Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Flowers, Glorious Flowers!
If you do not weep with joy at the sight of these Thanksgiving cactus blooms, your heart is made of cold, black ice.
Talkin' about the weather
John likes to give me a hard time because I have spent so much time talking about the weather; he says I'm all elderly. But I don't like to be cold or wet, and we are smack in the middle of cold, wet season, so there is a lot to talk about, i.e. complain about.
Check this out: 11 days ago, this was the view from the front of our house:
Nice, eh? I failed to get a photo of the tree-line up above this, but it was equally spectacular.
Then 4 days ago we got enough fine-grained hail, as evidenced by the residue on this car next door, that Hannah thought we'd had our first snow:
She had to wait 4 days until today to have her wish come true:
It is not quite cold enough to stick, but we've had occasional flurries all day, mixed with cold rain. Ick! So in 11 days, we've experienced the height of fall and the onslaught of winter. I need to get more sweaters!
Check this out: 11 days ago, this was the view from the front of our house:
Nice, eh? I failed to get a photo of the tree-line up above this, but it was equally spectacular.
Then 4 days ago we got enough fine-grained hail, as evidenced by the residue on this car next door, that Hannah thought we'd had our first snow:
She had to wait 4 days until today to have her wish come true:
It is not quite cold enough to stick, but we've had occasional flurries all day, mixed with cold rain. Ick! So in 11 days, we've experienced the height of fall and the onslaught of winter. I need to get more sweaters!
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Switched at Birth?
No one who has actually seen Hannah and me together would ever doubt that she's my child.
See?
But sometimes I wonder if there was some kind of switcheroo in the hospital nursery. To wit:
The child does not like gummy bears. Or cheese. Or pants. (I don't hold it against her for not liking licorice--not many people do.)
She (still) loves pink and sparkles, although not necessarily in the form of her own clothing anymore.
Given the choice, she only reads books about witches and ghosts. Of course, our library only has 2 basic options for her age group: ponies or witches/ghosts/vampires.
In short, she's definitely mine, but not my clone: she's her own person.
It still makes me sad, though, that she doesn't want to read the Little House on the Prairie series, or many of the other books I liked as a kid.
See?
But sometimes I wonder if there was some kind of switcheroo in the hospital nursery. To wit:
The child does not like gummy bears. Or cheese. Or pants. (I don't hold it against her for not liking licorice--not many people do.)
She (still) loves pink and sparkles, although not necessarily in the form of her own clothing anymore.
Given the choice, she only reads books about witches and ghosts. Of course, our library only has 2 basic options for her age group: ponies or witches/ghosts/vampires.
In short, she's definitely mine, but not my clone: she's her own person.
It still makes me sad, though, that she doesn't want to read the Little House on the Prairie series, or many of the other books I liked as a kid.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Blah to the nth
I have got to be the most boring person on the Internet. John and I spend a lot of time laughing and entertaining ourselves, but it just doesn't seem to translate to the blog page for some reason.
The highlights of the last week:
I told my class: "Don't ever depend on technology, because it will just crap all over you." This after the USB-stick cock-up, even though I had *a whole hour* to try to sort it out. I wonder if this little baby would be the answer to all my dreams (and it's Star Wars--win!). Only I can't decide between R2D2 and Darth Vader. (DV is out of stock. *pout*) Or maybe the Swiss Army Knife version? Oh, the possibilities!
Hannah had a friend come over, and the cats managed to escape into the stairwell. Missy is an old pro and meowed at the door when she wanted back in. When the friend left, I found Eliza frozen in abject terror two floors down. I had to peel her paws away from the edge of the stairs and carry her back up to the apartment. This is a cat that barely allows her favorite human in the world, John, to pick her up for a quick cuddle.
My Thanksgiving cacti are positively laden with blooms. I am waiting until the majority of them open before posting a photo, but it is gonna be good!
Now I must get back to the grind, etc.
The highlights of the last week:
I told my class: "Don't ever depend on technology, because it will just crap all over you." This after the USB-stick cock-up, even though I had *a whole hour* to try to sort it out. I wonder if this little baby would be the answer to all my dreams (and it's Star Wars--win!). Only I can't decide between R2D2 and Darth Vader. (DV is out of stock. *pout*) Or maybe the Swiss Army Knife version? Oh, the possibilities!
Hannah had a friend come over, and the cats managed to escape into the stairwell. Missy is an old pro and meowed at the door when she wanted back in. When the friend left, I found Eliza frozen in abject terror two floors down. I had to peel her paws away from the edge of the stairs and carry her back up to the apartment. This is a cat that barely allows her favorite human in the world, John, to pick her up for a quick cuddle.
My Thanksgiving cacti are positively laden with blooms. I am waiting until the majority of them open before posting a photo, but it is gonna be good!
Now I must get back to the grind, etc.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
No, I’m not dead in a ditch
But thanks for asking. *g*
I haven’t even had the excuse of being ill. I’ve just been in a black funk that hasn’t been very conducive to blogging. (Not that anyone would want to read anything I might have written in that state.) Nothing in particular happened to set it off; it was just a perfect storm of hormones and autumn, I guess. Yesterday was the nadir, but as SJ over at I, Asshole was recently explaining, somehow once you’ve hit bottom, you find yourself back on top. So after gorging at the buffet of irrationality, I am back to snacking on the carrots of happiness. Or something.
At least now I can look back at the stupidity of it all and laugh. That’s a good sign that it’s over.
I finally took Hannah to the doctor about her cough. She has had that tic cough for a while now, but one evening she was coughing every 2 or 3 seconds, and I thought she was having a hard time getting any air. So the doctor checked her lung function, and it was perfect, which means she doesn’t have asthma. But he still wasn’t satisfied with labeling her cough a tic, so we are keeping a “cough diary” for the next 4 weeks. If she is still coughing then, she’ll have to go to a pulmonary specialist to have her larynx checked out. If she is still coughing then, I may have to be admitted to the funny farm. *g*
Hannah’s friend had a Halloween party, and the kids were allowed to trick or treat in their neighborhood. They got a pretty good haul, considering that Halloween isn’t a big holiday here. Hannah dressed up as a ghostbuster, complete with our vacuum cleaner’s hose. Unfortunately, I neglected to get a photo, but she did a good job on her costume.
I’m sure other things have been happening around here, but they are still hidden behind the gray veil of the last couple of weeks, so I’ll have to think on it and get back to you.
I haven’t even had the excuse of being ill. I’ve just been in a black funk that hasn’t been very conducive to blogging. (Not that anyone would want to read anything I might have written in that state.) Nothing in particular happened to set it off; it was just a perfect storm of hormones and autumn, I guess. Yesterday was the nadir, but as SJ over at I, Asshole was recently explaining, somehow once you’ve hit bottom, you find yourself back on top. So after gorging at the buffet of irrationality, I am back to snacking on the carrots of happiness. Or something.
At least now I can look back at the stupidity of it all and laugh. That’s a good sign that it’s over.
I finally took Hannah to the doctor about her cough. She has had that tic cough for a while now, but one evening she was coughing every 2 or 3 seconds, and I thought she was having a hard time getting any air. So the doctor checked her lung function, and it was perfect, which means she doesn’t have asthma. But he still wasn’t satisfied with labeling her cough a tic, so we are keeping a “cough diary” for the next 4 weeks. If she is still coughing then, she’ll have to go to a pulmonary specialist to have her larynx checked out. If she is still coughing then, I may have to be admitted to the funny farm. *g*
Hannah’s friend had a Halloween party, and the kids were allowed to trick or treat in their neighborhood. They got a pretty good haul, considering that Halloween isn’t a big holiday here. Hannah dressed up as a ghostbuster, complete with our vacuum cleaner’s hose. Unfortunately, I neglected to get a photo, but she did a good job on her costume.
I’m sure other things have been happening around here, but they are still hidden behind the gray veil of the last couple of weeks, so I’ll have to think on it and get back to you.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
I'm back in black, er, blue
Most of the time, my life at the university rolls smoothly along. Then other times--like every time I try to use a departmental library--life hits a few bumps, flips a couple of times, and bursts into flames. That's an hour of my life I'm never going to get back.
I had pity on you all and spared you the diatribe I had scribbled after all that. Just so you are properly thankful.
The professors in my department are really very nice, but also very chatty. A two-hour office hour is just not enough for some people to get through a list of 7 people. I'm just saying. At least there was a little entertainment out in the hallway. The guy after me has a quack for a ring-tone. That is made of win!
One morning on the bus--isn't it always on the bus?--I saw a *ahem* well-built young woman wearing a bouffant hair-do and way too much eye shadow. She was a pair of platform shoes, false eyelashes, and a layer of cherry red lipstick away from being a drag queen.
After the bus, I passed a man on the bridge. Hey, Dude! Frankenstein says, "Shoulder pads--baaaad!"
Hannah whacked her head on the same lamp I gashed myself on last summer during the great clean-athon of 0-7. Of course she did this on a school night on her way to bed. (What she was doing crawling around behind her bed at bedtime, I'll never know.) She still has the scab, but I don't think it'll leave a bad scar.
Hannah and I have been crafting to the max recently. First, she made a house out of sugar cubes and egg-white + powdered-sugar glue.
Then I made a Halloween lantern.
(Hannah drew the face. The witch looks like she fears for her safety on that thing.)
Then Hannah made little confections out of baker's marzipan, dipping chocolate, and leftover butterscotch morsels.
Finally, I made a card/table decoration that sits in front of a candle.
Now I just need to come up with a Halloween design for my card, and I'll be set!
I was bragging to Kee that I am first! to buy xmas gifts this year. Some of them are even in the mail as we speak. (Mainly because they got packed with some birthday presents for October/November.) I realized while doing some of the xmas/bday shopping that now is the perfect time. The shops haven't yet turned up their heating to "hell", and no one else has started shopping, so there are no crowds. Hannah has already given us a list ofdemands wishes, so I could get hopping on that. Maybe after I start, write, and turn in my paper. :-(
I had pity on you all and spared you the diatribe I had scribbled after all that. Just so you are properly thankful.
The professors in my department are really very nice, but also very chatty. A two-hour office hour is just not enough for some people to get through a list of 7 people. I'm just saying. At least there was a little entertainment out in the hallway. The guy after me has a quack for a ring-tone. That is made of win!
One morning on the bus--isn't it always on the bus?--I saw a *ahem* well-built young woman wearing a bouffant hair-do and way too much eye shadow. She was a pair of platform shoes, false eyelashes, and a layer of cherry red lipstick away from being a drag queen.
After the bus, I passed a man on the bridge. Hey, Dude! Frankenstein says, "Shoulder pads--baaaad!"
Hannah whacked her head on the same lamp I gashed myself on last summer during the great clean-athon of 0-7. Of course she did this on a school night on her way to bed. (What she was doing crawling around behind her bed at bedtime, I'll never know.) She still has the scab, but I don't think it'll leave a bad scar.
Hannah and I have been crafting to the max recently. First, she made a house out of sugar cubes and egg-white + powdered-sugar glue.
Then I made a Halloween lantern.
(Hannah drew the face. The witch looks like she fears for her safety on that thing.)
Then Hannah made little confections out of baker's marzipan, dipping chocolate, and leftover butterscotch morsels.
Finally, I made a card/table decoration that sits in front of a candle.
Now I just need to come up with a Halloween design for my card, and I'll be set!
I was bragging to Kee that I am first! to buy xmas gifts this year. Some of them are even in the mail as we speak. (Mainly because they got packed with some birthday presents for October/November.) I realized while doing some of the xmas/bday shopping that now is the perfect time. The shops haven't yet turned up their heating to "hell", and no one else has started shopping, so there are no crowds. Hannah has already given us a list of
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The Semester Has Begun
Today was the first day of the class I am teaching, and I was a bit nervous this morning leading up to it. Between that and it being the first day of Aunt Flo's visit, I had to pee about twice an hour from the time I got up before 6:30 and when class started at 11:15. But I didn't go down in flames, so that was good. I went to campus early in case there was a problem with traffic or the bus--Hannah's school bus has broken down *twice* in the last two weeks--so I was sitting around for 20 minutes needing to pee and having nothing better to do than go back over my notes for class. What better time to start a lame-ish blog post? So here it is (you've been warned!):
I've been using the little 3x3 pages from our telephone notepad for my listmaking because such a tiny piece of paper doesn't seem quite as threatening as a full sheet. I just tuck it into my Miss Piggy notebook (thanks, Family Jooge!) and add or cross off items as needed. Only now that I'm up to 3 tiny pages filled front and back, it's starting to feel like a pile, and people suffocate under piles. Fortunately, I still manage to get a lot done, even if the 3 long-term items keep getting shuffled from list to list, so I have the satisfaction of being able to crumple up at least one little list each day before having to start a new one.
I can see that I'm going to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest this semester, but I am finding it invigorating instead of terrifying. That should prove what many of you have thought about me for a while. :-) Anyhoo, here's what I have on my weekly plate:
2 hours of tutoring in English
2 hours of teaching presentation skills
1 office hour for my student job
4 hours of attending pedagogy classes
2 hours of attending a language use class (presenting in German!)
2 hours of attending a master's thesis class
+ doing whatever the faculty need help with for up to 30 hours per month
This may not sound like much for my friends who are working full time, but John and I are also splitting the after-school care of our not-so-little munchkin, so I have to be home 2 or 3 afternoons a week for munchkin wrangling.
Oh, yeah... remember how I said work just falls into our laps? I might end up teaching a second course (although I initially turned them down). I'll just have to wait and see how that turns out.
Hannah hates sports so much that she has renamed P.E. "sporture". So we were very proud that she was able to overcome her distaste and run/walk *7 kilometers* in a school fundraiser for UNICEF. Yay, Hannah!
I bought some pumpkins a couple of weekends ago to use as fall decorations, and Hannah just couldn't rest until she had mutilated a couple of them.
I tried out something I saw in a book about pumpkins, scraping a pattern into the rind, but not all the way into the flesh. It worked out well on the small green gourd. For the bumply pumpkin, I just drew a face with a black marker; unfortunately, I am no artist, so it didn't turn out "one-eyed goblin" so much as "industrial accident victim".
We were a bit too early with our carving, and now it looks like Night of the Living Dead around here.
This one was supposed to be our jack-o-lantern, but I think I'll pass on the oozing and just toss it in the compost bin. Besides, the farmers still have their stand up, so I can get another one this weekend.
Now it's time for me to get back to work!
I've been using the little 3x3 pages from our telephone notepad for my listmaking because such a tiny piece of paper doesn't seem quite as threatening as a full sheet. I just tuck it into my Miss Piggy notebook (thanks, Family Jooge!) and add or cross off items as needed. Only now that I'm up to 3 tiny pages filled front and back, it's starting to feel like a pile, and people suffocate under piles. Fortunately, I still manage to get a lot done, even if the 3 long-term items keep getting shuffled from list to list, so I have the satisfaction of being able to crumple up at least one little list each day before having to start a new one.
I can see that I'm going to be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest this semester, but I am finding it invigorating instead of terrifying. That should prove what many of you have thought about me for a while. :-) Anyhoo, here's what I have on my weekly plate:
2 hours of tutoring in English
2 hours of teaching presentation skills
1 office hour for my student job
4 hours of attending pedagogy classes
2 hours of attending a language use class (presenting in German!)
2 hours of attending a master's thesis class
+ doing whatever the faculty need help with for up to 30 hours per month
This may not sound like much for my friends who are working full time, but John and I are also splitting the after-school care of our not-so-little munchkin, so I have to be home 2 or 3 afternoons a week for munchkin wrangling.
Oh, yeah... remember how I said work just falls into our laps? I might end up teaching a second course (although I initially turned them down). I'll just have to wait and see how that turns out.
Hannah hates sports so much that she has renamed P.E. "sporture". So we were very proud that she was able to overcome her distaste and run/walk *7 kilometers* in a school fundraiser for UNICEF. Yay, Hannah!
I bought some pumpkins a couple of weekends ago to use as fall decorations, and Hannah just couldn't rest until she had mutilated a couple of them.
I tried out something I saw in a book about pumpkins, scraping a pattern into the rind, but not all the way into the flesh. It worked out well on the small green gourd. For the bumply pumpkin, I just drew a face with a black marker; unfortunately, I am no artist, so it didn't turn out "one-eyed goblin" so much as "industrial accident victim".
We were a bit too early with our carving, and now it looks like Night of the Living Dead around here.
This one was supposed to be our jack-o-lantern, but I think I'll pass on the oozing and just toss it in the compost bin. Besides, the farmers still have their stand up, so I can get another one this weekend.
Now it's time for me to get back to work!
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Scotland: The End
I FINALLY finished blogging our Scotland trip. Just to make it easy on you, I am including a link for each day's post, plus a link for the full photo album for each day on Flickr. Don't forget to put on your reading Depends, and enjoy!
Day 1 (only one photo, so no album)
Day 2 and album
Day 3 and album
Day 4 and album
Day 5 and album
Day 6 and album
Day 7 and album
Day 8 and album
Day 9 and album
Day 1 (only one photo, so no album)
Day 2 and album
Day 3 and album
Day 4 and album
Day 5 and album
Day 6 and album
Day 7 and album
Day 8 and album
Day 9 and album
Friday, October 12, 2007
Don't look at meeeee!
I really like Indian food, but I almost always have the same reaction: I eat a small portion of some seemingly harmless chicken over rice with sauce (mmm... chicken korma...), and while I’m at the table, I feel like I could just go on eating. But as soon as I get up, that innocuous dish turns into a medicine ball in my stomach. About the time I feel my pregnant-hippo sized body must be obvious to the rest of the world, my brain is attacked. It feels like it is being smothered by down pillows. The safest thing to do at that point is to hold down some furniture and hope no one asks me anything important.
Have you ever noticed that when you see someone being an asshole (like pushing to the front of the line for the bus), that person is indelibly marked as an asshole in your mind, even if someone else is an asshole to the original asshole. And even more oddly, if you are like me, you might kind of admire the second asshole, even if his assholish ways would have gotten him original asshole status if viewed in the absence of the first asshole.
It’s getting cold enough at night that I’ve started bringing my plants in. The sunroom is filling up right quick with the mouse cage, patio table and two chairs, chilis, cherry tomatoes, citrus, two Thanksgiving cacti, and the plant stand full of ivy. The azalea only made it as far as the front hall before I realized I need a drainage dish for it before I can take it upstairs.
After I bragged about my azalea green thumb, I noticed that the local florists all have blooming azaleas out. oof! Guess it was just preprogrammed to happen.
My chilis are finally turning red, and two are almost ready to pick. I told John to get his mouth all ready. But when I went in to check/admire them today, I realized that some of the plants were dripping sap because they were infested with *aphids*. grrrr... The green specks that showed up on my black cardigan after I was messing with the chili plants were a bit of a giveaway. I chopped off the affected plants, none of which had chilis on them, and John is going to smoke his pipe at the survivors later.
After the first battle for the chilis, I felt itchy all over. Of course I realize that to an aphid, my skin would be the equivalent of Death Valley, but I still had the itchies.
Just when I thought the tomato plant was about done for the year and I could chuck it to make some space in the sunroom, it has gone crazy putting out new branches and new blooms. For some reason, we haven’t even managed to eat up the last batch of tomatoes, and now we’re faced with a barrage of new ones.
But I am quite excited that both of my Thanksgiving cacti are about to bloom. Teensy weensy buds are coming out. Yay! If only the aphids will keep their pokey little proboscises to themselves.
Sadly, the other main annoyance in our household right now is Hannah, but don’t tell her I said that. She has had this non-productive, throat-clearing cough for a while, and there are times when it drives me straight up the wall to hear “a-HEM... a-HEM”, repeat a million times a day. I know it is just a tic because she doesn’t do it in her sleep, and she didn’t do it on our trip to Trier, when she was among friends, until after she walked into that pole and was angry, and cough drops seem to have no affect on the tickle that she says causes it. Some nights, when I am trying to fall asleep and she is still reading in bed downstairs—coughing—I just have to yell at her to go get a drink of water or a cough drop or SOMETHING. *GAH!*
I have used the cell phone a total of two times now to make outgoing calls, and I felt like a total tool both times. The first time, I was walking up the pedestrian street to the store to pick up some milk and ketchup, and I wanted to see if John had any other items for me to buy. I waited until the street was fairly clear before I started dialing, but I was totally slow, and when I looked up—still not done dialing—I was 2 steps away from walking into another cell phone user, probably texting. I felt like a total jackass, which doubled while I was walking and talking to John.
The second time, I was at the bus stop after being out later than I had thought, and I was checking in with John about starting dinner. The bus stop is on a very busy street, and it was loud, so I found myself talking loudly to be heard over the car noise. With my phone conversation, I managed to scare away two little bunnies eating down near the river. I’m a monster!
Have you ever noticed that when you see someone being an asshole (like pushing to the front of the line for the bus), that person is indelibly marked as an asshole in your mind, even if someone else is an asshole to the original asshole. And even more oddly, if you are like me, you might kind of admire the second asshole, even if his assholish ways would have gotten him original asshole status if viewed in the absence of the first asshole.
It’s getting cold enough at night that I’ve started bringing my plants in. The sunroom is filling up right quick with the mouse cage, patio table and two chairs, chilis, cherry tomatoes, citrus, two Thanksgiving cacti, and the plant stand full of ivy. The azalea only made it as far as the front hall before I realized I need a drainage dish for it before I can take it upstairs.
After I bragged about my azalea green thumb, I noticed that the local florists all have blooming azaleas out. oof! Guess it was just preprogrammed to happen.
My chilis are finally turning red, and two are almost ready to pick. I told John to get his mouth all ready. But when I went in to check/admire them today, I realized that some of the plants were dripping sap because they were infested with *aphids*. grrrr... The green specks that showed up on my black cardigan after I was messing with the chili plants were a bit of a giveaway. I chopped off the affected plants, none of which had chilis on them, and John is going to smoke his pipe at the survivors later.
After the first battle for the chilis, I felt itchy all over. Of course I realize that to an aphid, my skin would be the equivalent of Death Valley, but I still had the itchies.
Just when I thought the tomato plant was about done for the year and I could chuck it to make some space in the sunroom, it has gone crazy putting out new branches and new blooms. For some reason, we haven’t even managed to eat up the last batch of tomatoes, and now we’re faced with a barrage of new ones.
But I am quite excited that both of my Thanksgiving cacti are about to bloom. Teensy weensy buds are coming out. Yay! If only the aphids will keep their pokey little proboscises to themselves.
Sadly, the other main annoyance in our household right now is Hannah, but don’t tell her I said that. She has had this non-productive, throat-clearing cough for a while, and there are times when it drives me straight up the wall to hear “a-HEM... a-HEM”, repeat a million times a day. I know it is just a tic because she doesn’t do it in her sleep, and she didn’t do it on our trip to Trier, when she was among friends, until after she walked into that pole and was angry, and cough drops seem to have no affect on the tickle that she says causes it. Some nights, when I am trying to fall asleep and she is still reading in bed downstairs—coughing—I just have to yell at her to go get a drink of water or a cough drop or SOMETHING. *GAH!*
I have used the cell phone a total of two times now to make outgoing calls, and I felt like a total tool both times. The first time, I was walking up the pedestrian street to the store to pick up some milk and ketchup, and I wanted to see if John had any other items for me to buy. I waited until the street was fairly clear before I started dialing, but I was totally slow, and when I looked up—still not done dialing—I was 2 steps away from walking into another cell phone user, probably texting. I felt like a total jackass, which doubled while I was walking and talking to John.
The second time, I was at the bus stop after being out later than I had thought, and I was checking in with John about starting dinner. The bus stop is on a very busy street, and it was loud, so I found myself talking loudly to be heard over the car noise. With my phone conversation, I managed to scare away two little bunnies eating down near the river. I’m a monster!
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Yikes!
I've been neglecting my poor little blog, but it has been for a strange mix of reasons. First, I had nothing to say, then we went out of town for 2 days, and there was almost too much to say, but I wanted to say it on my travel blog, and then I went crazy and spent a whole day (yesterday) writing. Everything is topsy-turvy!
Now I can't even remember the few things I wanted to post before we went off on our wild adventures. Or not so wild. This is us we're talking about here. Last Friday, we headed for the Spessart to check out a moated castle John wanted to see and to enjoy the fall foliage. Then on Saturday we got up early-ish and headed to Trier with another family we have befriended. Hannah is taking Latin, and Trier is chock-full of Roman stuff--the baths, the Porta Nigra, an amphitheater--so we thought she might be interested, but alas, the best we were able to get was that she and her friend found a place to flop themselves each time our tour group stopped to view something, so at least they weren't disruptive. She walked right into a sign post just before the tour started, so with her subsequent bad mood, it could have gone really badly.
We walked about 5 miles in Trier, so with my own errands in town, that brings me up to 26.15 miles since I started the trek to Rivendell. I am very sad to see that I am still only on day 2, where the "road rolls up and down." *sigh* Classes start back next week, so I will be getting out of the house every single day and racking up the miles.
Ok, I realize this post is completely made of LAME, but I will start paying more attention and taking notes so I can get back to boring you at a much lower level.
Now I can't even remember the few things I wanted to post before we went off on our wild adventures. Or not so wild. This is us we're talking about here. Last Friday, we headed for the Spessart to check out a moated castle John wanted to see and to enjoy the fall foliage. Then on Saturday we got up early-ish and headed to Trier with another family we have befriended. Hannah is taking Latin, and Trier is chock-full of Roman stuff--the baths, the Porta Nigra, an amphitheater--so we thought she might be interested, but alas, the best we were able to get was that she and her friend found a place to flop themselves each time our tour group stopped to view something, so at least they weren't disruptive. She walked right into a sign post just before the tour started, so with her subsequent bad mood, it could have gone really badly.
We walked about 5 miles in Trier, so with my own errands in town, that brings me up to 26.15 miles since I started the trek to Rivendell. I am very sad to see that I am still only on day 2, where the "road rolls up and down." *sigh* Classes start back next week, so I will be getting out of the house every single day and racking up the miles.
Ok, I realize this post is completely made of LAME, but I will start paying more attention and taking notes so I can get back to boring you at a much lower level.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
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?
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?
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
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!”
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!”
Monday, September 24, 2007
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!
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!
Friday, September 21, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
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!
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!
Friday, September 14, 2007
I hate to tell you this...
but I am strawberry cake.
I'm not sure about the cake, but the description doesn't seem too far off. Just ask John.
| 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! |
I'm not sure about the cake, but the description doesn't seem too far off. Just ask John.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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*
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.
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.
Friday, September 07, 2007
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.
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:
![Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket](="http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k36/nee_stewart/IMG_7584.jpg")
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.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
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.
Now to fold a load of laundry and head off to bed.
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