I wish it were so, JFK...

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)

From the A.Word.A.Day mailing list.

Computer stuff

I am not fond of having to download software to be able to use a web site, but I am kicking myself for not having installed the Flickr Uploadr sooner. Rather than selecting the photos you want to upload, waiting for them to upload (which can take a while if there are a lot), and then having to come back and label them, you can select and label them first using the software, which them uploads them directly to Flickr without you having to go to the site and log in first, and when it is finished, all the labels, tags, and sets are already done.

I don't know if I mentioned it already, but we used our xmas loot to buy a new digital camera. Our old one was about 5 years old and had already been in the shop twice when it gave up the ghost. The new one is a Fujifilm camera that has a way-more powerful zoom feature than the old one and uses an SD card instead of whatever the old one had (for which I had to buy a separate reader when the cable croaked since our computers only have SD slots).

Right now I have some photos loading from February, so head on over there later if you would like to see them.

And on that note, I need to get back to translating.

--Nee in Germany is only uploading photos right now as a favor to John

Let's see...

Getting lots of stuff done lately, here and there. Yesterday, Hannah's class had a hot dog stand at their school festival / open house for incoming 5th graders. John and I took a turn through it, dutifully buying hot dogs for lunch--24 of which we had already bought and donated for selling--and washing them down with a chocolate milkshake to benefit a school in Uganda and chocolate-dipped bananas on a stick (well, John ate those).



Here you can see the classroom a little better. Hannah and I spent half a Saturday in January painting it green. It started out a rather distressing yellow, but this is a big improvement, even if all of the adults involved on painting day said, "Better the kids than us," regarding having to sit in such a bright green room.



Then we walked over to the library to return 3 books. Now I remember why I don't take John with me--he checked out 3 dvds and 8 cds. That means one of us has to go back in a week to return the dvds and in 2-1/2 weeks to return the cds. You get books for a month, so there's no pressure to hurry back until you need more reading material.

After that, we got some groceries so we could make aloo baingan (Indian eggplant and potato dish) and gumbo and tamales. John found the ingredients for tamales in a kit when we went to the commissary a while back and wants to try it out.

I finally got the floor of the shower stall good and clean after trying out various cleaners and spending way too much time on my hands and knees scrubbing. When the cleaning bug bites, you just have to go with it.

Every year at xmas, I am inspired to make a gingerbread house. My attempts at making one from scratch in the past have always failed, so I aim to buy a kit as early as possible in the season and hold onto it until Hannah says, "I'm bored!" Next year, I'm going to let Hannah munch on it the first time she asks, because by the time I decided we no longer needed it as a decorative holiday element, it had gotten so hard that Hannah had to saw through it with a serated knife and scraped her gums trying to chew it. I finally threw it out this morning.



We have been eating our way steadily through the American food bought on post, but it has not all been as good as we remembered. I made a strawberry cake for VDay from a mix; not good. Looked good, but tasted odd. And I mentioned John's canned chili recently--yuck.



I spent a big chunk of the day on Friday labeling photos from our Italy vacation in 2008(!). I don't know if I am ever going to manage to be done. There are so many photos! And I am still only on day 3 out of like 12 days. This may end up being my new neverending project.

--Nee in Germany doesn't seem to be making as much headway with her projects as she thought

Movin' on up

As of yesterday, I am 38. I'm not feeling any particular anxiety about getting older, I don't think, especially not with John announcing to facebook that he finds me hotter than ever. :) I cut my hair short recently, and the compliments I got on it (also on facebook) were a nice boost to my ego. I have also been running the 14-minute game on Wii Fit every day (I managed it in 13 minutes the last 2 days), so physically I am feeling pretty good. (I highly recommend the B52s "Private Idaho" as exercise music.)

I imagine I'll be getting off the St. John's wort soon, too. I made a little health journal when I was feeling funny recently, and although I didn't have a way of taking my blood pressure, I checked my pulse a couple of times a day for about a week and a half, and it was up over 100 for the whole time. It was back down to 80 yesterday for the first time and was still at 80 this morning before I exercised. I wonder if it has something to do with my menstrual cycle, or if it has been off and on for a while and I just never noticed it? In any case, it hasn't stopped me from doing what I want to do, so maybe I just shouldn't worry about it for now.

Let's see... Yesterday I hand-wrote notes to all the customers I had last year (in English and German) and sent them out with my business card. I am between jobs at the moment, so it seemed like the perfect time for marketing myself. I also did 3 loads of laundry, helped Hannah prepare for a Latin test on Thursday, and baked cupcakes, half of which were a disaster, although I am not quite sure why. We bought yellow cake mix at the commissary recently, and it should have been a snap, but I think they were not arranged optimally in the oven (all 24 in one go); I should have waited to put the second batch in by itself. Hannah's been eating batch 2--flat and crunchy on the edges--so they can't be too terrible. Well, edible at least. I mixed up chocolate frosting from scratch and slapped that on the "good" cupcakes, but there is still some left for helping the "bad" cupcakes go down.

John has already spilled the beans on facebook about Hannah's school problems. She's doing really bad in 2 subjects, bad enough that she could have to repeat the year. We have gotten her into tutoring, 3 times a week, but it may be too little, too late at this point. She is pretty far behind in math and Latin and may not be able to catch up. We were rather surprised to hear from her teacher, though, that Hannah's attitude seems, to her, to be one of the biggest impediments to her learning. The math teacher we've heard such terrible things about only has 4 students doing as poorly as Hannah. (Latin is an unqualified disaster for all of the students, but that has more to do with them starting so young and having to learn more due to changes in the curriculum.) Apparently, at the beginning of the school year, Hannah put up a sign on her desk, in all of her classes, "I am on strike." I have no idea why she did this, and she only stopped when her homeroom teacher pointed out that she was only hurting herself and her grades with her strike. I had never heard a peep about it until the teacher told us about it on Monday. That made me want to cry. Then yesterday, Hannah came home from school and told us that there was no vocabulary quiz in Latin, which we had been studying madly for for days, and instead she had a major test (the 2nd of only 4 for the whole school year) on Thursday on 2 totally different chapters. I wanted to curl up in a ball and cry at that, as well. But I managed to pull myself together and help her study the "new" material. It is impossible for her to get a top grade at this point, but I gave her some tips about making lots of notes on the test so the teacher can see what she does know, even if she is not able to apply it on the test. Knowing the material and knowing how to use it are not always the same thing, so that is something I am trying to address with her. I've steeled myself to giving her my afternoons to help her with her school work; she won't be able to get caught up otherwise. But with her school schedule and her tutoring schedule, it shouldn't eat too much into my working hours. I will just have to be sure to buckle down when I am working and to be as effective and efficient as I can.

--Nee in Germany is trying to be Zen-like, but fears she is probably more like Cornholio

Doing and spending...

Right after I finished my last translating gig, I was offered 2 short jobs back-to-back. I got the last one out the door on Monday and have been trying to get crap done ever since, with mixed results.

For one thing, I went back into my list of bookmarks to clean it up. I have a new system now that I have a new laptop: permanent links are filed in folders. Links that are actually reminders (to buy a replacement light bulb for the microwave, etc.) are unfiled, but I delete them once I take care of what they were reminding me to do (the bulb came in the mail today).

I have a few paperwork-type things to do. I have some marketing-type things to do. And I have some Hannah-type things to do. I'm going to be busy for a bit, but I have a heads up on more work in a couple of weeks, so I know I can't dally in getting my stuff done.

Hannah is home sick today. We all used it as an excuse to sleep in, which was nice, but now my mental clock is off by about 2 hours. Hannah has a bad cold: red, watery eyes, clogged sinuses, light sensitivity (she dug out her shades to wear in the house), sneezing, runny nose, cough. She hasn't been running a fever to speak of, though, so I think a little rest today will go a long way. She has to give a very short presentation in English tomorrow, which I have been making her work on and practice today, and we both hope she's up to giving it. I made her take a steam shower (head over sink) this morning, and that seemed to help, so maybe we'll repeat it this evening before bedtime.

We're having some lovely sunny weather, and the bulb flowers are starting to come up next door, but it doesn't quite feel like spring because there isn't any water flowing out of the neighbor's yard. We had a bunch of snow around the holidays, then a thaw and a bunch of rain, leading to the Great Flood of Winter 2011 in January:



Normally that kind of flooding doesn't happen until later in the year; I wonder if the change is going to affect the farmers in the area.

We went to the commissary on base on Friday and stocked up on 200 dollars worth of crap, to put it in the most accurate terms. This was after eating at Taco Bell. (I was pleasantly surprised by the fresco burrito I had; I think it had real pico de gallo in it.) John didn't seem to think that the 4 cans of Wolf Brand chili I had bought would be sufficient for his chili-eating needs, so he threw in another 4 cans. After eating one can for lunch on Saturday, he wondered why I didn't keep him from buying something that is suspiciously similar to pet food and contains the nutritional equivalent of a jar of lard. I'm sorry, but if my calling Wolf Brand chili "dog food" for the last 10+ years has not turned you off of it, John, I don't know what else I can do but try to sabotage your chances of getting back on base. Since John's contact is moving back to the States, like this weekend, I think it is going to be a long time. But now I have 7 cans of "dog food" and a husband leery of eating them. Maybe I'll donate them to a food pantry....

I must admit I folded like a cheap card table and threw in a few items myself--oh, Nutter Butters, I am your bitch--but I tried to stick to the list we had made in advance. John was *so sloooow* going through the store; on each aisle, I would get whatever was on the list, then I would send Hannah back to the previous aisle to tell her dad he needed to get X on the next aisle, because he hadn't specified on the list what type or how many of X he wanted. Then he would catch up with us 2 aisles later with a grumpy look on his face and 20 pounds of chips and dip perched precariously in his arms.

When we got home, I had to find a place for all the crap, which means that not only is the pantry closet and the snack cabinet packed to the gills, but also the top shelf of the spice cabinet, the freezer shelves, and the cabinet above the stove, plus the corn chips stashed on top of my baking pans in a drawer, not to mention the cookies and candy I just left on the counter. Good thing I had already started working out with the Wii!

Then on Saturday, we needed a little R&R (and pants), so we ventured into town for a little shopping, movie-viewing, and pizza eating. We did manage to find pants for Hannah and John, but H&M almost derailed us. It was crazy packed in there, and Hannah refused to wait in line to try on the pants she had picked out, and I refuse to let Hannah buy pants without trying them on, so we ditched H&M and found a couple of nice, quiet department stores up the street in which to spend our money.

Hannah wanted to see Black Swan, but 1. it is for 16 and up, and 2. it has a late-ish showing, so we ended up seeing the first part of Harry Potter 7. Now, I am one of those people who will almost always prefer the book to the movie, no matter how well made the movie (I'm looking at you, Lord of the Rings), and I have really not enjoyed the HP movies since after the first one. I can't remember exactly, but I think I blew off seeing one of the later ones in the theater, because I just couldn't bear seeing how mangled it would end up. But I was pleasantly surprised at how 7 turned out. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared. I still had to explain several things to John (who hasn't read any of the books) and Hannah (who hasn't read book 7) over dinner, requiring a pen and paper and some charting to make it all clear. I'm sure the 2 bored-looking girls at the table next to us in Pizza Hut were thrilled to hear all the specific details of the Harry Potter universe, plus spoilers for the second half of book 7.

--Nee in Germany passed on the Trix and Lucky Charms to have plain old muesli for breakfast

Quote of the Day

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

- Abraham Lincoln, 1809 - 1865

from Quotes of the Day newsletter

Freestyle

I finished my translation work for the day, and we are going to meet John's "connection" to do some grocery shopping and fast food munching on the base, so I suddenly found myself with a little free time.

So here, in no particular order, is a bit of what has been going on around here lately:

I think I mentioned getting the Wii Fit game, and I have been "playing" it for 30 minutes, 4-5 days a week. I woke up with a bit of a headache yesterday (stupid weather) and didn't feel up to exercising, but I kind of missed it. The wacky music and weird situations seem to have grown on me. For instance, in one game, my Mii character (an animated avatar of myself) is wearing a little penguin suit, and by shifting my weight from one side to the other, I can make my Wii slide on its stomach from one side of an iceberg to another to catch (and presumably devour, but they just disappear) fish. Or the soccer game where I am supposed to head balls that are kicked at me left, right, and center, but avoid being hit in the head with soccer cleats and panda heads. Mostly I like jogging, although John thinks I am mad. Most of the routes are rather short, 4-5 minutes, but even the 14 minute route is doable. I didn't think I would enjoy exercising this much, but I also don't try to do a specific routine or target certain areas. I just do what I feel like, whether that is yoga poses, jogging, balancing games, or snowball fight.

John bought me a food processor (at my request) for xmas, and I have been trying to finagle our uneaten fruit and such into new and delicious recipes. Banana cream pie was a win, although I was disappointed in the meringue topping. I've got breadmaking down, but eggs seem to be my Waterloo. On days when I don't have a lot of work, or I'm between gigs, I try to get more from-scratch cooking in. I have even managed to make some things that are rather healthy and get Hannah to eat them, like the blueberry muffin recipe I modified by using frozen mixed berries. She ate those in her school snack every day that week. We've gotten through about 3 loaves of fresh bread since xmas. I have even been making homemade yoghurt, just to see if I can. I found tips online at Salon in the food section and have had one ok batch and one quite good batch. I wonder if I could use straight cream to make some? Don't want it to go bad on me. I also made up my own muesli to eat with my homemade youghurt, and it is just sweet enough (thanks to the granola in it, I think) that it complements the sour yoghurt perfectly, or vice versa.

Some cooking has not gone so well, especially American recipes that call for very specific ingredients like corn syrup. It is not to be found here, and the sugar syrup I tried to make as a substitute was a disaster. Oh, yes, and anything based on eggs, like baked meringues. They were tasty, but the middle was way too chewy to me. With John's dental problems and Hannah's braces, I've just given up on making them for the foreseeable future.

John can't decide whether to be amused or horrified by the notes I make on my recipes: "J & H bitched about the lack of nuts" on a banana bread recipe. Seems like a perfectly legitimate reminder to myself, as far as I am concerned.

Last year, I planted carnations in my window boxes, but then I read on the seed package that they only bloom in the second year. The weather has turned warm-ish lately, so I went out and checked them, still in the box hanging on the balcony, and they seem to still be alive and generally unharmed. Plus there are a bunch of seedlings coming up in the other boxes, so I pulled all the dead stuff out of there to give them a little space, now that they seem to have taken root. I may not have to shell out much for plants this year.

My indoor plants seem to be doing ok, too. I think I didn't keep my poinsettia's covered long enough, though, because they didn't finish putting out the actual flowers in the middle. You can see here how they look stumpy.


Plus, I think this was originally a red poinsettia, which you can see streaks of on one of the bracts in this photo:


So it was a semi-success for xmas 2010. There's always next year, I guess.

The mystery citrus has pleasantly surprised me, once again. This is what I was looking at all fall and winter to date:


I mean, look at that tangle of bare twigs! But then this started to happen just a week ago or so:


Baby leaves! Now I'm glad I didn't start hacking away at like I had planned. I guess I will wait and do that in the summer when it has put out all its leaves and I can tell what is really dead.

I also finished reorganizing my office. I did it in two stages, well three, if you count swapping my desk and plants so the far end of the room is a hothouse and the other my office.




Now I have a handy bookcase with my work materials, two outlets for my gadgets, and I still have the great view. Plus, my stuff is out of the way for when the chimney sweep comes (only once a year, but still).

-Nee in Germany spends a lot of time at home

Quote of the Day

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

-Herman Melville, novelist and poet (1819-1891)

From the A.Word.A.Day newsletter (more info at Wordsmith.org)

And now for something different

I like reading about regional issues, especially those having to do with the logistics of feeding urban areas. Here is a well-written refutal of the persistant myth that there are no grocery stores (by which is meant *national chain* stores) in Detroit, by James Griffioen.

I don't know sometimes...

I recently took part in an exchange on Facebook with a teenaged relation (not one belonging to any of my readers) that bothered me. She started off by saying that she wanted a boy who would call her sweet names, among them "baby girl". One of her friends (a guy) said he thought all the names *but* "baby girl" were kind of derogatory, and I responded that I thought that was the worst one. When her response included "...the day i stop wanting to be treated like a woman...", I had to disengage or my head would explode.

Does she really think having a man call her "baby girl" makes her womanly? To me, it is infantizing her and putting him in a father-like role. That is the patriarchy, plain and simple. Is this what girls are learning about love relationships and gender roles? I know she is only 16-ish, and has had a rather odd upbringing, but isn't anyone telling her about the joy of a relationship based on respect and equality?

I love John, but I've already told him that the first time he calls me "baby girl" (or "wifey", another usage I've seen from a relation), I'm punching him in the gonads. It's actually already kind of a joke between us; sometimes he'll exclaim that I'm just so cute (in the kind of voice you use to talk to/about very small children or kittens), and I'll flip him the bird, just to make sure he knows that I consider that the very least of my attractions.

--Nee in Germany is a woman, not a baby

Stress

In the spring and summer of 2009, I was writing my master's thesis and thought I knew what stress was. I was eating poorly and sleeping less than I would have liked; I had lots of weird dreams; I had hot flashes during the night a few times; my eye tic returned; I stopped having my period for 3 or 4 months. To me, that is what stress should physically look like.

In the fall of 2010, I started having weird feelings in my chest and ended up at the doctor's office, where I was given a variety of tests and some beta blockers. I finally landed in the offices of a cardiologist and a gastroenterologist. Even after all the poking and prodding, the only thing that came up was gastritis and H. pylori. After I was done going nuclear on the H. pylori, I discovered that I had a lot more energy, but the weird chest feeling was still there.

When I ran out of beta blockers, I went back to the doctor, but this time I saw someone else in the same practice. This was in the run-up to xmas, and I had been having a hard time emotionally. I cried baking cookies. I cried listening to Abba. I cried washing the dishes. At that point, I had spent a little time each day that week crying, often in the shower so I wouldn't upset my family. I felt like I needed a way to get the sadness out of me, and since do-it-yourself primal scream therapy probably wouldn't win me any friends in our 4-family house, crying seemed like the best approach.

The doctor's office was the emptiest I had ever seen it, so I guess that is why the doc spent so much time talking to me--there was no one else waiting. I had a hard time keeping it together in her office, and she gave me a prescription for St. John's wort. She said it would give me a bit of distance from the emotional problems. It has worked as promised in that respect, but I have to say, I was not expecting to suddenly feel more mentally alert or sharp than I had in a long time. That's not to say that I've been feeling stupid, but suddenly I was able to take all my post-antibiotic newfound energy and direct it in a way I hadn't been able to for a while. Like I told John, if that is what St. John's wort does, I am never going to stop taking it. I wonder if I could plant it in my flower boxes...

I also mentioned at that visit that the weird chest sensation (palpitation-like) had been more or less replaced by a kind of muscle-burning sensation that goes from my sternum to my back, but she thought that was a back/posture problem and suggested a physical therapy course just for strengthening your back muscles. I found several courses through the city's web site, but I just missed the enrollment dates, and they were all offered on the opposite side of town from where we live. It would have taken 45-60 minutes to get there by bus. So using my newly sharpened mind and my reignited sense of direction, I went into town on a whirlwind shopping spree that included buying a balance board for our Wii and a Wii Fit Plus game (used, so it was only 15 bucks--woo hoo!). I've been doing 30 minutes on it every day this week but haven't noticed any difference in the burning sensation, except that it is stronger when I am tired. I'll mention that when I see the doc again next week.

After I had been at the doctor's office, I was working on a translation about job burnout and came across this online stress test:

"The Life Stress Test, also known as the Holmes and Rahe test, was first created in 1967."

It has events that could occur in 8 different areas of life (finances, living conditions, etc.), and you are supposed to check off how many of them occurred to you in the last year.

"If your score totals 150 or more: You have a 50-50 chance of developing an illness."

"If your score totals 300 or more: You have a 90 percent chance of developing an illness."

My score was 257.

I was floored, because I hadn't experienced the same kind of physical response to stress in 2010 that I had in 2009. (Of course, once I started a "real" period this month, I realized that I had been having a "barely there" period all fall, which I had wanted to attribute to changes in my hormone levels as I am getting older interacting with the Mirena IUD I still have.)

I had also been discounting stressors that I had not viewed in a negative light, like finishing my degree (after months of antsy waiting for my results) and starting up my freelance business. Those things, on top of losing my grandmother in March (which was not unexpected, but still...), John's uncle in July (he was only 58 and had a series of heart attacks), and Shannon in September, apparently were enough to push me into the danger zone as far as my own health goes.

I know that time heals all wounds, and eventually I will get there, but I am trying to just take things one day at a time, to be productive, eat better, exercise every day. Not to take my friends and family for granted and remember to tell them I love them every chance I get.

Quote of the Day

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
-Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

From the A.Word.A.Day newsletter (more info at Wordsmith.org)

Notes to myself

There are certain things that recur year after year, but I haven't come up with a reliable way to leave myself notes about them. For example, when we went to set up our xmas tree this year, we found the base in the cellar, but there were no screws in it. John found them upstairs in the tool box. Why? No idea, but there must have been a reason for it last year. Then once we got the tree set up, water started leaking out of the base. That must have been the reason. (After the drying of the floor and tree skirt and the siphoning off of the rest of the water in the base, our tree was tinder dry.) But after xmas, I went over that base with a fine-toothed comb and tested it with colored water, and there was no leak. So I can only assume I filled it too high and it overflowed. That would be a good thing to know next year, hence this entry.

I could make a note in my Palm organizer or in one of my many journals, but I don't use my Palm for much outside of jotting down appointments while out and about or noting library call numbers for books I want to pick up, and rereading my old journal entries makes me sick to my own ass, all the whining and navel-gazing, really. But I generally find myself rereading my old posts here a few times a year (or more, shhhh), so this might be the most convenient method. Maybe I will also jot a note on my paper family calendar to look this post up in the fall. Hmmm...

Item 2: John is supposed to check the mystery strands of lights in the xmas box. I think they are our outdoor lights, but I don't think they work. He refused to address it this winter--his doom is sealed for next winter.

Item 3: Pat the chicken completely dry before breading and frying. I have a little burn on my forehead from popping oil that is scabbing over, and I would like to avoid that in future, thx.

Item 4: Buy an advents wreath *before* the first Sunday of advent, because there won't be any afterward. One day I will manage this. Same with advent calendars, although they might be cheaper if we wait, but all the good ones will be gone.

I may be coming back and adding more to the list as it occurs to me, but this is a good start, if not completely seasonal.

--Nee in Germany needs a steady stream of reminders in order to maintain her sanity

More small victories

I've been trying to take care of small repairs and replacing defective items around the house. Recently I had to buy a new flashlight due to corrosion in the old ones (no idea how that happened), but it is currently only being used for one thing--illuminating the contents of the microwave through the glass in the door since the bulb went out. And of course the microwave manual says to take it to a certified repair person to *change the lightbulb*, which is ridiculous, even if you have to take off the entire casing to reach it. As soon as I can get to the hardware store, I'll be looking for a replacement bulb to do it myself.

I also have to find the proper knob for the radiator unit in our living room and exchange the one I bought last weekend. Ages ago, I was able to pop off the knob from the radiator in the dining room and snap it onto the one in the living room, and it worked just fine, but the stuff I found all had ventilator valves and extra bits and pieces I don't need. Unfortunately, everything in this apartment is rather outdated, so I don't know how easy it will be to find "just" a knob for this particular radiator when neither the radiator or the knobs that are still intact have any part numbers or other identifying marks.

Speaking of light bulbs, John replaced the light bulb in the fridge, lo these many years ago, and it never lit up again. While fiddling around with the microwave, the unfairness of it struck me: John had gone through who knows what ordeals to find the stupid bulb, had stuck his hand at an uncomfortable angle into the frige to remove and then replace the bulb because the cover would not come off, and then it didn't even work. So I fiddled around with it and finally got it to work by some combination of tightening and wiggling. Now we can finally see everything in the fridge, and boy is it a mess!

I think I mentioned that John is the president of a local club for Swedophiles. This club does not have an office or a fixed location for events; they just have to rent out space on an as-needed basis. This means that anything the club has accumulated--books about Sweden, leftover items from parties and events, coffee and tea thermoses and decorations for their annual xmas event--has to be divided up among the members of the leadership committee for storage. We seem to have gotten more than our fair share of this stuff, but since our apartment is rather snug, storage-wise, and our cellar rather, eh, *earthy*, we've been stashing boxes under a patio table at one end of our sunroom, which currently doubles as my office. I think I mentioned that John and Hannah moved our stuff in the cellar to a slightly less moldly corner, so that led to us reorganizing the Sweden stuff under the table and moving some of it into the cellar. Yesterday, I got some more of it pared down and into a smaller box that I hope to move out of the sunroom soon. As of right now, the space under the table is clear. My plan is to clear out, at least partially, one of the bookcases in the downstairs study, move it upstairs to my office (where it will provide storage for my books and binders and a surface on which to put some of my plants), and move the table onto the lower balcony. I want to claim the whole room as office space, and although I have been using the spaces between the plants on the table to hold papers and office supplies, I think it is better if I am not using a sizeable chunk of the room for storage.

I was relieved to find that I had stored my notes about our Italy trip in the folder with our digital photos, so that survived the great involuntary laptop-purge of 2010. I think I will work on labeling those photos this weekend.

--Nee in Germany likes to plan ahead

I am a buzzing bee... buzzzz...

Let's see--I've been busy busy lately.

Yesterday I spent the whole day cleaning out my side of the closet (not even the clothes, just the storage) and my side of the bed (the floor and shelf have been such tempting storage places in the past). I bit the bullet and tossed some things I am never going to use (ugly crochet pattern for Barbie "antebellum" gowns, articles from class on prepositions of space, a plethora of amazon boxes). I downsized, reorganized, and redistributed, and now everything fits with space to spare. I even vacuumed upstairs when I was done, although it was 8 o'clock at night.

Saturday John and I drove across town and got lots of errands done while Hannah went into town with her friend and bought make-up. She got home before us, of course, because even make-up shopping can get old after an hour-and-a-half and 15 bucks worth of nail polish and lip gloss (thanks, Gwamma!). But she was perfectly cool and collected when I called from the store to tell her we were on our way home, almost 2 hours after she had gotten there herself. Recently she had told me she thought she was old enough to spend a few hours by herself in the evening if John and I wanted to go out. Our 16th anniversary is coming up in March, and we didn't get to celebrate our 15th because I was at my grandmother's funeral in Texas, so we might just have to take her up on that.

Last week I spent my evenings saving every blog entry and accompanying comments for Shannon's blog. I had saved it on my old computer (whose data has now gone bye-bye) as a series of pdfs, minus the comments, but this time I wanted to get everything, in case Blogger decides to take it down. By the time I was done, I had 674 pages in Microsoft Word. That was a mighty output for 5 years.

I thought I would be a lot more torn up reading back over her posts, which is one reason why it took me so long to start. (The way I had done it before, I was able to save a year at a time without having to go through every entry.) One thing that probably helped was this new prescription for St. John's wort, which I got just before xmas. The doc said it would help me feel a little distance from things. So far, so good. But reading back through all the entries, I was reminded of just what a wonderful person Shannon was, and how much love she had for so many people, myself included. That is something to feel good about, not sad.

Last Wednesday, we had some friends over for coffee, so the whole day was taken up with baking (me) and cleaning (John and Hannah--woo!) in the morning and visiting in the afternoon. But that meant I lost a day of translating. Today I more than made up for it. I have been aiming to get through 5 manuscript pages a day--this is for an informative brochure with lots of big pictures, so most pages are not solid text--but today I got through 11! Granted, one page with *just* a photo, but there was still a header to translate.... The next bit of text could be more challenging, since it is 3 or 4 pages of glossary to explain the medical jargon used in the brochure, but I think I have a pretty good handle on all the terms by now, 35 pages in.

And now I have to go finish up the stroganoff so we can eat.

--Nee in Germany loves dairy and mushrooms, so stroganoff is right up her alley

In the New Year

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
- Carl Bard

This quote kind of sums up my philosophy for 2011. I'm not usually one for making New Year's resolutions; this just kind of came up during my time off over the holidays. You have more time for thinking once things begin to settle down after xmas.

I have made up my mind that there's no use having regrets about things I can't (and probably wouldn't) go back and change, so why let them take up so much of my mental real estate? I can't go back and practice more so I don't choke during the school musical or state music contest; my master's thesis is never going to be any better; I can't go back and not put off the small thoughtful gestures I thought I would have time to get around to doing.

So now I am trying not to put things off, even if it is just something small, like sending a donation to the proprietor of an email newsletter I have been receiving for years or filing papers in their proper place instead of stacking them on top of the file box. The big things are made up of the small things, and maybe by accomplishing enough of the small things, they will add up to something big.

--Nee in Germany resolves not to be such an ass, but she makes that resolution every year

Baby steps

My friend Shannon, who passed away in September, was a big fan of quoting song lyrics. She was always much more in touch with her emotions than anyone else I know, and could find links between what she was feeling and certain songs.

I, on the other hand, have only rarely been struck that way, but I wanted to share this video for "Firework" by Katy Perry, because it reminds me of Shannon.

This and that

Hannah and John still have a week of vacation, so to combat all the loafing around, he took her down to the basement and made her help him clean out our storage area and move everything into the space vacated by our downstairs neighbors when they moved a couple of months ago. Our stuff in cardboard boxes had been sitting on an earthen floor for 7 years, and the boxes were moldering. The neighbors' space was at least lined with some kind of rough tile, and they left behind a storage rack (minus shelves) that I think John was able to get some use out of. He also found a few bottles of mead that he had made back in the day, maybe 5 years ago, and one beer. Unfortunately, he also found a couple of framed items that I could have sworn were with the other framed pictures behind the desk in the study. I guess they got left in their box from when we moved here because they were relatively big. One is a drawing John's high school friend made for him and seems to be in ok shape; the other is the cross-stitch my mother made us when we got married. It looks a little moldly around the edges--I just hope I can get it clean. Any tips, LMIL?

I managed to get a decent amount of work in today, even though I slept in this morning after a less-than-decent night's sleep. The cherry on the top was checking my bank statement and finding out I had been paid for my last 2 jobs. Whooo!

I've been saving up my veggie scraps in a freezer bag to make broth, and I had a full bag, so while the soup for dinner cooked yesterday evening, I had a pot of broth simmering on the back of the stove. Then I got busy doing something else after dinner while it was cooling, but Hannah was kind enough to remind me on her way to bed that I needed to strain my weeds.

I also made goose broth from our xmas dinner carcass, but it might be a bit strong for soups and such. Maybe in rice? That carcass also provided some nice grease, with which I made a crust and the rue for a sauce to go into my chicken pot pie a couple of nights ago. Yum!

Last year, John started keeping track of all the books he had read for pleasure since we moved here, and he started an account at Shelfari (sp?) for this. I wasn't willing to go that far at the time, because it would have taken me ages to enter all the books I remember, after learning how to use it, but I did make up a list in Excel. Which I lost during the great computer debacle of my own making of 2010. Alas. But I am going to start from scratch for 2011, seeing how I got some books for xmas and all. So if I manage to get it set up, I will try to add a gadget (widget, whatever) to the side bar so you can see what I am reading.

--Nee in Germany didn't seem to mind the snow as much this winter

not dead, but starting to wish

computer has been fucked for several days

using John's new computer, hate the keyboard, couldn't find notes in msword all day

have a rush job, suddenly behind on everything else

*sigh*

Busy, busy

Today I spent the first part of the day running errands. Xmas is just around the corner, you know, plus I needed to pick up some medicine, do some insurance stuff, buy some shampoo--you know, errands. I was mostly successful, so that was nice. I came home tired but with a feeling of accomplishment.

When John went to clean the stairwell this afternoon, he realized that the bucket has been sitting out on the balcony, in the sub-zero temperatures, ever since we had our shower repaired. Sitting full of water. He thought it was frozen solid, but it turned out only the sides and top 2 inches were frozen. So now there is an enormous ice cube (or partial cube) melting in the bathtub.

Hannah has been watching the adventures of Chad Vader on Youtube. She got a Star Wars (Clone Wars) advents calendar this year, even though it has no chocolate in it, just cheap plastic toys. She has been bitching about the makers' sloppy attention to detail vis-a-vis light saber colors, etc, yet happily drags the bits of plastic around with her the whole day at school.

After the recent round of antibiotics, I have been feeling great energy-wise, but have recently started having digestive discomfort. I read that is pretty common until you build the flora in your gut back up. Since I originally came by my intestinal flora by passing through my mother's birth canal, and I don't think I'll manage it again that way, I have been drinking priobiotic yoghurt drinks, but I probably need to be drinking them more often. I asked John if he would share his flora with me by taking bites off my food.


I need flora, any flora!

John did not seem disposed to help me, for some reason. So I'll just have to do it on my own. Plus, I picked up the proton pump inhibitor my doctor prescribed me. That keeps you from making too much stomach acid, so I'll see if that helps, too.

And now I am off to watch the first movie from the Netflix-type service John set us up with.