Well, that was a short month

So I obviously did not manage the full month of blogging as planned, but to tell you the truth, I am not too upset about it. It takes a while to form a new habit, and half a month is not a bad start. Besides, a lot of my posts were drivel. Which is better, post every day but every post is crap, or post less frequently and hope the posts are more substantive.

The first day I missed, I had been watching a movie about Gandhi when I realized it was the end of the day and no post. But really, compared to the life of Gandhi, what does it matter if I blog or not. I am trying to be philosophical about it. Maybe I'll do the NaBloPoMo again next month, give it another try.

In the meanwhile, I have been all Betty Crocker. I made turtles from scratch, and they turned out perfect. I took a photo of the halfway point, where the pecans were covered in caramel, so I could post it. Ha ha ha. I forgot that John's Palm doesn't play well with my laptop because my laptop doesn't have an infrared port and the USB connection for his Palm doesn't work properly, so I can't get the photos off his Palm. *sigh* We've got to send in the camera for repair soon.

I also finally denuded my basil plants for the winter. The leaves filled our stand mixer, and after chopping them up with a little water, salt, and olive oil, it was enough to completely fill an ice tray. I hope we remember to use the cubes of basil in the freezer before they get freezer burn.

I am also trying to force my poinsettia to bloom. I know the odds aren't in my favor, but it doesn't take too much effort, as long as I remember to cover it at night. (Only forgot once! Better than my blog this month.)

My pink Thanksgiving cactus is in full bloom and the white one is covered in buds. Yay for color on a rainy day!

Hannah starts a week of Fall Break tomorrow. We signed her up for a cooking class, so she will be occupied from 9 to 4 every day. At the end, the parents are invited to come taste the fruits of the kids' labor. I can't wait to see what Hannah comes up with.

Thoughtful Article

I don't think it is a secret that I lean left-ward, but that doesn't mean that I am close-minded (I hope). I just read an article in the Associated Baptist Press--not a source I regularly read, but I followed a link from Jay Lake's livejournal page--that I found to be a thoughtful look at the psychology of chain emails:
Fear Not: What does virtual rumor-mongering say about Christians? by Robert Marus & Ken Camp.

This Just In

I was reading to John from my email:

"Happy anniversary, Bill O'Reilly! Five years ago yesterday, the Fox News Channel host was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit brimming with lurid details about vibrators, phone sex, threesomes, masturbation, Caribbean shower fantasies, a Thai sex show, falafel, stewardess trysts, vehicular coupling, and Al Franken."

His response? "O'Reilly eats falafel?!"

hahahahaha!

(from the Daily Media News Feed email from mediabistro.com)

New Favorite Web Site

Regretsy: "Handmade? It looks like you made it with your feet"

A takedown of some of the "products" for sale on Etsy. Many are not safe for work or children in the room. At least not if you want them to grow up with a healthy sense of sensuality.

My favorite so far is Kitten Head on Amputee. I don't know which is better, the title--I Can Haz Stump--or the last line--"Depends on the frame." I have been laughing so hard I feel sick to my stomach. Yes, it is *that* good.

So tired

Had my first class today in a too-small room with too many extra people. Too many things to complain about, so will stop before I say something libelous.

Had lunch with John and his American colleagues today. Fun was had by all.

Ate popcorn with Hannah, who swears that the sweet microwave popcorn we get here can't hold a candle to kettle corn. Aunt Kee made her kettle corn, and she knows from kettle corn.

Cooked dinner late after the popcorn, but John was later still. At least he got home before we were done eating.

And now I am off to bed, where I am reading a book about widows in Early Modern England remarrying. Fascinating!

Got the blahs

Today's weather: cold, wet, occasional sunshine interspersed with hail. Not the fine fall weather we were enjoying just a couple of days ago.

This afternoon, Hannah and I got flu shots and got new vaccination "passports" for keeping track of our shots. Since she is due for at least one more round of boosters and is out of space on the little card from her Austin pediatrician, this will be very helpful to us, to have space for everything on one record.

Now my shoulder is sore and I don't feel like doing anything. Not a good run-up to my first class tomorrow.

Good night.

Texas, Our Texas: 2009, Part 1.5

Ok, I forgot a few things from our visit to WF, like waking up in the middle of the first night because I didn’t know if the truck got locked after we unloaded it and remembering that Hannah’s portable DVD-player was probably laying out on the back seat and trying to decide how I could get outside to the truck in the dark without killing myself on the stairs or being eaten by the guard dog. And then I remembered that my mother’s truck (loaned to us for the 3 weeks we toured the southern US) had one of those key-fob-thingies, and lo and behold, it worked from the second-floor bedroom, so I avoided death by dog or stairs. It took me so long to figure out because our car here in Germany, the one we are used to, can only be locked or unlocked by putting the key in the door. I know, positively Paleolithic!

I also forgot sending the kids to the pool with John and Mr. Jooge in the air-conditioned car—too bad, no room for Nee and Jooge, so sad (or not)—and taking over the tv remote to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and having a lovely tear-fest while Jooge went crazy in the kitchen and whipped up an apple pie. *Whipped up a pie*, I say! The woman is a master of fruit-filled desserts.

We also drank pot after pot of percolator coffee. These are *my* people.

And we got the grand tour of the chicken ranch. The layers are lovely birds, healthy-looking and active. The fryers were sad hulls of flightless birds. They basically sat there, listless and semi-featherless. There will be no more fryers in future, I have been assured. *shudder* They looked sad.

And we saw the fledgling garden. You know I can’t resist a garden. Sadly, their large tomatoes had fallen victim to the tomato blight, may they rest in peace.

Finally, we tried to avoid injury by pre-schooler, but weren’t always successful, damn those little push-cars.

Late

Once again, I have managed to only get around to blogging when it is basically time to go to bed. In my defense, in reality I only got around to blogging when it was time to make dinner, and then Hannah wanted to use my computer, and now it is bedtime, without any noticeable blogging having taken place. I did manage to do some research for my courses I am teaching, and some laundry, and some sewing, so today wasn't a total wash, but it really wasn't blog-worthy, either. Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day.

Texas, Our Texas: 2009, part 1

Our trip to Texas this August started out well enough. We left in plenty of time, and we remembered which exit we needed to take for the long-term parking … where we found that the lot was closed. Apparently, it had been closed for a while, because grass was growing up through the asphalt. And there were no signs there telling us where it had moved to, or if holiday parking even still existed (which it does, I just checked, but in a very different place). So we parked at the airport in the garage, knowing it would probably double our parking costs. Unfortunately, neither the airport signs on the road nor the itinerary from the travel agent indicated which terminal we would be flying out of, so we ended up parking at the very far end of the parking garage and hiking the length of Concourse A before discovering that we had to fly out of Concourse C. At least we were in the right terminal, but we still had to get up to the top floor to take the skytrain with all our luggage—no trolleys allowed—to get from A to C.

Once we were at Concourse C, though, everything went smoothly. One thing I like about Frankfurt is that when they rennovated their international flight terminal, they added extra security lines. The first time we flew back home, about 5 years ago, there were 2 scanners for the whole area. 2. The lines were at least an hour long, I kid you not. Now, there is at least 1 scanner for every 3 or 4 gates. Easy peasy.

We flew through New Jersey, and as usual, our second leg to Dallas was delayed, but it wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I called my mom with a credit card from a pay phone—DO NOT DO THIS! 11 bucks for a 30-second message on my mom’s voice mail—and let her know we’d be coming in a little late. Got in late in the evening, went home with her, had a good night’s sleep, up at 6ish, and straggled out the door to drive to Wichita Falls later than originally planned, which is par for the course for us. We would have warned the sibs we were on our way, if they hadn’t changed their phone numbers recently and only notified us by email ONCE WE WERE ALREADY IN THE AIR. But no hard feelings, Mr. Jooge. *g*

Driving up I-35, we noticed a lot of faux-German buildings and signs for various German heritage events. Hannah was all, "Aaaugh! We can’t get away from German stuff!" To top it off, we drove through Muenster, Texas, which is nothing like Muenster, Germany. Sorry Muenster, Texas.

When we got to Wichita Falls, we were able to enjoy all the finer things, like taking everyone out for Mexican food lunch to celebrate the brothers' birthdays. Mr. Jooge totally confused the waitress by asking for the filet mignon tacos. (When John was a teenager, his mom was dating this guy who took the two of them out to dinner, so John ordered the filet mignon, on his mom’s date’s dime.)



Notice how Hannah is bookended by her cousins. Now that she is older, she is a highly coveted playmate by the younger kids in the family. She has always been popular, but being a pre-teen now gives her a certain panache among the elementary-school set.



She wasn’t the only popular one, though.



The wee one really enjoyed capturing the attention of the grown-ups; he’s a funny little monkey.



There were also kittens, which always adds to the attractiveness of visiting relatives.



Unfortunately, this cute little kitten gave Hannah and at least one of her cousins ring worm. A little anti-fungal cream later and all is well, though.

Tomorrow, San Angelo.

I can die now

...that I have found the Muppet Wiki. Yay!

Word of the Day

catsturbation: when a cat rubs itself on any available inanimate object--the edge of the coffee table, on a stack of DVD cases--in lieu of a pet from its cat-parents


This is actually my coinage, after watching Eliza satisfy herself this morning. John was impressed and entertained (by my new word, not by the cat).

I love opening email from the Wordsmith

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

-John Danforth, priest, ambassador, senator (b. 1936)

And the lameness lives on

Hannah had an earache and sore throat this morning, so we let her stay home from school and sleep in. I feel like I have an incipient cold, but have felt that way for a while now, so I got a little extra sleep, too, and took it fairly easy today. I did have a proofreading job come in, and I got through half of it before I had to start dinner and make Hannah get online to study her Latin vocabulary. After dinner, we played Scrabble, and John won, but Hannah was a close second, with my assistance. Tomorrow is Friday, and Hannah is going to school no matter what, and maybe I will manage to finish the proofreading and the syllabi for my 2 courses that start next week. Too tired now to think of anything else...

Free from the tyrrany of class-parent-hood

I went to the meet-the-teachers evening at Hannah's school and stepped down as classroom parent. I don't know that I was all that helpful as the number 2 person, but the replacements (#1 also stepped down, but she is a full-time teacher of disabled first- and second-graders and has 3 children, so it wasn't unexpected) only have one year ahead of them because the kids will get sorted into new classes next year. So I don't feel like anyone is getting taken advantage of because I stepped down.

On the way home, I was reading The Joy Luck Club and almost missed my stop. Oops. The meeting had run over, as usual, so it was 10:30 when I got off the bus.

This morning, I got up and got Hannah off to school, then I lay down on the couch and went to sleep for 4 hours. This afternoon, John lay down for an hour or two. We are two lazy--or perhaps slightly ill--people. At least Hannah still seems healthy.

Busy bee

I got up and screwed around for a little while on the Internet this morning before helping John get out the door. Then I washed a whole pile of dishes, which is no fun because we still have that leak in the kitchen sink and therefore have to do dishes in a large plastic bowl that came with pancake(?) mix from Costco or Sam's back in the day. But, our landlord came by (only a week later than expected--huzzah!) and measured the sink and promised to get a chrome replacement for it. Right now it is out of some mystery substance that is an unpleasant brown--very 70s--so chrome is a definite improvement. If only he would replace the dishwasher, too, but since we have never brought it up, the odds are not good. Oh well, it is probably eco-friendlier this way. Maybe.

Then I threw some towels in the wash--oops, gotta go take those out--and headed out to the grocery store. One place we shop is a discount store: they have a certain amount of stock (food) that is always there, but every week they have specials on non-food items or specialty (often foreign) foods. I found some stuff for Hannah's bed I had been looking for a few weeks ago when I blew our budget on some kitchen appliances, so between those things and the shopping, I had a hell of a lot to carry up to our top-floor apartment on my very own (Hannah was at school and John at his office). Oof! Hannah got home just as I was carrying the last 4 bags up the last 2 flights of stairs--she's got that uncanny sense of timing from her dad's side of the family--so she helped me put away the groceries and complained while I ate some tuna salad. While she ate lunch and studied Latin, I put together the new support system for her bed. The American-style box-spring is unknown here. Instead, people use a Lattenrost, a slatted frame that fits into a bed frame and on top of which the mattress is laid. Hannah's looks about like this:



Her old play bed just had a simple arrangement of slats that are nailed directly to the edges of the frame but have no spring to them. Since she is bigger than me now--i.e., grown-up sized--it was past time for her to have grown-up back support.

I also got a mattress pad for her bed, but it is rather thick and cushy, so it is almost like a pillow-top for her mattress. She seems pretty happy with the new set-up so far, although she hasn't slept in it yet. If she falls out tonight, I'll have to go back and pull out the old slats that are still nailed in place under the new system. I really don't want to do that, though, so I hope gravity gives her a break near the edge of the bed.

Now I am a bit stiff and sore from the lugging, sitting on the floor putting the Lattenrost together, and yesterday's turn at cleaning the communal stairwell. Since I have to go to a parent meeting later this evening--which I can't skip because I am one of the classroom reps, oi--I will now go lie down somewhere and veg out.

Last Minute

I was sitting there eating dinner--homemade pumpkin soup, which Hannah refused to eat--and realized I hadn't posted yet today. It would be rather lame of me to lose steam of day 5 of my month of blogging, so here I am while Hannah plays Animal Crossing.

We spent the last 3 days making our way through The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. I can't help myself thinking of The Very Secret Diaries whenever we watch it, though. Highlights: Aragorn--"Still not king." Legolas--"Still prettiest." Everyone: "Sam will kill him if he tries anything."

And that is the lame end to a rather lame day 5.

A Little Bit of This and That

John got all Mr. Fix-It recently and fixed:

1. the toilet seat in the downstairs bathroom, which had been sliding off the rim to the left every time we sat on it, for ages.

2. the light switch in the upstairs bathroom, which had a bit of it snapped off.

3. the light bulb in the car's right headlight.

I was Suzy Homemaker and sewed:

1. a cozy for the new kitchen radio after spraying it with powdered sugar. John mocked me for making a kitchen cozy, since in his experience only grandmothers sew cozies, but when our radio is still clean, functioning, and dust-free in 5 years, he will thank me for it.

2. hems on 2 new pairs of pants I bought in the States.

3. 2 still-secret xmas presents.

4. the second bench cushion, once I figured out the proper sewing machine needle to use on the upholstery.

5. and generally fixed a few things in need of repair, sewing-wise.

Hannah has joined the drama club but skipped the first meeting. She has promised to attend the next one this week on pain of death or loss of Animal Crossing, whichever would pain her more.

She tried to go to the movies today to see a German teenie film called Gangs with her classmates--girls only because the boys acted like "idiots" the last time--but it turned out to be a big event because the cast was there to give autographs, and half the group, including Hannah, couldn't get tickets. Hannah swears some girl shoved the person in front of her in line out of the way and swiped her ticket, which I doubt, but it does sound like it was crowded and crazy. She and her friend came back to our house and are watching Clueless now.

I am finding my laptop super annoying right now. The space bar doesn't always work, and now that I am managing to get in more typing, that means more times for the space bar to annoy me. grrr...

Our camera has crapped out on us, and I don't know when we'll have it fixed. The pictures look smeared, and a little research online shows that it is probably a part that Canon will fix for free, if we send it off to a Canon shop to be repaired. Now we just have to figure out where we can send it. That means I will not be able to inflict new photos on you. Luckily, I have a hard drive full of old photos. bwahahaha! Maybe later.

The Littlest Rock Band

Last night, John wanted to play Rock Band, but Hannah was already playing Sims on my laptop and I was sewing, so he had to play with himself.* He didn't have a preference for a particular instrument, so Hannah picked for him--singing, which he hardly ever does. He made his way through some Nirvana, Wheezer, Fu Fighters, and Blue Oyster Cult, and then for some unfathomable reason, he chose a French song. Since we have the German version of Rock Band, we have some additional tracks in German, and apparently this one in French. It's a catchy song, except since none of us actually speak French, we have no idea what is being said. You can have a peek at it here, Manu Chao by Les Wampas.



It's a rather fast song, so even if John could read the French, the words were flying by so quickly on the screen he would barely have been able to sing along (which also happened on the Fu Fighters track). He ended up basically making up words and singing in a horrible nasal tone that was supposed to approximate French; Hannah and I laughed so hard I thought she might wet herself. And to top it off, when his score came up and he had a chance to add his name to the high-score list, he was perturbed to find that he was only number six, since none of us had ever done that song before.

I think Hannah is the only one of us before last night that has played Rock Band alone as a singer, but I never payed attention to the avatars while she was singing (which is basically the only time you get a clear look at them without the guitar/drum line in the way). The only reason I payed attention last night was that I had recently read that Courtney Love was pissed about the way the avatar for Kurt Cobain had turned out for Guitar Hero.



Hannah has always commented on the appearance of the avatars--"Get a haircut, hippies!" (I think she's channeling Richard Nixon)--but I just noticed that one in particular bears a strong resemblance to a character from The Dark Crystal:



"Hi, I'm a Gelfling!"



Uncanny, no?

Post number 2 for October

As promised, I blogged our trip to wine country over on my travel blog. I can't imagine that I will be able to keep up this level for the whole month, but who knows--there are still lots of trips we made last year that never got blogged. That should take up several days of work/writing.

Enjoy!

National Blog Posting Month

I decided to bite the bullet and join NaBloPoMo, which you can find out more about here. If you were to judge by my recent posting, I am sure you would say, "Ha!" And you might still be right, but I am going to give it the old college try.

I was looking for something in my archives the other day and noticed that the number of posts I had up had decreased from one year to the next from when I started, and that disturbed me a bit. Recently, I have felt extra boring and reserved, which I don't find very conducive to writing chatty blog posts. I don't really want to be boring and reserved, and yet, that may be all I have to write about this month. Suffer, Popes!

Yesterday, I granted myself the leisure of surfing the Internet because I had gotten up and worked and taken a walk and just generally been righteous. I waswearing the Empire Strikes Back t-shirt* I acquired while in Louisiana, and spotting the NaBloPoMo badge above seemed like a good sign that joining was the right thing for me to do now. Also, Obi-Wan makes everything better.

Anyhow, this is my official first post, since I plan to blog throughout the month of October as my penance *ahem* project, but I thought I would give my victims a chance to run for the hills for the next month, if the mood strikes you that way.

I am much more likely to do something if I plan it out in advance, so I am cheating by writing this on the last day of September to post on the first day of October, but on the second day of October, I plan to put up a link to a to-be-written (not cheating!) post on my travel blog about our recent outing to the wine festival in Freinsheim.

*I wore this shirt the day before yesterday, too, but yesterday I layered it over a long-sleeved shirt. It is currently one of my woobie items and is in frequent rotation. It caused the pharmacist to have difficulties making change for me because she was mesmerized by Darth Vader.



Mesmerizing, no?

Then she told me about a Lego youtube video where Darth Vader orders a pizza, maybe like this one here:



I mean, what do you expect if you argue with Darth Vader about the pizza toppings? Sheesh.