The Wheels on the Bus

...aren't nearly as interesting as the characters on the bus. Who did we have today?

1. The girl who thinks she is LaFee (a German singer)



but whose make-up ends up looking like one of those Harlequin clowns.

2. This really good-looking African guy who I never notice until he is getting off the bus, and staring at that point is both awkward and futile.

3. A guy in a tri-corner hat, carrying a spear, a sword, and a lantern, and reading a novel. I thought he was going to a Revolutionary War reenactment--in Germany?!--but John pointed out that he could be one of those tour guides in period costumes. Like this.



Yes, a guy in an 18-th century costume and a girl with eye-liner doodles on her cheek have been the highlight of the week. So sad.

Nasty Break-Up in the Works

Nick* and I are having a bit of a lover’s quarrel at the moment, and I’ve decided we could really use some time apart. I mean, he said he’d be showing up with a new episode of Winx yesterday, yet when I greeted him at the agreed-upon 3:15 pm, he only had fucking Drake and Josh. I mean, hel-lo? I totally hate that show.** And last week, he told me he’d be there with Winx at 4:45 pm, M-F, yet this Monday he apparently decided he really meant 3:15 pm, and didn’t I check his web site, Baby, he can’t be sending commercials every time he decides to change the programming. Sheesh!

Anyhow, I’ve decided to go with my back-up lover, the master’s thesis. He makes me feel better about myself, although I will miss the excitement and the romance. He is the Colonel Brandon to Nick’s Willoughby.

And I know Nick is thinking I will come crawling back to him when he starts waving Avatar in front of me at the end of the month, but by then, I’ll be all, “Nick who?” Smell ya later, Nick!


* Nickelodeon, duh!
** Drake is supposed to be a hottie who can do no wrong, but he is just a dick. And the little sister, Megan, is a psycho. And Josh is constantly being abused. It is all just wrong!

Fourteen

Day 1





Day 5114

From my reading: the federal spending addition

I just read an article in the NYTimes, "A Zealous Watchman to Follow the Money", about Earl E. Devaney, the inspector general of the Interior Department, who is now in charge of keeping track of the money paid out from the stimulus package. There are two web sites mentioned in the article, both of which will track spending and outcomes:

Recovery.gov, the Interior Department site

StimulusWatch.org, an independent site

I will definitely be bookmarking these sites and checking them often.

And along those lines, here is a site with a poster that shows federal spending:
Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go

Super Quick Update

...while the rice is cooking.

I delivered Hannah to the train station this morning for her class trip. She called around 5 to say she was having a good time and had been awarded a "ranger certification" for snowshoe-ing or birdhouse building or something. So 2 nights and 2 full days more of Hannah-less-ness.

In No Particular Order

I slipped on some ice 2 weeks ago and landed on my knee. I hadn't realized how much kneeling I do around here until my injury, which caused me to jump up or fall over every time I had to fish something out from under the sofa or the bench. The bruising was gone after about 10 days, and I can kneel again now with minimal soreness. Stupid ice!


Hannah's class is going on their class trip starting next Monday. They are going to Freiburg to ski and visit the Roman exhibit at the museum. The teacher decided that his original plan--going to Cologne and Bonn in June--was too ambitious, but the realities of trying to book space at the hostel in Freiburg meant we got kind of short notice (about 3 weeks, one of which was during a school vacation). I forced Hannah to buy a new hat and to promise to actually wear it while outdoors. We also bought new snow boots, not a simple task at the end of the winter season. She wasn't too thrilled about skiing at first--what is she ever thrilled about?--but I think she is looking forward to the trip now.


Winx is back on the air! It must have started on Monday, because on Tuesday we happened to be watching Nick and the second episode from the first season came on. Woo! Welcome back, Nick addiction!


Hannah and friends came up with the idea of joining the school newspaper and talked the older kids on the newspaper staff into taking them on. There weren't any underclassman on the paper, and Hannah and friends thought they would like to be represented. Hannah seems to be the spokesman for the group and has already written a short article about the recent spate of graffiti at the school. She also has 12 pages of a spy novel written, and she says that her alternate career path (to being a cook) is to be a journalist; after she's made a name for herself in that career, she'll publish her novel, make a ton of money, and retire. Riiiight. At least she found an extracurricular activity to take an interest in, since ballet and Swedish didn't seem to do it for her.


We got an auto-parts circular in the our mailbox the other day, and there was a whole section on marten-protection for your car. (I particularly like the photo on this product: it looks like the marten wants to break into the car and steal the radio, not chew on some delicious rubber parts.) In case you are wondering, a marten is like a weasel. Wikipedia (neither in English nor in German) doesn't say anything about it being a threat to vehicles, but then again, we had mice in our AC system once, and I doubt that would get a mention in Wikipedia either.


We're at that horrible time of year when spring keeps putting its head up and then getting whacked back down, like a seasonal whack-a-mole. Yesterday I tried going out without a hat, but by the time I headed home again, I was wishing I had it with me. And don't get me started on the open window in the ladies' toilet in the English Department! Brisk is one thing, but having your ass frozen onto the seat is another. The neighbors facing us across the street have yards that tell us when we are creeping up on spring: the yard on the left floods from an underground spring, and the yard on the right sprouts crocuses. Both are entertaining in their own way.


I recently bought and set up a wireless router for our apartment, but we discovered that John's laptop didn't have a wireless card installed, so he has been tethered to the router with a cable for a week or two. I finally was able to find a card for his laptop in the States, and after a week underway, it got here Tuesday. Since John is working hell-for-leather on a translation job, I had to wait until the evening to try to install the card. I opened up the laptop, plugged in the card, attached the antennae, and... nothing. The next day, I downloaded the correct driver, fired it up, and... nothing again. Argh! John's laptop has a switch on the side for turning on the wireless connection, but the LED never came on when I switched it on. I turned to the Internet, where I found an ingenious solution that involved taping over some of the pins on the wireless card. And it worked! Even though my laptop is newer and came with a wireless card installed, I had a lot more problems getting my wireless Internet up and running than his. I guess that is mostly because I already had to adjust a bunch of junk on John's machine when I installed the software for the wireless router earlier (even though John was using it as a LAN connection). Anyhow, snaps for me! Like I told John, it seems scary to mess around with stuff on the computer since I am not especially computer literate, but I will do almost ANYTHING--cooking, sewing, reading music, computer troubleshooting--if I have some kind of directions. And it paid off! (Sorry, I'm still jazzed about the whole thing.)

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

After 2 nights of obvious dreams—someone stepping over me on the ground in a sleeping bag trod on my hair, me begging WesTexGirl to put a good word in for me with her mother the ex-barber—and weeks of being annoyed at finding 2-foot-long hairs on everything I own, not to mention the many incidents of getting my hair caught in the fan in the back of the hairdryer (ouch!), I finally broke down last week and got out the sewing scissors. That’s right, I went from this (thanks to Hannah)




To this



Hannah says it makes me look younger, which I don’t know about, but it does make me less crazy, and that’s worth it to me. It is still long enough to put in a ponytail, but not long enough to get caught under my shoulders when I roll over in bed, so that has saved me from having to wake up every time I want to roll over in the night. Win!

Kickin' it at home

Back in January, the city library closed for a 5-month renovation (only 4 more months to go!). The library wisely put the word out that patrons should stock up for the long, dry period, partly for the customer-service aspect, and partly so they wouldn’t have to move all the books to storage. We unwisely waited until the next-to-last open day to do our stocking-up. There were no DVDs at all (I think they may have been moved to one of the smaller branches), no English books, and the kids section was like a ghost town. John was able to find a big ole stack of travel books—checked out on my card! So now the library thinks I am obsessed with bicycling through Bavaria, etc. Hannah scrounged up several kids’ books, but it would take a shipping container to hold 5 months of reading for her, so that hasn’t actually helped with the bedtime what-to-read routine. I was reduced to scavenging through the cookbooks. I actually like to cook and would like to be able to make more traditional German recipes, so it wasn’t too much of a hardship. I found a cookbook with some *very* German-looking baked goods, so I thought I would try it out. So far, I have made one really delicious item and one really dense item, but since we are talking about German baked goods, I may have actually made it correctly.

No, the main enjoyment has come from the cookbook itself. For some reason, the producers of the second-most popular German soap opera, Unter Uns (“In Private” or “Between You and Me”; the first-most popular is Gute Zeiten—Schlechte Zeiten (“Good Times—Bad Times”)), decided that a cookbook full of photos of the characters from the show was just what the public wanted. I’ll let you decide.

Here’s the happy family:


Who needs water to surf?


Hey—Wham called. George Michael wants his hair back.


Now take a guess at the date of these photos.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

John and I were guessing mid-80s. *1996* is when the book was published, and the show first aired in 1994. Mind. Boggling.

Now, to complete the horror for you, I present the top of the page for the recipe for a pie made out of chocolate-covered marshmallows (here’s what they look like on the inside):


Oh my god—my eyes! That puppet totally creeps me out. Even if I were inclined to make the recipe—which I am not; can you say “diabetes”?—I don’t think I could stand around in the kitchen with the page open long enough to manage it. I am thinking of paper-clipping the 2 pages together so they don’t accidentally fall open.

Dream a Little Dream of Wee

I have always had vivid, complex dreams, and I can normally pinpoint what is contributing to them. For instance, before my dermatologist appointment, I had the tentacle-mole dream; before my GYN appointment, I dreamed I picked at a pimple-like bump on my breast and a big hole opened up and the contents of my breast fell out and turned to yellow dust. When I have a little guilt over being such a bad correspondent with my friends back home, they show up in my dreams. Thanks for the reminders, Subconscious!

But there's one frequent dream-and-variation that has left me scratching my head. Try to imagine, if you will, the dirtiest, nastiest, most disgusting public toilet you have ever encountered. Now multiply that by 30 stalls, none with doors, paper, or seats, and most containing floaters. Now find one toilet you could talk yourself into hovering over, but then notice it has no or low walls and is in the middle of a busy public thoroughfare or a men's locker room, after you've pulled your pants down. I have this dream all the time. This morning, I finally realized what it is: the don't-piss-the-bed dream. Despite peeing every night immediately before bed and being a light sleeper--light enough that needing to pee would definitely wake me up--my Barbie teacup-sized bladder has joined up with my subconscious, and they have decided not to take any chances on an adult bed-wetting episode, hence the yuck-tastic dreams.

I'm going to the dentist next week. I'm sure I will have a nightmare involving giant tooth-zombies.

Broken-Hearted Nee

While looking something up for Hannah on the German Nick web site, I discovered that both Winx and Avatar have been taken off the air. Noooooooooo! Nick, why have you forsaken me?!

To add insult to injury, Nick decided to give a second season to a really awful show called Genie in the House. Now, I'm sure that the actors and writers are lovely people--they call their grandmothers, take good care of their pets, floss. BUT, I've seen more interesting writing on the wall of a public toilet, and William Shatner could take some over-acting tips from the cast. This is supposed to fill the shoes of Avatar*. This is a Nick UK production, and you have to wonder about the state of British comedy if the nation that brought us Monty Python and Black Adder has now been reduced to a one-trick children's show.

At least there's still Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide and Zoey 101, for a little while.

* I will miss Winx, but I recognize that it is definitely not in the same league with Avatar. Let me put it this way: if Avatar is a 3-course meal in a 5-star restaurant, Winx is Hubba Bubba.

Hannah cracks me up

I don't often have it together enough to jot down Hannah's non-stop stream of hilarity, but you guys lucked out this time.

Hannah was sick a few days last week, so she was home on Friday--already on the mend--with John, who got side-swiped by whatever crud she had. When I got home from teaching, she told me that she had been taking good care of John, keeping him in tea and Muppets. (The Muppet Show was still running when I walked in.)

Then, more recently, she had unbraided my hair for me while I was sitting on the couch and commented that she liked it better loose--"You look wise, like a little hairy Buddha." Thanks!

Futzing around

I realized a long time ago that I have very little talent in the area of the fine arts. But that doesn't stop me from making weird arts and crafts in my free time. (I *will* finish my video clip of Gandolf and the Balrog, someday.) I really love wrapping paper, so I have been trying out the art of collage.* You might have noticed my previous attempts at changing the background to this blog. I think I have it down now, though. Enjoy.

*I think collage won't hurt the copyright of the wrapping paper artists. I hope.

Favorite Graffiti

I wanted to take a photo of my favorite graffiti here in our village, but it got painted over before I could. But the section of fresh paint will always remind me of the message:

"Günther, why??"

You have to wonder what ole Günther was up to:

• broke up with someone


• ran over someone's dog


• slept with someone's sister


• put Michael Jackson on his iPod

Such a brief message, and yet so fertile for the imagination!

HATE!

Let me say right now just how much I hate this ad for an inauguration party last week. HATE! I even labeled this photo "Hate" on my hard drive. I'll give you one guess as to why. I took down the 2 copies of this flier that were in the English department and asked John to get the 1 I had seen in his department. (And then I post it on the Internet for the whole world to see.)

Oddly enough, this ad was put up by the German-American Institute (DAI) here in our town. *boggles*

The part I find offensive is the name of a band. Actually, it's not that I find the band's name *offensive* per se, but I think the juxtaposition of the name with Obama's picture was really poor judgement on the part of the DAI. It bothered me a lot. I haven't ever heard of the band before, so I can't imagine they are really that huge. Why couldn't the DAI make a different band the headliner? (Of course, I don't know which bands were there--probably Satan Eats Your Soul and Americans are My Bitch. *g*)

That is my rant of the week.

Oh, yeah...

I went to the dermatologist today, and all of my moles look fine. So no skin cancer. Yay me!

Winter has us in its clutches

We got some snow about a week ago, enough that Hannah could go sledding once.



There was snow on the ground for a week, people! Right after it snowed, a high pressure system moved in and froze everything.



In Holland, the canals have frozen over, for the first time in like a dozen years, I think I heard. Here in Germany, a lot of the rivers have frozen, bringing ship traffic to a halt. There was a segment on CNN yesterday about ice breakers having to let through coal ships so the power plants have enough fuel.



Even the Neckar has sheets of ice on it. Here’s the collection of photos I took on Tuesday.


Yesterday it snowed for a few hours, adding to the overall whiteness, coldness, and wetness.

Today it warmed up, and the ice on the Neckar broke up into small sheets that look like paving stones. I guess if you weren’t worried about drowning, you could hop, skip, and jump across the river on them.

And so ends the story of my descent into winter madness.

Except I just remembered that even my 5L watering can is full of ice and frozen down to the tiles on the balcony. WHYYYY??? Oh, yeah, because I keep filling it with the run-off from the condensation clothes dryer.

Bye-Bye, Brunette

You may remember that Hannah talked me into putting semi-permanent black dye on her hair 2 summers ago.




Over the xmas holidays, she pestered me into giving it another try. Here, her last moments as a natural brunette:




And here she is in mid-dye:



I have to make a note that we should have bought 2 bottles of dye. One problem is that I have no idea what I am actually doing, but Hannah has SO MUCH HAIR. Her hair is thick like John's (almost as thick as her Aunt Kee's), so it was impossible to get the dye over all the layers.

Want to guess what color she ended up with?




The bottle says “pomegranate red”, but I like to call it “strawberry shortcake”:




She was disappointed that no one noticed the new color when she went for a play date last week—that didn’t stop her from pointing it out herself—but she got a gratifying round of “no way!” when she went back to school yesterday. It’s nice to be validated.

Wii Updatery

Well, the Rock Band software arrived, and John and Hannah broke out the instruments and started jamming. Only, the microphone didn’t work, so I should be hearing from the store where I bought the Instrument Edition when their shipment of replacement microphones comes in. From what I read online, the microphone is the weak link in the kit.

Hannah, as drummer, insisted on being the leader of the band, and she took her responsibility very seriously. Here is the contract she forced John to sign:

“I, (your name there ->) Mickey Mouse, do promise my Soul, my heart and my Music to the band leader and manager, Hannah S.”

He knew she meant business when she booted him out of the band until he signed. She had stored the contract in the box the instruments came in, but John went crazy straightening up before our company came over yesterday and burned up all the cardboard packaging that was still lying around, so now we have to find a different place to put it.

First we need to get rid of our ridiculously big xmas tree that is taking up a sizable chunk of the floor space in our living room so we have space to store the drum kit, etc. The volunteer fire department won’t come until Jan. 10, though, to tote it off, and I don’t know what other alternatives there are, so I guess we’ll have to tough it out for about 8 more days until we can take it down.

Hannah seems to like the Mii part of the Wii better than the actual games. She has made about 40 avatars, covering the 3 of us, several alternate personalities, and at least one avatar per letter of the alphabet, giving us Zoey and Xena to pick from. I did not appreciate her creating an alternate for me with my real name, gray hair, lots of wrinkles, and short and squat. She may think it is a good likeness, but I pay out the allowance around here, and she would do well to remember that.

She claimed when she started adding all the extras that she would rather have avatars of her own making as opponents in the various Wii Sports games, and not just the random Wii figures. But I know that she totally digs anything resembling Sims. She even used part of her xmas money from Gwamma to buy Sims 2 for her Nintendo DS. Five minutes into her first time on it, she was getting a shake-down from the Mafia in the hotel she was running. Who designs these games?

Since then, she has been making pictures for an art gallery inside her hotel. The people who have been buying her pictures include one fan (a crazy pirate) and one hater (who calls her work vulgar and buys it to prevent it from coming to the attention of the public at large). Like I already said, who designs this stuff?

Maybe the new DS Sims will keep her off my laptop and her old Sims game so I can get more of my own stuff done.

A Rockin’ Chocolate New Year’s Eve

We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends down the street, bringing along some friends from Sweden. Not wanting to overload our hosts, we offered to bring some of the food and the dessert. I baked some yummy cupcakes and chopped about 5 pounds of fruit to dip in the chocolate fountain John gave me for xmas. But first Hannah and I hit the marked-down xmas candy.

Here you see the half-price chocolate Santas marching to their doom.



Here Hannah prepares the sacrifices.



And here are the happy celebrants.



Finally, here are some tips on using the chocolate fountain, if you are ever so decadent as to purchase one, like us:
1. Make sure your chocolate is broken into very small pieces. Letting the children smash the chocolate Santas does not lead to very small pieces. Large pieces take forever to melt directly in the fountain, and you will end up getting a heat-gun out of your tool shed to speed the process up. As our friend said, it is part of the modern woman’s kitchen.
2. Even faster is melting the chocolate in the microwave first. Then you don’t have kids popping in every 30 seconds to pester you about the state of the fountain.
3. Cover everything in a 5-foot radius of the fountain in plastic. There will be drips, drops, and splats. The fountain really should come packaged with stain remover.
4. Fondue forks work pretty well for dipping fruit into hot (well, warm), melted chocolate without suffering burns, but some fruit is a bit too soft to dip well without breakage/smushing, like kiwi. Cupcake bites are right out.
5. Hot water does wonders in cleaning solidified milk chocolate off stainless steel if you don’t have a 9-year-old with a turbo-metabolism and a sweet tooth at hand.

Weird to be back

Hey, y'all! (As Britney Spears would say. Or Britney Spears as interpreted by the Fug Girls. Which is actually weird of me to bring up, because I have only looked at, like, 3 blogs since I went cold turkey a month ago.)

All those asides aside, I seem to have survived my horrendous semester so far. I still don't have a grade back on my one exam, and I still have to study for and pass my second exam, so there is still plenty of time for me to crash and burn scholastically before the end of the semester, but for now I am not worrying about it. John and Hannah have toddled off for groceries, and I am trying to remember how this thing called "blogging" works while I have some time on my hands for the evening.

For xmas, John bought me a chocolate fountain, which I hope works as cool as it sounds. Hannah insisted on going with John to the store this evening--we normally have to bribe her to come along--so she could pounce on the left-over choco-Santas to feed into the fountain. We have unverified plans for company at New Year's, and we were thinking of using the choco-fountain as the dessert centerpiece, with fruit and such for dipping into the cascades of cocoa-y delights.

In other xmas-y news, Hannah hates the city's decorations downtown.



These lights hang over the middle of the street her school is on, and she calls them "Death Stars": "I am afraid those death stars are going to fall down and puncture my flesh." Yes, that is something we are all afraid of.

Another thing she hates about winter is the Winter-scented Charmin her father mangages to sniff out (ha ha! see how I did that?) each year and drag home by the car-full. "Great! Now bears are going to be attracted to my pine-cone-smelling butt." Not too many bears in this neck of the woods, but maybe Hannah should stay away from Bavaria and the Tirol.

We had a nice, quiet xmas at home this year. I color-coded the wrapping paper this year, and Hannah didn't manage to guess which color was hers before the big unveiling, so I guess I was successful. She was guessing blue, because there was a big package wrapped in blue under the tree. In kid logic, big=kid's, right?



What she didn't know was that the red package next to the big blue one held a Wii. The big blue one just held a Wii game--Rock Band. Unfortunately, the instrument pack did not come with the game software--I managed to not notice the large, red sticker on the package announcing that--so we had to make a special amazon-run yesterday. It should be here on Monday, and then we will rock!

Until then, we'll have to make due with Samba-ing.



At John's request, I made a goose. It was really easy to roast, and I made some delicious roast potatoes in the drippings, but it was a bitch to cut up and serve, and there wasn't really all that much meat on it. And it was rather expensive. It cost me about 8 bucks per person, which hurt my penny-pinching little soul. It was pretty, though, no?



At least we got some sunshine on xmas day.



Hannah thought that if we couldn't have a white xmas, we should at least have a dismal gray one that looked like it was trying to be white. I, for one, was glad of the sunshine, even though it only lasted part of the day.

After being extra good and loving for two whole days, Hannah was starting to show a few cracks around the edges yesterday evening. I called her Grumpy Smurf, and she replied, "No, Smurfette-on-her-period-grumpy." Hannah identifies so strongly female that she refuses to be called male in any form or fashion, so she had to come up with a grumpy alternative, even if it meant thinking about Smurfette in a completely new way.