About To Change My Phone Number

There's this woman I know from university, and she is about to drive me crazy. I only hear from her when she needs to kvetch or when she needs a favor. She just now sucked up 15 minutes of my time on the phone, time I can't afford to spend on her right now. I am sure she is a lovely person and has other fine qualities, but I can't deal with her negativity. Maybe I'll start letting the machine pick up when I don't recognize the number...

The Great Big Sucking Vortex of the Last 48 Hours

Hannah came home from school on Thursday at about 2 with two classmates in tow to work on a class project. That's when she informed me that she had taken a spill in the hall at school and her arm hurt, just above her wrist. I wrapped it up with the bandage left over from when she sprained her other wrist last fall and gave her a cold pack and an ibuprofen. She held her arm still all afternoon, but otherwise she seemed ok, ok enough to do a half-assed job on her project and watch videos online with her friends. I tried to call the pediatrician's office but didn't manage to get through, so I figured we'd keep it wrapped and wait and see.

Just before her friends were going to leave, she discovered that her mouse Dickerchen, aka Vanessa, was dead in her cage. That night, Hannah wanted to sleep with us. The next morning, she discovered that the other mouse, Isabelle, aka Pipsqueak, was also dead. Friday morning was rough. When Pipsqueak developed her tumor, we had started discussing where we could possibly bury her. There is no yard attached to our apartment, just a square of dirt next to the front door that is mostly taken up with a giant pine and a bunch of bushes, but Hannah didn't want to put the mice there because she thinks it is full of refuse from passing teenagers. (She has a pretty poor opinion of teenagers for someone who claims she basically is one.) John and I had been thinking we could take them up to the woods, but Hannah didn't want them to get dug up by wild animals, or for someone to come along and mess with the marker she had made, and she thought it was too far to go to visit them. Hannah asked me if we could bury them on the balcony in the same pot with one of the walnut trees, so that is where we interred them.



John and I had wanted to go for a short hike with the other May Day celebrants in our village, but Hannah complained of grief, depression, tummy ache, diarrhea, and pretty much everything short of plague. She didn't look like she felt very well, but she is averse to physical activity and the great outdoors, so we weren't completely sure that it wasn't a put-on, but we stayed home and went ahead and cancelled our dinner-date for that evening. Then she started complaining that her arm hurt, so we ended up taking her to the emergency room (May 1 is a holiday). An x-ray showed that she has a Radiuswulstfraktur, which I think roughly translates to a green-stick fracture. She ended up with a shoulder-to-hand cast.



The whole emergency room trip took about 4 hours, even though it didn't seem especially busy there. We went back and forth between the examining room and various waiting rooms, and since we weren't sure when we might be called for the different procedures, we didn't want to leave to go find some dinner, even though Hannah was starving. We were finally able to eat at about 8 and then drive home.

I have to do the grocery shopping this morning before taking Hannah back to the ER to have the cast checked again. Then on Tuesday we go to the orthodontist to have a new mold made of Hannah's teeth for her activator. Then on Wednesday we go back to the ER for one last check of the cast, then she should get the cast off 3 days after her birthday. *sigh* This is going to be some long-lasting suck.

Facebook and all that

I have been thinking about writing a post about facebook for a while, trying to formulate my thoughts in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a drooling idiot—too late!—but I guess I will just have to blunder my way through this and hope it makes a little sense.

When I joined facebook, it was at the behest of a friend and former co-worker. She had joined at the behest of yet a third friend. Neither of us did much posting, and I didn’t search out any other potential fb friends. Mostly, I just let it molder. As a matter of fact, if I wanted to check my account, I had to go back through my email to find her original invitation, because I hadn’t bothered to bookmark it. That was roughly my first 6 months on facebook.

Later I discovered that Yoda (formerly known as WesTexGirl, not yet known as a symbol), with whom I’ve been friends since the 6th grade, was also on facebook, so I friended her. I friended my husband, who is probably more the original target demographic since his friends list consisted mostly of friends from his grad school days. I got most of my fb friends after that through one of them.

I’ve been very reticent about embracing facebook: I don’t have my maiden name posted, I don’t look for new fb friends, I don’t use the suggested friend function, I don’t use many of the applications. For one thing, I don’t need another time suck. For another, I don’t see the point of a lot of it. Don’t get me wrong: I liked people I went to school with (or worked with), and they liked me, but it was a vanillla-ice-cream kind of liking. No one actively hates vanilla ice cream. But I can’t see devoting a lot of my time to a big bowl of virtual vanilla ice cream.

I have tried to limit my friends list to the chocolate-covered coffee beans—and if you are reading this, you are a dark-chocolate-covered espresso bean!—but the occasional scoop of vanilla has snuck in. The people who are vanilla ice cream to me might be baked Alaska to someone else, but I don’t know them well enough to be aware of that. And they probably don’t know that I am Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream. I am loathe even here, in the sanctuary of my own personal blog, to let my freak flag fly, so you can image how much blander I am over there. I really am vanilla ice cream on facebook.

Once you are stuck in the sugar-cone of facebook, it is really hard to break free from the unending banality of "here’s a picture of my cat" and "I had soup for dinner". (Of course, you could say that about 99% of the non-political content on the internet in general.) There have been times when I have wanted to ask more questions of people I have re-friended on there, but I would feel like a tool bringing stuff up after weeks and months of being friended and years of being not-friended. Maybe I am just overthinking things.

The last point was brought home to me by a message I got from someone I had been close with all the time I was growing up in West Texas, but who I had let drift away in the intervening years. We became fb friends, but I felt awkward and didn’t know how to get past the vanilla-ice-cream stage, so I just let it stay that way. She showed me that she is a Frappuccino by making the first move. I really hope that we can reconnect, although I can’t imagine doing it through facebook alone. But I will say that for the Frappuccinos who are brave enough to take the first step (obviously not me), facebook can at least provide you with a place in which to take it.

Britain's Got Talent

By now, most people have seen Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent, but I bet you haven't seen this.

Fixed for now

Well, it looks like I got my blog graphics organized the way I wanted for now. It will probably be a while before I have time to change it again, so get used to it!

Hannah's mouse was limping around for about a day and generally listless, but she perked up again and seems to be doing ok now. But mouse 2's tumor is getting even bigger. She still moves around unimpeded, but it looks horrible. Hannah is changing their litter as I type.

I went out on the balcony this morning and cleaned all the yellow pollen off the rails, the tile floor, the top of the dryer, the window ledges, and the drying rack, all so I could do a little laundry and use the drying rack and not have yellow mud forming on the tile. Then, since I was already filthy, I repotted some plants, planted some new seeds, and was generally Jenny Green-Thumb. I am stoked because I already have some little yellow blossoms on my canteloupe plants, which I grew from seeds I collected from a store-bought canteloupe. I love melon!

Maybe tomorrow I will be able to do more than one thing.

Graphic Disaster

Just a quick note to say that I realize something is amiss with my garden gnomes along the left side, but I don't have the time to fix it right now. I hope to get to it soon, but in the meanwhile, here's a tip: it will sit in the proper place if you open the browser window to full-screen and close the favorites sidebar.

I got a nice note about my editing work (I'm doing a "superb job"--yay!) and am raring to get back to work after being totally useless yesterday due to bad sleep, headache, and allergies/cold.

Ps. Now Hannah's other mouse is looking ill. Will take her (and maybe the lumpy mouse) to the vet later today when Hannah is home (she gets out early today).

What a Cock-Up

I stayed up too late last night, so I didn't get enough sleep, so I didn't work on my editing job this morning before heading out to my student job at 9. But, I did print out some stuff for the editing job and for my thesis to work on while sitting in the student office, waiting for other work to come in. Only, I apparently left the printing at home. So I am sitting here with (almost) nothing to do and an hour to do it in. *sigh*

Plus Hannah is bringing a friend home with her after school, so I have to do a modicum of cleaning when I get home, just to prevent the friend (and the rest of us, I guess) from being engulfed in dust bunnies and killer pollen fuzzies.

And the Romance Languages Department next door is having a student rally to bitch (rightly) about the poor teacher to student to chairs ratio in their department. Did I mention they are right next door? And that we share a courtyard? And that the student office is on the courtyard side of the building? Even with my MP3 player going, there's lots of noise. I guess it is just as well I forgot my stuff at home. It might be hard to concentrate with all the speechifying going on outside my window.

Drive-By the First

I am waist-deep in work at the moment, but I will try to pop in when I can. Right now, I am waiting for some water to boil so I can blanche some tomatoes for soup.

Went back to the orthodontist with Hannah, and we are looking at 3-5 years of treatment, depending on how well Hannah keeps up her end of things. She'll be in a retainer [make that an activator--ed.] for the first year to pull her lower jaw forward. Then she'll get braces. I don't know if she'll have them on the bottom, but definitely on the top to push her front teeth back into position and to pull one of her incisors down into place (it is growing out of the side of her gum right now).

For people who fear socialized medicine: our insurance will pay 80% over the course of treatment, and if Hannah does everything she is supposed to, i.e., has a good outcome, they will reimburse us for the other 20% at the end. Just sayin'...

Adventures in Dentistry

I got Hannah and myself in to see the dentist for some way overdue check-ups, and he referred her to an orthodontist. We went in for the initial x-rays and impressions but have to wait until next time for the photos. I am pretty sure they are going to put her in braces, but we won’t know the full extent until her next appointment during Easter break. She seemed ok with the idea at first, but she had a minor freak-out about it one day when we were arguing about her study habits, so I don’t know how she is going to handle the up-coming consult. Please cross your fingers for her.

My check-up went about the same as always: x-rays, which always pinch my gums and hurt more than any other dental work short of dental surgery; more appointments set for a cleaning and a few cavities. At the cleaning, I started to wonder how long the hygienist could leave her fingers in my mouth before my saliva would start to dissolve them. It’s the first step in digestion, you know. John has been giving me a hard time about that ever since, especially after my revelation at an earlier visit.

At the first filling appointment, I got an old amalgam filling drilled out and a new composite filling put in. It looks really good—you’d never even know it wasn’t my tooth. That was on a molar, and everything went normally. The dentist offered me a shot, but the sound of the drill bothers me more than the actual drilling, and a shot won’t help that, so I said no. He said most women say no. Then I had an appointment to fix some cavities on my front teeth (well, one front and the one next to it to the side—I don’t know tooth names). I thought I was going to get the top of my head pulled off. At one point, there were 4 hands, multiple tools, and maybe a foot up in there. It was crowded! My jaw is still a bit sore up where it hinges, but my teeth look good, so that’s a mercy.

My dentist gave me instructions on a slightly more complicated method of brushing and a prescription for a special toothbrush. It looks like a tiny bottle brush, and I shove it between my molars instead of flossing back there. I had no idea there was so much space between them! So now my dental hygiene routine is ridiculously long. If you have been wondering where I’ve been, probably cleaning my teeth.

Ps. When the dentist handed me a mirror to look at my teeth, I also noticed that an amazingly long hair was sticking out of my nose. I don't normally patrol my nose, I just wait until my immediate family members make some kind of horrified comment before taking any kind of nose-action, but this was bad. And of course, the dentist had been staring into my mouth and ostensibly also up my nose for about an hour, minus the 10 minutes he disappeared and no one knew where he went. *sigh*

I am a Lush

…fan. Despite the fact that I can’t actually stand going into a Lush shop, just like I can’t stand spending more than 5 seconds near the perfume counter in a department store. Total olfactory overload. But the extreme scent output has a plus-side: I often use Lush as a smell-landmark when walking through town. "Ok, I can smell Lush, so I must be near X." This is one reason why John and Hannah’s birthday gift to me this year was not as much of a surprise as they had been hoping: one whiff of the car’s interior when they picked me up, and I knew exactly where they had been. You don’t forget a smell like that.

But even though it wasn’t exactly a surprise, the big box o’ Lush products was appreciated. The bath bombs are really cool and fizzy, but the Supernova leaves little strips of confetti in your bathwater. Somehow, that had less of a "party in the tub" and more of a "fell in a puddle at Mardi Gras" feel to it, but the water does end up pink. I had to get a drain strainer from the kitchen before I could drain the tub, though.

Lush tries to be environmentally friendly, so they use real popcorn as packing material. Hannah took one look inside the freshly opened box and made a grab for some of it, totally ignoring all the slips of paper warning her not to eat it. "Tastes soapy." *spit* Hmmm … a box full of loose popcorn cushioning unwrapped bars of soap. Soapy, you say? An unexpected bonus: I poured the popcorn in the organic recycling bin under the sink, and the Lush smell neutralized the usual vomit-y smell in there.

I stowed the cardboard box with the dwindling supply of soaps in the bathroom cabinet, and now everything else that is stored in there also smells like Lush: boxes of kleenexes, John’s shaving bag, our table linens. It’s quite refreshing to clean your nose with a Lush-laden tissue. I wonder what the cats think of the scent-bomb in the bathroom…

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.