Activated!

Hannah got her activator last Tuesday, and I thought people might be interested in how that is going for her.

The activator looks like what we used to call a retainer. It is removable, with wires that hook onto her teeth and smooth plastic pieces that fit against her palate on top and under her tongue on the bottom. Hannah picked clear plastic with glitter for her activator.

The purpose of the activator is to pull her lower jaw forward, thereby stretching the jaw muscles and training them to hold her jaw in the new position. This is to correct for an overbite, or as the orthodontist explained it, her teeth don’t match up properly. Each top tooth should sit on the crack between two bottom teeth underneath it. Mine do; Hannah’s don’t.

In addition, her jaw was popping. It doesn’t pop with the activator in, though, so that is one area where we can see an immediate improvement.

So without further ado, here is her profile without the activator in:



And here is her profile with the activator in:



And here is the activator in her mouth:



As she says, all she needs to do is sharpen those prongs, and she’ll give herself a tongue piercing! (And no, I have no idea what they are for.)

She is on school vacation for 2 more weeks, so she is wearing the activator most of the day at home. When school starts again, she won’t wear it to school, but she should still be able to get in her 12-14 hours per day. It doesn’t really look all that bad, but she drools something terrible. (You do not want to know about the time she sneezed with it in.) It also affects her speech, as her Aunt Kee discovered on the phone the other day.

Then tomorrow she gets the cast off her arm. Hoorah! She can finally get wet all over, and I have threatened to lock her in the shower and pour shower gel on her over the top of the locked doors if she doesn’t do it herself. Today she thought she had gotten cracker crumbs inside her cast (how?!), so tomorrow’s uncasting may be quite unpleasant. Wish us luck!

My Girl is Growing Up

Hannah turned 12 yesterday. She says I should remember to enjoy this time, because next year she’ll be a stinky 13-year-old and probably sleeping a lot, eating a lot of pizza, and smoking and taking drugs. I don’t know how many 13-year-olds she knows, but I can’t imagine that describes many of them.

She woke us up the first time at 5. I only went to bed at 1 because I had been reading, so I was not ready for her to be jumping on the bed, all “wakey, wakey!” and “where’s my loot?!” We sent her away, and she watched some Nick Jr. for a while. On her next attempt, I told her to go boot up my computer and surf amazon, since she got a gift certificate from her Aunt Kee and fam. Finally, it was 8 am, and we couldn’t put her off any more. We let her carry her gifts downstairs while we dragged our carcasses out of bed. Only, John poured coffee grounds all into the water reservoir in the coffeee maker, so that caused a further delay while we got it cleaned out. But never fear, she got her loot:



She got Swedish and German books, some movies, some video games, a model wind-mill, and some Blendy Pens. She put the pens to use right away:



She spent the afternoon watching new movies and playing with her new games, but then disaster struck—the tv finally stopped working, after years of things breaking on it one-by-one, and months of the picture flickering out on occasion. So the new Wii game and the 4 new movies—unusable. Except, then I got a brilliant idea: I went online and found a code to change her American portable DVD player into a region-free DVD player. She’s still tethered to the power converter for it, but at least she can watch any of the DVDs we have.

I had run out of flour on Thursday, so Friday afternoon I had to run down to the store to get the last of the supplies for a birthday cake. Hannah was totally patient about it, so yesterday evening we finally had cake.



And in this last picture, I don’t know if you can tell, because of the way she is standing, but Hannah is now officially as tall as I am.

Spamalot

Ok, I don't normally check my spam box, which is why there are 800+ messages in there now, but I am expecting something in my email which hasn't arrived yet, so I had to go check. And I must say, the spammers' kennings are quite impressive, to whit:
PORKSWORD

I think I am going to start using this one: "Hey, Honey, why don't you and your porksword come over here and..." Or, "Is that a porksword in your scabbard, or are you just happy to see me?"

Hmm... I may need to add a hyphen, because after a few readings, it starts to look like porks-word, and that doesn't make any sense.

Sometimes you feel like a nut

...sometimes you feel like throttling your entire family, down to the last cat. I call those times "PMS". John and Hannah have been looking at me askance and laughing half-heartedly at my lame jokes that send me off on laughing jags. Oh, well, if you can't please everyone, you should at least please yourself.

Yesterday we stimulated the local economy. *Five hours* of economy-stimulation later, we made it home in one piece and still speaking to each other, so I think it was a banner day. Hannah has a birthday this week--hint, hint, family members--so we had to do some birthday shopping, plus we were down to the last of the cat litter, and we had to replace a lamp and buy some more potting soil, so we hit the mall, the pet store, IKEA, and the Lowe's-like store. I swear, every time we go to the IKEA is worse than the last time, crowd-wise. It occurred to me this morning that we should have just ordered the damn thing online. I'm making a mental note of that for next time.

This morning I got up and started using the new potting soil to transplant some seedlings and to start some herb seeds. I've already got cilantro, but soon we'll have parsley, basil, and chives. I've got to find some more recipes calling for cilantro before more of it starts trying to put out flowers.

Hannah gets her activator after school on Tuesday, just in time to kick off her school vacation. She will be out for 2-1/2 weeks. Yikes! It looks like there are lots of pre-teen friendly movies coming out over the vacation, though, so maybe I will pony up for movie tickets a couple of times to get her out of the house, otherwise she'll be glued to the couch.

Now I am off to spin the chore wheel--dishes, stairwell cleaning, laundry, editing, Latin tutoring, or thesis writing? What to do, what to do...

About To Change My Phone Number

There's this woman I know from university, and she is about to drive me crazy. I only hear from her when she needs to kvetch or when she needs a favor. She just now sucked up 15 minutes of my time on the phone, time I can't afford to spend on her right now. I am sure she is a lovely person and has other fine qualities, but I can't deal with her negativity. Maybe I'll start letting the machine pick up when I don't recognize the number...

The Great Big Sucking Vortex of the Last 48 Hours

Hannah came home from school on Thursday at about 2 with two classmates in tow to work on a class project. That's when she informed me that she had taken a spill in the hall at school and her arm hurt, just above her wrist. I wrapped it up with the bandage left over from when she sprained her other wrist last fall and gave her a cold pack and an ibuprofen. She held her arm still all afternoon, but otherwise she seemed ok, ok enough to do a half-assed job on her project and watch videos online with her friends. I tried to call the pediatrician's office but didn't manage to get through, so I figured we'd keep it wrapped and wait and see.

Just before her friends were going to leave, she discovered that her mouse Dickerchen, aka Vanessa, was dead in her cage. That night, Hannah wanted to sleep with us. The next morning, she discovered that the other mouse, Isabelle, aka Pipsqueak, was also dead. Friday morning was rough. When Pipsqueak developed her tumor, we had started discussing where we could possibly bury her. There is no yard attached to our apartment, just a square of dirt next to the front door that is mostly taken up with a giant pine and a bunch of bushes, but Hannah didn't want to put the mice there because she thinks it is full of refuse from passing teenagers. (She has a pretty poor opinion of teenagers for someone who claims she basically is one.) John and I had been thinking we could take them up to the woods, but Hannah didn't want them to get dug up by wild animals, or for someone to come along and mess with the marker she had made, and she thought it was too far to go to visit them. Hannah asked me if we could bury them on the balcony in the same pot with one of the walnut trees, so that is where we interred them.



John and I had wanted to go for a short hike with the other May Day celebrants in our village, but Hannah complained of grief, depression, tummy ache, diarrhea, and pretty much everything short of plague. She didn't look like she felt very well, but she is averse to physical activity and the great outdoors, so we weren't completely sure that it wasn't a put-on, but we stayed home and went ahead and cancelled our dinner-date for that evening. Then she started complaining that her arm hurt, so we ended up taking her to the emergency room (May 1 is a holiday). An x-ray showed that she has a Radiuswulstfraktur, which I think roughly translates to a green-stick fracture. She ended up with a shoulder-to-hand cast.



The whole emergency room trip took about 4 hours, even though it didn't seem especially busy there. We went back and forth between the examining room and various waiting rooms, and since we weren't sure when we might be called for the different procedures, we didn't want to leave to go find some dinner, even though Hannah was starving. We were finally able to eat at about 8 and then drive home.

I have to do the grocery shopping this morning before taking Hannah back to the ER to have the cast checked again. Then on Tuesday we go to the orthodontist to have a new mold made of Hannah's teeth for her activator. Then on Wednesday we go back to the ER for one last check of the cast, then she should get the cast off 3 days after her birthday. *sigh* This is going to be some long-lasting suck.

Facebook and all that

I have been thinking about writing a post about facebook for a while, trying to formulate my thoughts in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a drooling idiot—too late!—but I guess I will just have to blunder my way through this and hope it makes a little sense.

When I joined facebook, it was at the behest of a friend and former co-worker. She had joined at the behest of yet a third friend. Neither of us did much posting, and I didn’t search out any other potential fb friends. Mostly, I just let it molder. As a matter of fact, if I wanted to check my account, I had to go back through my email to find her original invitation, because I hadn’t bothered to bookmark it. That was roughly my first 6 months on facebook.

Later I discovered that Yoda (formerly known as WesTexGirl, not yet known as a symbol), with whom I’ve been friends since the 6th grade, was also on facebook, so I friended her. I friended my husband, who is probably more the original target demographic since his friends list consisted mostly of friends from his grad school days. I got most of my fb friends after that through one of them.

I’ve been very reticent about embracing facebook: I don’t have my maiden name posted, I don’t look for new fb friends, I don’t use the suggested friend function, I don’t use many of the applications. For one thing, I don’t need another time suck. For another, I don’t see the point of a lot of it. Don’t get me wrong: I liked people I went to school with (or worked with), and they liked me, but it was a vanillla-ice-cream kind of liking. No one actively hates vanilla ice cream. But I can’t see devoting a lot of my time to a big bowl of virtual vanilla ice cream.

I have tried to limit my friends list to the chocolate-covered coffee beans—and if you are reading this, you are a dark-chocolate-covered espresso bean!—but the occasional scoop of vanilla has snuck in. The people who are vanilla ice cream to me might be baked Alaska to someone else, but I don’t know them well enough to be aware of that. And they probably don’t know that I am Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream. I am loathe even here, in the sanctuary of my own personal blog, to let my freak flag fly, so you can image how much blander I am over there. I really am vanilla ice cream on facebook.

Once you are stuck in the sugar-cone of facebook, it is really hard to break free from the unending banality of "here’s a picture of my cat" and "I had soup for dinner". (Of course, you could say that about 99% of the non-political content on the internet in general.) There have been times when I have wanted to ask more questions of people I have re-friended on there, but I would feel like a tool bringing stuff up after weeks and months of being friended and years of being not-friended. Maybe I am just overthinking things.

The last point was brought home to me by a message I got from someone I had been close with all the time I was growing up in West Texas, but who I had let drift away in the intervening years. We became fb friends, but I felt awkward and didn’t know how to get past the vanilla-ice-cream stage, so I just let it stay that way. She showed me that she is a Frappuccino by making the first move. I really hope that we can reconnect, although I can’t imagine doing it through facebook alone. But I will say that for the Frappuccinos who are brave enough to take the first step (obviously not me), facebook can at least provide you with a place in which to take it.

Britain's Got Talent

By now, most people have seen Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent, but I bet you haven't seen this.

Fixed for now

Well, it looks like I got my blog graphics organized the way I wanted for now. It will probably be a while before I have time to change it again, so get used to it!

Hannah's mouse was limping around for about a day and generally listless, but she perked up again and seems to be doing ok now. But mouse 2's tumor is getting even bigger. She still moves around unimpeded, but it looks horrible. Hannah is changing their litter as I type.

I went out on the balcony this morning and cleaned all the yellow pollen off the rails, the tile floor, the top of the dryer, the window ledges, and the drying rack, all so I could do a little laundry and use the drying rack and not have yellow mud forming on the tile. Then, since I was already filthy, I repotted some plants, planted some new seeds, and was generally Jenny Green-Thumb. I am stoked because I already have some little yellow blossoms on my canteloupe plants, which I grew from seeds I collected from a store-bought canteloupe. I love melon!

Maybe tomorrow I will be able to do more than one thing.

Graphic Disaster

Just a quick note to say that I realize something is amiss with my garden gnomes along the left side, but I don't have the time to fix it right now. I hope to get to it soon, but in the meanwhile, here's a tip: it will sit in the proper place if you open the browser window to full-screen and close the favorites sidebar.

I got a nice note about my editing work (I'm doing a "superb job"--yay!) and am raring to get back to work after being totally useless yesterday due to bad sleep, headache, and allergies/cold.

Ps. Now Hannah's other mouse is looking ill. Will take her (and maybe the lumpy mouse) to the vet later today when Hannah is home (she gets out early today).

What a Cock-Up

I stayed up too late last night, so I didn't get enough sleep, so I didn't work on my editing job this morning before heading out to my student job at 9. But, I did print out some stuff for the editing job and for my thesis to work on while sitting in the student office, waiting for other work to come in. Only, I apparently left the printing at home. So I am sitting here with (almost) nothing to do and an hour to do it in. *sigh*

Plus Hannah is bringing a friend home with her after school, so I have to do a modicum of cleaning when I get home, just to prevent the friend (and the rest of us, I guess) from being engulfed in dust bunnies and killer pollen fuzzies.

And the Romance Languages Department next door is having a student rally to bitch (rightly) about the poor teacher to student to chairs ratio in their department. Did I mention they are right next door? And that we share a courtyard? And that the student office is on the courtyard side of the building? Even with my MP3 player going, there's lots of noise. I guess it is just as well I forgot my stuff at home. It might be hard to concentrate with all the speechifying going on outside my window.

Drive-By the First

I am waist-deep in work at the moment, but I will try to pop in when I can. Right now, I am waiting for some water to boil so I can blanche some tomatoes for soup.

Went back to the orthodontist with Hannah, and we are looking at 3-5 years of treatment, depending on how well Hannah keeps up her end of things. She'll be in a retainer [make that an activator--ed.] for the first year to pull her lower jaw forward. Then she'll get braces. I don't know if she'll have them on the bottom, but definitely on the top to push her front teeth back into position and to pull one of her incisors down into place (it is growing out of the side of her gum right now).

For people who fear socialized medicine: our insurance will pay 80% over the course of treatment, and if Hannah does everything she is supposed to, i.e., has a good outcome, they will reimburse us for the other 20% at the end. Just sayin'...

Adventures in Dentistry

I got Hannah and myself in to see the dentist for some way overdue check-ups, and he referred her to an orthodontist. We went in for the initial x-rays and impressions but have to wait until next time for the photos. I am pretty sure they are going to put her in braces, but we won’t know the full extent until her next appointment during Easter break. She seemed ok with the idea at first, but she had a minor freak-out about it one day when we were arguing about her study habits, so I don’t know how she is going to handle the up-coming consult. Please cross your fingers for her.

My check-up went about the same as always: x-rays, which always pinch my gums and hurt more than any other dental work short of dental surgery; more appointments set for a cleaning and a few cavities. At the cleaning, I started to wonder how long the hygienist could leave her fingers in my mouth before my saliva would start to dissolve them. It’s the first step in digestion, you know. John has been giving me a hard time about that ever since, especially after my revelation at an earlier visit.

At the first filling appointment, I got an old amalgam filling drilled out and a new composite filling put in. It looks really good—you’d never even know it wasn’t my tooth. That was on a molar, and everything went normally. The dentist offered me a shot, but the sound of the drill bothers me more than the actual drilling, and a shot won’t help that, so I said no. He said most women say no. Then I had an appointment to fix some cavities on my front teeth (well, one front and the one next to it to the side—I don’t know tooth names). I thought I was going to get the top of my head pulled off. At one point, there were 4 hands, multiple tools, and maybe a foot up in there. It was crowded! My jaw is still a bit sore up where it hinges, but my teeth look good, so that’s a mercy.

My dentist gave me instructions on a slightly more complicated method of brushing and a prescription for a special toothbrush. It looks like a tiny bottle brush, and I shove it between my molars instead of flossing back there. I had no idea there was so much space between them! So now my dental hygiene routine is ridiculously long. If you have been wondering where I’ve been, probably cleaning my teeth.

Ps. When the dentist handed me a mirror to look at my teeth, I also noticed that an amazingly long hair was sticking out of my nose. I don't normally patrol my nose, I just wait until my immediate family members make some kind of horrified comment before taking any kind of nose-action, but this was bad. And of course, the dentist had been staring into my mouth and ostensibly also up my nose for about an hour, minus the 10 minutes he disappeared and no one knew where he went. *sigh*

I am a Lush

…fan. Despite the fact that I can’t actually stand going into a Lush shop, just like I can’t stand spending more than 5 seconds near the perfume counter in a department store. Total olfactory overload. But the extreme scent output has a plus-side: I often use Lush as a smell-landmark when walking through town. "Ok, I can smell Lush, so I must be near X." This is one reason why John and Hannah’s birthday gift to me this year was not as much of a surprise as they had been hoping: one whiff of the car’s interior when they picked me up, and I knew exactly where they had been. You don’t forget a smell like that.

But even though it wasn’t exactly a surprise, the big box o’ Lush products was appreciated. The bath bombs are really cool and fizzy, but the Supernova leaves little strips of confetti in your bathwater. Somehow, that had less of a "party in the tub" and more of a "fell in a puddle at Mardi Gras" feel to it, but the water does end up pink. I had to get a drain strainer from the kitchen before I could drain the tub, though.

Lush tries to be environmentally friendly, so they use real popcorn as packing material. Hannah took one look inside the freshly opened box and made a grab for some of it, totally ignoring all the slips of paper warning her not to eat it. "Tastes soapy." *spit* Hmmm … a box full of loose popcorn cushioning unwrapped bars of soap. Soapy, you say? An unexpected bonus: I poured the popcorn in the organic recycling bin under the sink, and the Lush smell neutralized the usual vomit-y smell in there.

I stowed the cardboard box with the dwindling supply of soaps in the bathroom cabinet, and now everything else that is stored in there also smells like Lush: boxes of kleenexes, John’s shaving bag, our table linens. It’s quite refreshing to clean your nose with a Lush-laden tissue. I wonder what the cats think of the scent-bomb in the bathroom…

The Wheels on the Bus

...aren't nearly as interesting as the characters on the bus. Who did we have today?

1. The girl who thinks she is LaFee (a German singer)



but whose make-up ends up looking like one of those Harlequin clowns.

2. This really good-looking African guy who I never notice until he is getting off the bus, and staring at that point is both awkward and futile.

3. A guy in a tri-corner hat, carrying a spear, a sword, and a lantern, and reading a novel. I thought he was going to a Revolutionary War reenactment--in Germany?!--but John pointed out that he could be one of those tour guides in period costumes. Like this.



Yes, a guy in an 18-th century costume and a girl with eye-liner doodles on her cheek have been the highlight of the week. So sad.

Nasty Break-Up in the Works

Nick* and I are having a bit of a lover’s quarrel at the moment, and I’ve decided we could really use some time apart. I mean, he said he’d be showing up with a new episode of Winx yesterday, yet when I greeted him at the agreed-upon 3:15 pm, he only had fucking Drake and Josh. I mean, hel-lo? I totally hate that show.** And last week, he told me he’d be there with Winx at 4:45 pm, M-F, yet this Monday he apparently decided he really meant 3:15 pm, and didn’t I check his web site, Baby, he can’t be sending commercials every time he decides to change the programming. Sheesh!

Anyhow, I’ve decided to go with my back-up lover, the master’s thesis. He makes me feel better about myself, although I will miss the excitement and the romance. He is the Colonel Brandon to Nick’s Willoughby.

And I know Nick is thinking I will come crawling back to him when he starts waving Avatar in front of me at the end of the month, but by then, I’ll be all, “Nick who?” Smell ya later, Nick!


* Nickelodeon, duh!
** Drake is supposed to be a hottie who can do no wrong, but he is just a dick. And the little sister, Megan, is a psycho. And Josh is constantly being abused. It is all just wrong!

Fourteen

Day 1





Day 5114

From my reading: the federal spending addition

I just read an article in the NYTimes, "A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money", about Earl E. Devaney, the inspector general of the Interior Department, who is now in charge of keeping track of the money paid out from the stimulus package. There are two web sites mentioned in the article, both of which will track spending and outcomes:

Recovery.gov, the Interior Department site

StimulusWatch.org, an independent site

I will definitely be bookmarking these sites and checking them often.

And along those lines, here is a site with a poster that shows federal spending:
Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go

Super Quick Update

...while the rice is cooking.

I delivered Hannah to the train station this morning for her class trip. She called around 5 to say she was having a good time and had been awarded a "ranger certification" for snowshoe-ing or birdhouse building or something. So 2 nights and 2 full days more of Hannah-less-ness.

In No Particular Order

I slipped on some ice 2 weeks ago and landed on my knee. I hadn't realized how much kneeling I do around here until my injury, which caused me to jump up or fall over every time I had to fish something out from under the sofa or the bench. The bruising was gone after about 10 days, and I can kneel again now with minimal soreness. Stupid ice!


Hannah's class is going on their class trip starting next Monday. They are going to Freiburg to ski and visit the Roman exhibit at the museum. The teacher decided that his original plan--going to Cologne and Bonn in June--was too ambitious, but the realities of trying to book space at the hostel in Freiburg meant we got kind of short notice (about 3 weeks, one of which was during a school vacation). I forced Hannah to buy a new hat and to promise to actually wear it while outdoors. We also bought new snow boots, not a simple task at the end of the winter season. She wasn't too thrilled about skiing at first--what is she ever thrilled about?--but I think she is looking forward to the trip now.


Winx is back on the air! It must have started on Monday, because on Tuesday we happened to be watching Nick and the second episode from the first season came on. Woo! Welcome back, Nick addiction!


Hannah and friends came up with the idea of joining the school newspaper and talked the older kids on the newspaper staff into taking them on. There weren't any underclassman on the paper, and Hannah and friends thought they would like to be represented. Hannah seems to be the spokesman for the group and has already written a short article about the recent spate of graffiti at the school. She also has 12 pages of a spy novel written, and she says that her alternate career path (to being a cook) is to be a journalist; after she's made a name for herself in that career, she'll publish her novel, make a ton of money, and retire. Riiiight. At least she found an extracurricular activity to take an interest in, since ballet and Swedish didn't seem to do it for her.


We got an auto-parts circular in the our mailbox the other day, and there was a whole section on marten-protection for your car. (I particularly like the photo on this product: it looks like the marten wants to break into the car and steal the radio, not chew on some delicious rubber parts.) In case you are wondering, a marten is like a weasel. Wikipedia (neither in English nor in German) doesn't say anything about it being a threat to vehicles, but then again, we had mice in our AC system once, and I doubt that would get a mention in Wikipedia either.


We're at that horrible time of year when spring keeps putting its head up and then getting whacked back down, like a seasonal whack-a-mole. Yesterday I tried going out without a hat, but by the time I headed home again, I was wishing I had it with me. And don't get me started on the open window in the ladies' toilet in the English Department! Brisk is one thing, but having your ass frozen onto the seat is another. The neighbors facing us across the street have yards that tell us when we are creeping up on spring: the yard on the left floods from an underground spring, and the yard on the right sprouts crocuses. Both are entertaining in their own way.


I recently bought and set up a wireless router for our apartment, but we discovered that John's laptop didn't have a wireless card installed, so he has been tethered to the router with a cable for a week or two. I finally was able to find a card for his laptop in the States, and after a week underway, it got here Tuesday. Since John is working hell-for-leather on a translation job, I had to wait until the evening to try to install the card. I opened up the laptop, plugged in the card, attached the antennae, and... nothing. The next day, I downloaded the correct driver, fired it up, and... nothing again. Argh! John's laptop has a switch on the side for turning on the wireless connection, but the LED never came on when I switched it on. I turned to the Internet, where I found an ingenious solution that involved taping over some of the pins on the wireless card. And it worked! Even though my laptop is newer and came with a wireless card installed, I had a lot more problems getting my wireless Internet up and running than his. I guess that is mostly because I already had to adjust a bunch of junk on John's machine when I installed the software for the wireless router earlier (even though John was using it as a LAN connection). Anyhow, snaps for me! Like I told John, it seems scary to mess around with stuff on the computer since I am not especially computer literate, but I will do almost ANYTHING--cooking, sewing, reading music, computer troubleshooting--if I have some kind of directions. And it paid off! (Sorry, I'm still jazzed about the whole thing.)

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

After 2 nights of obvious dreams—someone stepping over me on the ground in a sleeping bag trod on my hair, me begging WesTexGirl to put a good word in for me with her mother the ex-barber—and weeks of being annoyed at finding 2-foot-long hairs on everything I own, not to mention the many incidents of getting my hair caught in the fan in the back of the hairdryer (ouch!), I finally broke down last week and got out the sewing scissors. That’s right, I went from this (thanks to Hannah)




To this



Hannah says it makes me look younger, which I don’t know about, but it does make me less crazy, and that’s worth it to me. It is still long enough to put in a ponytail, but not long enough to get caught under my shoulders when I roll over in bed, so that has saved me from having to wake up every time I want to roll over in the night. Win!

Kickin' it at home

Back in January, the city library closed for a 5-month renovation (only 4 more months to go!). The library wisely put the word out that patrons should stock up for the long, dry period, partly for the customer-service aspect, and partly so they wouldn’t have to move all the books to storage. We unwisely waited until the next-to-last open day to do our stocking-up. There were no DVDs at all (I think they may have been moved to one of the smaller branches), no English books, and the kids section was like a ghost town. John was able to find a big ole stack of travel books—checked out on my card! So now the library thinks I am obsessed with bicycling through Bavaria, etc. Hannah scrounged up several kids’ books, but it would take a shipping container to hold 5 months of reading for her, so that hasn’t actually helped with the bedtime what-to-read routine. I was reduced to scavenging through the cookbooks. I actually like to cook and would like to be able to make more traditional German recipes, so it wasn’t too much of a hardship. I found a cookbook with some *very* German-looking baked goods, so I thought I would try it out. So far, I have made one really delicious item and one really dense item, but since we are talking about German baked goods, I may have actually made it correctly.

No, the main enjoyment has come from the cookbook itself. For some reason, the producers of the second-most popular German soap opera, Unter Uns (“In Private” or “Between You and Me”; the first-most popular is Gute Zeiten—Schlechte Zeiten (“Good Times—Bad Times”)), decided that a cookbook full of photos of the characters from the show was just what the public wanted. I’ll let you decide.

Here’s the happy family:


Who needs water to surf?


Hey—Wham called. George Michael wants his hair back.


Now take a guess at the date of these photos.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

John and I were guessing mid-80s. *1996* is when the book was published, and the show first aired in 1994. Mind. Boggling.

Now, to complete the horror for you, I present the top of the page for the recipe for a pie made out of chocolate-covered marshmallows (here’s what they look like on the inside):


Oh my god—my eyes! That puppet totally creeps me out. Even if I were inclined to make the recipe—which I am not; can you say “diabetes”?—I don’t think I could stand around in the kitchen with the page open long enough to manage it. I am thinking of paper-clipping the 2 pages together so they don’t accidentally fall open.

Dream a Little Dream of Wee

I have always had vivid, complex dreams, and I can normally pinpoint what is contributing to them. For instance, before my dermatologist appointment, I had the tentacle-mole dream; before my GYN appointment, I dreamed I picked at a pimple-like bump on my breast and a big hole opened up and the contents of my breast fell out and turned to yellow dust. When I have a little guilt over being such a bad correspondent with my friends back home, they show up in my dreams. Thanks for the reminders, Subconscious!

But there's one frequent dream-and-variation that has left me scratching my head. Try to imagine, if you will, the dirtiest, nastiest, most disgusting public toilet you have ever encountered. Now multiply that by 30 stalls, none with doors, paper, or seats, and most containing floaters. Now find one toilet you could talk yourself into hovering over, but then notice it has no or low walls and is in the middle of a busy public thoroughfare or a men's locker room, after you've pulled your pants down. I have this dream all the time. This morning, I finally realized what it is: the don't-piss-the-bed dream. Despite peeing every night immediately before bed and being a light sleeper--light enough that needing to pee would definitely wake me up--my Barbie teacup-sized bladder has joined up with my subconscious, and they have decided not to take any chances on an adult bed-wetting episode, hence the yuck-tastic dreams.

I'm going to the dentist next week. I'm sure I will have a nightmare involving giant tooth-zombies.

Broken-Hearted Nee

While looking something up for Hannah on the German Nick web site, I discovered that both Winx and Avatar have been taken off the air. Noooooooooo! Nick, why have you forsaken me?!

To add insult to injury, Nick decided to give a second season to a really awful show called Genie in the House. Now, I'm sure that the actors and writers are lovely people--they call their grandmothers, take good care of their pets, floss. BUT, I've seen more interesting writing on the wall of a public toilet, and William Shatner could take some over-acting tips from the cast. This is supposed to fill the shoes of Avatar*. This is a Nick UK production, and you have to wonder about the state of British comedy if the nation that brought us Monty Python and Black Adder has now been reduced to a one-trick children's show.

At least there's still Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide and Zoey 101, for a little while.

* I will miss Winx, but I recognize that it is definitely not in the same league with Avatar. Let me put it this way: if Avatar is a 3-course meal in a 5-star restaurant, Winx is Hubba Bubba.

Hannah cracks me up

I don't often have it together enough to jot down Hannah's non-stop stream of hilarity, but you guys lucked out this time.

Hannah was sick a few days last week, so she was home on Friday--already on the mend--with John, who got side-swiped by whatever crud she had. When I got home from teaching, she told me that she had been taking good care of John, keeping him in tea and Muppets. (The Muppet Show was still running when I walked in.)

Then, more recently, she had unbraided my hair for me while I was sitting on the couch and commented that she liked it better loose--"You look wise, like a little hairy Buddha." Thanks!

Futzing around

I realized a long time ago that I have very little talent in the area of the fine arts. But that doesn't stop me from making weird arts and crafts in my free time. (I *will* finish my video clip of Gandolf and the Balrog, someday.) I really love wrapping paper, so I have been trying out the art of collage.* You might have noticed my previous attempts at changing the background to this blog. I think I have it down now, though. Enjoy.

*I think collage won't hurt the copyright of the wrapping paper artists. I hope.

Favorite Graffiti

I wanted to take a photo of my favorite graffiti here in our village, but it got painted over before I could. But the section of fresh paint will always remind me of the message:

"Günther, why??"

You have to wonder what ole Günther was up to:

• broke up with someone


• ran over someone's dog


• slept with someone's sister


• put Michael Jackson on his iPod

Such a brief message, and yet so fertile for the imagination!

HATE!

Let me say right now just how much I hate this ad for an inauguration party last week. HATE! I even labeled this photo "Hate" on my hard drive. I'll give you one guess as to why. I took down the 2 copies of this flier that were in the English department and asked John to get the 1 I had seen in his department. (And then I post it on the Internet for the whole world to see.)

Oddly enough, this ad was put up by the German-American Institute (DAI) here in our town. *boggles*

The part I find offensive is the name of a band. Actually, it's not that I find the band's name *offensive* per se, but I think the juxtaposition of the name with Obama's picture was really poor judgement on the part of the DAI. It bothered me a lot. I haven't ever heard of the band before, so I can't imagine they are really that huge. Why couldn't the DAI make a different band the headliner? (Of course, I don't know which bands were there--probably Satan Eats Your Soul and Americans are My Bitch. *g*)

That is my rant of the week.

Oh, yeah...

I went to the dermatologist today, and all of my moles look fine. So no skin cancer. Yay me!

Winter has us in its clutches

We got some snow about a week ago, enough that Hannah could go sledding once.



There was snow on the ground for a week, people! Right after it snowed, a high pressure system moved in and froze everything.



In Holland, the canals have frozen over, for the first time in like a dozen years, I think I heard. Here in Germany, a lot of the rivers have frozen, bringing ship traffic to a halt. There was a segment on CNN yesterday about ice breakers having to let through coal ships so the power plants have enough fuel.



Even the Neckar has sheets of ice on it. Here’s the collection of photos I took on Tuesday.


Yesterday it snowed for a few hours, adding to the overall whiteness, coldness, and wetness.

Today it warmed up, and the ice on the Neckar broke up into small sheets that look like paving stones. I guess if you weren’t worried about drowning, you could hop, skip, and jump across the river on them.

And so ends the story of my descent into winter madness.

Except I just remembered that even my 5L watering can is full of ice and frozen down to the tiles on the balcony. WHYYYY??? Oh, yeah, because I keep filling it with the run-off from the condensation clothes dryer.

Bye-Bye, Brunette

You may remember that Hannah talked me into putting semi-permanent black dye on her hair 2 summers ago.




Over the xmas holidays, she pestered me into giving it another try. Here, her last moments as a natural brunette:




And here she is in mid-dye:



I have to make a note that we should have bought 2 bottles of dye. One problem is that I have no idea what I am actually doing, but Hannah has SO MUCH HAIR. Her hair is thick like John's (almost as thick as her Aunt Kee's), so it was impossible to get the dye over all the layers.

Want to guess what color she ended up with?




The bottle says “pomegranate red”, but I like to call it “strawberry shortcake”:




She was disappointed that no one noticed the new color when she went for a play date last week—that didn’t stop her from pointing it out herself—but she got a gratifying round of “no way!” when she went back to school yesterday. It’s nice to be validated.

Wii Updatery

Well, the Rock Band software arrived, and John and Hannah broke out the instruments and started jamming. Only, the microphone didn’t work, so I should be hearing from the store where I bought the Instrument Edition when their shipment of replacement microphones comes in. From what I read online, the microphone is the weak link in the kit.

Hannah, as drummer, insisted on being the leader of the band, and she took her responsibility very seriously. Here is the contract she forced John to sign:

“I, (your name there ->) Mickey Mouse, do promise my Soul, my heart and my Music to the band leader and manager, Hannah S.”

He knew she meant business when she booted him out of the band until he signed. She had stored the contract in the box the instruments came in, but John went crazy straightening up before our company came over yesterday and burned up all the cardboard packaging that was still lying around, so now we have to find a different place to put it.

First we need to get rid of our ridiculously big xmas tree that is taking up a sizable chunk of the floor space in our living room so we have space to store the drum kit, etc. The volunteer fire department won’t come until Jan. 10, though, to tote it off, and I don’t know what other alternatives there are, so I guess we’ll have to tough it out for about 8 more days until we can take it down.

Hannah seems to like the Mii part of the Wii better than the actual games. She has made about 40 avatars, covering the 3 of us, several alternate personalities, and at least one avatar per letter of the alphabet, giving us Zoey and Xena to pick from. I did not appreciate her creating an alternate for me with my real name, gray hair, lots of wrinkles, and short and squat. She may think it is a good likeness, but I pay out the allowance around here, and she would do well to remember that.

She claimed when she started adding all the extras that she would rather have avatars of her own making as opponents in the various Wii Sports games, and not just the random Wii figures. But I know that she totally digs anything resembling Sims. She even used part of her xmas money from Gwamma to buy Sims 2 for her Nintendo DS. Five minutes into her first time on it, she was getting a shake-down from the Mafia in the hotel she was running. Who designs these games?

Since then, she has been making pictures for an art gallery inside her hotel. The people who have been buying her pictures include one fan (a crazy pirate) and one hater (who calls her work vulgar and buys it to prevent it from coming to the attention of the public at large). Like I already said, who designs this stuff?

Maybe the new DS Sims will keep her off my laptop and her old Sims game so I can get more of my own stuff done.

A Rockin’ Chocolate New Year’s Eve

We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends down the street, bringing along some friends from Sweden. Not wanting to overload our hosts, we offered to bring some of the food and the dessert. I baked some yummy cupcakes and chopped about 5 pounds of fruit to dip in the chocolate fountain John gave me for xmas. But first Hannah and I hit the marked-down xmas candy.

Here you see the half-price chocolate Santas marching to their doom.



Here Hannah prepares the sacrifices.



And here are the happy celebrants.



Finally, here are some tips on using the chocolate fountain, if you are ever so decadent as to purchase one, like us:
1. Make sure your chocolate is broken into very small pieces. Letting the children smash the chocolate Santas does not lead to very small pieces. Large pieces take forever to melt directly in the fountain, and you will end up getting a heat-gun out of your tool shed to speed the process up. As our friend said, it is part of the modern woman’s kitchen.
2. Even faster is melting the chocolate in the microwave first. Then you don’t have kids popping in every 30 seconds to pester you about the state of the fountain.
3. Cover everything in a 5-foot radius of the fountain in plastic. There will be drips, drops, and splats. The fountain really should come packaged with stain remover.
4. Fondue forks work pretty well for dipping fruit into hot (well, warm), melted chocolate without suffering burns, but some fruit is a bit too soft to dip well without breakage/smushing, like kiwi. Cupcake bites are right out.
5. Hot water does wonders in cleaning solidified milk chocolate off stainless steel if you don’t have a 9-year-old with a turbo-metabolism and a sweet tooth at hand.

Weird to be back

Hey, y'all! (As Britney Spears would say. Or Britney Spears as interpreted by the Fug Girls. Which is actually weird of me to bring up, because I have only looked at, like, 3 blogs since I went cold turkey a month ago.)

All those asides aside, I seem to have survived my horrendous semester so far. I still don't have a grade back on my one exam, and I still have to study for and pass my second exam, so there is still plenty of time for me to crash and burn scholastically before the end of the semester, but for now I am not worrying about it. John and Hannah have toddled off for groceries, and I am trying to remember how this thing called "blogging" works while I have some time on my hands for the evening.

For xmas, John bought me a chocolate fountain, which I hope works as cool as it sounds. Hannah insisted on going with John to the store this evening--we normally have to bribe her to come along--so she could pounce on the left-over choco-Santas to feed into the fountain. We have unverified plans for company at New Year's, and we were thinking of using the choco-fountain as the dessert centerpiece, with fruit and such for dipping into the cascades of cocoa-y delights.

In other xmas-y news, Hannah hates the city's decorations downtown.



These lights hang over the middle of the street her school is on, and she calls them "Death Stars": "I am afraid those death stars are going to fall down and puncture my flesh." Yes, that is something we are all afraid of.

Another thing she hates about winter is the Winter-scented Charmin her father mangages to sniff out (ha ha! see how I did that?) each year and drag home by the car-full. "Great! Now bears are going to be attracted to my pine-cone-smelling butt." Not too many bears in this neck of the woods, but maybe Hannah should stay away from Bavaria and the Tirol.

We had a nice, quiet xmas at home this year. I color-coded the wrapping paper this year, and Hannah didn't manage to guess which color was hers before the big unveiling, so I guess I was successful. She was guessing blue, because there was a big package wrapped in blue under the tree. In kid logic, big=kid's, right?



What she didn't know was that the red package next to the big blue one held a Wii. The big blue one just held a Wii game--Rock Band. Unfortunately, the instrument pack did not come with the game software--I managed to not notice the large, red sticker on the package announcing that--so we had to make a special amazon-run yesterday. It should be here on Monday, and then we will rock!

Until then, we'll have to make due with Samba-ing.



At John's request, I made a goose. It was really easy to roast, and I made some delicious roast potatoes in the drippings, but it was a bitch to cut up and serve, and there wasn't really all that much meat on it. And it was rather expensive. It cost me about 8 bucks per person, which hurt my penny-pinching little soul. It was pretty, though, no?



At least we got some sunshine on xmas day.



Hannah thought that if we couldn't have a white xmas, we should at least have a dismal gray one that looked like it was trying to be white. I, for one, was glad of the sunshine, even though it only lasted part of the day.

After being extra good and loving for two whole days, Hannah was starting to show a few cracks around the edges yesterday evening. I called her Grumpy Smurf, and she replied, "No, Smurfette-on-her-period-grumpy." Hannah identifies so strongly female that she refuses to be called male in any form or fashion, so she had to come up with a grumpy alternative, even if it meant thinking about Smurfette in a completely new way.

Oral Exams are Done!

Yay! That means 6 topics are over and done with. Hooray!

I took the English exam last week and made a pretty good grade. Which is weird, because I was super nervous the whole time, and I started shaking toward the end like I had caught a chill. Also, I started my period 5 minutes--not joking--before going into my professor's office, so that was a good start to an hour-long exam.

I did the German exam today, and I totally choked. That faint gagging sound that woke you up around 3 am? That was me. I passed the exam, but I am so glad it is over. I told John I'd have to wake up with the plague in order to surpass last week's pre-exam unpleasantness, but really I was hoping I'd wake up with the plague so I wouldn't have to go through with it.

The strange thing is that after the English exam, I felt all elated and tearful and just overly emotional. Today, I felt completely empty afterword. No music in my head--as opposed to last night when I was trying to get to sleep--no sense of relief. Just nothing. I guess that's better than self-recrimination, because I know if I had gotten on the ball sooner, I could have pulled it off in German. Well, that's water under the bridge now.

So next up is catching up on all the proofreading I promised people this month and all the housecleaning I've put off over the last few weeks. But first some lunch. Cheerio!

Somebody's Checking Out!

I am giddy with relief that the presidential election is over and that Obama has been elected our next president.

Moving on, I am putting my blogs on hiatus at least through November. I have so much to do, I feel like I am coming apart at the seams. I still have half of that dissertation to edit, plus a 30+ page article to edit for my student job, and 3 English courses per week to teach, on top of studying for my exams. And in case the last bit doesn’t actually sound too bad to you, check out my schedule for the rest of the semester, *just for the exams*:

Nov. 11: 45-minute PowerPoint presentation in German on suppletion and morphological markedness

Nov. 20: 1-hour oral exam in English on 4 topics
15 minutes on Toni Morrison
15 minutes on 18th-century women writers
15 minutes on cognitive semantics
15 minutes on language change

Nov. 26: 1-hour oral exam in German on 2 topics
30 minutes on locative adverbials
30 minutes on cognitive approaches to second language-learning pedagogy

Dec. 18: 5-hour written exam in German on topic from Nov. 11 presentation

Jan. 8: 5-hour written exam in English on a linguistic topic (TBA)

Thinking about all the above, plus normal day-to-day stuff, makes me want to curl into my natural pill-bug form and sleep the winter away under a log somewhere. But since that is not really an option—since I want to finish my degree and my family likes clean clothes and eating—something else has to give. And that something is my Internet addiction. Bye, bye, blogs. Sayonara, favorites list. Catch you on the flip side, World Wide Web. I won’t be checking the email account for my blogs at all, and my personal yahoo account only infrequently. Since my students contact me via my gmail account, that is the only one I’ll be checking, and only once a day. I hope to be back, if only briefly, around Thanksgiving.

And to keep you from being too bored while I’m gone, here is a photo riddle.

John brought home flowers. What do you think?

Rose?



Overly trimmed cabbage?



Audrey II?



Discuss. See you in a few weeks.

Halloween

Hannah was very excited about Halloween this year. She made, unmade, and remade plans for the big day, including having a party, going to an amusement park's Halloween day, and finally setting for plain-ole trick-or-treating.

Getting a costume for her turned out to be a logistical nightmare. It's not like you can run out and get any type of costume here. Your choices basically boil down to witch or vampire, with the occasional skeleton here or there. Hannah insisted she wanted to be a Storm Trooper. **insert sound of dismayed silence** And of course she found a costume on an expensive, American costume site. I thought Toys R Us might have it here, but Hannah insisted they wouldn't. She also claimed that she had gone to a department store at the bus stop and checked their costumes with no luck (see witch, above). Finally, since I was ordering her some clothes from Target, I checked their costumes, and there was the Storm Trooper, on sale even. Target doesn't mail internationally, so LMIL forwarded the stuff to us last Thursday via Express Mail.

So far, so good, right?

Wrong. The package came before Halloween, but it is sitting in Customs. We got the notice in the mail ON Halloween AFTER the Customs office closed for the weekend.

BUT, on Thursday, Hannah and I had found--wait for it--a STORM TROOPER COSTUME at the department store she had previously been to, but in their toy department. So on Friday afternoon, I ran out and bought the local costume:



She caught the bus down to her friend's house later that afternoon, and they trick-or-treated their way back up the hill to our house. They managed to get a pretty good haul, despite the fact that Halloween is not a big holiday here. People who didn't have candy dug into their pantries and refrigerators and change purses: I think they ended up with 2 new packages of cookies, a full bag of gummy bears (not individually wrapped), and over 9 Euros in small change.



Then they hung out here until her friend's mom came to pick her up after 11. Our doorbell only rang 2 or 3 times, despite having a glowing jack-o-lantern on our balcony. I expected it to act as a beacon for the little sugar-fiends, but there was a light rain all evening, so I guess that kept them indoors.



I cut the lid into this pumpkin, but Hannah did all the other work: scraping out the guts, designing the face, even making a mole hole next to the nose. She doesn't seem to have inherited my tendency to self-inflicted injuries, thank the 7 dwarves. We have lost the skull on our plastic skeleton, so Hannah did a little mix-and-match decorating with what we had.



The kids spent the rest of the evening gorging themselves on candy and watching Tim Burton movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice. I am such a wiener that I was having trouble staying awake until the friend's mom came, so who knows what they were doing between the end of the last movie and then, but the house is still standing this morning, so it couldn't have been too bad.

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!)