Fraud! Fakery!

As a student, I have always felt like a bit of a fraud. On the one hand, I try to get away with coasting on my brains instead of working hard. Then when I have to take a test or write a paper, I feel like I should finally get my comeuppance (which, since I kind of believe in Karma, I totally deserve). But then I inevitably get a good grade. Like the paper I wrote last October. I finally got it back (or at least got an answer to my email to my professor about it), and I got a 1.7 on the paper and a 1.3 for the class. In Germany, grades start at the top with a 1.0 and go down to a 6. So once again, my suckitude has gone totally unnoticed! I guess I am just going to have to work harder at proving I suck.

But at least this gave me a bit of a boost for finishing the current paper, so I'll see if I manage to squeak by or get the lashing I deserve this time.

Working working working, dying dying dying...

Let's see ... at the rate I'm currently going, I'll have finished my paper by sometime in late 2009. I need to pick up the pace if I want to get this thing turned in before classes start again the third week of April.

Hannah is on Easter vacation, so of course she has a bad cold. Which means she has to sneak into my bed in the middle of the night to breathe sick germs on me and steal my pillow and generally squash me, which equals a bad night's sleep for Nee. I think I'm going to bed early, like right after posting this.

John has totally put me to shame with his stick-to-it-iveness. I think I hate him. He's spent the whole day preparing for a new class he'll be teaching this semester. What an upstanding jerk, ha ha. (Please take my sarcastic assholery with a grain of salt--I'm totally projecting onto poor John.)

Back to the mines!

*They* are the champions

Apparently I am the only lame-ass in my immediate family. John was recently voted president of the local German-Swedish club (out of a field of 1, but still), and Hannah was just accepted into her first-choice Gymnasium. We just turned in her application one week ago and weren’t expecting an answer for at least two more weeks, so it was a pleasant surprise to get the letter in the mail today.

I, on the other hand, don’t have a single word down for my paper, which was due by today. I’ve been reading and thinking, and thinking and reading, but no writing yet.

Unfortunately, my lame-assery is spreading, because all I can manage blog-wise right now is some linkitty, for your entertainment.

Some printables for kids (German site)
Each of the pictures links to a different collection (calendar pages, seasons, sports, etc.).

Children’s artwork translated into photographs (click on the arrows for the complete series)

Crass avarice (or stuff I would like to buy):
chess cookie cutters
approximate watch
parasite pals erasers
a sari
Jane Austen action figure
periodic table shower curtain

The Periodic Table of Dessert
A Scientific and Rigorous approach to patisserie -- in Full Color

Place the state game
Name all 50 states in 10 minutes

Death and Taxes poster

Stuff aimed at specific readers:
Art Garfunkel’s reading list
Chris' Eastern Screech Owl Nest Box Cam'

Photos galore

Today I will let my photos do the talking. Here are a few recent events.

Winter waited until the first day of Spring to wrap up, but I think it is over. Click on the photo for the full array of carnage.


Once Spring defeated Winter, we took advantage of the nice weather to go to a nice big park (think Zilker Park in Austin) in a neighboring town. Again, click photo for the full album.


I didn’t manage to work up a full plant-blogging post, but I did put a few recent photos together into an album (click photo).


John shows the proper way to hold up your pinkies during high tea. Hannah invited us.

Let it snow x 3

The intermittent snow of Wednesday was followed by the ceaseless snow of Thursday and Friday (where we live, at least.)

Unfortunately, it is a very wet snow that Hannah says is no good for making snowballs. Walking in it sucks, too. And tomorrow starts our week of servitude in the public areas of our house, so John will get to shovel snow (if it doesn’t melt off overnight, which is doubtful), and I will get to clean the stairs and entryway. Bleah.

I think I had mentioned the unusually warm winter we had been having up until the first day of spring. The restaurant next door to us got a bit ahead of themselves; they started working on expanding their outdoor dining area right before the snow hit. I was impressed, though—their handymen kept working despite the bad weather, and now the steel girders supporting the new wrap-around porch are already in place.

I think my iron levels have stabilized, if slightly at the low end of normal. For one thing, my eyes look a lot like those of a white rabbit—reddish around the edges. Back when I was bloodless, that part was the same color as my skin. For another thing, walking up stairs (or through slushy snow) no longer makes my leg-muscles gasp for air like a stranded whale (at least, that’s what it used to feel like).

We put in Hannah’s application to her Gymnasium of choice. She may not get accepted because they have a lot of variables they consider, some of which don’t apply to her (sibling already attending), but she had a second and third choice listed in the case she doesn’t get in to the number one choice. We feel that she will get a good education no matter which school she gets into, and we don’t plan on being here for the rest of her education (knock on wood), so it is not the end of the world if she goes to 2 or 3. We know of some parents who dislike the local choice of schools so much that their reaction to not getting into the private schools they applied to was to start considering moving to another country. *boggles*

On the first day of Spring 2007,

Mother Nature gave to me...

Snow


Sun


Snow again


Sun again


... and repeat up to now. It hasn’t been below 40F since this morning, so there was no chance of it sticking, but that doesn’t mean the weirdness of the weather was lost on us.

This was the most exciting thing to happen to us since Hannah lost a tooth last week, so you can understand the dearth of posting. Maybe I will do another gardening post in a day or 2, since that is one of the few major things I’ve been up to. (I did finally find a paper topic; writing it will be a different matter.)

Food-blogging

Happy Anniversary to Me!

I don’t know that the recipe I had for this is very close to real Black Forest Cake, but that much whipped cream can’t be wrong.

Did you know that the (GenX) 12th anniversary is gold foil?

That is one of the dangers of having an anniversary that falls within the grocery store Easter-display season.

I know that, at least in Texas, people have the impression that German sausage is the end-all, be-all. If you are talking about Bratwurst, you may have a point, as evidenced here by this prototypical German dinner of Bratwurst and Spätzle:


But the German sausage-making industry has a dark underbelly: Wurstsalat (sausage salad).

The sausage is basically strips of bologna, and the salad is made of the same ingredients for tuna salad—mayo and pickles, etc. John wanted to try it, but that was likely the first and last time.

Another German food with a reputation that is better than its actual taste (to me) is Knödel. These are basically potato dumplings. I made plain ones from a mix, but you can also fill them with meat or veggies. I thought I made them too big, even though I followed the directions on the package, but mine looked a lot like one of the pictures on the Wikipedia page I linked to above. To me, they ended up tasting like a gloppy lump of gluey potatoes.


We got out and enjoyed the first nice, warm day of spring. See John and Hannah frolic here.

Dullsville, Population 3

We have finally caught up to the 20th century. Yes, you read that right: the last century. We still don’t have a tv with a remote or a cell phone, but we do have a DVD player (2 actually—1 American and 1 European), and as of yesterday we have a cordless phone. This from a family who hooked up DSL before our computer was even delivered.

This morning I asked John if I should make a Black Forest Cake this weekend.
“Do we really need a cake?”
“Don’t you like a cake for celebrating?”
That’s when he got the deer-in-the-headlights look. I know it might seem self-serving to others, but I didn’t want him to be caught flat-footed tomorrow when there will definitely be no opportunity for him to run out and make a last-minute contribution to our anniversary festivities. I don’t actually want anything, but I want him to at least have a chance at doing something, if he wants to.

When we do our grocery shopping on Saturdays, we each get a candy bar. That is John’s idea from the Swedish tradition of “Saturday candy”. Sometimes I let Hannah get a magazine in addition to/instead of her candy, if she is with me at the store; last week it was a Barbie magazine (aargh!). During our outing last Sunday, she had it in the back seat of the car and was checking off all the items she wanted out of a mini-catalog on the back page. She tallied up her choices: 250 Euros! She asked if I would buy her everything on her list. No-o! Well, how many chores would she have to do to buy them? I would never have to lift a finger around the house again. She automatically rejected cleaning up cat barf—that would still be my job. Then she decided to try a new tactic. She pared a few items from the list. How about buying her 120 Euros worth of stuff? Still no go. She has been working on the list every time she comes across the magazine this past week.

John was tired of the moth-sex paper in the pantry, especially since he thought it was cruel to leave Wormy Little Bastard stuck on there indefinitely. WLB seemed to be getting dehydrated, etc. So John took the paper down and was going to remove WLB from his hormone-laden prison. But in doing so, he pulled WLB in half. Which is much less cruel than leaving him stuck on the pantry wall. So farewell, Wormy Little Bastard. You were a much better pet than Missy Cat, and you left Eliza Cat in the dust.

We have spent the better part of the last winter stockpiling newspapers, in the event we ever got around to buying wood for our wood-burning tile oven, which we didn’t. I was reading up on ways to form logs out of the paper, and I was planning on trying it out one of these nippy mornings. But of course it is getting steadily sunnier/warmer, so even that pitiful attempt to light up the oven just once this year is doomed to failure.

Remember the fruit seeds I saved for planting? Those are doing fine, but now John is getting in on the action with some walnuts that were sprouting in the pantry.

This one is already pretty far along; the other one is just starting to peek out from its shell. Maybe tomorrow I’ll fix up one of the window boxes with the onions that are sprouting.

School Daze

While I was making Hannah’s snack for school, she asked me not to chop up her carrot, because she likes to eat it whole.
Me: I’m just afraid it’s too hard and will snap off your teeth.
H: To me, it is as soft as a baby’s butt.

Hannah asked me to get her a training bra. I find the sports bra to be infinitely more comfortable than the regular kind, but I figured that every girl needs a traditional hook-and-lace type bra to start. She was so excited, she put it on right away. Then we went to a school open house, and she fidgeted, and pulled, and complained the whole time. “Welcome to the rest of your life,” I told her. She took it back off as soon as we got to the car.

In the German school system, instead of having one all-purpose type school that offers a wide variety of classes, they have schools that are specialized, and the children are sorted into them based on their personal strengths. Children that are strongly academically oriented go to Gymnasium (college-bound); each Gymnasium has its own orientation. We went to an open house yesterday at one that stresses foreign languages and all-around personal development. Band has not traditionally been a school subject here, but this school offers band, and for those who don’t want to participate in band, keyboard or recorder. There is also a science track at this school, but even that requires two foreign languages. Hannah really liked the school; if she went there she would take English and Latin next year (and probably keyboard), and add French in 8th grade. It’ll probably break John’s heart, but she’ll drop Swedish lessons next year.

I’ve often considered coloring my hair a la SJ, but 1. I don’t have the nerve, 2. I’m not thrilled with the idea of bleaching (i.e. frying) my hair first, and 3. I’m not sure it would take on the white hairs (which would not actually be the purpose of said dyeing). As to #3, John said maybe a rinse would work, since it works on old ladies. As much of a fuddy duddy I may be, I refuse to accelerate the process of aging by putting a purple rinse on my hair.

Homebody Nee

My poinsettia has been looking kinda sickly, so I googled up a cure. Turns out, I should have retired it after it bloomed and let it “mummify” before reviving it when the weather turns warm. (Sounds very mad scientist-ish, eh?) So I lugged it out to the balcony, where I will patiently neglect it for a while.

That little maneuver has freed up some space on the table in the sunroom, but I had to clean the sap off it before I could reclaim it for my own use. Did you know that the sap from a poinsettia can cause an allergic reaction in a large portion of the people with latex-sensitivity? Also, a poinsettia is not poisonous. As this site so helpfully puts it: “If you're going to knock the hubby off for the insurance money (there's a cheery holiday thought...), find another plant.” I love learning useful stuff off the Internet.

On one of my mad mad mad mad Spring cleaning days, I emptied the pantry (again) and pulled out the shelves (behind which I found some more larvae—AARGH!), then scrubbed everything with shower cleaner. Then I did the same thing with a small cabinet where we keep our snacks—crackers, nuts, dried fruit, popcorn—then I put everything into zipper bags and plastic containers. Now it is several days later, and I was just going to brag on our worm-free pantry (excepting Wormy Little Bastard on the flypaper, of course) when Hannah went to open a Tupperware of cereal and found a larva up under the rim. It was blocked from the actual food by the awesome power of the T-ware seal, but it *should not have been alive* in the first place. So then I had to check all the other million containers, one of which also had a foiled larva against the rim. Hannah wanted me to add the newcomers to the flypaper so she can feed them to her Venus flytrap—she just sowed the seeds 2 days ago—but I said, Hell, no! The flytrap will have to attract its own food. This isn’t a cafe, you know. It is very humiliating to be bested by a creature with only one more brain cell than George W. Bush. *zing!*

I am afraid I have gotten acclimated to the rigors of indoor gardening and pest battling; if it were to get any more exciting around here, I might have a heart attack.

Back in the Saddle Again

Avenging Unicorn Play Set: “Everyone wants an imaginary unicorn friend that they can call forth to smite their enemies.”
I never knew I wanted one, but now that I know it exists, I can’t imagine living without it.

We needed to get out of the house this weekend and stretch our legs, so we took a little day trip on Sunday. For the last 3+ years, we’ve lived a half-hour away from the town I lived in as an army brat; we visited it for the first time yesterday.

The only address I could find was from my birth certificate, so John did his Internet magic and printed out a map or 2 to help us find it. We shot right past it on our way into Darmstadt, but since we also planned to see a couple of other things south of town, we decided to check it out on our way back out.

We made our way to the city-center, which is where you usually find any sites of interest in a German town. Turns out that Darmstadt is centered around a giant shopping complex, but there were a few interesting places interspersed among the shops. Nothing looked familiar.

Once we hit the old buildings, the playground, and the ice cream shop, we found our car and headed back out of town. Due to my bad directions, we ended up making a big loop to get back to the military housing, but find it we did. We took some photos of the building number on my birth certificate, then drove along the “village” and took some random photos of buildings. They definitely looked familiar to me, but none of the surrounding area did. There was a fence around the whole thing and a couple of guard posts, which I am sure I would have remembered if they had been there when we lived there. But that was almost 30 years ago; things change.

Afterwards, we found Burg Frankenstein (Frankenstein Castle) and walked around in it and took tons of photos. My dad likes to tell about the haunted house they (used to) set up at Halloween there. Looks like they still do. I remember going there once.

Then we headed for the Felsenmeer (Sea of Boulders). We were also there when I was a kid, but the parts I remembered weren’t the way I remembered them. I guess that is normal. Unfortunately, the name didn’t ring a bell when John was planning out our trip, so I ended up tromping around in the woods and mud in these.


Up until we had to hike back up the hill to get to our car, Hannah declared it was the Best. Outing. Ever. She got to climb over boulders. She used her walking stick to christen all the more interesting ones, like Big Rock and Whale. She ran out of steam at the end, though. Her last attempt? “I dub thee ‘stupid-I-have-no-name-for-you’.”

Out and About with Nee

I bought some fly paper covered in moth pheromones as the next stage in the escalating Battle for the Pantry. The first thing I caught was a bag of chips that had been improperly stowed on the top shelf, then I caught myself trying to get the chips off. Finally, after about a week, I caught a larva. It was still alive after four days, so John and I elevated it to the status of pet (albeit one we don’t feed), and he named it Wormy Little Bastard, a pet name with a storied history on his mother’s side of the family. Yesterday Hannah spotted another larva in the pantry, so John stuck it on the fly paper next to WLB. Hannah thinks they make a cute pair. We didn’t come up with a name for it, which is just as well, because it made a break for freedom, and John had to crush it. Sayonara, little worm.

John asked me what I wanted for my birthday, but he thought I wasn’t being serious, or was asking for something cheap to let him off the hook, so he bought me some DVDs instead. But I really wanted it, so I went out yesterday and bought it for myself. Isn’t he cute?

Flying Pig Watering Can

Hannah had a week of school vacation last week, and we actually managed to keep her fairly occupied. Her friend spent the night once, another friend came over for a play-date, we took Hannah and yet another friend to the dreaded JumpInn, and we went into town for the Fasching Parade. Hannah insisted we go early to stake out a good spot because she was paranoid about claim-jumpers. She had already pictured the evil-doers in her mind, hanging around to pinch her spot as soon as she moved and taunting her about it: “Someone will jump in front of me and say, ‘Ha Ha, it’s my place now, you little twit’.” See how she planned to react?


Unfortunately, she did not foresee that neighboring parade viewers would be a bigger problem than potential place-stealers. Between the cuteness of the toddler on our left and the aggressiveness of the 12-year-old on our right, Hannah figures she had a 20% loss in candy receipts. Her haul was still ¾ of a plastic Halloween pumpkin plus a baseball cap and a wallet, so it was nothing to sneeze at.

She went all out on her costume, let me tell you. It was basically the same as her costume on the last day of school before the holiday:

Business Woman Costume

Except she added lipstick, shades, and a headband to transform herself into a millionaire.

I got out my sewing books and taught myself how to knit after the semester was over. Not being happy to just knit practice squares, I immediately started a project. It turns out that the hat ended up too small for Hannah, so it is winging its way across the ocean to my 5-year-old niece Fall, who has a much smaller head.

Ode to Librarians

„March of the Librarians“: Watch their annual migration to the ALA conference and observe them interacting in their natural habitat

The Illustrated Librarian Temporary Tattoos: “Read or Die”, a sentiment after my own heart

Librarian Action Figure: The perfect replacement for all the superfluous Barbies in your life.

Library Thing: Turn your personal collection into your own private library. One day I’ll get around to joining.

Hello from Boring-ville

So, what have I been up to lately? Not much.

I have laid in so many plastic containers in my death-match against the meal moths that my pantry would make a Tupperware salesman perish with delight. It had gotten to where I couldn’t walk past the pantry without inspecting the dry goods, and yes, I was *still* finding worms. Aarrgh!

After suffering from the ill-timed antics of our booby-trap shower head *bonk!* for 3+ years, we finally got around to finding the right replacement part for attaching the shower head to the wall (37 bucks for one little part!). It took the combined might of John and myself to get the original bit off, but it was worth every ounce of elbow grease. Now we’ll have to think of another way to keep overnight guests on their toes.

I’ve been going through a very Betty Crocker phase recently. First I tried a recipe for beer bread out of a magazine for students I picked up at the university. It was only so-so. Then since we were out of store-bought bread, and no one wanted to eat any more beer bread, I made a batch of my old standby, James Beard’s whole wheat bread. Then I got really creative and made a Swedish Lenten specialty, semlor. mmm... calorie bomb... I still have a few other items on my to-make list, but I am quickly running out of steam.

John has decided to call the last couple of months “The Winter That Wasn’t.” Here’s a little photographic proof, taken by yours truly last weekend as Hannah and I walked through the rain to the bank.
Last weekend:


This time last year:

The Funny Farm

Me: “Why does the kitty need a truck full of [Playmobil] swords?”
Lego-master: “Should I know?”
Then she explained that it was in defense against all the thousands of kids who want a cute little kitty. And then when the kids run and tell their moms about the cat with the truck and the swords, the moms say, “Oh, my kids! So young! And so drunk!”

John is not so good with the aphorisms: “Remember, honey, that which doesn’t kill you will probably maim you anyway.” Whatever happened to “Buck up, little camper?”

John also has a hearing problem. For instance, this morning he thought I was singing “Take this cat and shove it” (*insert bizarre mental image*), when in fact, I was singing “Take this food and shove it” to the cats in response to their incessant pestering about their breakfast.

One of the videos John bought in Texas was Labyrinth. He asked Hannah on several occasions if she wanted to watch it, and she turned him down flat (her usual m.o.). I thought it might be too scary for her, but he finally talked her into it one dull evening around the house. I kept waiting for the devil to appear. “That’s Legend,” said John (but you could hear “Dummy” from the tone of his voice). Hey, you know I’m bad with names, but I guess no Tom Cruise and lots of Muppets should have been a tip-off.

The bad part about Hannah seeing Labyrinth is that she now has an aversion to David Bowie. “Pants...too tight! Hair...too big! Make-up...too gay!” Anyhoo, there’s a really popular band here in Germany called Tokio Hotel. They are all about 18, so they have quite the teen and preteen following, all across Europe. The band is on the cover of a recent issue of Stern magazine, so we were all checking them out when we got the mag. The lead singer, Bill, is mighty androgynous, as well as being a big fan of David Bowie. Can you tell?


Hannah claims to be put off by Bill’s feminine mystique, but I know for a fact that at one time, she had some Tokio Hotel postcards/trading cards that she bought with her own money, and she had written “Sweet!” on the back of all of them.

Don’t you hate it when you pick out a new shower gel, and then you actually use it, and it smells like upholstery cleaner?

Organization is not my forte, so needless to say, keeping up with assigning Hannah chores and paying out allowance in a timely manner have never really worked out around here. We have switched to the pay-as-you-go system; Hannah isn’t necessarily doing more chores, but she’s not hounding me about late allowance money either, because I paid her on the spot. One night I was telling her that when I get old, she’ll have to take care of me, kind of like a baby, feed me, wash me—“I’ll just Swiffer you off,” she offered. So guess who’s now in charge of dusting...

I got through my student-teaching practice run (I have no idea what you would call a one-time, one-hour session of teaching by a visiting teacher-in-training) and felt pretty good about it and got mostly positive feedback afterwards. And I found out yesterday that I got a really good grade on it, so the day started off good. Then I took a final I was not fully prepared for (bad Nee! no biscuit!) in a class that no one was really sure what was going on in anyway. *Seventy* people enrolled on the first day, and *eleven* took the exam. Add to that the fact that I thought I started my period halfway through the test (false alarm), and you can see that the second half of the day took a steep nose-dive.

All I Want for Xmas...

One of Hannah’s permanent teeth was coming in above her baby tooth, so she had to have the baby tooth pulled. It and the one next to it had been loose for months but just hadn’t been getting any looser. Since she was already numb, the dentist went ahead and pulled the neighboring tooth as well; he said it wouldn’t be long until it came out anyway. Hannah was glad for the 2 bucks (she knows about the Fairy, so I didn’t have to stay up past my bedtime to make the swap) but disappointed that she didn’t get gas, because she had heard about my experience when I had my 4 wisdom teeth out, where I was *inside* Mahler’s First Symphony; she wanted to be inside “Baila Loco” by Soul Control and had even imagined up an outfit for the occasion: a cropped shirt with one long and one short sleeve, covered in glitter, and a striped mini-skirt. She’s all about the pop-star fashion.

Hannah normally reads for a while at bedtime, but last night she wanted to play in the living room + 5 minutes of reading for her pre-sleep routine. Here are the results:

A robber band


And their hide-out.

Who knew that the littlest Barbies were also the most criminally minded?

We seem to have returned from Texas with more of Hannah’s school photos than I had anticipated, so now I fear that we overlooked someone (or ones). If you didn’t get a photo, or know of someone who didn’t, let me know so I can fix that. Hannah decided to embellish one of her photos; I keep it in my notebook, but I will share a very blurry version here.

Friday's Child is Fair of Face (right?)

I used some of Hannah’s Wickedly Hot Chocolate lotion (this stuff is the *bomb*), and of course John had to chime in that he doesn’t think lotion should smell like food. Later, when he was cracking some nuts for a snack, Hannah commented that he should get some lotion that smells like nuts, or Viking.
“What does Viking smell like?”
“Stink. But maybe it would be better with a little cherry or strawberry.”


Dear Japanese Girl on the Bus,
I don’t know you from Sam, but please let me say that your puffy yellow jacket and matching Pikachu earmuffs totally cracked my shit up today. Well played.
Love,
Me


John was trying to remember the name of the nutty old man that the hobbits stay with briefly.
Tom Diddle?
Tom Dooley?
He went on in this vein until he made it to:
Weeble Wobble?
Snargle Fargle?
Tom Bombadil, you ... Tolkien-noob! He didn’t even remember that Old Tom B shows up in the first bit of the Fellowship of the Ring, before the hobbits meet up with Strider. He thought it was in The Hobbit. Pff! My mad research skillz totally saved the day on that one.


I love numbers, but I have decided to make an exception for these numbers. (Brought to you by my looming birthday.)
16 years ago I was 18; in 16 years I will be 50.
The year I turn 40, so will John, and Hannah will be 16.
I have been licensed to drive for 18 years.
I have been married for a dozen years, and my child is almost 10.
I graduated from high school 16 years ago.
I got my BA 11 years ago.
I met my best friend, WesTexGirl, 23 years ago.
I can’t go on. It makes my brain hurt.


A Hannah classic:
“There’s butter on my brain to make it work smooth. And pudding.”


Hannah is a latchkey kid for about half-an-hour once a week. *sniff* John said he came home to find every light downstairs on. Hannah said she was a little nervous about monsters. I pointed out that they would have to be tiny monsters since our apartment is kinda small. One could fit in the tile oven, she pointed out. One could *be* the tile oven.

John and I pointed out that Missy cat spends a lot of time up in the space toward the top of the oven, and the monster hasn’t eaten her. Simple: the monster-oven is using her as bait because it wants to eat a baby. Or the oven and Missy are dating.


We were watching Wetten, dass...? again (Bet that...?), and this 10-year-old kid managed to do his trick, so the moderator of the show told him he could choose his prize: “You can kiss these 2 ladies [one of whom was Beyonce Knowles] , or get something else.”
Kid: “I want something else.” (He got a trip to the Kennedy Space Center.)


Weather-talk alert!
After the wind storm last week, we got hit by a cold front this week. We got a little snow, not too much, but the temperatures have barely broken freezing for the last 3 days. I could do without walking to my first class in -6C (22F). Here is one of the poor flowering plants I mentioned last week.

Can you see the snow on the ground below it?


And to wrap up, a gratuitous photo of my plants.

Hannah, my Hannah, all hail the mighty child!

One day when I was walking Hannah to school, she was explaining that she would not like to be a popstar, because even though you would make a lot of money, you would get old, and they would push you out, then you’d spend up your money and live on the street, and that is why she does not want to be a popstar. Quick! Where’s Britney Spears’ cell number? My child has some important info for her!

This morning Hannah told us she had a math test today. I reminded her of the stuff she had been doing in homework recently, and how she knew how to do each thing. She said that if she had any questions during the test she would go up to ask the teacher, because some kids do that, like if they want to know which number to round to, or how 5 pigeons are supposed to eat one rat. We asked if that was a math problem she had to do, dividing up a rat equally. She thought maybe it was for “cooks who can open up a rat without anything falling out”. John: “What in the world!?” Hannah: “Or someone in a sewing club who can put a zipper in the rat.” It is getting harder and harder to keep a straight face in this family.

Late but Long

When John’s back was giving him fits over a week ago (he’s much better now!), he had the wattle bottle on his person at all times. When he started feeling better, he left it at home during work hours, which is when my story takes place. I had retreated upstairs to the “facilities”, and I heard Hannah coming up the stairs. Wanting to head off an invasion, I shouted, “I’ll be out in a minute!” Then I heard something hit the floor, accompanied by a sloshing sound.

Hannah: “Oops! My liver!”
Me: “Take your liver back downstairs and I’ll be there in a minute!”
Hannah: “It won’t go back in! I’ll have to cook it up and feed it to the cats.”
Me: “Whatever.”

I am taking a teaching course this semester, and we each have to teach one 45-minute session to foreign students in the language program. I was observing during one of my classmates’ attempts this last week, and she was doing really well right up until the point that one of the students pointed out that they had just recently gone over the *exact same text* with a different student teacher (from the other teaching class, led by a different instructor). Ouch. A student teacher’s worst nightmare.

Hannah woke us up at 4:30 one night/morning last week with “I’m bleeding to death!” At first I thought maybe puberty had struck at an unseemly time, but then she showed up in our room with a copious nosebleed. She had bled all over her sheets (which are red, so that shows some foresight on my part *g*) and her white t-shirt, but I managed to get her cleaned up and back to bed without any more theatrics. She had another nosebleed the next night, but she was better prepared and didn’t even bother to wake us up. Thanks, Babe!

I am currently engaged in a fight to the death with these cute little moths that live in our pantry closet. I don’t have a problem with the moths themselves, just with their hideous, disgusting larvae. I thought I had managed to track them all down and destroy them before we left for Texas, but I guess it just wasn’t enough to throw out half our dry goods, seal the rest with packing tape, and scrub them entire pantry with bleach (shelves, walls, and the little holes for the adjustable shelves included). I am usually friendly to nature; I even take the time to shoo wasps and spiders outside instead of smashing them, but I cannot stand those creepy crawly caterpillar things. Flesh...crawling... I hope I will have had better luck with round 2.

I ran out of toothpaste while in Texas, so I bought some good ol’ Crest gel. Man, this stuff is *weak*. I had been using an herbal paste that tastes strongly of licorice (mmm...licorice, aka anise), and I could feel the germs dying when I used it. This Crest had better be death on wheels toward cavities, because I am too tight to toss a full stupid giant tube.

We’ve been steadily making our way through the stack of DVDs we brought back with us from Texas. Now Hannah’s indoctrination in Futurama and Greg the Bunny is complete. She’s been well-versed in Spinal Tap since a young age, so that was just a refresher course for her. [True story: When Hannah was 4, Sluggo and the lovely Peaches came to dinner, and Hannah asked them if they wanted to watch Spinal Tap. I think she had a very high rating on the “cool child” meter that night.]

I’ve also been listening to Pink every minute I’ve been in the kitchen (home of the CD player) since we got back. I’m Not Dead is a rockin’ album, although I was a bit taken aback by the amount of crack showing on the back cover. Less is more, Pink! But excessive crack aside, I like every song on the album, in large part because they cover such a wide variety of styles, including a folksy anthem-like song written by her Vietnam-vet dad and performed as a duo by the 2 of them. The tunes are so catchy that John and I found ourselves mentally humming them when we had the occasional bout of sleeplessness after getting back from Texas. I’d have to give this gift (from John) an A+.

Mr. Jooge also gave us a Forever Sharp (TM) knife that I am slightly scared to death of. I have a bad track record with sharp objects (like knives, cheese graters, paper, cardboard, and razors), and I thought I might faint when he told us about the demonstration where the guy dropped a tomato on the blade and it cut itself. Eeek! It works great on meat, though, so I guess we’ll keep it.

The weather has been all screwed up since ... uh ... forever. The overnight low has reached freezing only twice in all of January, so the plants think it is spring. Bushes and some of the smaller trees are putting out leaves; the viney-type bushes have yellow or dark pink flowers on them; bulb plants are pushing up leaves; and what I think is a cherry tree is covered in pale pink blossoms. I go by the last one twice every day on the bus, and every time I think, “Man, that shit is *bananas*!” Even I would agree that 17C (~63F) in January is wrong (although I enjoyed it anyway).

All of Europe was affected by a huge wind storm that hit Thursday. More than 2 dozen people were killed, and trees are down all over Germany on the roads and rail lines. We were very lucky in this area to have only minimal damage.

OMG. I see that I just wrote an entry on a bug infestation, toothpaste, cutlery, and the weather. Where’s my Geritol? It’s obvious I have the sensibility of a septuagenarian.

Except... How cool is this? This guy and friends/family built a scale model of Helm’s Deep OUT OF CANDY. Why can’t I ever do something that awesome?!

The Mother Lode!

Our adventures in flying went off without a hitch. We left home a little later than I had planned, but the long-term parking at the airport worked like a dream, so that helped make up for the lost time. When we found our check-in area, the line went all the way back into another section of the airport. Fortunately, the line was moving quickly, so it only took us about 40 minutes to get checked in. Security was easy as pie compared to last time, so the whole process was as painless as an international flight at xmas-time could be.

Unfortunately, there were several pissed-off babies (POBs) on our flight. Once they screamed themselves into exhaustion, we were all able to have a little peace and quiet, but then occasionally one would wake up and get started again. Luckily, that didn’t seem to set off the others. One mother was traveling alone with 2 small kids, one of them belonging to the pack of screamers. Except hers also thrashed and kicked and went boneless and threw herself backwards. John was sitting at the end of their row and got the impression that POB wanted Da-da. The poor mom was so wiped out from wrestling with the POB that as soon as the kid fell asleep, she did, too. The non-POB entertained herself the whole time with a cup, a water bottle, a book, and napping. John bets that the first thing her mother does when she gets off the plane is to punch the father.

We saw most of the smaller kids over the course of our flight, either wandering up and down the aisles alone or being walked by a parent. My favorite was this grumpy-faced tyke wearing a perpetual scowl.

While we were waiting at the gate, Hannah passed the time by composing a musical, “Nice Mice—We Love Cheese.” All the songs were about how nice the mice were, and how much they loved cheese and no one could change that. She envisioned 2 grown-ups in mice costumes in the lead roles.

The air on the plane dries me out like a starfish on the beach, but I was so paranoid about the stupid new rules that I took the travel-size tube of lotion out of my backpack. The semi-frequent but tiny drinks from the airline just didn’t cut it in the hydration department.

I don’t know if it is a German-US thing, or if the airlines have just loosened up in certain respects since the last time I flew 2 years ago, but the flight attendants on Lufthansa weren’t as, um, glossy as the American Airlines FAs. They weren’t schlubs by any stretch of the imagination, but they didn’t look like they had been shellacked as part of their pre-flight routine, either.

Also of note on our flight: the Norwegian woman with sleeves that might have been caught in the escalator at the airport. It’s the only way I can account for the shreds of lace hanging from her wrists.


I wrote the above while on the plane to Texas. I didn’t write a single word between then and now, so my recollections of all our visiting isn’t quite as precise. We stayed with my dad the first and last nights, and in between we managed to visit in *8* other places. I have photographic evidence up at Yahoo, labeled “Xmas 2006”, Stops 1-7. We saw lots and lots of people, but it would have been nice if we had had more time to spend with them.

There hasn’t been any news regarding John’s side trip (you know if you know), but feel free to continue with the finger-crossing for now.

Some kid highlights from the trip:

Our niece “Chicken” is addicted to the old coin-ear trick. When asked how the coins got in there, she replied, exasperatedly, “It’s magic!” Well duh, Aunt Nee! She only cares about the trick, not the cash, so afterwards we kept finding “ear money” lying around.

Another niece, “Fall”, is, um, selective of hearing, so it took a couple of tries to convince her that crawling on the back of the couch that stands in front of a window was not a good idea and she should get down. Her brother remarked that she was a big butt-head at home. Me, disbelieving: “Fall, are you a big butt-head at home?” Fall: “Yep.” So there you have it.

John cut his hair. He’s a damn good-looking man, isn’t he?

We couldn’t come up with a better idea than the JC Penney hair salon for the doing of the deed, so while he made his donation to Locks of Love, me and Hannah and Mom and JC roamed the mall. After we had traversed the whole length of it (it’s a small mall), Hannah said, “This place is full of crap no one wants to buy!” Indeed.

The trip back was almost as uneventful as the trip over. Our stupid e-tickets did not indicate that NO lunch would be served on our noon flight (there was no meal info for any of our flights), so we were kind of hungry when we got to Dulles, but some hot sandwiches fixed that. John was bummed that he did not get to eat at Arby’s and only once at Taco Bell, but such is life. Then on the trans-Atlantic leg, Hannah spilled her drink on John’s lap, and I lost the stylus to my Palm PDA, a tragedy that brings tears to my eyes even now, 4 days later. Here is the ersatz stylus I came up with, but it pales in comparison to the real thing.

Yes, that is a duck pirate (or pirate duck, if you prefer) pencil topper. Hannah didn’t want it.

We haven’t had too much jet-lag, but the twinge in John’s back after the trip (probably from toting four 50-pound bags up to our third-floor apartment) has developed into a crippling like the one he had on our last trip to Texas in 2004 and last spring. He looks like an unbent paper clip.

As I knew would happen, Hannah was unable to keep track of all the presents trickling in over the course of 2 weeks of visiting. Her great-grandmother firmly believes that “Xmas present” = “clothes”, so we made a trip out to Sears with her to pick out our presents. Which is where Hannah had a bit of a meltdown: “Everyone else gets cool stuff, and I only get socks!” (n.B. No socks were actually bought at Sears.) This prompted a visit to Super WalMart (Ack! My soul! It burns!) to spend up the Xmas largesse from various family members. We mainly invested in DVDs; I was on the verge of opening them all before packing so customs wouldn’t think that we were starting a DVD-smuggling ring, but it was too much work. They didn’t seem to bother Homeland Security when they opened our box and one of our suitcases.

I also ponied up for some sports bras with spaghetti straps. I have been considering going bra-less for some time (damned plastic bits on the straps of my beloved training all-cotton bras!), but the fear of nipplage has held me back. I also have a great fear of German department stores after the Snoopy-panty debacle of last fall, so our Texas trip was my first chance to look for an alternate form of chestal coverage (not having what could properly be called a bosom). Anyhoo, props to Fruit of the Loom for their excellent work in ladies’ under-apparel!

Before I got off track, I was going to mention that Santa left Hannah a note in her stocking that he was delivering her present to Germany and it would be there when she got back.

She hasn’t even had any lessons yet (or a music book, for that matter), but she’s already composing her own music with the help of stickers she numbered herself.

We managed to convey our wealth of xmas gifts back to Germany with minimal breakage; even the 18-by-24 picture frame (with glass!) and 4 place-settings of Corelle made it through unscathed. See?


My earlier, pre-trip comment that winter had arrived in Germany seems to have been premature. Winter only paid Germany a brief visit before jetting off to settle in for a long stay in the NW of the US, I would guess. Since we landed on Sunday, it has hovered around 10C (50F) and has rained off and on. You can check out the difference between this year and last year by clicking on the third link in the article, “Foto-Serie: Winter '06 und '07 im Vergleich“. The pictures in 1-8 are of the same locations, the first in each pair from last year and the second from this year (1-4 in Bavaria, 5-8 in Berlin); 9-14 are all from this year.

And on that note, I’m going to bed to the gentle pounding of the rain.