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.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
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!
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!
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
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.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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!
Monday, May 19, 2008
News of the Weird, Hannah edition
Hannah has changed her mind that she wants to be cremated when she dies. Instead, she wants a double-decker casket, with a tv and unlimited movies, a toilet, and snacks and magazines. Plus, everyone has to wear white to her funeral.
In less morbid news, she has revisited the Grease-remake idea and decided that the original Grease needs to be remade with *pets*. John wanted to know if the cats and hamsters would get greasy hair-dos. Hannah gave him her patented "whatever" look, complete with "W" gesture.
I took Hannah to John's office while I had class today (only 1 week of school vacation left--woooo!), and on the way we passed a little boy walking with 2 ladies who were ignoring him crying. (Totally understandable.) Hannah wondered why he was crying. I pointed out that the ladies had probably denied him candy or ice cream, or permission to pick up a dead bird. Hannah said she wouldn't cry like that because she is a teenager. I pointed out that she is 10 years and 51 weeks and 5 days old. That is a far cry from "teenager". Then she came home and played on the Noggin site. *g*
In less morbid news, she has revisited the Grease-remake idea and decided that the original Grease needs to be remade with *pets*. John wanted to know if the cats and hamsters would get greasy hair-dos. Hannah gave him her patented "whatever" look, complete with "W" gesture.
I took Hannah to John's office while I had class today (only 1 week of school vacation left--woooo!), and on the way we passed a little boy walking with 2 ladies who were ignoring him crying. (Totally understandable.) Hannah wondered why he was crying. I pointed out that the ladies had probably denied him candy or ice cream, or permission to pick up a dead bird. Hannah said she wouldn't cry like that because she is a teenager. I pointed out that she is 10 years and 51 weeks and 5 days old. That is a far cry from "teenager". Then she came home and played on the Noggin site. *g*
News of the Weird
I broke my not-cutting-myself streak by making a magnificent slice in my thumb Saturday night while slicing onions. Luckily, I did not get any blood on the food. Unfortunately, I had to finish cutting up the onions and 2 pounds of tomatoes for soup.
It stopped hurting immediately, and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly, too, but now I have a gaping, white flap of skin on the end of my thumb. I finally got rid of the last bandaid this evening while washing dishes, but the thought of anything catching on my thumb-flap made me scrub very gingerly. And the thought of having to type the words "thumb-flap" makes me physically ill.
Making meatballs without meating up my thumb-flap was also an adventure in cookery that I would have avoided if at all possible.
It stopped hurting immediately, and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly, too, but now I have a gaping, white flap of skin on the end of my thumb. I finally got rid of the last bandaid this evening while washing dishes, but the thought of anything catching on my thumb-flap made me scrub very gingerly. And the thought of having to type the words "thumb-flap" makes me physically ill.
Making meatballs without meating up my thumb-flap was also an adventure in cookery that I would have avoided if at all possible.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Hannah-upagus (-Lupagus? I don't know)
Me to John: It’s 10 o’clock—do you know what town your child is in?
Earlier in the school year, Hannah’s class went to a museum in another town with the train, but she never made it clear to us what town that was.
Conversation with my child:
Me: Hannah, you do not have fat, hairy legs.
Hannah: Yes I do.
Me: That is crazy talk.
Hannah: No, this is crazy talk: blah blibbzty blahdy blblblblbl.
Hannah took part in a chain letter for kids (allegedly for a Guinness Book attempt), and some of the resulting mail got mis-delivered to our house, despite having the correct address on the envelope. Hannah has been anxious to get the letters back in the mail—OMG! Chain letterrrrr!—so we wrote “MIS-SENT” on it this morning and she ran it down to the mailbox. When she came back, she declared that the postal service was lucky we didn’t sue them for their egregious error. While John and I tried to talk some sense into her, she blew us off with the reflection that she doesn’t have any money for a lawyer anyway. As John said, “Our little litigant.”
Hannah was asking me what kind of movie I would make if I could: Sci-fi? Animated? Grease re-make with transvestites? She knows me so well.
Hannah is constantly speculating on what happens to characters after the action of a book or film is over (I see fan-fiction in her future). She thinks there should be a Grease 3, but she doesn’t appreciate my efforts to deduce what kind of vehicle will be featured. Original Grease had fast cars; Grease 2 had motorcycles. For Grease 3, we came up with jet skis, skateboards, a Segway--
Get that guy, Thunderbirds!
--or the Little Rascal.
Hannah was not amused.
Hannah’s birthday is coming up fast. She is going to be 11! I am not too weirded out by my baby growing up so fast, but some days I think, “Poof! 11 years gone.”
Hannah has already been planning out her birthday parties for the next few years, to be sure to cover all the possibilities. This year, we are taking her and 2 friends to Holiday Park after a sleepover. Her birthday falls during school vacation *and* on a holiday, so the amusement park will be open an extra hour. She has already asked us if we can celebrate her birthday in the summer vacation (August) the next two years, that way we can take her to Legoland (in Germany) and Parc Asterix (near Paris). She doesn’t really care about celebrating with friends, as long as we take her someplace cool.
John and Hannah insisted we buy an inflatable boat, so that is how they spent Mother’s Day, paddling around on the Neckar.
(Full set here.)I have very bad luck with boats smaller than a ferry, so I stayed on shore and photographed the big event. It didn’t help my peace of mind to know that Hannah was wearing a swim ring as a make-shift life vest, and that the tourist cruise boats were out in force.
Hannah was dying to get back in the water this weekend, but the life vest John ordered hasn’t come yet, and it has been overcast with intermittent rain, so I don’t think she’s going to make it today. Maybe on Monday, says John.
Earlier in the school year, Hannah’s class went to a museum in another town with the train, but she never made it clear to us what town that was.
Conversation with my child:
Me: Hannah, you do not have fat, hairy legs.
Hannah: Yes I do.
Me: That is crazy talk.
Hannah: No, this is crazy talk: blah blibbzty blahdy blblblblbl.
Hannah took part in a chain letter for kids (allegedly for a Guinness Book attempt), and some of the resulting mail got mis-delivered to our house, despite having the correct address on the envelope. Hannah has been anxious to get the letters back in the mail—OMG! Chain letterrrrr!—so we wrote “MIS-SENT” on it this morning and she ran it down to the mailbox. When she came back, she declared that the postal service was lucky we didn’t sue them for their egregious error. While John and I tried to talk some sense into her, she blew us off with the reflection that she doesn’t have any money for a lawyer anyway. As John said, “Our little litigant.”
Hannah was asking me what kind of movie I would make if I could: Sci-fi? Animated? Grease re-make with transvestites? She knows me so well.
Hannah is constantly speculating on what happens to characters after the action of a book or film is over (I see fan-fiction in her future). She thinks there should be a Grease 3, but she doesn’t appreciate my efforts to deduce what kind of vehicle will be featured. Original Grease had fast cars; Grease 2 had motorcycles. For Grease 3, we came up with jet skis, skateboards, a Segway--
Get that guy, Thunderbirds!
--or the Little Rascal.
Hannah was not amused.
Hannah’s birthday is coming up fast. She is going to be 11! I am not too weirded out by my baby growing up so fast, but some days I think, “Poof! 11 years gone.”
Hannah has already been planning out her birthday parties for the next few years, to be sure to cover all the possibilities. This year, we are taking her and 2 friends to Holiday Park after a sleepover. Her birthday falls during school vacation *and* on a holiday, so the amusement park will be open an extra hour. She has already asked us if we can celebrate her birthday in the summer vacation (August) the next two years, that way we can take her to Legoland (in Germany) and Parc Asterix (near Paris). She doesn’t really care about celebrating with friends, as long as we take her someplace cool.
John and Hannah insisted we buy an inflatable boat, so that is how they spent Mother’s Day, paddling around on the Neckar.
(Full set here.)I have very bad luck with boats smaller than a ferry, so I stayed on shore and photographed the big event. It didn’t help my peace of mind to know that Hannah was wearing a swim ring as a make-shift life vest, and that the tourist cruise boats were out in force.
Hannah was dying to get back in the water this weekend, but the life vest John ordered hasn’t come yet, and it has been overcast with intermittent rain, so I don’t think she’s going to make it today. Maybe on Monday, says John.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I was in the middle of Spring Cleaning...
...when the doorbell rang. I got to take 30 minutes out of my busy cleaning schedule this morning to be an official witness (I had to sign some forms and stuff) for some cops who turned up with a search warrant on one of our neighbor's kids. No one was home, and they couldn't track them down, so I got to be the stand-in to ensure that they didn't break anything and only searched the kid's (he's 23) stuff.
After that, cleaning the floor and shoving around the furniture just didn't seem as exciting anymore.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Somebody's Checkin' In!
Sometimes I hear ladies my age talk about having a(nother) baby, and I wonder what they are thinking. My conversations with Hannah yesterday included the words hotpants, bra, and hickey; no poop-laden infant can hold a candle to a preteen, although I guess you have to start somewhere.
WE ARE DUMB
When we moved here, we brought an international VCR to watch videos on, DVDs just then making inroads into the movie-watching media. John got a laptop for work, and we sometimes used the disc-drive to watch the handful of German DVDs we had bought or borrowed. The drawbacks were that we couldn’t watch any of the American DVDs people were sending us, and John had the nerve to want to use the laptop to work—when we were requiring entertainment, sheesh! Jooge and Mr. Jooge took pity on us and sent an American DVD player. Shortly after that, the disc-drive on John’s laptop crapped out on us, so I bit the bullet and went out and bought a German DVD player.
Kept up so far? At that point, we had a VCR and 2 DVD players, and we had to keep switching around cables depending on which DVD (American/European) we wanted to watch.
Just recently, while wrangling cables and settings, Hannah accidentally put an American DVD in the German DVD player. And it worked! I had to dig to find the weensy print in the manual, but it turns out I had managed to buy a remarkably cheap international DVD player that *didn’t even advertise itself as such*. Weird, eh? So we packed away the American player for later and have spared ourselves a lot of effort in our pursuit of entertainment.
Of course, we still have an incredibly ancient television set that doesn’t even have a remote control, and the on-off button is broken, so we have to plug it in to turn it off. And the volume and channel buttons are starting to wear out, so you have to press extra hard when you want to scroll though the channels (UP and DOWN are the 2 channel options). But it came with the apartment, so at least we didn’t have to buy a tv to go with our million video players.
WE ARE GASTON
Remember that jerk from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast? And how he sings, “I use antlers in all of my decorating!”? I bet he didn’t have one of these:
That’s right, it’s a dining-room chandelier made out of antlers. Every meal, we sit beneath the partial remains of multiple German deer. They match the patterns on the chairs:
And the tile oven:
And the outside of the house:
I mentioned that I need to recover the cushions on the dining room/tile oven bench, and I finally got around to ordering the fabric:
It’s not exactly the same pattern, but it’s not bad for a replacement (and if your taste runs to Bavarian kitsch). Now I just need to let it sit in the storage space under the couch until I finish a metric buttload of school work, and then I’ll need to figure out where I can rent a sewing machine.
IN OTHER CRAFTY NEWS
Since my brain basically calls it a day as soon as dinner is done cooking, I dug out the quilt project I’ve been working on since *cough* 1996 *cough* to have something to do in the evenings. Even though I’m only quilting an hour or two a night, I’m making a lot of progress. See?
And the back:
Maybe one day I will be finished, but for now, it is keeping me out of the crack dens and other low places.
MRS. GREEN-JEANS
Now that it has finally turned warmer, I am having a little more success with my apartment gardening. These walnut trees have totally taken off just in the last week:
I’ve got 2 pots of Lemon Balm going upstairs, and it is heavenly:
Hannah even had some pepper seeds going, but then the cats ate them, but then some more seeds came up. I was so pleased, I repotted them in a big old container and even showed them to John. Five minutes later, I saw that one of the goddamned cats had eaten several leaves off them:
I just planted you some cat grass, bitches! So I moved the baby pepper plants onto the balcony, but only after locking the cats out of the sunroom for a whole day. The nights are not getting below 50 now, so I think they’ll be just fine.
WE ARE DUMB
When we moved here, we brought an international VCR to watch videos on, DVDs just then making inroads into the movie-watching media. John got a laptop for work, and we sometimes used the disc-drive to watch the handful of German DVDs we had bought or borrowed. The drawbacks were that we couldn’t watch any of the American DVDs people were sending us, and John had the nerve to want to use the laptop to work—when we were requiring entertainment, sheesh! Jooge and Mr. Jooge took pity on us and sent an American DVD player. Shortly after that, the disc-drive on John’s laptop crapped out on us, so I bit the bullet and went out and bought a German DVD player.
Kept up so far? At that point, we had a VCR and 2 DVD players, and we had to keep switching around cables depending on which DVD (American/European) we wanted to watch.
Just recently, while wrangling cables and settings, Hannah accidentally put an American DVD in the German DVD player. And it worked! I had to dig to find the weensy print in the manual, but it turns out I had managed to buy a remarkably cheap international DVD player that *didn’t even advertise itself as such*. Weird, eh? So we packed away the American player for later and have spared ourselves a lot of effort in our pursuit of entertainment.
Of course, we still have an incredibly ancient television set that doesn’t even have a remote control, and the on-off button is broken, so we have to plug it in to turn it off. And the volume and channel buttons are starting to wear out, so you have to press extra hard when you want to scroll though the channels (UP and DOWN are the 2 channel options). But it came with the apartment, so at least we didn’t have to buy a tv to go with our million video players.
WE ARE GASTON
Remember that jerk from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast? And how he sings, “I use antlers in all of my decorating!”? I bet he didn’t have one of these:
That’s right, it’s a dining-room chandelier made out of antlers. Every meal, we sit beneath the partial remains of multiple German deer. They match the patterns on the chairs:
And the tile oven:
And the outside of the house:
I mentioned that I need to recover the cushions on the dining room/tile oven bench, and I finally got around to ordering the fabric:
It’s not exactly the same pattern, but it’s not bad for a replacement (and if your taste runs to Bavarian kitsch). Now I just need to let it sit in the storage space under the couch until I finish a metric buttload of school work, and then I’ll need to figure out where I can rent a sewing machine.
IN OTHER CRAFTY NEWS
Since my brain basically calls it a day as soon as dinner is done cooking, I dug out the quilt project I’ve been working on since *cough* 1996 *cough* to have something to do in the evenings. Even though I’m only quilting an hour or two a night, I’m making a lot of progress. See?
And the back:
Maybe one day I will be finished, but for now, it is keeping me out of the crack dens and other low places.
MRS. GREEN-JEANS
Now that it has finally turned warmer, I am having a little more success with my apartment gardening. These walnut trees have totally taken off just in the last week:
I’ve got 2 pots of Lemon Balm going upstairs, and it is heavenly:
Hannah even had some pepper seeds going, but then the cats ate them, but then some more seeds came up. I was so pleased, I repotted them in a big old container and even showed them to John. Five minutes later, I saw that one of the goddamned cats had eaten several leaves off them:
I just planted you some cat grass, bitches! So I moved the baby pepper plants onto the balcony, but only after locking the cats out of the sunroom for a whole day. The nights are not getting below 50 now, so I think they’ll be just fine.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Avatar and Nee
My prediction about my favorite TV show, Avatar, came true. After airing the first 11 episodes of the third season, they went all the way back to the very first episode *of season 1*. This lead me to do a little poking around on the Internet, where I discovered that in the US the last 4 episodes will make a giant series finale *in July*. I was in a funk about this, so I did some more poking and found a trailer for the second half of season 3 that was just released at Comic Con. You’d think this would be good, but it just put me in more of a tizzy. Then on the German Nick, they announced that the series finale will be in the fall. *In the fall*, people. So, like, 5 months from now.
For those of you with Harry Potter inclinations, it’s like Book 6 came out, and then JK Rowling announced that extra people were going to die in Book 7, and then Scholastic moved the release date for Book 7 back to a later date. *That* is the level of pain I was experiencing, seriously. I am totally Nickelodeon’s bitch.
But then John, my dear husband, father of my child, light of my life, fire of my loi—oops! Moving on, he found episodes 12 and 13 online, thanks to the generosity of the Canadians in airing 2 more episodes than the Americans. A good chunk of the trailer clips were in those 2 episodes, which I found reassuring somehow. Since then, I have been feeling more calm about having to wait, but that might have more to do with the fact that I am coming off a manic hormone peak. Or stoic resignation. Or anti-pms. It’s hard to tell.
For those of you with Harry Potter inclinations, it’s like Book 6 came out, and then JK Rowling announced that extra people were going to die in Book 7, and then Scholastic moved the release date for Book 7 back to a later date. *That* is the level of pain I was experiencing, seriously. I am totally Nickelodeon’s bitch.
But then John, my dear husband, father of my child, light of my life, fire of my loi—oops! Moving on, he found episodes 12 and 13 online, thanks to the generosity of the Canadians in airing 2 more episodes than the Americans. A good chunk of the trailer clips were in those 2 episodes, which I found reassuring somehow. Since then, I have been feeling more calm about having to wait, but that might have more to do with the fact that I am coming off a manic hormone peak. Or stoic resignation. Or anti-pms. It’s hard to tell.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Twisted Sister
Hannah got the Spongebob movie while we were in Texas. In one scene toward the end, Spongebob plays "I'm a Goofy Goober" to the tune of Twisted Sister's "I wanna rock."
Spongebob Squarepants The Movie - Goofy Goober Rock - More amazing video clips are a click away
So this morning when John started singing "I wanna rock", I had to chime in with "I'm a goofy goober". That's just how I roll. John wonders what Dee Snider and company think of the use to which their music has been put.
Then I remembered that I actually had that album (well, cassette) as a kid. And then I remembered that I used to play "You're gonna burn in hell" at LilSis. And then my father threw my cassette away.
I guess I could blame LilSis for the loss of my marvelous tape that might have been a collector's item by now, but instead I will apologize to her for terrorizing her with big-haired 80s metal. It turns out I was the twisted sister.
Spongebob Squarepants The Movie - Goofy Goober Rock - More amazing video clips are a click away
So this morning when John started singing "I wanna rock", I had to chime in with "I'm a goofy goober". That's just how I roll. John wonders what Dee Snider and company think of the use to which their music has been put.
Then I remembered that I actually had that album (well, cassette) as a kid. And then I remembered that I used to play "You're gonna burn in hell" at LilSis. And then my father threw my cassette away.
I guess I could blame LilSis for the loss of my marvelous tape that might have been a collector's item by now, but instead I will apologize to her for terrorizing her with big-haired 80s metal. It turns out I was the twisted sister.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Participant in Rock-Release Program
It may seem that I’ve been hiding under a rock recently, but I have actually been kind of productive, in a boring, not very bloggable kind of way. I jumped ahead on my to-do list and ordered a new under-the-sink trash can. On runners! We’re way hi-tech around here.
Hannah and I planted flower seeds, which are not looking so hot at the moment, but at least we tried to start our spring gardening.
I bought a garden gnome. He is ceramic instead of resin, which I like, but he is a little more Disney than I had planned on getting. But he is still many-times better than some other ones I had seen at the garden center, and he only cost me 8 bucks at the grocery store. (Many thanks to Hannah for spotting him on an aisle I wasn’t planning on going down.)
I have prevented John from microwaving a bowl topped with a lid edged in metal. I don’t think he is on any medication, but I am starting to worry about him.
I have done some proofreading and bibliography-cleaning and bibliography-building, so I am definitely getting my hours in on my student job.
I have been soaking in new episodes of Avatar. Last Saturday Nick showed all of season 2 in the run-up to showing the first episode to season 3, and every night this week (and through next Tuesday, according to their web site) they’ll be showing the new episodes, in order. By next week, we’ll be caught up with the episodes that have aired in the States. Of course, sometimes Nick stalls out around then and starts re-showing earlier episodes before getting to the end of the new season, so I will have to wait and see what the new schedule looks like when it comes out online.
Despite the icky weather recently—and Spring is supposed to show up by Sunday, if you can trust the weather man—lots of flowers have come out. My favorites are purple, and the color is like a zap of electricity to the brain via the optic nerve. I read somewhere that purple is supposed to be an energizing color, as opposed to pale green being soothing, and it definitely seems to be true for me. Here is a picture of some lobelia.
While in Loosiana, we stopped in a mall in Monroe to buy jeans. We were hungry, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat at Food N Food. Do you think they sold food? If I were a little more country, I might have gone into The Camouflage Shoppe, but the extra –e made me feel that there should have been more dust ruffles and tea involved than I saw on display. Not that the camo baby clothes and taxidermied toys weren’t cute.
This brain dump has been brought to you by the letter M and the number Z.
Hannah and I planted flower seeds, which are not looking so hot at the moment, but at least we tried to start our spring gardening.
I bought a garden gnome. He is ceramic instead of resin, which I like, but he is a little more Disney than I had planned on getting. But he is still many-times better than some other ones I had seen at the garden center, and he only cost me 8 bucks at the grocery store. (Many thanks to Hannah for spotting him on an aisle I wasn’t planning on going down.)
I have prevented John from microwaving a bowl topped with a lid edged in metal. I don’t think he is on any medication, but I am starting to worry about him.
I have done some proofreading and bibliography-cleaning and bibliography-building, so I am definitely getting my hours in on my student job.
I have been soaking in new episodes of Avatar. Last Saturday Nick showed all of season 2 in the run-up to showing the first episode to season 3, and every night this week (and through next Tuesday, according to their web site) they’ll be showing the new episodes, in order. By next week, we’ll be caught up with the episodes that have aired in the States. Of course, sometimes Nick stalls out around then and starts re-showing earlier episodes before getting to the end of the new season, so I will have to wait and see what the new schedule looks like when it comes out online.
Despite the icky weather recently—and Spring is supposed to show up by Sunday, if you can trust the weather man—lots of flowers have come out. My favorites are purple, and the color is like a zap of electricity to the brain via the optic nerve. I read somewhere that purple is supposed to be an energizing color, as opposed to pale green being soothing, and it definitely seems to be true for me. Here is a picture of some lobelia.
While in Loosiana, we stopped in a mall in Monroe to buy jeans. We were hungry, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat at Food N Food. Do you think they sold food? If I were a little more country, I might have gone into The Camouflage Shoppe, but the extra –e made me feel that there should have been more dust ruffles and tea involved than I saw on display. Not that the camo baby clothes and taxidermied toys weren’t cute.
This brain dump has been brought to you by the letter M and the number Z.
Monday, April 14, 2008
That's My Girl
Hannah was getting low on reading material, so John suggested she try some of my Terry Pratchett books. Except for Harry Potter, Hannah hasn't shown much interest in what I read, so I was surprised that she agreed. Except--unsurprisingly--she wanted me to read it to her. But that turned out to be her undoing, because she got hooked.
Between me reading a chapter or so aloud to her and her reading a couple more pages beyond that to herself, we managed to get through Wee Free Men over several bedtimes.
Now she has started on A Hat Full of Sky, and she isn't calling out for me to read to her every single evening. Just every other evening or so.
Maybe by the time she gets to The Wintersmith, she'll be reading 70% on her own.
Between me reading a chapter or so aloud to her and her reading a couple more pages beyond that to herself, we managed to get through Wee Free Men over several bedtimes.
Now she has started on A Hat Full of Sky, and she isn't calling out for me to read to her every single evening. Just every other evening or so.
Maybe by the time she gets to The Wintersmith, she'll be reading 70% on her own.
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