then over to the stationers for Hannah’s school supplies, then over to the bank. I was wet and my throat hurt, so I was going to call it a day and head home, but then I noticed that the rain had let up, so I decided to take care of my library errand while I was already in walking distance. Except when I got to the library, it was closed for a service day. *sigh* Then I was about 3 minutes too late for the bus—I saw it at the other end of the bridge as I approached. At least I could sit under the bus shelter while I waited 17 minutes for the next one, but it turned out that I had walked the length of the shopping district and back—in the rain—for naught.

I did laundry for 3 straight days after we got back from Italy, but I think the last 2 loads will just have to wait for a less sucky day to get done. And the organic garbage to get taken out. And maybe the stairwell to get cleaned.


I need to go into my YouTube account and close the comments on the couple of videos Hannah and I have up. I haven’t specifically said, “Video made by small child,” so people can’t know that when they comment, but typing “fagfagfag” isn’t really constructive criticism. Yes, I agree that that is the swishy-est undead cephalopod to come nancing down the pike, but your comment is not really adding to the discourse. *delete*


Hannah sometimes goes to this Halloween costume site where she will spend hours—if given the chance—looking at costumes. We have started a list of themed costumes for her, me, and John to wear, ignoring the fact that we don’t go trick-or-treating or to costume parties. But anaways (as my Grammy would have said):
Tropical theme: monkey, banana, hula girl
Natural enemies theme: cat, mouse, cheese
Garden of Eden theme: Adam, Eve, apple with worm
Half of the fun is arguing about who has to wear which costume.


And now I may go lie down before making dinner. Ciao!

We're Ba-ack!

Yes, we made it back from Italy on Saturday, no worse for wear.

Hannah started school this morning, but we overslept, so things were a bit hectic--did you know we can wake up, get ready, make a snack, and run out the door in 3 minutes?--but she made it on time.

I am still hip-deep in laundry and receipts but will be back in the saddle again soon.

Ciao!

Gone with the Wind

I seem to have brought a bad cough back from Sweden with me, so I am working at about half-speed on everything. I have 4 days worth of photos up on Flickr and 2 days blogged over on the travel blog.

Tomorrow is dedicated to cleaning in preparation for a house guest from Texas who is going to house/cat-sit for us while we are in Italy.

On Monday, John is going to pick said friend up from the train, and Hannah and I have several errands to do to get her started on school supplies--she goes back on the 8th--and to turn in some paperwork for a job I'll be doing when we get back.

All in all, it's not the best time to be under the weather, but it is not affecting my sleep too much--except for the first night when I coughed so hard I saw 2 rings of light, probably my retinas coming loose around the edges. I can still see, though, flash-free, so they probably aren't completely detached yet. Since then I have been careful to sit all the way up in bed if I have to cough, just to keep the pressure in my eyes somewhat even.

At least I have coffee to help cut through the slime. It was a close call, though. We left for Stockholm on Wednesday. On Tuesday morning, the coffee brewed, but the hot-plate under the pot didn't get hot. No prob, pour the coffee in the thermos. On Wednesday morning, while getting ready to go, nothing happened when we turned the coffee machine on. *sigh* I didn't have any coffee until we got checked in at the airport at about 1:30. John and Hannah are lucky that I didn't eviscerate them in my uncaffeinated state.

After we got back from Stockholm, John ran down to the local bakery for pasteries and coffee, may blessings rain upon him, and then went out and bought a new coffee maker. He was talking about an instant, big, fancy espresso-making thingamabob, but it turns out that those are muy expensive, so he went with almost the exact same version we had before.

The coffee maker is dead.



Long live the coffee maker.



Also, I was going to call people this weekend, but this stupid cough makes it hard to get out more than a sentence or two. So if you need me before 4 am on Tuesday (9 pm on Monday, Texas time), when we are leaving for Italy, send me an email.

We're back!

We made it back from Stockholm yesterday with a minimum of fuss. The cats were alive when we got home, so it was a win all the way around.

After the second day there and the first day of walking around, my thighs were sore. After the third day, my knee hurt and I was starting to get a sore throat. The knees seem fine now, but I have a bit of an icky cough. John and Hannah are healthy as horses, and of course I was the only one to get sunburned on the one sunny day. Woe is me!

I am in the process of uploading our 357 photos (or at least a sizeable portion of them) to Flickr, so feel free to check over there for updates. I hope to start getting posts plus photos up on my travel blog tomorrow, but I'll keep you posted over here.

To tide you over until then, here are a few tidbits:



A Carlsberg beer truck. Confident, aren't they?

And for Mr. Jooge:



Here is the wrapping paper for John's belated bday present from me:



He says licorice tastes like ass (how does he know?), so it is ironic that he gets the licorice mix wrapping paper.

Inside was this t-shirt:



Now I just need to figure out a way to get rid of his old, dingy, ratty Viking t-shirt.

Speaking of licorice, I never had to share my Swedish gum:



Mmmm... salty licorice gum. And sugar-free!

Finally, a tutorial in European toiletry for my American homies:



Push on the left for full-flow, the right for low-flow. It depends on what has been deposited. Now you can travel internationally without making a bathroom faux pas!

We're off to Stockholm!

Laters!

I love my mini-garden

But rather than bore you all to tears with non-stop photoblogging of my balcony garden, I'll just keep adding photos to my new Flickr badge on the right, you lucky devils.

Clothes, Glorious Clothes

Once Hannah was out of school for the summer and I had finished my paper, it was time for us to do a little clothes shopping before all the summery clothes were gone. BTW, can you believe that the shops are already putting out the fall clothes?!

I haven’t bought Hannah much in the way of summer clothing the last couple of years because 1. she still had some stuff that fit and 2. one week of hot weather spread over three months does not a proper summer make.

But this year, her t-shirts have gotten obscenely small, so it was time to replace them. Maybe I can smuggle some of the old ones out of her closet now without her noticing.

As for me, I was down to one pair* of rather threadbare denim shorts and wanted something lightweight but with a little more coverage, like capris, to wear in the tropical climate of Italy later this summer. So in between Hannah grabbing everything in sight off the racks and whining that I wasn’t buying her jeans and boots (in the fall, I said!), I tried a few things on.

I am not really all that big, although I do have proper womanly curves in the right places, but apparently you have to have legs like dowel rods to be able to buy pants in the women’s or juniors’ sections here. I guess they just don’t design pants for the weeble wobble-shaped woman here, or I need to find a w-w shaped woman to follow into the right shop for that. Anyhow, I finally found a pair of pants that mostly fit. In the children’s department. In the huskies section. Yes, I had to adjust the *elastic in the waistband* of my *huskies children’s pants*, but now they fit. I mean, screw it. John likes the way they look on me, and Hannah can wear them next year (they are only one size larger than she wears) if she starts getting husky on me. The end.

* I actually found another pair of shorts in the back of the closet after I had gone shopping. They are dark blue heavy twill, but the waist is lower than I am generally comfortable with. Unfortunately, that was all I could find last year when I was looking, and I’m not sure that I even got to wear them last year because the weather changed again as soon as I had bought them.

Hitting the pool

On Wednesday, it was brutally hot--33C (about 92F) outside and 28C (about 83F) inside--so we drug our carcasses to the local outdoor pool. John complained that we found a spot in the shade under a tree. Hello? What is the point of going somewhere to cool off if you don't--sit somewhere cool? John and Hannah swam a bit, then John took his towel to go lie in the direct sunlight. I love the heat, but hate sunbeams--I can feel my skin sizzling in direct sunlight--so I stayed on the blanket under the tree.



No, I didn't smother him with a floaty. He was too lazy to sit up while taking his turn at blowing up Hannah's alligator. He worries that it looks like he is pleasuring a blow-up alligator, but I assure you, he never does that in public. (Ha ha, Honey!)



Now that Hannah is careening toward the teenage years, I fear that all her photos for the next, oh, 10 years will look like this, just with different clothes. Oh, well.

Here is something I jotted in my notebook at the pool:
"Old ladies, middle-aged ladies, young women, girls--all wear two-piece swimsuits, bikinis even. The men wear trunks, speedos, a prosthetic leg. There are none of the long t-shirts of my youth, no beach cover-ups. I find myself staring at someone's back in line at the snack bar. Does that spot look cancerous? Should I say something? She walks off holding ice cream."

Sorry about that--I was reading Margaret Atwood at the pool.

Anyhoo, about 5 minutes after we got there, a big black cloud settled over the sun and floated back and forth over it for the next 3 hours. Have you seen my recent post "Murphy's Law"? Yeah, that's my life. I thought I also heard thunder, but that turned out to be the sound of children flopping themselves down the new big, plastic pool slide.

If we were to chart Hannah's level of enjoyment of a pool outing, it would look like a big V. When John suggests a trip to the pool, she gets totally gung-ho, gathering up everything without being reminded, grabbing the car keys so she can pack up and wait for us in the broiling parking lot, being extra polite. We get to the pool, she gets into the water, gets a snack (with her own money), and then she is ready to go home. No, there is no reason to stay, life at the pool is an unremitting hell, etc. etc. Finally, she stalks off to get back in the water, just to get us off her back. That would be the bottom of the V. Then she finds her friend's brother. A boy about her own age to pester? Nirvana! Back to the top of the V until it is time to go.

Murphy's Law

We are trying to do our bit to reduce our energy consumption, both for the environmental benefits and also because the cost of energy keeps going up. John reminds us constantly about turning out unused lights. I do my bit in the area of laundry.

Al Gore recommended not using the hottest setting on the washing machine, so I have already given up 90C for whites. (A lovely side effect is that the strata of deodorant on John's t-shirts doesn't get melted onto them; they have never been more deodorant-free.) I also bought a drying rack to reduce our use of the electric dryer.



I don't think I've used the dryer more than about once a week in the last couple of months.

Of course, the weather here tends to throw a monkey wrench into my laundry plans. We either have a long stretch of cool, wet weather, which means I have to either find room for the rack indoors or use the dryer, or we have unseasonable, unpredictable storms. Recently, we have woken up to sunny, hot weather. Perfect for drying jeans, think I. So I shove the jeans in the washing machine on cold. I drag the wet jeans onto the balcony and arrange them on the drying rack. Thirty minutes later it clouds up. Thirty minutes after that it starts to pour rain. Or, as happened on Saturday, it begins to hail:



I wonder if I have inherited my Grammy's weather-influencing ability. She lived in Houston with my Gramps and had always heard about how dry it was out in West Texas. Alas, every time she visited us in West Texas, it rained. She didn't believe him about the desert conditions.

Hannah really didn't want to go on a class outing on the next-to-last day of school, so she got busy on the Internet looking for tips on rain-making. She spent all of Monday evening in her raincoat and galoshes, shaking her home-made rain-maker and spinning and chanting. Unfortunately, the rain did not hit until *after* the class had reached their outdoor destination. Fortunately, they went back to school early to watch a movie, and Hannah had dry clothes in her backpack.

So the moral of the story is that Mother Nature will always kick you in the proverbial nuts.

Camera fun

We have had our digital camera for 3 or 4 years now and have never figured out how to take close-up photos without them coming out blurry. Just recently, I noticed a setting with a little tulip-shaped flower and the letters "MF". I don't know why we hadn't ever tried it before. I thought it turned on the date-time stamp--Monday through Friday--and John only thought "motherfucker", although I can't see how that is an automatic setting on a camera. Usually that is user error. Anyhow, I finally noticed and tried it:



Motherfucker, indeed. (Except on me.)

So without further ado, I will now bombard you with photos and commentary about my balcony garden, because I love the satisfaction of coaxing things to grow.

All the flowers in our window boxes were planted as seeds, so it has taken awhile to get actual flowers. These were one of the first ones to put out blooms:



I don't know what any of the flowers are called, because I wasn't very good about labeling the pots when I started them, and Hannah was helping me, and some of them are from mixed-seed assortments that didn't specify what was in them beyond "summer assortment" or "butterfly assortment" or whatever.



These are on one side of the yellow flowers. The flowers are tiny, but there are lots of them, and their perfume really attracts the insects.



This is on the other side of the yellow flowers. It is only one plant, but it is putting out clusters of purple buds at every node. It is also an insect-pleaser.



I have a variety of these in different shades of pink and orange in the next planter over. This is the latest one to open up--I just love the salmon color! The flowers look very delicate, but the petals are quite thick and firm, and the flowers last a long time without discoloring or wilting. I think the oldest flower is about 3 weeks old and is just now getting brown around the edges.



I made this picture a little larger so you could see the weirdness of this plant. It looks like a succulent, with fleshy leaves, but it needs lots of water. The underside of the leaves and the stems are covered in tiny bulges that look like water droplets. Occasionally this plant puts out a spiky--something--that has fine hairs sticking out of it. Not knowing what this plant really is, I guessed that it was some kind of ground cover and that the spiky things were its flowers. But then one of these popped up:



It only lasted a couple of days, but the lovely color and delicate petals were a nice contrast to the fleshy leaves underneath.



Lemon balm. I've been using it in frozen concoctions instead of lemon or mint. Delish!

Hannah saved some seeds from the kitchen, and now we have these:



I wasn't sure which kind of pepper I had been chopping when Hannah asked for the seeds, but I'm guessing bell pepper. The 2 plants that survived have put out a ton of flowers, so we should get quite a few peppers over the summer. The go nicely with the tiny citrus trees



and gigantic walnut trees



that stand next to them in that corner of the balcony.



Last year I bought seeds to plant chili-peppers for John. We didn't manage to use all the chilis, and I didn't get around to composting the dead plants, so a few weeks ago I went out and harvested the seeds from the leftover chilis. Voila! New plants. I love recycling.

John was waxing optimistic about growing half our own produce, but that is hard to imagine in our circumstances (no actual garden). But, it will be nice to go out on the balcony and snag the occasional pepper to throw into some spaghetti. And although our flowers are few in number, they give me a lot of enjoyment on a cool summer morning.

Done!

I turned in my final paper on Friday, after writing seriously for 4 or 5 days. I ended up with a 19-page linguistics paper in German. I call that quite an accomplishment.

I am still trying to get caught up on a few things around the house but will be back soon, promise!

quickie

I went downstairs this morning to wake Hannah up and discovered that _somebody_ (of the 4-footed variety) had deposited a dead bat at the foot of the stairs. Fortunately, it wasn't mangled or anything. On the other hand, I doubt it flew into our house and then had a peaceful heart attack while lounging on the tile floor.

Anyhoo, I couldn't get John to get his lazy carcass out of bed and come deal with it before Hannah saw it--which was a close thing anyway because she suddenly got a nosebleed and came out of her room before I could go in there to wake her up--so I scooped it onto the dustpan and put the whole thing out on the balcony.

While I was fixing Hannah's snack for school, John came moseying downstairs. "So, did you remove the deceased?"

Hannah: "Huh?"

Me: *mind racing* "Hannah, we're speaking obliquely."

Hannah: "Hello, people! Eleven-year-old kid, here! I haven't read the whole dictionary."

And thus we avoided the topic of the dead bat until Hannah had to leave for school 3 minutes later.

Don't have much time...

John needs to get to work, so Internet fun and games is over for me for now, but I wanted to point out that I put a butt-load of pictures up at Flickr this weekend for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to look around over there (via the widget on the right) in lieu of reading anything here.

TMI = Comedy Gold

(I told John I was going to blog this, but I don't think he believed me.)

We were in bed, and the sheet had slid off, and I asked John to pull it back up because I didn't like the cats looking at my ass. "They can see right up my crack!"

John: "Those cats can't tell the difference between your crack and your face."

Way to be reassuring, Honey!

minorly annoyed

The last few days have been beset with minor annoyances. While getting some milk out, Hannah knocked a cup of yoghurt out of the fridge, which then exploded lemony dairy over half the tile floor. I left the mop propped against the counter in the kitchen, and Hannah bumped it, causing it to fall onto the cat’s ceramic food bowl and smash the edge of it off. Etc. Etc. Sometimes it seems that my life is just a string of minor annoyances.

On Monday, I turned on the TV briefly while I was eating lunch, and in the middle of a tourist ad for some African country, the picture narrowed down to a couple of colorful stripes in the middle of the screen. I turned the TV off and back on. Stripes. I turned on the DVD player. Stripes. I turned everything back off and thought. Then I vacuumed the back of the TV. Bingo! We are bathing in the electric glow again! One small success can really turn my day around (for a little bit, at least).

In other news, John found flights on Ryanair to Stockholm in August for 0 Euros (I think the roundtrip total for the three of us is 150 Euros in fees), so we are going to Stockholm for about 5 days for John’s birthday in the middle of the month, then a week after we get back, we’re driving to Italy for 12 days. I am planning on putting our adventures in European travel up on my travel blog; I’ll keep you posted.

It’s a shame that the bulk of our extended family’s birthdays are in the late summer/fall, because we are going to be as poor as church mice after all that traveling. Thank goodness for our American visa—we sure can’t use it over here with the horrible exchange rate. But we have it in case of emergency.

Hannah has an infection in her toe. We had been treating it at home, and it was getting better, but then after she spent the day doing the equivalent of the Presidential Fitness Test, she was complaining about it, so I took her in to the doctor. Who then gave me a prescription for iodine and curd soap (?--Kernseife). So unless her toe swells up or really starts to hurt, we continue with the home treatment. Plus she has another plantar wart, so I spend way more time than I enjoy messing with her right foot.

Except for me bitching and moaning about writing my paper, and John working his heart off (as he put it on the phone today) on several projects at once, and Hannah waiting impatiently for the end of school in 3-1/2 weeks, that is all that is happening with us. Our life is one big party, no?

The internet is bringing up Hannah

Hannah was playing an RPG online, and some guy claiming to be Zach Efron was trying to pick up some girl on the rebound. So of course Hannah had to ask: If you're Zach Efron, aren't you dating Vanessa Hudgens, and what are you doing trying to pick up this girl?

Hannah is learning some important life lessons via the internet.

Wow--this really is me!

Your Ice Cream Personality:

You are an incredibly modest person. You don't feel comfortable bragging about yourself... or even receiving complements. You are incredibly cautious. You rather miss out on something than make a mistake. No one would ever call you wild... but they would call you responsible. You are a somewhat open minded person, but deep down you're fairly conservative. You don't like trying new things very much. And if you do find something new you like, you stick with it. You are a natural multitasker. You feel alive when you're doing more than one thing at a time. You are fun loving and sweet. You tend to enjoy joking around and teasing people.

The Ice Cream Personality Test

Quote of the Day

Hannah says:

"I just want you to know that I wear brown pants to show my dislike for Thursdays."

Don't we all?

Hannah is a glamour queen

Hannah has long had a love of shiny shoes.


Shiny silver Pippi Longstocking sneakers, bought in Sweden when she was 3.


Shiny pink platform sandals, bought in Sweden when she was close-enough to 4. (Diva-tastic!)

(I am now wondering about all the shiny children's shoes available in Sweden--probably a response to the dreary winters.)

And now, to complete the trinity of shininess:


Shiny silver flip-flops, bought here in Germany to replace her old, worn-out, pink rubber flip-flops.

Oops, I forgot the tennis shoes, which I think I may have already shown here:

Shiny gold swooshes on white leather, bought here in Germany, but American all the way, Baby!

Hannah is quite demure in all other aspects of her dress, so I don't mind buying her some flashy shoes if she wants.

Favorite Headline Ever

Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens

Yes, it's a bit old, but I was poking around in my favorites folder and came across it again this morning.

Welcome aboard!

About a week ago, Mr. Jooge sent me a link to an NPR piece, because it made him think of me:
Stimulating the Economy with Gay Marriage

I had read somewhere that New York was also using this argument in support of gay marriage.

Then today I read over at the Whatever, How to Save Your State Economy, Scalzi’s commentary on the MSNBC article on the same topic. Only, some commenters have rightly pointed out that $64 million in tax revenue is chump change when you are talking about a state with a deficit of $15 BILLION.

When I got the original email from Mr. Jooge, I had just been tearing up over the story of George Takei’s* wedding. He has been with Brad Altman for 21(!) years, and now they are able to be married, thanks to the change in California. The man is *71* years old. You never know—he might not have that much time left (although he looks much, much younger than that). It made me really happy to know that he will get to experience a state that many of us take for granted.

Way back in the day, John and I were not dead-set on getting married. We were committed to each other and knew that a piece of paper wouldn’t make any difference in how we felt about each other. But then we decided that getting married would make life easier (God—I can’t imagine what a nightmare moving abroad would have been if we weren’t married to each other). I am honest enough to admit that I got all gushy and tingly over throwing a wedding, and reading about George Takei, I felt that all over again on his behalf. I would have loved and honored John no matter what (as George and Brad have done for 21 years), but there was something magical about going through the ceremony, and I am tearing up again thinking about all the people who are going to get to share in that magic.

Mushy, gushy aside, just today I read a fascinating article in the NYTimes, "Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage," on how researchers are looking at gay marriages in comparison with hetero marriages, and how they are discovering that some marital problems are not gender-specific, as previously thought. Very interesting stuff.

-----
* For the geek-impaired, George Takei played Sulu on the original Star Trek series.

Quote of the day

John to Hannah:
“I love you, monkey—will you translate a book for me?”

2 great tastes that taste great together

You know I love me some Avatar, and some Muppets. Here's what you get when you mix the two: Avatar, the Last Puppet Bender. Enjoy.

Muppets never get old

Hannah finished watching a Barbie movie this morning and wanted to know what to put in next. She suggested The Muppets Take Manhattan, but I didn’t feel like it. She said I had to turn in my “I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you” t-shirt if I didn’t want to watch it. She doesn’t understand that even if I didn’t feel like watching it in the first place, that doesn’t mean I won’t laugh myself sick at Dabney Coleman running up and down the hall with a Muppet chicken clamped onto his ear and Animal grabbed onto his legs, or the Swedish chef throwing popcorn in his face and singing, “Popping corn--3D!” I still got Muppet cred.

Phone message from Hannah

"Mo-om--hi, it’s me did you just try to call a few minutes ago well I’m home now and just want to talk and I was wondering what happened, like why isn’t anybody here cause like I’m here and, hel-lo shouldn’t someone be here usually? *Sigh* Ple-e-ease come ho-o-ome. Bye. Hannah."

Yes, it was all in one long breath. I was waiting for her outside her school, and she had got out 5 minutes early and taken an earlier bus home. Can I help it that I wasn't waiting at home for her when I had expected to actually ride home with her.

I like how she added her name at the end like it was a letter, or like I didn't know who it was before that.

Confession is good for the soul, or so I've heard

This week started out pretty good but has since headed straight into the crapper. On Monday, I got some good work in for some school stuff, and then I went to class. I had given my presentation the week before, so there wasn’t anything traumatic waiting for me there. Or so I thought.

I may have told this story before, but one semester, while some classmates and I were waiting for an exam to start, one girl suddenly realized she hadn’t turned in a paper for a class the previous semester. What a way to start a test, right? Guess what happened to me in class on Monday? While the teacher was droning on about sentence constituents, I remembered that I was supposed to do a make-up presentation for a master’s colloquium I took last semester. Our department was one professor short that semester, so 2 classes worth of students were crammed into one class, and there were not enough presentation slots to go around. So those of us who got the shaft were supposed to arrange to do it this semester. *Supposed* to. *sigh*

This is a course we are supposed to have completed before we can apply to take our master’s exams/write our master’s theses, so I had a horrible sinking feeling beyond the normal self-recriminations for being so disorganized. This whole debacle feels like the pigeon-poop icing on the cow-patty cake that has been my education in Germany. I am going to go talk to the professor on Thursday to see if I can salvage what’s left of my dignity and school career.

I have felt extra-scatterbrained ever since Monday afternoon. Small things slip by me all the time, but I eventually manage to get them done. Today, I wanted to work on my laptop while holding my office hour in the English Department, only I left the cable at home, so I could only work for about 55 minutes. I neglected to go to the post office, and I totally forgot to write Hannah an excuse for her school-absence yesterday. That didn’t help either. She woke up with a tummy ache and promptly barfed (just a little). I could have sent her to school, but it is hard to tell with her whether a little barfing first thing is a cure for what’s bothering her or just a preview of what’s to come.

So having her at home yesterday and my bummed-out-ness over my presentation weren’t very conducive to any sort of effort at anything on my part. I was the sluggy-est slug to ever get addicted to Cake Mania on the Nintendo DS.

But today I vow to do better. I came home from my only partially successful morning in town and started hacking away at some of the household-y stuff I have been needing to do. Hannah should be home any minute, so after I get her fed and started on homework/amusement, I need to work on a heavy edit of an article one of my professors sent me. Just reading over the first paragraph made me want to beat my head against my laptop, but I shall perservere!

176 White Trash

176 White Trash
Originally uploaded by .eti

My Flickr friend from the Netherlands put up his Lego White Trash scene, and I almost died laughing. Go look--you know you know these people.

Tat your kid

Man, this would have been useful when Hannah was smaller--although she only ran off enough to scare the bejeezus out of me once, in a department store: the safety tat. It's a temporary tatoo that you personalize with your cell phone number. Maybe it's not as sure a thing as a harness/leash, but you get fewer funny looks in public.

Dead Russian Composers R Us

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Pyotr Chaikovsky. I AM the Real Chaikovsky! Considered by most Westerners to be the greatest Russian composer of all, most late 19th Century Russians think I'm actually too Westernized in my musical tendencies. Despite this criticism, as well as the flak I had to take for my preference of Y-chromosomes, my ballets "The Nutcracker" and "Swan Lake" are upheld as among the greatest and most popular pieces of all time. Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Food, glorious food

We knew when we moved to Germany that we wouldn’t be able to buy a lot of the foods we were used to eating in Texas, like Tex-Mex cuisine. But we were surprised at how few pre-packaged/processed foods were available. We hadn’t really thought of ourselves as especially big consumers of pre-packaged/processed foods before we moved here, but having to go without mac-and-cheese in a box or cornbread mix showed us how much we were relying on them before. (I can’t imagine any self-respecting German eating mac-and-cheese at all, and cornbread is more of a regional Southern thing, kind of like Tex-Mex, so maybe these aren’t the best examples.)

Since we can’t get any of the mixes we were accustomed to using, we have combed over recipes in all our cookbooks and on the internet to find approximations of the stuff we like. Fannie Farmer has taken care of our cornbread and pancake recipe needs, Hershey is keeping our arteries well if infrequently oiled with its cake recipe off the back of the cocoa box and a brownie recipe, and everything else we are figuring out by trial and error using random internet recipes. Recently, John wanted to make beef enchiladas, having imported many, many corn tortillas from Texas on our last trip, but alas, we had not remembered to buy any sauce mix. I got online and found a recipe, and it turned out pretty good, even though it didn’t call for tomato paste. As you can tell, my enchilada sauce-making experience is basically limited to opening a package of seasoning, adding water and tomato paste and stirring.

One side effect of having to make every imaginable type of dish from scratch has been to make me more aware of what exactly goes into our favorite foods. You might die on the spot if you knew how many eggs go into yellow cake—the recipe I tried with good results calls for *8* yolks, and I think I was trying to get away with as few as possible when I picked the recipe. I’ve found that some dishes are a ton of work—I let John cook those *g*--and others are much simpler than I would have thought.

Don’t get me wrong, we still eat processed foods, like frozen fries, breaded and frozen fish, and spaghetti sauce in a jar, but even those seem simpler than their American counterparts. For one thing, I don’t think they contain corn syrup the way they would in America. My German friend wasn’t even familiar with corn syrup when I mentioned it to her.

Over at La en vie, Sedulia was talking recently about the prevalence of corn syrup as an additive in American processed foods, and how this wasn’t the case in France (she just moved back to the States within the last year). I know that here in Germany, people are pretty picky about what goes into their food, and I can imagine that the sentiment is the same, if not stronger, in France. As John has often noticed, this might explain why a lot of German snack foods don’t taste as good as, say, Doritos—Germans just haven’t figured out how to load their snacks with additives yet.

Hannah is probably the biggest consumer of processed foods in our house, because we stupidly let her pick (mostly) what she wants in her snack at school and her lunches at home, so there is probably a can of ravioli and couple of packages of ramen in the pantry right now. I can get her to eat fresh fruit if I chop up apples and offer them to her with peanut butter or Nutella, or if I eat a banana and beg her not to take any bites, in which case she will hurry over to eat half in one gulp. Yes, I am a paragon of parenting. She is not fond of cheese (I think she must have been switched at birth), and is *meh* about meat. As I constantly tell her, I am surprised she doesn’t have rickets yet. I guess her love of milk is about all that is keeping her healthy, and the dairy farmers are threatening to gone on strike. *sigh*

Fortunately, she does like strawberries and has managed to eat most of a pint by herself in the not-too-distant past. And even more fortunately, it is now strawberry season. You can’t walk more than 10 feet in town without seeing displays for fresh strawberries. My friend gave me a recipe for a refreshing cold drink—necessary since the temps have been creeping up near 90F, with no AC: blend strawberries, add mint leaves (I’m going to add lemon balm), and freeze in ice trays. Add a couple of cubes to some mineral water, and presto! Summer drink.

Hannah does *not* like asparagus, the other in-season produce, so I will have to come up with a way to serve them that makes them an optional part of the dish. I’m thinking crepes with ham, asparagus, and hollandaise sauce. Yum! I’ll just leave the asparagus out of hers. Since we are a family of non-smellers, there’s nothing to mar our enjoyment except Hannah’s likely commentary during dinner.

It’s official—she’s 11!

We survived Hannah’s birthday last week. Hannah was so stoked about having 2 friends over to spend the night that she pestered me for chores for a day-and-a-half before they even came over. Here you can see the fruits of her decorating.





She didn’t quite get it that you are supposed to separate the rolls into streamers.

They stayed up horribly late, watching infomercials and being silly. The next morning we stuffed them full of pancakes and packed them in the car to go to an amusement park in a neighboring town. And of course Hannah yakked before we even got out of the city limits. We never leave home without a fistful of plastic produce bags.

We got to the Holiday Park by 9:30 and didn’t leave until shortly before they closed at 7, so we had a long day of fun. It is a small-ish park, way smaller than Six Flags, so we got to do most everything we wanted to without having to wait in excessively long lines.



I don’t know about John, but I really appreciated that there were lots of gruesome animatronic displays on various rides. If we ever go back, I’m going to take way more pictures of them.



They really seemed to have a medieval corporal punishment theme going.



Mmmm… meat!



Ah, fun for all ages.

John managed to get most of the girls onto the 2 roller coasters, but I think they were all out of their minds.



John and I ditched the girls to watch a water-ski show that was a hilarious mash-up of several Arabian-esque stories. On water skis. In genie pants.

Hannah was supposed to keep in touch with us via cell phone when we got separated, only it would have worked better if her phone had not been forwarded to the answering service until 3 o’clock, when I finally figured out what was going on and unforwarded it for her. D’oh!

At the end of the day, we managed to catch a house-pet circus. (Alas, photography was not allowed.) The cats were the weak link in the performance, and one of the two lady trainers finally ended up picking up a cat and giving it a light toss through the ring. I could have told her that in advance. They had a cute bit where they put a cat and a rat into a big wooden box, but pulled out a giant rodent (a gopher?) after a few seconds. Get it? At the end, they had a cavalcade of pets made up of dogs, cats, rats, ferrets, chickens, a pony, a donkey, a goat, a full-sized pig, a pot-bellied pig, a PORCUPINE, and a SKUNK (neither a popular house-pet, as far as I’ve ever heard). The whole circus was cute but very smelly.

We spent Friday recuperating, and Hannah went back to school yesterday, thank the 7 Dwarves!