Fall into Fall

Now that my balcony garden is gasping its last breath and my once-noble walnut trees look like sticks in a bucket,



I thought I would look back on the weeks of pleasure I got out of tinkering with seeds and dirt this year.

When I started out, I didn't have any grand ambitions, such as feeding my family solely from the fruits of my labors or opening a stand at the farmers' market; rather, I just wanted to see if the seeds Hannah and I had been collecting in the kitchen would sprout and/or thrive. I totally love cantaloupe, so I was thrilled to see that it took off



at first, but it was not to be. I started the seeds in the sunroom upstairs, but after a certain point, they just pooped out, even after I moved them outside.

Fortunately, my pepper plants didn't follow the lead of the cantaloupe.



I just threw a bunch of seeds in a couple of pots and ended up with a ton of plants putting on bell peppers and hot peppers. Luckily, most of them survived our absence in August, so I came back to lovely fruit:



and



I've since stringed up the peppers to dry, which may or may not be successful since it has been cool and a bit damp recently, but I would like it if my gardening efforts lasted longer than the warm weather here.

I also had cilantro sporadically (sorry, Jooge), which we loved for making guacamole when we could get decent avacados, and some basil that just wouldn't die but surprisingly didn't bolt, even though we heard August was hot while we were gone.



I also made compost, despite John's protests that it would stink and attract flies.



I found some lovely grubs in the soil we bought, so I tipped them into the compost and they cheerfully slithered their way down into it. *shudder* Lovely! I had been trying to turn the compost regularly, but while we were in Texas stuff started to sprout in it. So I came back to a pot full of mystery plants.



I swear a lot of them look like tomato plants, but I don't recall putting tomatoes in there. Oh, well, they'll be dead soon enough when it finally turns cold.

Next year I would like to get more food plants to grow, although I don't have any specific ideas of what I want to plant, just not more bell peppers, although they are pretty easy.

My other gardening love is our row of window boxes. The house we live in has some typical southern German gingerbread trim, complete with window boxes, but it pained me to pay hundreds of dollars to fill them with equally typical hanging geraniums, so I have been buying packets with mixes of seeds to pack in there. What I like about them is that the mix invariably includes early and late sprouters, flowers that like the heat and flowers that like the cold, tall and short, and a variety of colors. In the spring and summer, there is nothing I like better than to get up and get a cup of coffee to take onto the balcony and survey my little seedlings in the early morning sunlight that is special to that time of the year. Sometimes I have an interesting guest



or two.



Mostly I enjoy trying to figure out what is going to bloom next. It is always a pleasant surprise.



Yesterday I trimmed all the dead plants in the flower boxes and moved them to the floor of the balcony and then swept up all the dead leaves for the compost. After Xmas I will start sorting through my already purchased flower seeds and planning how I want to arrange them so I can see them through the kitchen window after the spring equinox. I'm looking forward to it.

Feel the Burn

I seem to have developed an aversion to the blank page. A strong aversion. The kind I normally reserve for flan



or Carrot Top.



It's that bad. I find myself opening MS Word and then closing it or even getting up and leaving the room. Same thing with my notebook. I carry it around the house with me but don't actually open it.

I guess I should just suck it up and post what I have, but I can't promise anyone will enjoy it. Here goes:

Title: "The French Braid of Life"

Most of the time, I am pretty dextrous when it comes to keeping all the hairs under control while I weave them into the 'do of life, but lately more and more strands are slipping out of my hands and making a snarly mess of things.


...and that's all I had. After I wrote it, I realized it sounded horribly melodramtic. Mostly I was thinking about how the act of cleaning Hannah's room led to a bunch of other tasks. For instance, I went through Hannah's closet and got rid of the clothes she had outgrown. She refuses to part with almost anything--"the memorieeeeeees!" (shades of her grandfather)--so I just went in while she was otherwise occupied and sifted through her closet. A lot of clothes went to charity, but she had ripped the knees out of all her jeans, so they weren't donate-able. I couldn't see throwing away 5 pairs of jeans, so I cut them into strips



(the whiskey cannister became the spool for the finished "thread" later) and crocheted them into a rag rug for my kitchen.



That was a whole day of work.

I managed to talk Hannah into giving away her dress-up clothes (heads up to Lil Sis and Jooge: she wants them to go to your little ones), but that meant sorting them and packaging them to go in the mail, whenever that happens. That also meant that I had now freed up two shelves in her closet.

She wanted me to convert her tall play bed into a regular low bed, but first we had to figure out where to put all the stuff (so.much.stuff) that had been under the play bed. Four days of cleaning and sorting resulted in a low bed and a half-empty room, plus a yard-trimming-sized bag of garbage plus 5 other shopping bags worth of garbage. Plus a bunch of mini-electronics (I hate you, McDonald's) that had to go to the special recycling center instead of the garbage can. Plus the rest of the play bed parts that had to be wrapped up and put in the cellar.

Once we had her room under control, it was time to go shopping for a desk to go in it. We headed down south to the opposite end of town from where we live, where we:
1. bought 2 months worth of cat litter,
2. bought a desk and chair and sought in vain for something else for Hannah's bed,
3. bought a mixer, a blender, a kitchen radio, and an MP3 player (I lost mine in Texas, probably on the plane on the way there), and
4. bought corn chips.
As you can see, we have to take advantage of the long trek to do several errands at once.

I put the chair together that night and the desk the next day. Of course, I put it together wrong on the first try (damned unlabeled parts) and had to redo part of it. grrr... Then I had a big pile of cardboard to get rid of, also at the special recycling place. The whole project felt like dealing with the Hydra. And now that I've written it all out, I am almost as tired as when I actually did it. Actually, I just finished the last thing (trip to the recycling place) this morning, so I guess I have a right to feel that tired.

And on that note, I'm off to bed.

Dipping a Toe In

(Yesterday, upon discovering a Tupperware of pistachios in the fridge):
Me: What are your dad's nuts doing in the fridge?
Hannah: Um, that didn't sound good.
Me: Ye-es, I could have put that better.

Ewww!

Ok, lady I passed yesterday on the street--I know I am not exactly a fashion plate myself, but we have to talk. About your tights. I know you probably think they are kicky or something, but I have to tell you that you look like you were holding a breast-fed baby that then had an ass-plosion all down your legs. Please, for the love of all that is holy, save the tights for at home. Thank you.

Pinkie

The weather held out yesterday, and Hannah got cut loose from school early, so we went to the pool. I am not a pool person, but I had promised John I would take her if the weather was good, so I found myself waist-deep in cold water--well-water cold--at 4 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, I only remembered to put sunscreen on my body (50 SPF, baby!), so I had to get out quickly (I wasn't complaining!) and slather up my face. Hannah said I looked like Jasper the Ghost. When I explained it was Casper, she complained that she couldn't be expected to know American culture when we dragged her over here, etc. etc. But then I pointed out that various Casper movies had been on German tv, and that to my certain knowledge she had watched them, and that the name had not been changed. Well, ::bluster::. Sometimes my child is a bit of a blowhard. I hope I am not modeling that kind of behavior, but maybe.

Anyhow, ten minutes of sunscreen-free pool-standing, and now my face is a bit pink. Not even really uncomfortable, but when you are as pale as me, ten minutes is all it takes.

Holding down the fort

John is off learning Gaelic in Scotland, so I am holding down the fort with Hannah during her last full week of school. Today she is supposed to do the dialogue for two characters from the Nibelungen; I have no idea what the project is, but she's been practicing her lines and figuring out a way to indicate she has changed characters--jacket, no jacket. I wonder if Siegfried would have worn a tank top?

After weeks and weeks without a tv, and almost as many weeks of Hannah hounding us to please please please buy a new tv, we spent John's last afternoon at home tv shopping. I must say, the mall-like shopping center is much easier to survive on a Friday afternoon than anytime on a Saturday. I wasn't even actively craving death when we left! Of course, we dropped a large chunk of my recent paycheck for teaching 2 courses last semester, but we walked out with a 37-inch flat-screen tv (plus 5-year warranty), a week's worth of groceries for me and Hannah, a water-proof jacket for John, and two new non-stick pans. (Oh, yeah, also about 100 pounds of cat food and cat litter.) So if it was squeaking close to 4 figures, you can imagine why. Anyhow, we came home and set the tv up, and it is great. There are enough connectors in the back that we can have the DVD player, VCR, and Wii hooked directly to it and still have space for one more device and a computer (if we had the right cable for that). Hannah has figured out how to work all the most important functions, such as changing the screen size and switching between Nick and the Wii, so I think we are all set up now, and with a minimum of pain.

John and I used to have a daily routine like this: get up, fix Hannah a snack for school, dodge the minefield of Hannah's emotions at 6:45 am, make coffee, and settle in for some CNN and coffee. Without the tv, we had to resort to talking with each other. The horror! Now that we have a tv again, I tried out the CNN morning routine, but it just wasn't the same without John here. So I flipped around and watched some German news instead, but that was too depressing, so I decided to get to work on my stack of editing that is waiting on me.

Not that I am, but soon, Grasshopper.

I promised John that I would take Hannah swimming if the weather was good, but so far, no luck. On Sunday, it would pour rain for an hour, be miserably dark and wet for a while, then we'd get ten minutes of full sun, just enough for you to wonder if it would be possible to go swimming, at which point it would start to rain again. Yesterday it didn't actually rain, but dark clouds chased each other across the sun all day. Plus, Hannah didn't even get home from school until after 4, and she won't today, either, so that is not so conducive to eating dinner and going to bed at a normal time if we were to try to stuff in swimming, too. And yesterday I was totally wiped out. I almost fell asleep on the bus and didn't even care, I was that tired. I came home and found a spot under the window that got whatever sunshine there was available and took a nap for 2 hours. I feel like I have the tiniest smidge of a cold, which I wish would either do its thing and go away, or just go away, because it is getting really annoying.

Hannah and I have a date with Harry Potter on Thursday (cheap ticket day at the theater). I've heard good things about the film, with the caveat that it is not the film Potter-fanatics would wish for. Fair enough. I didn't even go see the last Potter film; I let Hannah go with some friends, but I wasn't really in the mood to see the latest mangling of the story.

I don't know when I can expect to hear back about my thesis. The whole process was a long string of deadlines, but they don't tell you what the deadline is for the professors who are evaluating your thesis, probably to keep people from harrassing them once the deadline is up. Not me. I am kind of afraid of what I'll get back, so I am actively avoiding them. Oh well, one of them lives in Northern Germany most of the time, so I doubt I'll just run into her at the grocery store, but the other one lives just up the hill from me (we use the same bus stop), so the simple act of taking the bus can be nerve-wracking, wondering if he'll say anything. (Please, no.)

After re-fixing a known crack in the kitchen sink, I discovered that there was a new crack, one that I didn't manage to fix and that was still leaking water. The sink was out of commission for 2 days while I let the silicon dry, and the dishes piled up, and then I had to go and do it all over again for the second crack. Needless to say, when the crack leaked after all that effort, I wanted to cry. But I have finished the piled-up dishes and will take another stab at it while there are only 2 of us generating dirty dishes (and 1 of us is away from home all day).

Another post-thesis project was cleaning my filthy, filthy house. I haven't quite finished in the kitchen (still need to mop), but I think I have managed to get the level of filth to "everyday wear and tear", down from "health hazard." I even scrubbed the tile in the shower, which is not for the weak of heart. All in all, I am enjoying being done with my thesis and having time for a normal life again, even if it is rather boring in a conventional sense.

The Dead Have Arisen!

I announced on Facebook that I had finished my thesis, but I couldn’t bring myself to reveal the full extent of my dumbassery to my quasi-friends on Facebook. I mean, most of those people barely know me, so why should I disabuse them of their notions of me? But here, in the bosom of my true compadres, I can tell my tale. It is a tale of dumbassery and academia, so it is not a new tale, but it is mine.

My deeply ingrained habits of procrastination were almost my undoing, once again. The research part of my thesis was very labor-intensive, and I started so late on it that it ate into my time for writing. During the two weeks leading up to the due date, I had been working steadily but slowly, blowing off family outings and such to have more time to work, but going to bed at the normal time. John was very supportive throughout, but I am perverse enough that supportive doesn’t actually motivate me. Once he started to express doubts that I could manage to get it done and in on time, though, *that* is when I started working with the single-minded determination of Paris Hilton looking for a Greek-shipping-magnate boyfriend.

I started getting up an hour early and working until a couple of hours past my bedtime. And in the run-up to my deadline, I pulled an honest-to-god all-nighter, basically writing non-stop for 29 hourse before hopping into the car—dumb, I know!—to get my thesis printed and bound here in our village and dashing into town to deliver it. I was all Run Lola Run, minus the cool red hair and life-saving mission, as I dashed from the car to the administration building. I got it in on the stroke of 12 and went home.

Then, I had to write up a summary of my thesis in German to go with it, due the next day. That led to another fucked-up day, with me running from place to place to get that done and turned in, to proctor an exam, and to grade two presentations in a special class-session.

Then, I had to put together a presentation on my thesis for a workshop in the English department on Saturday. I made a PowerPoint presentation on Friday, tweaked it a bit first thing Saturday morning, and gave it a few hours later to general approval. My thesis may have been wobbly, but I can always nail a presentation. That gave me back some of my confidence.

It has taken me a few days to get my sleep and eats back on schedule. During the last week or so of writing, I subsisted on the contents of our fruit dish, boiled eggs, coffee, and teddy-bear vitamins, so eating real food during regular meals has been quite a treat.

John was preparing a conference presentation and finishing up a book translation during the same period, so poor Hannah was basically neglected for a while there. And our house—John suggested that when the semester was over, we should embark on a round of cleaning, prefereably via firebomb. I like a clean start, and maybe the neighbor across the street will loan us the flamethrower he uses to kill weeds growing up from the cracks in the sidewalk.

While John used his post-semester weekend to chillax, I had the workshop Saturday morning and grocery shopping Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, I woke up at the unheard-of-for-me-on-the-weekend hour of eight and started to clean. I was really intending to sort through the stack of library books I have out, but I did enjoy the freedom to jump around from one thing to another. As it turned it, I managed to balance our checkbook (the first time since early June), wash dishes, clean under the kitchen sink (which is leaking again), water all my plants, wash 3 loads of laundry, and scrub out the silverware drawer, all before leaving in the late afternoon to watch Night at the Museum 2 and eat out. All in all, I woke up this morning generally satisfied with life. I will write more about my thesis later, probably on my writing blog.

Dental Update

Hannah's activator was hurting her over the weekend, so I sent her to the orthodontist with John today to have it checked out. The doc was able to adjust the activator, and she was very pleased with Hannah's progress. Her bite on her left side is already almost in place! Hannah also lost her last baby tooth last week, and the doc was pleased with that, too. So maybe Hannah won't be wearing this thing for a whole year. Yay!

Stress

I've been rather stressed lately. (I wonder why?!) I noticed that I've more or less permanently developed creases beteen my eyebrows. Even if I don't think I'm feeling stress at that exact moment, the creases are still there. As a matter of fact, I got a little sunburn over the weekend, and I noticed today that I have white lines inside the creases. So I have to keep frowning until my sunburn clears up, or I'll have 2 white lines on my forehead.

So tired...

Well, now I'm home from Hannah's big party day. Her birthday was last week, but today we took her and 4 friends to Pizza Hut, out for ice cream, and to see the preview of the Hannah Montana movie. John skipped out on the last part, but sitting in a dark theater with 5 pre-teens is something I thought I could handle alone. And the movie was cute, not nearly as wacky as the tv show, which I feel has an excess of wack.

I must say that the party with 12-year-olds was the easiest so far. They all managed to get themselves there and home, and they chatted smartly amongst themselves during lunch, negating the need for John and I to entertain them. Basically, we were the hosts/wallets, but otherwise we were extraneous. Oh, well. I guess I don't mind too much.

Bulwer-Lytton again

Well, it's that time of year, when I send in an entry to the Bulwer-Lytton contest. And here's the (auto-?) response I got:

"Your submission has arrived and will receive the treatment it deserves."

Bahahahahaha!! What a great response for this contest.

Cast Update

Hannah got the shoulder-to-hand cast off yesterday, which was a relief to her, but the skin on her inner elbow looks like she has road-rash.



Hannah tried to wash her arm after the big cast came off, but the skin was tender and it still hurt at the site of the break, so she was only able to do a cursory job of it.

When the doctor discovered that it was still hurting, he ordered us back to the cast room to get a different type of cast on her lower arm. I guess it is like a splint—the nurse made a hard form for the top side of her arm and then used a bandage to wrap it on to her arm. She’ll wear it for another week, and hopefully by then the healing will be far enough underway that she won’t need the cast anymore.



(You can see the cast under the soda bottle.)

So now she’s had a blue, a white, and a pink cast. If anything else happens, there’s only yellow left, and then she’ll have had the full assortment available at our hospital.

Activated!

Hannah got her activator last Tuesday, and I thought people might be interested in how that is going for her.

The activator looks like what we used to call a retainer. It is removable, with wires that hook onto her teeth and smooth plastic pieces that fit against her palate on top and under her tongue on the bottom. Hannah picked clear plastic with glitter for her activator.

The purpose of the activator is to pull her lower jaw forward, thereby stretching the jaw muscles and training them to hold her jaw in the new position. This is to correct for an overbite, or as the orthodontist explained it, her teeth don’t match up properly. Each top tooth should sit on the crack between two bottom teeth underneath it. Mine do; Hannah’s don’t.

In addition, her jaw was popping. It doesn’t pop with the activator in, though, so that is one area where we can see an immediate improvement.

So without further ado, here is her profile without the activator in:



And here is her profile with the activator in:



And here is the activator in her mouth:



As she says, all she needs to do is sharpen those prongs, and she’ll give herself a tongue piercing! (And no, I have no idea what they are for.)

She is on school vacation for 2 more weeks, so she is wearing the activator most of the day at home. When school starts again, she won’t wear it to school, but she should still be able to get in her 12-14 hours per day. It doesn’t really look all that bad, but she drools something terrible. (You do not want to know about the time she sneezed with it in.) It also affects her speech, as her Aunt Kee discovered on the phone the other day.

Then tomorrow she gets the cast off her arm. Hoorah! She can finally get wet all over, and I have threatened to lock her in the shower and pour shower gel on her over the top of the locked doors if she doesn’t do it herself. Today she thought she had gotten cracker crumbs inside her cast (how?!), so tomorrow’s uncasting may be quite unpleasant. Wish us luck!

My Girl is Growing Up

Hannah turned 12 yesterday. She says I should remember to enjoy this time, because next year she’ll be a stinky 13-year-old and probably sleeping a lot, eating a lot of pizza, and smoking and taking drugs. I don’t know how many 13-year-olds she knows, but I can’t imagine that describes many of them.

She woke us up the first time at 5. I only went to bed at 1 because I had been reading, so I was not ready for her to be jumping on the bed, all “wakey, wakey!” and “where’s my loot?!” We sent her away, and she watched some Nick Jr. for a while. On her next attempt, I told her to go boot up my computer and surf amazon, since she got a gift certificate from her Aunt Kee and fam. Finally, it was 8 am, and we couldn’t put her off any more. We let her carry her gifts downstairs while we dragged our carcasses out of bed. Only, John poured coffee grounds all into the water reservoir in the coffeee maker, so that caused a further delay while we got it cleaned out. But never fear, she got her loot:



She got Swedish and German books, some movies, some video games, a model wind-mill, and some Blendy Pens. She put the pens to use right away:



She spent the afternoon watching new movies and playing with her new games, but then disaster struck—the tv finally stopped working, after years of things breaking on it one-by-one, and months of the picture flickering out on occasion. So the new Wii game and the 4 new movies—unusable. Except, then I got a brilliant idea: I went online and found a code to change her American portable DVD player into a region-free DVD player. She’s still tethered to the power converter for it, but at least she can watch any of the DVDs we have.

I had run out of flour on Thursday, so Friday afternoon I had to run down to the store to get the last of the supplies for a birthday cake. Hannah was totally patient about it, so yesterday evening we finally had cake.



And in this last picture, I don’t know if you can tell, because of the way she is standing, but Hannah is now officially as tall as I am.

Spamalot

Ok, I don't normally check my spam box, which is why there are 800+ messages in there now, but I am expecting something in my email which hasn't arrived yet, so I had to go check. And I must say, the spammers' kennings are quite impressive, to whit:
PORKSWORD

I think I am going to start using this one: "Hey, Honey, why don't you and your porksword come over here and..." Or, "Is that a porksword in your scabbard, or are you just happy to see me?"

Hmm... I may need to add a hyphen, because after a few readings, it starts to look like porks-word, and that doesn't make any sense.

Sometimes you feel like a nut

...sometimes you feel like throttling your entire family, down to the last cat. I call those times "PMS". John and Hannah have been looking at me askance and laughing half-heartedly at my lame jokes that send me off on laughing jags. Oh, well, if you can't please everyone, you should at least please yourself.

Yesterday we stimulated the local economy. *Five hours* of economy-stimulation later, we made it home in one piece and still speaking to each other, so I think it was a banner day. Hannah has a birthday this week--hint, hint, family members--so we had to do some birthday shopping, plus we were down to the last of the cat litter, and we had to replace a lamp and buy some more potting soil, so we hit the mall, the pet store, IKEA, and the Lowe's-like store. I swear, every time we go to the IKEA is worse than the last time, crowd-wise. It occurred to me this morning that we should have just ordered the damn thing online. I'm making a mental note of that for next time.

This morning I got up and started using the new potting soil to transplant some seedlings and to start some herb seeds. I've already got cilantro, but soon we'll have parsley, basil, and chives. I've got to find some more recipes calling for cilantro before more of it starts trying to put out flowers.

Hannah gets her activator after school on Tuesday, just in time to kick off her school vacation. She will be out for 2-1/2 weeks. Yikes! It looks like there are lots of pre-teen friendly movies coming out over the vacation, though, so maybe I will pony up for movie tickets a couple of times to get her out of the house, otherwise she'll be glued to the couch.

Now I am off to spin the chore wheel--dishes, stairwell cleaning, laundry, editing, Latin tutoring, or thesis writing? What to do, what to do...

About To Change My Phone Number

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

The Great Big Sucking Vortex of the Last 48 Hours

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

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



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



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

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

Facebook and all that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain's Got Talent

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

Fixed for now

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

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

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

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

Graphic Disaster

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

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

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

What a Cock-Up

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

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

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

Drive-By the First

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

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

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

Adventures in Dentistry

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

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

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

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

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

I am a Lush

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

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

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

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

The Wheels on the Bus

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

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



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

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

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



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

Nasty Break-Up in the Works

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

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

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


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

Fourteen

Day 1





Day 5114

From my reading: the federal spending addition

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

Recovery.gov, the Interior Department site

StimulusWatch.org, an independent site

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

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

Super Quick Update

...while the rice is cooking.

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

In No Particular Order

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

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




To this



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

Kickin' it at home

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

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

Here’s the happy family:


Who needs water to surf?


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


Now take a guess at the date of these photos.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

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

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


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

Dream a Little Dream of Wee

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

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

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

Broken-Hearted Nee

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

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

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

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

Hannah cracks me up

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

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

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

Futzing around

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

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

Favorite Graffiti

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

"Günther, why??"

You have to wonder what ole Günther was up to:

• broke up with someone


• ran over someone's dog


• slept with someone's sister


• put Michael Jackson on his iPod

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

HATE!

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

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

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

That is my rant of the week.

Oh, yeah...

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

Winter has us in its clutches

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



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



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



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


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

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

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

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

Bye-Bye, Brunette

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




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




And here she is in mid-dye:



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

Want to guess what color she ended up with?




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




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

Wii Updatery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rockin’ Chocolate New Year’s Eve

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

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



Here Hannah prepares the sacrifices.



And here are the happy celebrants.



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

Weird to be back

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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



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



At least we got some sunshine on xmas day.



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

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

Oral Exams are Done!

Yay! That means 6 topics are over and done with. Hooray!

I took the English exam last week and made a pretty good grade. Which is weird, because I was super nervous the whole time, and I started shaking toward the end like I had caught a chill. Also, I started my period 5 minutes--not joking--before going into my professor's office, so that was a good start to an hour-long exam.

I did the German exam today, and I totally choked. That faint gagging sound that woke you up around 3 am? That was me. I passed the exam, but I am so glad it is over. I told John I'd have to wake up with the plague in order to surpass last week's pre-exam unpleasantness, but really I was hoping I'd wake up with the plague so I wouldn't have to go through with it.

The strange thing is that after the English exam, I felt all elated and tearful and just overly emotional. Today, I felt completely empty afterword. No music in my head--as opposed to last night when I was trying to get to sleep--no sense of relief. Just nothing. I guess that's better than self-recrimination, because I know if I had gotten on the ball sooner, I could have pulled it off in German. Well, that's water under the bridge now.

So next up is catching up on all the proofreading I promised people this month and all the housecleaning I've put off over the last few weeks. But first some lunch. Cheerio!