Trying to be stoic

We took Hannah to her new apartment (room in a boarding house, really, but she shares one whole floor with a kitchen, bath, and dining room with only one other person, so almost like an apartment/roommate situation) today, and I managed to forget to bring her bathroom box, so no shampoo for her until the stores open tomorrow.

We all teared up when John and I left, and he cried a little on the way home, but I managed not to cry, what with my flinty heart and all. I called her when we got home and she sounded cheerful. She was getting unpacked and enjoying getting her room arranged to her satisfaction. She had even figured out how to get YouTube on the tv in her room, so I guess she can have 9gag and a game open on her laptop while also watching YouTube videos of drunk people doing things on her tv.

Gardening

I've bought an inordinate number of Coleus canina plants, i.e. piss-off plants, to keep cats out of my garden. Every time I manage to drive them away with a couple of carefully placed plants, they find a new spot to take a dump in. The plants are pretty pungent, with a strong skunk odor. The first time I bought some, I didn't think ahead, so they stayed locked in my hot, closed car while I did my grocery shopping. It was not an enjoyable ride home, even with the windows open. The last batch were bought on a less hot day, and I remembered the windows, but there was still the stink on my arms from brushing against them while I carried them up from the cellar. At least they work as advertised!

Off to Frankfurt

Today I am driving Hannah to Frankfurt to pick up the keys to her room in a boarding house. That's where she'll be living for the next 3 years while she completes her apprenticeship to become a cook/chef.

(Sorry for the briefness, but I've decided that microblogging is better than no blogging.)

Avoidance as a lifestyle

Urgh--I soooo do not want to grade papers and presentations, but I have a rather big backlog, and people are going to start wondering about them since classes start back on Wednesday. I'm at the point that I'd like to just set a match to all of it (and Hannah's room while I am at it--I wasn't kidding when I mentioned her hoarding tendencies).

During the xmas holidays, it is traditional for me to subsist mainly on candy and then have to change gears back to normal food in January. This year, I have decided to also cut back on the places where I would normally add sugar--coffee, for instance. I've discovered that I really only need some milk to cut the bitterness. I'm not keen on the idea of how much processing it takes to produce sugar, and cane sugar has the added drawback of not being produced in Europe. I don't actually imagine I can have a modern diet and still only shop locally, but I can make minor changes in both my diet and my shopping habits to feel like I am making some kind of contribution to my own health and the health of the planet. (Maybe it is a drop in the bucket, but I might go more crazy than usual if I don't do anything at all.)

My aunt and mom "fought" for years over ownership of a certain cookbook that contained the recipe for my aunt's famous divinity recipe. I finally got the recipe from her, but in such a stripped-down form (only ingredients, and no specific directions) that it has been a disaster every time I have tried it. So this year I did my own research and found my own recipe (from the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, which is fairly dependable), and I still ended up with egg-white-and-walnut-flavored taffy. I forgot the cardinal rule--no candy-making when it is wet. That is hardly ever a problem in the deserts of West Texas, but in Central Europe, on the shores of a river, during a misty December--yeah, another disaster was inevitable. Moreover, corn syrup, as an American product, is not available here, so that will be my last-ever attempt at divinity, I have decided, for most of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. Otherwise, my stubborn-slash-stupid side would not let me quit until I had finally conquered it.

In the process of wasting those egg whites and so much sugar, I managed to destroy my hand-mixer (stupid, heavy divinity), so now I need to shop for a replacement. I may just get the same one again, if it is available, as it was very reliable, except when I wanted to mix something that was clearly beyond its capabilities. I may get a stand-mixer, too. And a larger food processor. (I currently have just a food-chopper.) John bought me a multi-device several years ago, but the blender function ended up being its downfall. I didn't get the base threaded on properly, and when I tried to blend ice cream in it, the motor ended up soaked in eggs and canteloupe; I couldn't get it open to clean it properly, so I've only used it a few times, when I've felt ambitious and forgetful. Inevitably, it either overheats or the clutch (?) doesn't work properly and it turns too fast, again leading to too much heat. So if anyone has any recommendations, I am all ears. Actually, I will probably just buy a German brand; Bosch is pretty good, and I think I can get it in our local kitchen shop.

We went to our favorite German restaurant last night, and on our way in, we overheard some people in the street talking about "flood tourism". I guess some people had come into town to see the Neckar overflowing its banks. That's an odd reason to come, but if it brings business to our local restaurants afterwards, who am I to complain.

My adventures in puttering this morning included halfheartedly pulling some (but not all!) of the ornaments off the tree, shaking the needles out of the tree skirt so I could put it away, and sweeping the rest of the needles off the floor. Tree pick-up is not until Saturday, so I may have it all done by then at this rate. Now I need to get my shopping list finished so I can go to the post office and the store. Tomorrow I have to be in Frankfurt first thing in the morning with Hannah, so I need to finish up a few things so I don't have anything left to do for our outing.

-Nee in Germany is digging the sunshine that's finally appearing

Puttering as an extreme sport

Seems I have taken my puttering to a new level. Today I accomplished a lot of little things that needed to be done, but not necessarily right.this.minute. Some of them were to protect my sanity--finding 3 books I know I own but haven't been able to put my hands on in some time, clearing away my literal "to-be-read pile" that had become a tripping hazard next to my bed--while others would be due soon anyway--quarterly tax payments, etc. And others were things we'd been promising to do but just hadn't gotten our asses in gear on; now that my puttering has managed to procure bookcases for Hannah's room, it's her problem to clean out her hoarding and to fill them.

I finally broke down and bought myself a smart phone, since the Crushinator had done in my brick phone and John and I were getting tired of not being able to reach each other since we were passing the other brick phone back and forth. I still haven't actually been carrying it around since 1) I haven't gone anywhere, and 2) my SIM card has only been partially activated, but now that I'll be going back to work next week and the last of the paperwork for my SIM card should go into the mail tomorrow, I'll finally be forced to take it for a spin soon. Maybe I can figure out how to work the Blogger app...

I think I mentioned all the snow we've had. It's been warming up, so we've had a lot of melt-off, then we got a little rain and a lot more snow yesterday. By yesterday evening, the city was warning people to move their cars because the river was expected to flood. Sure enough, the water was up over the divider at the locks this morning. With all the new rain and snow yesterday, we made the executive decision to just eat out this weekend and to do our weekly grocery shopping on Monday. It's my turn, and I wasn't keen on driving down our steep, unplowed, cobblestoned street. It also bought me some more time to make a grocery list.

I spent one whole day catching up on laundry over the break. When it got to the point where I couldn't find one particular pair of pants that I had just had on, I knew I needed to do something to get the mounds of clothes reduced to a livable level.

Hannah's laptop is driving me mad. It acted like it wanted to implode around xmas, and we finally got it up and running again, and now it is starting some of the same shit, 5 hours before she has a paper due. (Yes, she has homework over the holidays. Germany is not quite Korea when it comes to school pressure, but in her final year, it is starting to get up there.) Grrr...

-Nee in Germany is avoiding the inevitable--work

Flailing

Well, it's that time of year again, when the holidays are past and work is looming before me again. That means just one thing in these parts: Brain-flail!

Luckily for anyone reading, I find writing about the brain-flail as boring as you must find reading about it, so I will just skip it and move on to documenting life in the slow lane.

John's been spending all his free time (that falls outside of the local quiet hours) carving in the cellar. He's already got 2 panels done for the door of his garden shed/stave church and has been posting pictures like an obsessed person on facebook. Weatherwise, he can't do much up in the garden itself, so this is the next best thing for preparing to build the garden shed in the summer/fall.

Hannah has her school-leaving exams this spring, and every academic assignment this school year has inevitably led to tears at some point. I think it's the same for most of her classmates, though. German schools are notoriously difficult, but the stress has been ratcheted up for Hannah's cohort because the state changed the number of school years but not the graduation requirements right before she started high school, so she and her classmates have had to learn 9 years of material in only 8 years. We had already heard horror stories about kids having nervous breakdowns in their last year, but it could get even worse for the kids in Hannah's group.

Despite the best efforts of my colleagues, I wasn't able to get a new contract in the English department, but I applied for and got a contract in the translation department instead. Now I'm kind of wishing I hadn't. Translating (which I actually feel confident in my ability to do) and teaching translating are two different beasts, and I feel like I am letting everyone in the department down. That being said, I've already realized that it is not totally on me: they dumped 8 courses on me for my first semester, without any materials or curriculum beyond course titles. [FLAIL deleted]

We finally made it to the xmas market in Michelstadt. That is a little town up north of us in the Odenwald, and we had heard good things about it but had never managed to go. We went with another family on the last Sunday, and despite the rain, it was crazy crowded. We ate delicious wild boar sausage and visited a really cool museum while we were there, but the rain and crowds put a bit of a damper on the trip.

Then we were invited over to the same family's for New Year's Eve, which is our tradition. This year we played a dinner murder mystery game (John was the only person to suspect Hannah, that sneaky murderess!) and then stayed the night to avoid driving home in the snow. None of the chicks wanted to go outside in the cold to shoot off fireworks, so we stayed in while the dudes went outside. They didn't stay out long, though; a new roof on your house will make you loathe to play with fire near it, it turns out.

[Here's where we pretend I have managed to pull together these disparate elements into a satisfying conclusion.]

-Nee in Germany

Busy busy boring

Life has been hectic recently, but in a boring way.

I had a ton of grading due last week, exacerbated by my usual procrastination, so that wasn't fun.

In the middle of that, John and I had to travel to the other end of our administrative district to take care of some paperwork (the glamorous life of the immigrant). Anything to do with bureacracy around here can get very complicated very fast, but it could have been much worse. I'd like to spend more time there in Heppenheim if we get a chance. There was half-timbering out the whazoo, which I hadn't been expecting.

We had our 19th anniversary and finally found some decent Mexican food a thirty-minute drive away.

We have paying guests in our vacation apartment at the moment, so we had to clean in preparation for them coming, plus we had to replace a curtain rod and install some new lights we had bought. (One of the perqs of the vacation apartment is that now I have a place to put all the crafty stuff I like to come up with. I can thank John for that realization. On to the doily patterns!)

Our friends came over 2 Saturdays in a row, first to brew some beer and then to bottle it.

John and I also tackled the plants growing up our house. He trimmed and trained the roses and the grape vines, and I cut back this other mystery ivy on the north side. I also planted some carnations in a stone planter outside the vacation apartment--also on the north side, unfortunately, so there might not be enough sunshine there for them to be really happy. We'll see.

-Nee in Germany is actually getting shit done!

Garden planning, back corner

When we bought the house, there were already several kinds of plants in the garden, mostly flowers. Most of them were kinds we weren't familiar with, like this:



While very pretty and colorful, they took up a lot of space.



And they harbored and sustained the mortal enemy of the vegetable garden, the gastropod.



Sure, they look all cute and interesting, but they can get almost anywhere. We once saw a tv program about an escargot farm, and the snail farmers demonstrated that the snails are able to crawl over barbed wire and knife blades without injuring themselves (thick layer of slime, ftw!). I found this one



on this thorned berry vine (in the middle of the picture) hanging 20 feet or more down a stone wall behind our house.



Moreover, they ate the hell out of the plants I actually wanted in the garden. I tried using this "slug-away" gel, but it is a pain to encircle every single plant, and then it washes away too fast to really protect the seedlings.



Luckily, pumpkin plants can mostly grow fast enough to replace what gets eaten, but not so much the pumpkins themselves.



So last fall I spent a backbreaking half a day digging up those flowers at the top of this entry to deny the sluggy assholes a shady bower to snack on while they wait to denude my garden during the night. I am planning to put tomatoes in there instead, because I have been assured that they (as members of the nightshade family) repel slugs.

-Nee in Germany is planning while the sun don't shine

Happy Birthday to Me

I had a good 41st birthday. My family told me "Happy Birthday" first thing rather than "saving it up as a surprise" (John's excuse in the past). (News flash--not a surprise.) Hannah wasn't even all the way awake when she told me "Happy Birthday."

John and I went down the street and had steaks at the local German cuisine restaurant (Hannah was at a par-tay) on my actual birthday. The next day, we had a strawberry cheesecake.

My two punkin's were so sweet. Hannah bought me a card and put it in the actual mail to me.


John got me a sweater I had said I liked (I only had to tell him how to find the shop 3 times *g*).


And my seestor's gift came in the mail today. Behold!


She knows me so well.

-Nee in Germany likes the little things (especially socks)

Nee deep in the compost

We had a couple of beautiful sunny days but woke up to frost on everything this morning. I wanted to put some vegetable scraps on my compost pile on my way out, but I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I climbed all the stairs up to the garden.


Picture this covered in carrot greens and peels.

We are still talking about relocating the compost, but that would probably mean even more stairs. No bueno. Ah, well, we are still young and spry...

A little at a time, sweet Jesus

A little blogging, that is.

Rather than overdo it today and then blow it off for 4 months *cough*, I'm going to try posting just one thing a day, but for the whole week.

We didn't have a proper winter, just a lot of cold rain. Now it has warmed up to spring-like temperatures, and we've even managed to get a couple of days of sunshine--aah! That isn't supposed to last, but we are trying to enjoy it while we can. I spent a little time outside yesterday, planning my garden, and John is out there pulling weeds now.



Tomorrow: garden planning ideas

Sleeping like a baby (-ish)

When we moved last year, I started pushing for new mattresses. We had been on our old ones for 9 years, and they were noticeably squashed.

We decided to put it off because we had a lot of expenses at the time (buying a house comes with expenses? you don't say!), but I still managed to come out worse in the deal because I ended up with John's old mattress on my side of the bed.(1) He's much larger than I am, so you can imagine whose mattress had more wear.

We replaced Hannah's mattress first when we found the cushy, snuggly kind she likes on sale. As far as I am concerned, though, cushy mattresses are a type of torture device. John and I wanted firm mattresses, and we knew we'd have to spend some real money on them, so we put off our shopping a little longer.

Then our city's twice annual large trash pickup rolled around, and we realized that this was our big chance to get rid of our old, saggy mattresses, but that we would also have to suck it up and buy some new ones. To the Internet! (2) We did a little research on (German) consumer reports and managed to find what we were looking for, with free delivery even.

Once again, I (and Hannah) got the short end of the stick when the large trash day came, because John was enjoying himself in Croatia at a conference while Hannah and I schlepped mattresses down this hill to the pickup point near that church tower.

Then I got to sleep on our couch for a week (joined by John at the end of that time) until the mattresses were delivered. That was actually not such a big deal, because it is quite firm, which I like.

Now when I get in bed at night, the mattress doesn't sink down, not even a centimeter. It is great!

(1) Here in Germany, double beds have two single mattresses side by side instead of one large, square mattress like in the US (and France, it turns out).

(2) We're so far out, there aren't any decent furniture stores in the area, and we were going to have to have the mattresses delivered anyway, so this seemed like as good a method of mattress shopping as any.

All roses up in here

I waited a day too long to pillage more roses from the garden.

The purple one is another freebie out of our garden, but here it is already a bit faded and turning brown on the edges. It only lasted a day in the vase before it dropped all its petals. John and I can't quite put our finger on the scent: air freshener? Hospital hand soap?

This one is one of John's purchases for the slope: Friesinger Morgenröte, I think (=sunrise). It is a beautiful color, but John and I disagree as to which is the better rose, his or the pink one above. I can't tell that it has much smell to it (maybe it, too, was picked too late), but John reports that it is supposed to have a slightly peach-like scent to it.

The garden came with another type of rose, as well. In German they are called Beetrosen (=(flower) bed roses), but I guess in English they are referred to as being "bushy". They put out clusters of itty-bitty roses. I like them because they seem very old fashioned, but John is not impressed.

Last but not least, we have the climbing roses that actually grow up the street side of the house.

Unfortunately, they seem to have some rust or something growing on them. John was advised by a neighbor (who used to be a professional gardener, I believe) that they needed to be cut way back last fall, but John was loathe to at the time. Watching them over the last year, and having a little more experience in the garden, he's realized that even if cutting them back kills them, they can be replaced. And if it doesn't kill them, they'll grow back quickly. So we picked up some reading on how to trim the various kinds of rose bushes, and I guess we'll be whacking away at them in a few weeks.

--Nee in Germany loves her rose pruning gloves--look, Ma, no pokes!

Gotta get outside

If I spend too much time indoors working (like this week, finishing up a big translating job), I start getting antsy. Getting outside, even if just for 10 minutes, really helps me stay even. Luckily, our laundry room is situated such that you have to go out the back door to get to it. So if I run a load or two during the day, I have a ready made excuse to step outside for a bit.

Sometimes I putter around out back, fiddling with my potted plants or pulling grass and dead plants up from various cracks. At this time of year, though, there is one main task: cleaning up after the giant horse chestnut tree behind our house.

Pretty, isn't it? It provides nice shade up there if you want to take a break and sit on the bench behind it, but it also throws shade on our garden (see the grass John planted to the left?). And it drops friggin' chestnuts everywhere. The loud "thunk" of them hitting is very distracting (and a bit unnerving at night).

This is the view after I had already swept and shoveled the terrace completely clean last week. This is probably 1-2 buckets worth of horse chestnuts. They are actually quite pretty, but inedible, so I set some aside to use in fall decorations, but I haven't come across or been able to think of anything good to do with them. I finally just piled some in decorative bowls and put them out in the vacation apartment we rent out. If nothing else, they are supposed to drive spiders away.




--Nee in Germany has got your conker!

No promises

Rather than go on and on about the blogging or the lack of blogging (boring!), I'm just going to jump right in.

But anaways, when we bought the house and garden and half the hillside beyond the house, we also ended up with a bunch of plants. I'll probably put up some pictures later of the mystery plants from the spring, but here is a photo of one of the types of roses we inherited.

I haven't been able to get up into the garden as much as I would like lately, and it occurred to me that there won't be many more roses to enjoy this fall, so I brought this one inside to put on my desk. Not only is it beautiful, with its ruffled petals and interesting color of yellow blending to striated pink on the edges, but it has a lovely strong smell. I'm outing myself as being totally déclassé here, but the scent is that of the Barbie perfume maker of my youth. (Can't remember if that belonged to Kee alone or if it was a shared toy.)

Now if only roses would cure sore throats. John has been coughing and Hannah sneezing/stuffy for the last few days, but I had managed to dodge the worst of it until I woke up with a sore throat this morning. Not so bad that I had to go back to bed, but still making it hard to concentrate on work, especially since I keep getting up to make more hot drinks. Oh, well, I bet ginger lemon tea will totally cure it this time!

--Nee in Germany has a legitimate business-related use for those Muppets on her desk, I'm sure

Easter's around the corner

...but winter is still hanging in there. On Tuesday, snowflakes were swirling around when I left my office. Urgh!

We haven't been able to do anything outside in our garden, but I did manage to get some seeds into some dirt this past weekend. Amazingly, the hokkaido pumpkin seeds I threw in an empty pot (RIP, poinsettia) have already started coming up gangbusters. After one of the cats (ahem, Eliza) chewed up most of the potted Callas my friend had given me, I realized I needed to protect my fledgling pumpkins, so I brought up the cage Hannah used to keep her mouse in from the cellar and banged it down over the pot. It fits perfectly, with room to spare, so I hope I can keep them alive and uneaten until it is warm enough to get them into the ground.

I had a bit of a shock when I went to plant my geranium seeds, though. Apparently, the farmers are growing them in gold-plated pots and watering them with Evian, because a package of 10 seeds cost me 4.50! I hadn't even noticed in the store when I bought them with a bunch of other stuff. I put them in peat pots in my windowsill greenhouse because I wanted to give them the best possible chance to sprout, so of course the damn peat pots sprouted mold all over. So irritated. Luckily, the mold dried up when I took the clear plastic cover off. The cats haven't made a habit of getting up on that windowsill, so I have my fingers crossed that the open greenhouse remains unmolested. Today I saw that I have about 3 geranium seeds sprouting. Go me! So far that is 3 bucks a plant (since I bought 2 packages of seeds).

On further thought, I'm not going to post a picture of my Easter wreath, because it looks rather crappy. Instead, I'll post a picture of my most successful wreath to date: Halloween!

I think next year I'll stock up on some Easter chocolate and attach it to the wreath like I did with the Halloween chocolate.

If we get out of the house tomorrow, I want to take a picture of the little fountain down the street decorate for Easter. John was going to try to get us reservations to eat Easter fish, but no one answered the phone at lunch.

--Nee in Germany forgot to buy white eggs for dying

No rest for the wicked

I was planning on just lying around, maybe doing a little cross stitch, but of course my love of puttering put an end to that today.

After going online for a little bit this morning, I balanced our bank account--which meant chasing receipts and bank statements up and down 2 flights of stairs since I couldn't find them all--and paid some bills, including re-upping with the cat-sitting club and the youth hostel association and paying John's speeding ticket. I also went to look at my recently paid off student loan online. I'm hoping I'll get something from my  lender soon indicating that they are aware I don't owe them any money, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hannah informed me when she got up that her bed was broken. It turns out that the frame is just a tad too wide (or has warped) for the [box spring], and when she rolled over in bed this morning, it all shifted just enough to make one side fall through. John got out his drill and some wood screws and got the bed frame tightened, then we got some shadow-box style shelves up on the wall, and finally I dragged an under-used bookcase downstairs for Hannah to put her school stuff in. I put her to work cleaning and straightening her room, and in just a couple of hours, it looks tons better. She's still got 4 or 5 unpacked boxes at one end of the room, but those are items that are either too big to fit in the limited amount of storage space she has in her room, or are stuff she's not willing to part with yet (a big box of dolls, etc.). Last summer, while we were packing in preparation for our move into the house, Hannah was adamant that she did not want to get rid of *any* of her stuff--"don't throw away my childhood!" was her line. *sigh* Needless to say, none of "her childhood" has gotten unpacked or has otherwise been sought after, hence the leftover boxes.

Yesterday I hit the home improvement store and 2 grocery stories, and I had thought I'd be starting some seedlings today, but it was *snowing* when we got up, and I just didn't feel like wandering down to the cellar in the wet snow (too warm to stick) to fetch dirt, seeds, and my window-sill greenhouse. I've got to get out on Monday and Tuesday, though, so maybe I'll fetch that stuff on my way back in.

Since John agreed to make chicken enchiladas with the millions and gillions of corn tortillas the Lauries brought last month, I promised to make a salad, so I guess I better get on it.

Nee in Germany bustles when she walks

Busy busy

It was 5 degrees below freezing when we got up this morning. Oh, Winter, why are you still hanging around?

Freya got spayed on Wednesday and was already able to go up and down the many stairs in our house Thursday morning, and she joined us in bed Thursday night. She seems to be making a speedy recovery.

Still waiting for our bulb flowers to come up, but when it is -5C overnight, I don't blame them for taking their time. I'd like to start messing with the easily accessible part of our garden, but one end of it is full of brush that needs to be broken up into kindling. I got 2 loads (of Ikea bags) done just before Winter returned, and the pile looks just as big as before. John wants to burn the brush that's up on the steep slope, but we need to talk to someone at City Hall about permits and timing and such.

I have so much grading to do. Urgh.

I bought a grapevine wreath (I think?) and have been redecorating it each season. Hannah helped me pick out some cute plastic eggs and papier mache carrots to put on it, and after an extensive search, I managed to find some Easter ribbon I deemed acceptible. I will put up a picture later.

--Nee in Germany made baby steps

Too weird

I set up a blog for one of my classes, and while troubleshooting something for a student, I discovered that I had already created a blog for my other gmail account, although I do not remember doing it. Behold!

Why I decided to create a revenge blog from the perspective of our (now deceased) cat, I'll never know.

Well this is embarrassing...

Hello? Anybody still out there? It looks like my last post was in April of this year, so I don't blame people for wandering off to more lively pastures in the meanwhile. Lots has happened since April, but maybe I'll just hit the highlights for now.

We bought a house and moved 20 km away.

Goodbye, old house!

Hello, new house!

In the midst of all the packing and paperwork, we shipped Hannah off to spend August with our family in Texas and Louisiana.

She enjoyed herself and was spoiled shamelessly by all the family.

We got a kitten that John has christened Freya. She is frisky and friendly and a welcome change from Eliza, who has ensconced herself in a closet since the day we moved in, *7 weeks ago*.

We decided when we bought the house to rent out an apartment in it as a vacation apartment. It occurred to me that I now officially have 3 jobs: a half-time teaching job, a part-time freelance translating/editing job, and an infrequent (so far) job as the proprietor of vacation accommodations. Whew! No wonder I'm so busy!

Now that I've broken the blogging ice after my lengthy dry spell, I'm not going to make any outrageous promises about blogging every day. That would be crazy! (given my track record.) Instead, I figure that if Mimi Smartypants can manage it once a week or so, so can I.

-Nee in Germany took the day off