Something from something

While I am waiting for some video footage to upload from our Scotland trip (I’ll be done with the write-up some day, I swear!), I thought I would clean out my “to be blogged” file for your entertainment and edification.

A while back, the universe was steering me toward all things Star Wars on the Internet. I just realized that a large portion of my recent “to blog” bookmarks are for things made of different things.

First, I would like to present Jennifer Maestre’s sculptures made out of pencils. This imp is my favorite.



Next, Brian Dettmer takes illustrated books and carves them to reveal the artwork within, making a totally new work of book-art in the process. I particularly like the piece made out of the Webster’s Dictionary.

Pete Goldlust carves crayons, and I cannot convey how cool they are with that simple description.

The artists aren’t named at this site, but everybody loves art made from veggies, right? (If you’re having a hard time figuring out what some of the veggies are, think bell pepper...)

Okay, this isn’t really making something out of something else, unless you consider making something knitted out of yarn to fall under that heading, but it was too cool to leave out: a knitted teratoma.

And finally, a picture of the cornucopia that is currently our fruit dish. I am planning to make the smaller winter squashes in the window into some sort of fall decoration, maybe make the littlest ones into heads for the medium ones.

We clean more messes before breakfast than most people do all year

We were discussing maple syrup over a pancake breakfast this morning, and I asked Hannah if she knew about the stuff in trees that carries nutrients. "Pus?"

Before we even got to breakfast, I had to clean up cat puke. The cats polish off their food overnight, then when we refill their bowl in the morning, they gorge themselves, frequently leading to barfing. As a matter of fact, John is cleaning up another pile upstairs as I write. (And why is it that they always have to puke on carpet when 2/3 of the floors are tiled?!) Anyhoo, I was particularly put out with Missy this morning because I found her lying on the couch barfing on to the carpet below. As I told John, I much prefer her crouching on the floor, hurling in abject misery, to her lounging around and barfing at her leisure.

Missy joined us at the breakfast table, and John pointed out that she's basically a digestive tract with claws. It occurred to me that there is probably some alien species out there that considers us digestive tracts with thumbs.

Hannah found this Bratz *shudder* Fish Tank game, and she's been happily breeding and selling these weird Franken-fish. I'm pretty sure you can't cross a fish with a crab, but that doesn't stop her (or the game). She's not merely selling the fish, she is gouging her customers: "These guys'll buy anything! I could sell them a plastic fish!" At least she invests her proceeds back into fish-care products, but she is starting to scare us a little.

I ran out to do our grocery shopping, and while we were carrying the groceries in, Hannah told me she and John had been killing something. She was 1 floor above me on the stairs, so I couldn't hear her, and I pictured the two of them stomping bugs, not that they would normally do that. "Yeah--it's really fun!" I finally found out it was another video game, against other online players represented by cannons (no people-alikes). John and I were just saying how much we hate shooting games, so it took me a second to catch on.

While we were putting away the groceries, I said "enything" in conversation, and John had to be silly and say, "My sweet Texas girl!" To which I had to answer, "Kiss my sweet Texas can!" It's how I say, 'I love you'.

And now I am off to finish cooking about 2 of the 22 pounds of potatoes (see last entry) for dinner.

Camp Fun and Games

I went to the meet-the-teachers night at Hannah’s school last night, but I didn’t really get much out of it. The parents assembled downstairs, where the principal said something something something (I was standing at the back of a crowd consisting of the parents of over 130 fifth-graders), and then the band played “Linus and Lucy” and the theme from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” My enjoyment of the music—and you know I love me some sixth-grade band music—was marred by the smell of CO2 (lungy!) and cigarettes coming off the man next to me.

Afterwards we all trooped upstairs to our kids’ respective classrooms to meet the teachers. They all wore nametags, minus the subjects they taught, but they seemed to have skipped the part we were all waiting for, where they took turns standing at the front of the room and introduced themselves: “I’m Mr. So-and-So and teach This-and-That.” I recognized Hannah’s homeroom teacher from the first day of school, and the biology teacher actually made the rounds to meet those of us who were not so forward as our counterparts, but otherwise the teaching staff stood at the front of the room and waited for us to come to them. In theory, not a bad idea, but they ended up being monopolized by a certain sub-set of the parents. I’m not confident enough in a German-only setting to jump right in there and put myself forward, so I didn’t manage to introduce myself.

When I got home, Hannah had my glasses on the desk. I asked why she had them out. To look through. “You can’t see through my glasses!” (Not without incurring brain damage, I’m told.) She has explained that when she looked at things close up, they looked little but smudgy, which means she doesn’t need glasses. Who needs an optometrist when you have logic?

I am still waiting for my cayenne peppers to ripen, but they are staying firmly green. A bit of googling tells me it takes 80 days. 80 days! The first ones were already full-sized when we left for Scotland, so that was about 60 days ago, but really, you can get baby mice faster than that!

There are very few shows I make a point of watching, but I am addicted to Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon. They started playing Season 2 episodes back in March, and we *still* haven’t seen the very last episode. As a matter of fact, they hadn’t even started the last 7 episodes until about 2 weeks ago, so we’ve been watching the first 33 episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 over and over and over for about 6 months. I couldn’t stand the wait, though, and read all the Season 2 synopses at the Nick site and on Wikipedia. Season 3 has just started in the US, but there’s no telling how long it will take for the episodes to get translated into German, so it’s back to haunting Wikipedia for my Season 3 fix.

And I know I shouldn’t admit this, but I am also looking forward to Season 3 of Winx starting in October. John teases me about it, but I point out I am not running out and buying the full set of DVDs; I am enjoying it for the low-low price of 5 cents or so an episode, if viewed as a percentage of our cable bill. The shame of watching is the only thing he can pin on me.

John and I take turns doing the weekly shopping, and I can always count on him not knowing what is currently in our cabinets and buying duplicates of at least one item (last week it was raisins, almonds, and something else). I can also be sure he will buy a fresh fruit or vegetable he thinks we should eat, without planning a way of preparing it or adding it to the meal plan. Last week he bought 4 giant leeks at the store. Then he passed a farmer’s stand on the way home; this means he came home with 20+ pounds of potatoes. “What am I going to do with 4 leeks and 20 pounds of potatoes?!” “But they’re German potatoes!” There is no such thing as a direct conversation when this happens. Fortunately, I found a recipe for a leek and potato casserole, but how much casserole can one family eat before the potatoes start going bad?

With my last 2 outings, I’m up to 16.26 miles on the road to Rivendell. That means I haven’t even finished Day 1 yet. *sigh*

We played the Simpsons version of Clue after Hannah finished her math homework this afternoon. What does it say about me that I always play Mr. Smithers/Mrs. White?

Word Rich, Photo Rich

At my job back in Austin, I told my pregnant boss, J, “You shouldn’t make your baby out of chili dogs!” She had a lifelong habit of eating by whim—you can imagine how much of her budget take-out comprised—and her food choices were eclectic, to say the least, but she continued in this headlong fashion all the time I knew her, budget and nutrition be damned.

Sometimes I feel like I am following in J’s glorious footsteps. It would have been better for her and her baby if she had eaten something that fell squarely into one or another of the food groups, but chili dogs were often on the menu. It would really be better for my college career and my mental health if I would just sit down and write the paper that is due soon, but instead I am blogging and working on my short stories. The German IRS might prefer me to finish and send in last year’s tax return, but again, I am working my way through my German grammar book. It’s not like I am doing absolutely nothing—except yesterday, heh—but somehow I find myself doing stuff that is so far back on the burner that it is in the living room. Why?!

My new motto should be “Doing the Insignificant with Gusto!” Speaking of which, I crocheted us cell phone cozies to prevent the buttons being pushed while jostled about in a bag (I’m looking at you, John).

Purple sparkle for Hannah


Black for John and me


And I made a scrapbook* of Hannah’s artwork scrounged out of her “paper drawer”, directly under the “coloring implement drawer”, in her room. Now I see how previously unknown works by Beethoven or Shakespeare turn up—someone’s mom cleans out a drawer!

*In the original sense of gluing things on blank pages, not the artistic stuff WesTexGirl does.

Now that the daily introspection and beating myself up is over, I would like to give props to my hubby for carving this walking stick.



In case you are Germanic mythology-impaired, that is Odin. John’s interest in carving started back when we were still in Austin, thanks to the work of Rod Johnson, but this is his first completed object made using real tools and not a sharpened butter knife (don’t ask). A lot of people in our families have crafty hobbies, as opposed to John’s “hobby” of learning languages, so we’re glad to welcome him to the fold. Join us! It’s blisssss!

He’s going to carve me a witch out of this stick next. Can’t you just see the witch in it?



I think I mentioned this before in relation to Hannah’s elementary school, but even her new school seems to have no reliable system in place for providing substitute teachers. Yesterday, her last class was cancelled, so she came home 1-1/2 hours earlier than scheduled. This morning she called to say PE was cancelled and her class was going to have to just sit around for 1-1/2 hours. She called back at the end of that period to say that someone had played a trick on them; the PE teacher came looking for them when no one showed up for class, but not before 2 girls went home. I think we’ll want to bring this up at the meet-the-teacher event this afternoon. Also—yay us! for getting cell phones! If this is going to keep happening all school year, it will be good to have a way to find out that Hannah’s on the loose early.

I am probably going to jinx us by saying this, but John and I seem to have the most amazing luck in certain areas. Work just falls into our laps. For instance, John got a line on his current Swedish-tutoring gig through the German-Swedish club. He has also picked up translating work from people contacting him through the university (including the university administration!). I have also picked up a few proofreading/translating/teaching jobs through his department (I should write an Ode to Nepotism), but not recently. My student employee job in the English Department, which I applied for myself, led to a temporary instructor job this semester.

Here’s the best one of all: John was approached by a guy who lives just down the street to help him brush up his English (his company is owned by an American). A coworker also wanted tutoring, so John put me forward, and I’ve been doing that for about 2 years now. Recently, yet another coworker expressed interest in tutoring. So at 10:30 this morning, John was working on a translation for this company (arranged by me and the original tutee while I was there for tutoring), and I was on the phone with the university about my teaching contract, and someone from the company left a voicemail about the new tutee. I tell you, we can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting a job.

And to wrap up, a picture of our cat, who we probably couldn’t swing even if we wanted to. As Hannah’s friend said (but in German), “She’s GI-ANT!”

Ps. Flower Love

My azalea, a salmon-pink Christine Matton, is in bloom!

generic title here

John had pity on Hannah and bought a frozen cake for our 4-year anniversary. It took us 3 days to eat it, and I am afraid my digestion and my figure will never be the same. I asked him to just buy 3 slices of something from the bakery next time.



I think she has always been this way, but maybe had been improving lately, but recently, Hannah has been doing things without thinking her way through to the end, and it is making me slightly cranky. She talked her dad and I into allowing her to de-hair her legs. She is very self-conscious about them and won’t even wear clam-diggers. As the origin of her hair-problem (she is a natural, hairy brunette, just like yours truly), I could see where she was coming from, even though I thought she was a bit young to be starting. So Saturday I helped her put the depilatory cream on her legs, then I told her, “Sit right here on the stool where you can see the tv for 5 or 10 minutes, and DO NOT TOUCH THE CREAM.” Then I stood behind her folding some laundry. When I finished, I looked over to find her RUBBING THE CREAM OVER HER ARMS AND THIGHS. I could have strangled her. I rushed her to the bathtub and got her cleaned up without any weird hair-loss on her arms or head (a couple of smudges ended up in her head-hair). The cream worked fine on the original site, but she was surprised and disappointed the next day to find there was a little stubble. Welcome to a lifelong grooming habit, Sisyphus!

After the depilatory mess, Hannah went to her friend’s house for a birthday sleepover. At 12:30, we get a call that we should come pick her up. Unfortunately for her, John didn’t make it downstairs in time to catch the call, so we got her message via voice-mail. He thought she sounded cheerful enough, so we left her there, although neither of us could get back to sleep after that. I was worried that maybe she was sick or had another nose-bleed, and every car that passed our house made me wonder if it was the friend’s dad bringing Hannah home. Unfortunately, we live on the main street through our village, and for some reason there was a car going by every 10 seconds after 1 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, so that didn’t help the sleep thing. It turns out that Hannah was perfectly fine; she had started brooding over a perceived slight earlier in the party and decided that she was upset enough to come home, several hours after the fact. By the time I picked her up the next morning, she was totally over it. I told her straight up that if she had called a second time, her dad would have picked her up, but then she would never, ever be allowed to go to a sleepover ever again. Did I mention never?

The fabulous fall weather has been holding out, so we went on a walk through the woods yesterday. The birthday party Hannah had been to on Saturday included a scavenger hunt in the woods, but I misunderstood and thought they had been in the woods to the west of us. It turns out that we took the exact path through the woods to the east of us that she had just been on the day before. That explained part of her disinclination to go with us, but not her bad attitude. She threw herself on the ground at the end of someone’s driveway and refused to get up until I came back and threatened her. That’s when we found out about the repeat, but it was too late then. John really wanted to find a particular stream that we hadn’t been to before, so we jollied her into joining us, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try striking again.



You must remember that John’s “short outings” often end up being “death marches”. For the most part, Hannah and I managed to keep him to actual paths, as opposed to just tromping off through the woods in what he thought was the correct general direction, but it wasn’t easy.



We finally got where we could hear the stream running, so we climbed down toward the water, but at first, all we could see was this.



Yes, some sort of concrete fish tank. The stream flowed out of it a little farther down, though.



While trying to climb back up the other side of the ravine, I managed to step firmly in some muck that smelled a bit like sewage. I haven’t gotten that far in my Scotland vacation blog, but John also dragged us across a swampy mountain covered in sheep poop on the Isle of Skye, and this was basically a repeat of that. We were right at the end of our hike, and my shoes were befouled. aargh!

On the way out of the woods, we spotted some interesting carvings.


Old man stumpy! (in my head, to the tune of “Old Man River”)


Aack! Woods shark! (and some lumpy something that could be a duck or a witch, depending on the angle)

Finally, 2.4 miles later, we made it to the Italian restaurant for some ice cream and R&R.


mmmm... Pluto’s brains are surprisingly cold and sweet.

From there it was a pleasant walk along the river, a shortcut through the village, and a bus ride back up the hill to our house.



With the hiking and the running of errands last week—I found the vacuum cleaner bags at a large grocery store across town! Thank you, Baby Jesus and the 7 Dwarfs!—I have made some progress toward Rivendell:

Look back at lights of Hobbiton from first slopes of the Green Hill Country.
Hobbiton hidden as slopes rise and fall.
Stop in a birch grove. Eat a frugal supper (ca. 10 p.m.).
Reach Stock Road.

Only 440 miles to go!

Year 4 wrap-up

Hannah pointed out this week that Monday the 17th was the anniversary of our move here to Germany. She was positive it was the third anniversary, but it has actually been four years since we arrived. It’s hard to believe it has been that long.

When we got here, we had no idea we’d still be here 4 years later. We figured we’d already be back in the US by now, but the academic job market sneers at the attempts of puny mortals to predict their place in its future. John hasn’t let the whims of the American hiring committee system get him down, though. He is working hard at his job and on writing some articles and a textbook, and he’s even been taking on the odd job here and there. Plus he’s the president of his club, and people like him. (Sorry, slipping into Stuart Smalley mode there.)

When we came, we said to ourselves, we’ll stay long enough for Hannah to get through elementary school; then she’ll be changing schools and getting new classmates, and it’ll be the perfect time for a transition back to the US. Instead she has made the transition to German junior high school (it's actually a comprehensive 5-12 school). Four years ago, she didn’t speak a word of German, just some made-up gibberish she tortured her father with, and now she is fluent enough to attend a college-track school, where she is learning Latin via German and is taking *English* as a foreign language. Oddly enough, we all expected that Hannah would be leaving her best friend Sinya behind in Germany, but Sinya moved to Romania this summer, a complete reversal.

When we came, I thought four years would be more than enough to finish my master’s degree, but here I am with one semester of coursework and at least one semester of exams and thesis-writing before I’ll be done. I will have three mini-jobs during the upcoming semester, so that and my coursework will keep me out of trouble for a while.

But as much as we would like to be back in the US, Hannah summed it up nicely when she said life would be perfect if we could just get our family to move over here. I haven’t written about how much we enjoy living here, because I worried that it would cause our loved ones pain to hear it, but if we could transplant everything about our current lives back to the US, we’d do it in a heartbeat. Our apartment might be on the small side, but we live in a gorgeous area that you’d be hard-pressed to equal anyplace in the US I’ve ever been. We spend more time together than we’d ever be able to manage back home. We get by comfortably without having to work ourselves to death, and one of us is home with Hannah every afternoon after school (right now we’re both home). We don’t have a big circle of friends here, which is something we miss, but we make up for it with the time we can spend together at home and taking little trips, even a few big trips.

I had already planned to do a write-up of our first four years after we got back from Scotland, but it turned out harder to do than I had expected. But the last few days have been identical to the “Golden Autumn” we experienced when we first arrived, and that has helped put me in the right frame of mind for this little essay.

All shopping and no play makes Nee CRAZY!

Hannah made it through the first week of fifth grade unscathed. (She will tell you that she’s been a fifth grader since July since she was promoted at the *end* of fourth grade.) I think she even mostly enjoyed it. She’s pretty sketchy on some of the details, but it seems there might be another Texan in her class. What a small world!

Unlike in elementary school, Hannah didn’t get a master list of school supplies, so I’ve been running around all week picking things up after she found out each day what she needed. After the third day, though, I threatened to chop off Hannah’s hand if her list was written on it again. I didn’t buy all of that paper for nothing!

Also this past week, we have gone from being a zero-cell-phone family to being a two-cell-phone family.



With Hannah being more independent this year, and with John and I having irregular schedules, we thought it was time to get a little more connected. John and I have mixed feelings about giving up our anti-cell-phone self-righteousness, but since we bought the most basic phone we could find (and cheap!), we are looking forward to a new kind of self-righteousness. *tongue in cheek*

In addition to the frantic cell-phone and school-supply shopping, John and I had other household-y chores and errands to take care of. I am afraid that by the end of it, I was teetering on the edge of madness. All I needed to buy was some vacuum cleaner bags and curtain hooks, regular old everyday items in every household. Not live fairies clothed in gold. Not the last Chinese river dolphin. Just vacuum cleaner bags and curtain hooks.

It took me 4 tries to find the hooks. Actually, that’s not completely true, because the first shop had three empty racks where there should have been the kind of hooks I needed, but that did not help me.

In a town of about 150,000, in one of the most industrialized nations in the world, I still have not been able to put my hands on the goddamned vacuum cleaner bags, after a week of trying and *6* separate attempts. I have tried 2 department stores, and 2 electronics stores, one of them where we bought the damn vacuum cleaner in the first place, and the other the place where I regularly buy bags. To add insult to injury, the second place has a wall that is completely covered with bags, top to bottom, but guess whose bag was represented by a giant gaping hole where it was completely sold out? Their Friday shipment was not in as of 10 am or 2 pm, so I guess I either have to cram some more dirt in the current bag, or live in filth until Monday. I am considering ordering a case of them online.

It occurred to me on Wednesday that I should put my pedometer on. Over three days, I walked slightly over 7 miles. So if I translate that into the trek for Rivendell, I am still on Day 1 and I’ve managed this much:

Leave Bag End at full dark (ca. 7 p.m.). Go around (W) end, jump hedge.
Go through gate into a lane. Head west.
Leave lane, follow hedgerows south.
Cross The Water on a plank bridge.
Cross The Great Road from the Brandywine Bridge. Enter Tookland.

And I am almost here:

Look back at lights of Hobbiton from first slopes of the Green Hill Country.

So that was my errands. John hauled a cubic meter of wood in for our tile oven.



Of course it warmed up again and the clouds cleared off right after that, which means that you need a heavy jacket in the morning but not in the afternoon. It won’t be too long before we’ll want to start using it, though.

John moved the mice from Hannah’s room into the sunroom while he carried in the wood, and Hannah was so pleased at the lack of nightly noises that the move is permanent, at least for the foreseeable future. (Depending on how well-sealed our chimney is in the corner of the sunroom; we haven’t used the fireplace since they finished the sunroom, and I don’t want to asphyxiate our little rodent friends.)



The mice have been carefully locked away from the cats since Hannah got them, so now having them just the other side of a sliding glass door is like kitty TV for our two fuzzballs. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen scaredy-cat Eliza so animated. I was afraid that the poor mice would have a heart attack the first night with the cats prowling on the other side of the glass, but they eat and run on their wheel and otherwise act oblivious of them. They must be nearsighted, because the cats look like that Far Side comic with the cat splayed against the front window, staring at the collision between delivery vans for Bob’s Small, Flightless Birds and Al’s Rodents.

The mice are currently sharing the sunroom with the last of the cherry tomatoes.



Once the nights starting getting even colder (we’re down to about 50F at night right now), some of the balcony plants will join them. Like the citrus I am inordinately proud of (did I mention I grew them from seeds?).



And the cayenne peppers.



With actual (not quite ripe) peppers!



And last but not least, my azalea, which is actually trying to bloom again.



I’m not sure what to think of that. The web site listed on its tag makes it sound relatively easy to get it to bloom again, but the University of Minnesota extension service makes it sound quite a bit more challenging. Whatever I haven’t been doing, I guess it’s worked!

I hate to tell you this...

but I am strawberry cake.

You Are Strawberry Cake

Fresh, sassy, and romantic. You're a total flirt, who never would turn down a sugary treat. Occasionally you're a bit moody - but you usually stay sweet!

What Kind of Cake Are You?

I'm not sure about the cake, but the description doesn't seem too far off. Just ask John.

Already annoyed

Hannah has only been in school 2 days, and already I am annoyed at the lack of useful information she is bringing home. I am pretty sure she is getting various instructions from her teachers about supplies and stuff, but having to decipher the notes *written on her hand* makes me think that maybe some other things are slipping through. I know I sent TWO notebooks with her this morning, so it's not like she didn't have any paper.

Anyhoo, she rode the bus to and from school on her own today. It made me a little weepy watching her ride off in the morning and walking up to the front door from the bus stop this afternoon. *sniff*

Happy First Day of School to Hannah!

By day, she is a freshly minted fifth grader.



Complete with new cell phone.



By night, she is a hard-working mermaid.



So Hannah made it through her first day of fifth grade yesterday. It was actually only 2 hours long, so I guess most kids could manage that. There was a quick presentation for the new students and their parents, then the kids got divided up into their new classes. Hannah was happy to see that 2 girls from her fourth grade class (but none of the boys) are in her new class.

When I left the school, I passed some older students on break and almost had a laughing fit. It struck me as hilarious that Hannah is now attending school with students with moustaches. (Gymnasium includes grades 5-12.) The younger kids are on a slightly different schedule from the older kids and have their breaks in a different area, so it’s not like she’ll be mixing with them on a daily basis.

Today is probably going to suck for her, though. She had to catch the bus at a few minutes before 7 am, class starts at 7:50 and lets out at 3:30. She has never gone later than 1 before, so it will take some getting used to. Actually, she’ll only have afternoon class on Mondays and Tuesdays, but those are going to be loooong days for her. She has 9 subjects over the course of the week, including Latin and biology. Fortunately, she’s already pretty good at English. *tongue in cheek*

I thought we were going to have to buy 500 pounds of school supplies yesterday, but Hannah only got the list for one class, so that simplified our shopping. After the pizza lunch, we bought new tennis shoes, yoga pants for P.E., a new backpack and wallet, and a few notebooks.

John and I had gone before the pizza lunch to buy the cell phone, and it was amazingly easy. We went to this chain coffee shop (Tchibo) that runs weekly specials on various non-coffee items (usually household and kitchen goods, including small electronics and clothes), and for 30 bucks, we got a Nokia cell phone complete with 1 Euro prepaid on it. All we had to do when we got home was charge the battery and put in the SIM-chip. The phone number was printed on the paperwork, and the phone worked like a charm. I tried watching the demo and reading the manual to figure out how to use it, but Hannah just picked it up, fiddled around with a couple of buttons, and voila! She managed to figure out how to turn off the ringer without the instructions or the demo. Kids these days! :-)

I like hanging out with Hannah, because she always has something funny to say. Yesterday she was telling me that she’d like to be a robot, because then if you get an axe in the head, it’s not a big deal. O-kay... She was also imagining how horrible it would be to have different parents who didn’t love her like us, parents who would make her “trample stuff” to make wine for them but would only allow her to wash her feet, not the rest of her, so their wine wouldn’t get germy.

Before we left for school, John was reminding Hannah that since she would have new classmates, she should give them a chance and be friendly and try to get to know them and not be teasing or sarcastic. “You’re taking away most of my personality! That’s most of Hannah, dude!”

She is getting so mature. She was very conscientious yesterday about not picking really expensive items; she was worried about making us poor. I could have bought 3 times the stuff just from my last tutoring check (I tutor 1 hour per week), but it was nice to see that she is catching on that money doesn’t grow on trees.

Craft Masters!

With Hannah getting ready to go back to school on Monday, no one has really felt like tackling any of the large, looming projects, so we’ve been whiling away the time with various small craft projects. I crocheted this peek-a-boo sweater (that I can’t actually wear due to the sudden onset of Fall):



While I colored some xmas door-hangers, John put together a paper model that he had bought a while back of the Blue Tower of Bad Wimpfen:



I used my mighty craft skillz, Hannah’s stash of paper, and a template from a book to create this b-day card for John:



And all 3 of us got busy with the tie-dye. Lovely MIL had sent this kit, which we had promptly used, but we had some dye left, so we stashed it under the bed for later use. I came across it recently, but we had used up the packet of soda ash (to help the dye stick to the fabric better). Using my powerful google-fu, I figured out what exactly soda ash is (sodium carbonate aka salt of soda aka Na2CO3) and what it is used for (various types of cleaning, including laundry). I scoured the laundry aisle at the grocery store, and BINGO! Washing soda. Unfortunately, I had overlooked the fine print on the kit’s instructions, which said to use up the dye within 2 days of reconstituting it with water. (And also that it only works on natural fibers.) So our cotton tees that looked like beautiful rainbows after dying ended up pink and blue pastel after washing (and my puffy cloud socks turned out to be synthetic and dingy-looking):



Other than all the crafting, we’ve just been lounging about.

Griping in an Autumn Wonderland

Despite the semester looming ahead of me, I can’t seem to get in gear. Hannah starts school on Monday, and I think in the back of my mind I have given myself permission to be useless until then. Stupid brain. I really need to get cracking on a paper that is due October 1, plus I need to create a course from scratch on presenting in English before the first class on October 16, and it would be nice if I looked back over a few things I will be working on for my master’s thesis, which I will be starting this semester. Rereading all that, I am starting to feel a little light-headed.

John’s back threatened to go on strike after we got back from vacation, but John took that initial twinge very seriously and immediately hit the ibuprofen and hot water bottle. I know it can’t have been as bad as the last couple of times, because he continued to fart and proposition me (not at the same time) at the normal rate.

But right now I am considering doing him an injury that might put him in traction. We had a few days of nice, tail-end-of-summer weather after we got back from Scotland, but it has gone downhill from there, and now we are firmly in early fall, complete with cold and rain. John has this thing about “fresh air”, while I have this thing about “not freezing”, and I feel that the juncture of these two things is going to lead to blows. He walks around the house opening windows; I add another layer of clothes and go around behind him closing them. I am hoping we will get some firewood soon, and then we can fire up the old wood oven.

Tomorrow I will be lugging 30 pounds (roughly) of books back to the library, so I guess I better get rested up. Maybe something exciting will happen on the bus that I can report back on here. If not, look forward to another message from dullsville.

And Lame-O Was her Name-O

After some time off, it is hard getting back into the rhythm of blogging, and school, and writing, well, just about everything. This is going to be rough, but stick with me, eh?

When we got back from Scotland, John had a couple of birthday cards waiting for him, and he just wants to know, what’s with all the toilet humor?

Hannah has gotten noticeably taller recently, even to people that barely know her, so I just measured her: 55-1/2 inches at 10 years and 3 months. That’s a little over 2 inches taller than this time last year, but 1 inch of that is just since her birthday 3 months ago. Now where did I put that brick so I can put it on her head and stop her growing so fast?

I took Hannah into town to go to the library last week, and another one of those unique lines came up: “I don’t think they make burial clothes just for drag queens, Hannah.” She was disparaging my footwear.

In between my novel-a-day habit and some work for my part-time student job, I have gotten up to day 4 of our vacation journal, if you wanted to check it out. I was hoping to have a little uninterrupted work time since John went to campus to work on a paper he is submitting for a conference and Hannah went into town with her friend—they each have a new bus pass, and FREEDOM was calling to them this morning, but they got bored after Pizza Hut and one department store. And Hannah said that the gates around John’s department were closed, so I expect him to turn up soon, as well. *sigh* I guess I can label pictures until he gets home.

Home Safe!

We made it home from Scotland a little after 2:30 this morning. Ouch! The whole trip was great, but there is a metric ton of laundry to take care of, plus labeling and uploading the hundreds of photos we took (we filled up a 32 MB and a 256 MB memory card, plus half a 512 MB card), so I probably won't have much up for a day or two while we get caught up on sleep, etc. I did post a link to the first batch of trip photos on my travel blog (see link to the right), so you can get a preview of our adventures.

Now to fold a load of laundry and head off to bed.

Walking in a Summer Wonderland

You can almost set your watch by John getting antsy at 4 on a Sunday afternoon and needing to get out of the house. The weather has been atrocious, so when it turned actually pleasant over the weekend, I agreed to stretch my legs. Hannah, though, had to be dragged kicking and screaming and moaning and whining out of the house.

We live down in a valley, and the tops of the ridges along the sides are forested; you can walk for miles and miles on paths through the trees and end up in one of several neighboring towns. Getting onto the trail is not quite as simple as walking out your back door, but it is still fairly accessible. Once we got Hannah out of the car and onto the trail, she turned into a completely different kid. I told John that her “wilderness” personality was way preferable to her “civilization” personality.



Hannah’s class has gone hiking in the woods at least once a year for the last four years (and it seems they went about 4 times this past year alone), so we let her be the tour guide. She managed to find a particular stream she had told us about.



We followed the stream a ways and came across a beautiful meadow awash in sunlight.



John wanted to go all the way up to the source of the stream, but Hannah had to pee (she was so busy complaining and carrying on that she forgot to go before we left the house), so we only made it to a large puddle where Hannah managed to catch a tadpole and the drinking fountain across the path.



I had bought a pedometer recently because I want to make the trek to Rivendell, so I gave it a try on our outing (full photo set here). I did not try to measure any moon-walking, which is expressly mentioned in the directions for the pedometer, but if it worked under the “tricky condition [sic]”, we went about 4 kilometers. Now that I’ve got all the settings the way I want them, I’m toting it along to Scotland. If I’m going to do all that walking, I want it to count for something!

The Venus flytrap is blooming. Bet you’ve never seen that before!



And Hannah had a run-in with some food color when she tried to make silly putty from scratch using a recipe out of a kid’s experiment book. Grrr... fire bad!



And Happy Birthday to John (yesterday)! He’s finally caught up with me, at least until February, when I race ahead again.

See you back here in about 10 days with the full Scotland update.

No Rest for the Weary

I finished cleaning Hannah’s room last night, and I think someone may have been trying to tell me something. First, the light went out, but I’m too short to change the bulb, and John was already running out the door for a meeting when it happened, so I worked by the light of a couple of reading lamps.

Then John got home and changed the bulb. A couple of hours later, we heard something shatter, but weren’t sure if the sound came from the kitchen or Hannah’s bedroom. Turns out it was the overhead light cover in Hannah’s room; it didn’t get fastened properly when the bulb was changed, but I probably wouldn’t have done it right either, if I could reach it. By this time it was after 9, and I was picking up shards and vacuuming just so I could finish putting Hannah’s room back together.

Finally, I was able to put the big tub o’ toys back under her playbed, and as I was pushing the smaller tub in from the other side, I gashed my head open on the grip to the reading light attached to the side of Hannah’s bed (facing the wall). I rolled around on the floor for a few seconds, my scalp burning, until I put my hand on the right spot and found blood. That acted like a bucket of cold water, and it stopped hurting so bad. I got up and cleaned it up and went to bed. I was afraid that if I had kept going after such a clear signal, I’d end up electrocuted or something.

John hadn’t noticed anything amiss (he was in the study during all this), so when I told him what had happened, he tried to show sympathy by patting me on the head. Hello! Gaping wound on head! He was lucky I didn’t smother him with his own squishy pillow, which was Hannah’s suggestion after I had one particularly bad night’s sleep when John was making some weird noise in his sleep.

We all slept in nice and late this morning, and then I finished the last few bits in Hannah’s room and stripped her bed. The end. Thank the Seven Dwarfs.

We were planning on taking Hannah to Mannheim for an event hosted by Nick (the tv channel for kids), but we ended up staying home. For one thing, it has been raining so much that the Rhine has gone over its banks in several places, and the Nick thing was supposed to be held in a park along the Rhine. And then when we woke up, it was raining hard enough that no one felt like getting out in it. We would have still gone if Hannah had been really gung-ho, but she declined.

So instead of partying down with SpongeBob et al., she has spent the day organizing her new-found Barbie loot into a Barbie city in the living room. In addition to the Loving Family House that has been transformed into housing for the Barbies, she has a schoolroom, a throne/princess bed, a tree house, a grocery store, and a bathroom. It takes up less space than you would think, but it definitely contradicts Hannah’s statement that she never gets anything.

One of the perks of a major cleaning action is the recycling of old toys into new ones. Yesterday Hannah got into the dress-up cabinet and turned herself out as Hip-Hop Cheerleader (TM). She even insisted on going out into town with me like that. Some days it feels like she is growing up so fast—I just noticed that the top of her head reaches my nose—but then she spends a whole day naming her 101 Barbies and dressing up as Hip-Hop Cheerleader, and I realize she still has a lot of little kid left in her.

Nee the Cleaning Lady

I started yesterday on Hannah's room, and I probably won't be done before tomorrow evening. If you ever saw my room as a kid, Hannah's room was--ok, it actually wasn't that bad, but Hannah had been put in charge of straightening up the last couple of times, and her room had gotten to the point that you could hardly get under her play-bed without the aid of a compass and a shovel. I'm throwing away a lot more than the last time I had a mega-cleaning in there, but it's mostly small plastic toys out of the chocolate eggs. Those things seem to multiply in the bottom of her toy boxes, and she never plays with them after eating the chocolate, so it was time to give them the old heave-ho.

All the cleaning has eaten what is left of my brain, but maybe I have enough to watch some SpongeBob. Maybe tomorrow I will manage to scrape out whatever it was I was thinking on the bus earlier today. hmmm...

My Dirty Secret

You all know how much I have loved the series of Harry Potter books. If the price of Book 7 had been 45 bucks, a pint of blood, and my left hand, I would have been, "Here's 50--keep the change. Do I need to bring my own clean needle and tourniquet?"

So it may come as a surprise to you all that I do not particularly care for the movies. The first 2 movies were ok, but Prisoner of Azkaban was already getting a bit thin, plot-wise, and Goblet of Fire was almost unintelligible due to the amount that had to be chopped out to make it fit into a reasonable time frame. Hannah got to see Order of the Phoenix during a friend's birthday party, but I don't even have the urge to see it, even though we can watch it in English at one of the small movie houses here. If John were really set on it, I would go with him to that one, just to simplify explaining all the bits missing from the book and the bits John missed on screen, but otherwise I am not planning to go. I think Hannah is starting to feel the same; we could have bought the DVD of Goblet of Fire on sale this weekend, but she wasn't even interested, even though we had bought the videos up to that one.

So, to sum up:
Harry Potter books=yay!
Harry Potter movies=boo!

Hannah was going to spend the night with her friend last week, but she didn't manage to hold out (she had already spent the night with another friend the night before and had spent the whole day at the swimming pool with a local youth group, so I could have predicted that another night away from home might be too much). John was watching a video when she called (I was already in bed), so he turned it off and went to get her. The next morning I had to leave early to tutor, and I discovered that John had left the VCR and converter, and the computer and accessories, on over night. He is so anal about wasting electricity that I had to leave him a note about that. Then I left another note that I had baked some pretzels and he could find them in the oven. When I got home, this note was on the table:
Nee,
This morning I found handwritten notes on the dining room table and the computer keyboard, and some pretzels in the oven.
Love, John

He was actually home when I came in. He had just been watching the complete set of Monty Python DVDs and was feeling a bit whimsical, hence the note.

It's always fun and games around here.

I am a gardener. Really!

Not much going on with us. We all are kind of dragging, maybe due to a mild cold or just the semester/school year catching up with us now that vacation has started.

But in other news, my tomatoes are thriving.



My Thanksgiving cacti are putting out new, purple leaves, and even Hannah's Venus flytrap is trying to bloom.



Last but not least, the perfect fusion of Star Wars and organic farming: Grocery Store Wars

Ode to My Office Supplies

pencil sharpener—
ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone,
my silver darling

I feel a bit like the Hulk, but instead of being doomed to walk the earth alone, I am doomed to never find my goddamned pencil sharpener when I want it. That was one of the “little things” I was bitching about losing a few weeks ago, and now I’ve gone and lost the replacement I bought. That fucking pisses me off (as evidenced by my language). John says I should attach it to a tire so I don’t lose it; I thought about putting it on one of those wallet chains. Whadya think?


(Thanks to Bandit at Bikernet for the original photo.)

Anyhoo, office supply heartaches aside... I made tomato soup and cloverleaf rolls for dinner, and John was asking me how I managed it (with my mad chef skillz, yo!): “Did you roll the dough into little balls first and then drop them in the muffin hole?” “Muffin hole” has now officially taken over for “cake hole” at Chez Nee: Shut your muffin hole!
[ETA: John told me after he read this that he'd actually said, "stuff them in your muffin hole", which I had thought, but then I assumed it was my twisted brain putting words in his mouth. And in case you haven't caught on, he was talking about a muffin tin. *vbg*]

This isn’t looking so sexy anymore, eh?

But then I gave it a drink of water and it, ahem, perked back up.

The teenager downstairs insists on cranking his stereo a couple of times a day, and I discovered this morning that polka music with the bass turned up is a very effective counter-measure against washing machine music. I don’t know who gave us that CD (Jooge and Mr. Jooge?), but I actually kind of liked it. John was not amused by the music or my reaction to it, but at least it worked on the neighbor and I could turn it off quickly.

Hannah is now officially a 5th grader and on summer vacation, so we are sleeping late and otherwise being bums. Only 15 days until we leave for Scotland!

Stop—Hannah Time!

Walking to school with Hannah is always highly entertaining. Topics on the next-to-last walk of the school year on Tuesday:

• I have been harassing Hannah to buy new pants because hers are getting too short and too tight. But Hannah doesn’t want to buy any jeans that are glittery, because she is afraid that the boys at her new school next year will look at her butt* and whistle at her, and then she’ll have to punch them in the guts, and then she’ll get a note on her school records: “Not college material.”
  
  *With John and me as parents, it is cosmically impossible for Hannah to have anything but a big, bodacious boo-tay.



• Hannah wants to be a chef when she grows up, but she doesn’t see the point of the chef hat, and she definitely doesn’t want a moustache (apparently a requirement in her mental picture of a French chef).



• Tuesday was garbage pick-up day, so we had to wend our way past the bags and cans on the sidewalk. After passing a particularly nasty-smelling bag, Hannah commented. “Phew! That smelled like Dad’s farts after Mexican food. *pause* Or international night. Or meatballs.”



• On the way into the school, we passed a girl on a unicycle. Hannah said, “Too bad unicorns aren’t shaped like hamburgers. Then they could advertise for McDonald’s.”
  “What? Unicorns?”
  “Yeah!”
  At this point, we had entered the building, and something about its construction makes it a perfect echo chamber. If more than 1 person is talking in the hall, you can’t even hear yourself think over the din.
  Me: “Are you sure you don’t mean unicycle?”
  H: “What?”
  Me: *more fruitless questioning* and finally “Unicorn?!” (in German)
  H: “No.”
  Then she went in her classroom, so I still have no idea what was supposed to be burger-shaped.

Hannah refuses to use the correct endings of certain words in English. I am pretty sure she knows the correct 3rd person singular, but anything ending in –st doesn’t get a pronunciation of –sts; instead she says –stiz, giving us “cost-iz” and “taste-iz”. Now “mouse” has gotten the plural “mouse-iz”. She told me today: “Mouse-iz smell like raisins.” Not to me, kid.

Hannah is following in the hallowed footsteps of her Grandma Lou: dying her hair at the first possible chance.

I figured that if Jooge let K put a non-permanent dye on her hair over xmas, I could do the same for Hannah. Only Hannah didn’t want pink, she wanted black. And her color will last 24 washes. She goes back to school in September, so I hope we can squeeze 24 washes in during that time. *g*

Note to all parents:
Even if you think your kids are big enough to know better, please take the time to remind them not to play with chemicals in the form of household cleaners. Hannah managed to spray bathroom cleaner in her eye Monday night while she was supposed to be brushing her teeth. First she claimed it fell and accidentally sprayed, but the next day she fessed up that maybe she was trying to clean a weensy spot in the sink, but nothing came out of the bottle, so she turned the nozzle toward her face to check it out. She won’t be doing that again.
So please, please, remind your kids that cleaning supplies are off limits.

All That and a Bag of Potato Chips

Sorry I’ve been AWOL lately. I had a raging case of PMS, or in my case, DMS* (during menstruation syndrome), and I didn’t think you all wanted me spewing crazy on you, so I mercifully withheld pen from paper and fingers from keyboard until now.

*Yes, I realize that this coincides with my monogram, but at least I am not PMS, John’s ex-step-mother.

We have managed to be extra sociable lately. Hannah’s class had their end of school party on the first really summer-like day since the freak spell in April, so we soaked up some rays and chatted with a few of the other parents, John more so than me. Hannah spent a big chunk of time hunkered over a lizard she found; she spent the rest of the time catching grasshoppers. And of course the evening wasn’t complete until one of the boys ripped the pants of one of the girls, which was an improvement over the party in the first grade, when one kid just about brained another one (there was blood involved).

We spent all of last Saturday at an intimate garden party. Some friends of ours through the German-Swedish club (they are Swedes) invited us over for grilling and relaxing. They have the coolest garden. It is not at their house, but in the middle of a bunch of small fields, kind of like a community garden arrangement. The garden is a little Garden of Eden in the midst of some hay and bean fields. Berry bushes cover the fences on either side of a pretty lawn. You could travel from fruit tree to fruit tree like a pinball all the way to the cute little house where they store their grill and patio supplies. If we go back in another week or so, we could choose between apples, pears, quince*, plums, cherries, rhubarb, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, and even cherry tomatoes. They grilled sausage and pork chops for us, and John taught them how to make smores. *shudder* A good time was had by all.

*A quince looks like a pear, but you can’t eat it raw. Remember from Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”?
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
in a beautiful pea-green boat...
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon...

I have been cracking up over some posters up around the bus stop for SHITDISCO! In small print it says that it is a Glaswegian band. Everything’s coming up Scotland! Have I mentioned we are going there in August on vacation?

I am seriously considering boycotting the Internet for the next week or so until I can buy and read Harry Potter 7. It comes out tonight, and I don’t doubt for one minute that by 5 am some dummy will have posted the ending somewhere that I can’t help but stumble across it. Since I have to be mentally present for my last 2 classes on Tuesday, I can’t buy it before then (the agony of owning it but not being able to read it would be too intense for me to put myself through), but I still remember WesTexGirl telling me about her friend’s experience when HP6 came out: on a *scrapbooking* bulletin board, someone posted the ending IN THE SUBJECT LINE, so everyone who logged in that day saw it first thing. I would have been 87 flavors of pissed, so I am not going to allow myself to accidentally get in that situation, hence the boycott.

See you in about a week!

Happy 500th Post to Me!

Last week, I had some hard-core personality swings. One day I was Little Susie Homemaker—baking, cooking, cleaning, laundry, mopping, the whole nine yards. Then I was Girl Friday—filing, shredding, and a little more cleaning. If you were to judge me by the piles that tend to form in my wake, you might think I am a big slob. But really, I like to think of myself as loosely organized. I generally know which pile to look in to find things and can put my hands on what I’m looking for quickly. But even with the whole clean-athon last week, there are 3 (admittedly small) things that have gone missing in my household, and it is driving me *bonkers*. They should have been where I looked for them, even if they had started to molder. *sigh*

I did manage to finish the outfit I made for Hannah’s teacher’s impending baby. Hannah’s class had their end of school year party this afternoon (the first hot, sunny afternoon in ages, praise the Seven Dwarfs), and the kids gave her a joint present then, so I’ll slap some buttons on this puppy and take it to her sometime before school is officially out in 1-1/2 weeks. Turned out cute, eh?


I swear, there was more in my brain before it got melted at the party, and it is not getting any earlier, so I will turn in and take another stab at it tomorrow.

The Wheels on the Short Bus Go Round and Round and...

I’ve got to get out of the house more, because the crazy outside the house is much more interesting than the crazy inside the house (usually—Hannah was on a roll last night (see below)).

First there was a woman wearing the most hideous high-heeled, shiny, metallic *clogs* I have ever seen. They made me want to claw my own eyes out *while crossing the street*, they were that bad. The way the woman was strutting in them, she seemed to think she was hot shit. Yes, shit is definitely the right direction...

Then there was a sight at the bus stop that would have been hilarious if it didn’t also make we want to cry. An old man in a wheelchair was camped out under a tree; he had several cold drinks and a big outdoor umbrella. He had set up 2 chess tables, complete with 3-legged camp stools for potential opponents, and he had a selection of magazines and newspapers on sale in front of him. But the clincher was his cat. He had a not-fully grown cat in a harness attached to his wheelchair. Outdoors. The cat was totally calm, even though it had 3 giant jingle bells on its collar, and even let a kid in a stroller pet it. The man obviously was planning on spending some time there, because he had put out food and water (in sparkling stainless steel bowls!), had attached cat toys to his wheelchair with sticks and string, and had put a couple of puffy blankets for it to lie on. I found it very sad, somehow.

And finally, not crazy, but I saw a very pretty Russian dude on the bus. Like try-not-to-get-caught-staring pretty. That was the biggest bus excitement since my recent sighting of the drunk fighting couple from the next village over being drunkly lovey-dovey. I’ll take pretty Russians any day over that.

Hannah, Better Than TV

Hannah was asked in Religion class: What is God? She was telling us her answer at dinner last night:

H: God is in everyone. He could be Dad, he could be Mom, he could be this ham (gesturing at her plate).
J: I have an extra big dose of God.
H: You don’t even have long hair like Jesus!

She’s got you there, John.


Hannah has been thinking about dying a lot recently (in an abstract sort of way), probably in response to her great-granddad passing away. “This is my testament [will] for when I’m dead.”
Written on a piece of paper from the phone note-pad, translated from German by me:
“I want to be burned up when I am dead and put in a can and thrown in the waters of the Caribbean. If I have a fortune, I will give it to my first-born child (or my first adoptive child).”


John and I like to think of ourselves as beyond the sordid world of commerce, which is probably why we are so poor *ha ha*, but Hannah is a born entrepreneur. She has been planning on opening a restaurant for ages now, remember?


and here


And she and her friend practice their cooking skills on their rare play-dates (or more accurately, practice making odd concoctions that they write up and call “recipes”.


A lot of her restaurant talk has been about the interior design, and she doesn’t actually like food, so it is hard to imagine her actually becoming a chef, but you can’t keep a budding entrepreneur down. She has discovered the Hot Shot Business game on the Disney web site and has tried out lots of different businesses: pet spa, comic book shop, candy store. The site actually gives tips about marketing, etc., so it is educational, kind of. Hannah is not typically very competitive, but she did *not* like being 6th on a list of successful players and wanted to crush her opponents. We have a little Alex P. Keaton on our hands, I’m afraid.