Not for Children

Here are a couple of links that I have been saving. They depict the Teletubbies and Sesame Street, but they are definitely NOT for children. Wait until your kids go to bed to look at these.

Teletubbies kill
A shooter game. Enough said.

Sesame Streets
A "trailer" for a "film" by Martin Scorcese. (Which means audio from _Taxi Driver_ tacked onto video for Sesame Street. Sacrilicious!)

Gobble! Gobble!

The turkey and I will have a lot in common on Thanksgiving Day:

We’ll both be lying on a table with our legs in unusual positions.

We’ll both be stuck with metal implements.

We’ll both have more of our insides seen than we might like.

We’ll both be glad the day only comes once a year.

Guess what I’ll be doing, and I’ll scrounge up a prize for the first one to guess right.

Man, it is a gorgeous day!

The sky is clear and blue,



the sun is warm and blinding,



and the trees are orange and yellow and brown.



What more could you ask for? Fog?



Snow?



Yes, those last two are actual recent photos.

More Online Quiz Results

You Are the Swedish Chef

"Bork! Bork! Bork!" Your happy and energetic - with borderline manic tendencies. No one really gets you. And frankly, you don't even get you. But, you sure can whip up a great chocolate mousse

The Muppet Personality Test

Blah to the Blah

Winter struck right in the middle of Hannah's school vacation last week, so we've been getting acclimated to the cold. But today it is also raining. Ick. At least I don't have to get out today (my class meets every other week). And Hannah is home sick with a tummy ache. I don't know if it is due to the tiny portion of pinto beans she had last night, or the lingering post-nasal drip, or some stomache bug, but she really does seem (mildly) ill, which means she doesn't feel well enough to flop. That is how we assess her level of illness: if she starts flopping, she's not as ill as she's claiming to be.

I made a big ol' to-do list (my short-term memory is not what it once was, although it is still better than John's) yesterday, and the checking off of many, many items was quite thrilling. Of course, I went to show Hannah how I had whittled down my list, and there was still 2 Palm screens worth. *sigh* But not all of it is pressing stuff.

And that's about it. It's been a dull, dull week.

Quiz results

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
The South
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have?

Housekeeping

Sometimes I wonder why I even jot notes in my Palm when I never go back and write them up in blog form. So in the interest of freeing up some memory on my Palm, here are the bits and pieces that have been floating around in there.

One of John’s former classmates visited us while she and her husband were on their “memory tour” of Germany over the summer. Hannah loves to play hostess, and she proceeded to tell them all about our apartment and to introduce them to our cats. “Eliza is a big titty baby.” John’s friends are so cultivated that they didn’t even know the expression. This means that John is a cracker x 2, because I certainly didn’t teach her to say that.

I was waiting to cross the street one day, and I heard someone singing along at top volume to Tenacious D’s “Tribute” (aka, The Best Song in the World). It was the last place in the world I expected to hear it. (Usually I listen to it at home on our computer.)

Why did the guy sitting behind me on the bus smell like cigarettes and melted gummi bears? Who can say?

In reference to the class-hijacker: WANKER! (Wish I were British so I could pull that off properly.)

Hannah had a temporary hatred of xmas candy recently. She desperately wanted me to buy her some Jelly Bellies (Bellys? Hell if I know) so she could try out their recipes, and she had finally talked me into it. Except the department store we went to—where we both knew there were floor-to-ceiling bins of jelly beans—had blocked access to the bins with their displays of xmas candy. For 2 days, Hannah would randomly burst out in an angry hiss, “I hate xmas candy!” until I found her a mixed bag of Jelly Bellies at the other location of the department store. Now xmas candy is AOK again.

We sometimes hear some loud scuffling around coming from upstairs, and we used to think it was our 2 cats. Lately we’ve noticed that it also happens when Missy Cat is downstairs (i.e., Eliza Cat is alone upstairs), so John and I naturally assumed that Eliza was merely possessed or deranged or otherwise having some sort of episode. Case closed. But Hannah has a better explanation (or at least more entertaining). An evil gnome who formerly lived on the roof managed to get into our apartment through an open window and now spends his time terrorizing and trying to eat our cats. It’s as good a theory as any, as far as I am concerned.

Hannah found her Disney princess paper dolls while on school vacation this last week and has gotten a surprising amount of entertainment out of them. Each princess—Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty—comes with a prince—labeled “Prince”, how helpful—and girls and boys both come with their own outfits for mixing and matching. The first thing Hannah did was to grant each couple a divorce and pair them back up with a new partner. One prince has gone AWOL, so I think Cinderella is still single. Then she arranged them on the couch so they could 1. watch the video of Cinderella with us, and 2. act in a movie of Hannah’s own devising. I don’t know what the movie was actually supposed to be about, because Hannah spent more of her time on her cell-phone (drawn on paper by herself), telling the producer to get off her back, she’s trying to work! And who can work with the producer calling every 2 minutes?! Sheesh! She quits!

I couldn’t find a correspondingly hideous photo on the Internet to illustrate the horror that my classmate unleashed on the rest of us, so you will just have to use your imagination to fill in the spaces in my description. Picture a purse, made of red “leather”, of the roundish, pouchy variety. Add a ruffled edge, still red “leather”, to the top, along with 2 dark-brown handles. Now add a wide stripe across its width, slightly below the center, a stripe made of leopard print, edged with more ruffles of red “leather”. Did you sprain your brain? Me, too.

Halloween in photos

Halloween baking


Edible pot of dirt plus worms and frogs (aka chocolate cake with chocolate sprinkles and marzipan pot and gummies).


Hannah’s first try at a costume. We guessed “chimney sweep”, but she was really a witch (note the broom).


Gruesome!


Hannah attends a Halloween party thrown by her best friend


Hannah sorts her loot

Happy happy, joy joy

Sometimes it is good to unload and get all the hate out—kind of like lancing a boil. Even though John claims people enjoy my occasional overflow of vitriol, I thought I would take this opportunity to help you get the taste of hate out of your mouth by listing a few of my favorite things. (In the interest of full disclosure, there are no kittens or packages or string on this list.)

You already know how I love the M song and “Mahna Mahna”, but here’s another Muppet classic, “Never Smile at a Crocodile.” I laugh like a toddler in diapers every time that croc munches up one of the frogs.

NEVER SMILE AT A CROCODILE
(Peter Pan)

Never smile at a crocodile
No, you can't get friendly with a crocodile
Don't be taken in by his welcome grin
He's imagining how well you'd fit within his skin

Never smile at a crocodile
Never dip your hat and stop to talk awhile
Never run, walk away, say good-night, not good-day
Clear the aisle but never smile at Mister Crocodile



Hannah. Enough said.



Halloween, which will get its own post soon.

Christmas socks.

Coffee.

Nee Hates on Everyone

I don’t know why I’ve been in such a bad mood lately. It’s like I had a double-portion of hate and a side order of annoyance, but it’s still sitting in my gut like a lump of poorly digested hate. Or something. Maybe it’s hormonal, or the start of winter, or the time change. You choose.

Or maybe it’s all of the above PLUS my husband. There is a perfect word for him in German: Nervensäge (lit. “nerve saw”). When I’m already in a foul mood, like yesterday, he likes to push my buttons until I’m literally raging with clenched fists and gritted teeth and everything, then he says, “You’re scary.” GAHHH! He’s lucky I didn’t smother him in his sleep last night, but I always fall asleep first, so it’s not likely that is ever going to happen.

Giving Hannah a nibble on the cheek often helps me calm down, unless I have just noticed that she’s put a clean and folded pair of socks in the laundry (for the third time), or that she hasn’t put away her clean laundry and has instead thrown it on top of the tower on her play bed. GAHHH!

What else? Oh, yes. The cats’ very existence. Other drivers. Other bus passengers. That lady with a baby. That old lady. *Our downstairs neighbor*! Our new next-door neighbors. Our landlord. And a bunch of people I’m too tired to hate on right now.

Except I went to class and hopped right back on the hate-train. This jackass, who is not even officially signed up for our course, keeps jumping up and literally taking over every class (I mean, picking up a piece of chalk and drawing on the board and dominating the instructor). Hate! I’m bumping him above the neighbors on the hate-list. And he has a deep voice and makes a lot of sub-vocal comments and hmmms and ah-has, so it sounds like someone below us has the bass cranked up. I was on the verge of jumping out of my chair and throttling him, except I didn’t want to disrupt my classmate’s presentation (which this guy had already interrupted two or three times).

Let the healing begin!

Hannah the Chef

Hannah is the sweetest sweet little monkey-face! (She likes it when I call her that. Really!) She is still enamoured of the idea of becoming a restaurateur, so in furtherance of her career dreams, she offered to cook us dinner one night. The whole thing.

She planned the menu (see below), went grocery shopping with me, prepared the food (including a salad dressing from scratch), folded the napkins (into paper airplanes—unique!), set the table, lit candles, and generally provided a delightful culinary experience for us. She may have gone a bit overboard with the place settings (says the chief bottle-washer): a plate, a salad plate, and 2 bowls *each*. We ate salad, roast chicken, and mashed potatoes. There were more items of china than items of food! She also provided spaghetti eis (vanilla ice cream pushed through a press into “noodles”) for dessert. Yum!

I tried to convince her that all chefs have to train on dishwashing, too, but she didn’t believe me.

She wanted everything to be as fresh as possible, so if you ordered orange juice, you got an orange with a hole poked in it sitting atop a glass. You don’t get any fresher than that!

Menu



Putting on the finishing touches

Photos galore

Am I the only one that thinks this poinsettia is turning red(dish)?


I love the views at the end of our valley (the back of the hill where the castle is located), especially in the evening and when there’s fog. I’m tempted to do a photo essay on fog, but I’m just not a good enough photographer.







Real content soon, I hope.

In my head

I have spent most of the last four days singing the following to myself. But that’s all right, right?



Before that, it was this one:




I have finally discovered the perfect solution to my xmas music predicament: John Denver and Muppets! The great taste that tastes great together!


And for your reading enjoyment:
Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.


Halloween crafts made of tampons


An interview with Velvet d'Amour, a plus-size model who was in Jean Paul Gaultier's fashion show during Paris Fashion Week.

Rubbing It In

Don't hate me for living in such a beautiful corner of the world. Hate me for gloating about it. ;-p

View from our study



View from our upstairs bathroom

Teaching the Teacher

I am taking a teaching methods course and have already enjoyed our first two meetings. I’m not nervous about teaching per se—as John says, tongue in cheek, it’s one of the few jobs where people have to listen to everything *you* say, but you don’t necessarily have to listen to them. :-) And I am teaching two classes this semester on topics that I feel fully qualified to instruct others on—American English pronunciation and how to put together a presentation.

I am not quite up to terrified about teaching German, more like very, very nervous. I know my German is leaps and bounds better than when we moved here, but good enough to be able to help other people improve their German? I’m not so confident of that. Fortunately, I have from now to January to prepare for my 45-minute crack at teaching a German as a Second Language class; also, we are learning how to organize a class-hour so as to minimize any unpleasant surprises.

As part of our class, we are watching and analyzing videos of other people teaching. After we watched the first video yesterday, some people in my class were complaining that the teacher in the video didn’t give his students any rules about the grammar topic they were working on (past tense). This was a beginner-level class. They gradually worked their way up to the actual grammar topic via some introductory exercises (that were old-fashioned but surprisingly ingenious), and the way the teachers organized the lesson, the students came up with a simplified version of the grammar rule on their own, based on the earlier exercises. Some of my classmates thought the teacher should have given them the full set of “rules” regarding past tense at this point, and we debated it a bit. As I pointed out (*buffs nails on shirt*), this is not the last time in their German-learning that these students are going to work with past tense, so why overload them with rules? Maybe the teachers wanted them to have more a feel for how past tense works at this point, and then another time they can get additional examples that demonstrate some exceptions to the rule they came up with.

I came up with an analogy while walking to meet my tutee this morning. Learning a foreign language is a bit like learning to ride a bike. You wouldn’t give a 3-year-old a 27-speed mountain bike to start out. Instead, you give him something like this (which is what I saw a small child on this morning and which kick-started this train of thought):



When he gets really good at balancing and is tall enough, you move up to something a little bigger, maybe with training wheels.



It may take a while to build up to that mountain bike, and some people may never make it past 10 gears, but most people can learn to get around on a bike. Same thing with a foreign language. You can’t expect a person to be able to handle a whole pile of rules right away; you have to give him a chance to find his balance and get familiar with this new way of doing things.


Well, duh!
To Lower Costs, Hospitals Try Free Basic Care for Uninsured (NY Times)

The Wheels on the Bus

All I wanted on Wednesday was to get from point A to point C via point B, but that was the point at which Mr. Itinerant Preacher Crazy Man got on the bus. His non-stop diatribe really killed my enjoyment of being squashed between the window on one side and 80 other standing passengers on the other. At least we got the entertainment of catching each others’ eye and cracking up.

Mr. IPC Man was in fine form: (translated from the German) “G is for God. God is great, ja ja. G is also for great. God is good, which also starts with G, ja ja. This is NOT about Hitler!” And so on and so forth.

By the time we got to my stop, I had prayed more in the 6 minutes he was on the bus than in the last 20 years. I was able to tune him out a little by thinking, “Christ Jesus and Baby Jesus! Get me off this bus!”

The next morning, I was forced to partake of a fellow bus rider’s iPod playlist. I didn’t really want to be at a funky disco bus party; I just wanted to sit and be surly as usual.

Thursday afternoon was a bit better, bus-wise. One stop after I got on, a whole kindergarten got on the bus (in Germany, kindergarten = pre-school/daycare and not the grade before 1st grade), so there were about 40 kids, toddlers up to about age 4. Cute! I shared my seat with the two tiniest, and one of them fell asleep on me. I had forgotten how tiny they can be. I actually ended up riding one stop further so I wouldn’t have to trample my way through kinders or wake up the little punkin on my arm.

***

When we moved here, I planned to be done with my master’s degree in 4 years. Looking recently at the list of coursework I had completed and had left to complete, I saw that I would be able to finish all my coursework by the end of next summer semester, right on time. Except I wouldn’t be able to *get* my master’s by then, because you can only apply for admission to candidacy (basically) once all the coursework is complete and grades are turned in; at that point you can write your thesis and take your exams (2 5-hour written exams and 2 1-hour oral exams—ouch!), which you have a total of 12 months to do. So even if I finished all the coursework as early as possible, I would not be able to complete the other requirements by the end of the summer semester.

This put me in a bit of a conundrum. If by conundrum you mean a day-long crying jag. Should I go on bended knee to the department head and try to get her to pull some strings for me? Which meant I would have to cram in the coursework, thesis, exams, and quite probably packing up our household into one semester. Just thinking about it makes me want to die. Or should I drop out?

Finally, I realized that although the MA after my name would be nice, it doesn’t define who I am and wouldn’t guarantee me the job of my dreams later. So I have decided to continue with some of the coursework (dropping one upper-division class, whew!) that would be most useful to me in the case that I had the chance to teach German in the future (a teaching methods course plus student teaching, a course on second language acquisition, and a conversation course). I woke up the next morning feeling a sense of total-body relief (you know it if you’ve felt it). If events conspire to keep us in Germany longer, then I will finish up. If not, then I still haven’t wasted my time here.

***

I needed to get out and stretch my legs today, so fall photos from our village here.

***

Furniture made out of books! Why didn’t I think of that!?

How do I love lists? Let me count...

Now that the semester and “real life” have started up again, I am back in list-making mode. You all know that I love me a list, uh huh, but I just realized recently that I am a really sucky list-maker. Here’s an item from my Palm To-Do list: “Start reading for class.” How helpful is that? When can I consider that item completed? 2 pages into the text? 5 pages? It has finally occurred to me that I have to be specific, and I am allowed to break jobs down into their constituent parts, which means more things on the to-do list, but the list gets whittled down faster because I am not waiting for one big thing to be completely finished. So that list item became “Read Chapter 1.” Much better.

John is one of those people who has a routine, and he deals with new things by making a routine out of them. That is *really* hard for me to do. Taking my vitamins? Sporadic. Forcing the poinsettia? Thank the seven dwarfs the days are getting shorter anyway, because I often forget to cover that puppy until it is already dark out. List-making is one way I deal with this; if it is on the list, at least I am reminded of it once a day at a minimum. We’ll see how smoothly this semester goes with my new outlook on lists.


Gnome-fanciers unite!
“Man vows to fight garden gnome arrest threat”

I first read about this in a German magazine!
World’s Ugliest Dog Contest

“In contrast to an earlier finding, it does not appear children who watch a lot of television wind up with behavior problems in school, researchers reported Monday.”

Christmas in October

Germans already have Fasching/Carnival for their big dress-up holiday, so they don’t really do Halloween except for the occasional costume party for adults here or there. That would explain why the xmas cookies and candy are already on the shelves at the grocery store—there aren’t any buffer holidays like Halloween or Thanksgiving (in September in Germany) to slow down the train-wreck of xmas advertising.

Personally, it doesn’t matter to me what time of year it is, any time is good for humming xmas songs. I like the tacky songs, while John is more a religious-carol-type guy. I don’t think my love of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is going to jinx our relationship, but it does put a cramp in our holiday music buying.

Last year in December, I went into a Starbucks for the first and only time—a classmate invited me, I swear!—and not only did I drink a large cup of their coffee, I also bought a CD of xmas music. I felt my soul shrivel even smaller than usual on that day, but the CD turned out to be not quite what I was looking for, so that made me feel better. Here’s what I got:



Sleigh Full of Songs
1. I Like a Sleighride (Jingle Bells), Peggy Lee
2. Deck the Halls, Nat King Cole
3. Winter Wonderland, Dean Martin
4. The Christmas Waltz, Nancy Wilson
5. Do You Hear What I Hear?, Bing Crosby
6. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Aimee Mann
7. 2000 Miles, Holly Cole
8. The Little Drummer Boy, Lou Rawls
9. Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, Lena Horne
10. Merry Christmas, Baby, Charles Brown
11. Silver Bells, Wayne Newton
12. O Come All Ye Faithful, Ella Fitzgerald
13. Peace on Earth / The Little Drummer Boy, David Bowie & Bing Crosby

I realize that practically every recording artist prior to 1980 recorded at least one xmas song—my mom had complete albums of xmas music by Elvis and Jim Neighbors--but I’m not too keen on some of the artist/song combinations on my Starbucks album. In theory, I find it awesome that David Bowie and Bing Crosby did a duet, but in *practice*? Meh.

So if I were to compile a perfect xmas album—and this might be perfectly within my means via the magic of the Internet—here is what I would require, but not by any particular artist (I find that generic is usually better):

Sleigh Ride
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
Up on the House-Top
Jolly Old Saint Nicholas
All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth
Jingle Bells
Jingle-Bell Rock
Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland
Let it Snow
Silver Bells
Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town
Frosty
Rudolph
Blue Christmas
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer

Any additions? n.B. This is the camp-only list. Non-campy songs should go to John.

Speaking of xmas, has anyone successfully "forced" a poinsettia? Mine is 2 or 3 years old, and this year I am covering it with a black trash bag 6 pm to 8 am. After 3 weeks of this, one leaf looks a little blotchily red; the only other impact I can discern is that other leaves are turning yellow and dropping off. I don’t know if that might be due to changes in watering patterns after I brought it inside, being enclosed in plastic half the day, or being man-handled into the bag twice a day. Otherwise it looks mostly healthy (once I cut off a branch that had some kind of boils on its bark). According to the web site I linked to above, the whole process can take about 8 weeks; I’ll keep you posted.

New to Nee

I come across a lot of interesting things via my Internet reading, but I am loathe to forward them via email, because it seems like the modern version of my grandmother the bag lady clipping and mailing bits out of the newspaper. But since I have a blog, where people can decide for themselves whether they want to follow a link, I can put up items of interest whenever I like. Ha ha ha!

John is the real debater in our family. He can formulate a position and make logical arguments, and he doesn't get all worked up the way I do usually (depending on the topic and the other person). So for now, I will put up links with a short bit from the text itself, and maybe a quick explanation in case the topic is more controversial, and save the personal commentary.

My first article is from the New York Times (you probably have to be registered to read, but it is free--I've used it for about 5 years, no prob):

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

Halloween, part 3

I think I’ve already mentioned that Hannah and I wanted to make a Halloween version of a gingerbread house since we will be in Texas at xmas-time this year. Yesterday we got busy and put one together. (1)



Here are our building blocks. I made the dough from scratch out of an xmas-themed German cookbook; Hannah designed the house, and I made a pattern for cutting out the pieces. Then I whipped up some “mortar” made of egg whites and powdered sugar.



I can’t remember if this is before or after the house fell apart on us. I think it is the first assembly. Here’s a tip, if you should ever want to build your own g-bread house: let the walls set before putting on the roof—it is surprisingly heavy and will knock the whole structure down if the mortar is still wet.



Here is a front view of the finished product. Note how the edges of the walls curved while baking, so we had to fill in the gaps with lots of mortar and candy, “so the rats can’t get in,” said Hannah. Here’s another tip: be careful while adding the baking powder, or the walls will end up much puffier and rounded than you intended.



Here is a back view. Hannah didn’t really like the sugar-egg glue, so she pulled apart some Brach’s Halloween candies and used those to attach additional decorations onto the back wall since it was looking a little bare.



This morning Hannah got out some marzipan and sculpted a witch and a broom out of it. She got them to stick to the front of the house by impaling them on a toothpick. Gruesome!

(1) John is so sweet. He thought it was ingenious and original to come up with a Halloween version of the xmas favorite, but I had to disabuse him of that idea. A google search came up with 434,000 hits for "Halloween gingerbread house" and 125,000 hits "+kit". At least I didn’t try to market the idea, because some of the kits are really cool.