Blah and Blech and Ptooey!

My sister is coming up on her 10th anniversary this week. I finally dug out the quit I started as a *cough* wedding present and finished the top. I had to use the tiny Singer sewing machine my LMIL sent Hannah for her birthday to put the border on, and it worked like a charm. Putting the back on has been somewhat of a challenge, though. First I tried spreading everything out on the floor, but I just couldn’t get it to lie smooth. It was a little easier to layer the parts on our rectangular table with the sides hanging over the edges. I followed the directions in the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework (my grandmother swears it is too hard to learn from other people and gave me this extensive book) and started basting the layers together. (Note to LMIL: did you really just pin your quilts together while you were quilting on them? John says yes.) Somehow I neglected to notice that the batting didn’t reach to the edge of one side until I had already put in about 50 rows of basting. Breaking my own personal rule, I did *not* rip out all that basting and fix it properly. I cut an extra piece of batting and added it to the edge. Which is when I also noticed that I had got the back on at an angle. Fuck! I know my (middle) sister doesn’t read this blog (LilSis--shhhh!), so maybe she’ll be so stunned by the lateness of this gift that she won’t notice the incompetence in making it. *sigh*

WesTexGirl was recently talking about her (perceived) lack of skills in the area of comforting people who have gone through a loss. I can’t recall that this is an experience that we have gone through together, so I can’t comment on her performance, but I really can’t imagine her being as deficient as she seems to think. On the other hand, I seem to be extraordinarily skilled at saying exactly the wrong thing in all situations. Lots of families are aware of inherited traits that they have to remain vigilant about, like diabetes or addiction. In my family it is assholery. I don’t think I have inherited the selfish-type of assholery, but I am afraid that I haven’t completely dodged the curse, either. Yesterday I was on the phone with someone who I had managed to upset via email (gah! the bane of my existence), and as I was trying to soothe that person, who burst into tears midway through the call (which was due to a bunch of personal factors and not just due to me (I hope)), Hannah started crying because she was having troubles with her tiny sewing machine (see above). It was definitely a Calgon-take-me-away type moment. I’m afraid I didn’t cover myself in glory, but I didn’t chew off anyone’s head either, so it was a start.

Today I had to return some library books, and they have a nifty new machine that scans the books as you return them and prints you a receipt. High-tech, eh? Except it didn’t print one of the books I returned. Someone at the front desk went into the room to look for the book and couldn’t find it, so I said maybe I left it in my backpack (in the lockers downstairs). Nope, not there either. So I am probably going to have to go back next week and find it on the shelf and get them to turn it in properly so I don’t get fined eventually (the librarian renewed it for me, just in case).

And to top it all off, I think my deodorant has quit working.

This complaining has been brought to you by the letter B and the number 12.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

Happy Birthday to John! He’s very reluctantly turning 33. (Kicking and screaming is more like it.)

. . .

Recently, John said something was crap. Hannah’s response?

“Don’t say it; just do it.”

. . .

I got Hannah another puberty book about the differences between boys and girls, and she is *using it against me.* She brought it to me while I was working on the computer and forced me to read the paragraph on privacy and unwanted touching. She interpreted that to mean I must ask before hugging or kissing her. That means no more bedtime forehead smooches. And no more cheek nibbling. And no more squeezy hugs. Actually, I kind of see her point.

. . .

Hannah’s friend spent the night on Friday, so they pulled out the hide-a-bed to sleep on. True to form, Hannah has insisted on leaving the couch in bed-form. Last night she built a “cave” out of pillows and a thick comforter to sleep inside of. She was trying to figure out how she could get in since she had all the sides pretty well sealed. She liked my suggestion but couldn’t find a rope or a flashlight.

Me: “Did you set your anti-bear traps? This is bear country, you know.”

H: “Can you please be more grown-up?”

. . .

This morning Hannah was crawling into the cave while screeching and growling.

Me: “I hope you’re being eaten by a bear in that cave.”

H: “No, the bear is I!”

. . .

I wish I was wearing a hidden mic these days, because Hannah is always saying something bizarre, and I don’t always manage to write it down. Mostly she is being sarcastic and back-talking, which will probably delight my mother to no end, but we have been very careful to call her on it and tell her that she has one warning, and then there will be a specific punishment. She has gotten a little better about self-policing. And she is still a bad-language reminder.

Me: “You’ve just sliced off my ass with that sword!”

Hannah: “Don’t say the A-S-S word!”

The B-U-S

July was a scorcher around here, but as soon as I turned the calendar to August, Mother Nature did a 180. It’s been raining off and on since then, and it has been much cooler than your normal August. Today the high was in the 60s, and the overnight low is supposed to be about 50. One day last week, it even felt suspiciously fall-like, with a crisp breeze thrown in for good measure. One of John’s co-workers mentioned it, then I repeated the sentiment later that afternoon. His response? “La-la-la-la-la!” with his hands over his ears. He’s really hoping it will heat up again before we get to Sweden, but as my relatives say, you can shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up faster. John hates that saying.

Now that school is out, I haven’t been on the bus all that much, but I’ve finally managed to round up all the bits of paper I jotted my horror onto, so now I can share them with you.

[Ok, this was totally crappy, so I put it out of my misery.]

I have a cold, so cobbling these bits together into one post is about the most I can manage for now. Sorry.

Where are my bon-bons and stories?

Being on summer vacation is kind of weird. I have nothing in particular to do, and all the time in the world to do it. So I have been going through my back-list of things I wanted to do during the semester (or that at least sounded like fun at the time), but didn’t have time for.

I started with my zombie-snails project. Hannah and I made salt dough, which I then transformed into zombie snails, thanks to my collection of escargot shells. We painted a background in grays (Hannah made a bright-colored splatter painting, but I told her I didn’t think it had quite the gruesome effect we were going for, so now it is up on the kitchen cabinet), which I put into a shoebox to house our diorama of doom. Then we whipped up some cornstarch slime, added a bit of fluorescent green food color, and Hannah took on the job of sliming up the zombies. It turned out quite well, eh?



Then Hannah decided to make a video, which you can check out on her ad blog here.

To stave off impending boredom, Hannah got into the Halloween make-up again.



Doesn’t she look a bit like this character from a German children’s book?

I’ve gotten a lot of cleaning done, but it is not as fun as it sounds, because as soon as I finish, I have to start over again.

I also pulled out a sewing project that has been hanging over my head for *cough* more than 10 years. But I have a strong incentive to finish it before xmas, so I will keep you posted on that.

John bought me a tin whistle from the local Irish shop for my birthday (on my request), and I pulled it out after John and Hannah tried to learn how to play her recorder. I figured that a tin whistle would be much simpler to play than my clarinet, but I found the directions too frustrating. Practicing my clarinet would require more of my time, since I would have to build up my embouchure again, but I might try it anyway. My niece is going to start playing the clarinet this school year, so I’ve been thinking about playing more than usual.

I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump, as evidenced in my writing blog, but I hope to find a way around that soon.

We even went to the museum yesterday. They have an exhibit until the end of the month on an early culture around the Alps that built their houses on stilts right on the edge of lakes and rivers. John got there first, and we caught up with him at the exhibit, after we had been through the rest of the museum. Hannah is still not the most patient museum-guest, but there wasn’t too much I wanted to look at in detail, so I went along with the whirlwind tour. John read *every single display* in the exhibit, so he was there much longer than we were. But since we had traveled there separately, it wasn’t a big deal. We came home and made a knock-off recipe of Cinnabon rolls, so if you don’t hear from us over the next few days, we have probably suffered death by cinnamon roll.

John is counting down the days until our Swedish vacation. We’re leaving 2 weeks from tomorrow, so I don’t have to start freaking out or list-making for at least another week. *g*

Out and About with Nee

We went to the garden center yesterday and only *nearly* came to blows over nothing (the joy of Nee and John shopping together), but then we both took a chill pill and managed to enjoy the rest of our shopping and even find a few cute (and cheap) flowers to put in our window box.






I managed to restrain myself from buying a 2-foot-tall garden gnome, even though my paycheck from my recent teaching gig was burning a hole in my pocket. They were much cuter than the smaller ones. John, being the connoisseur he is, added to our cart a couple of bottles of the garden center’s *very own brand* of mead and blueberry wine. Classy. (Which we already knew from the days of the High Class Clock.)


Since we were going to be on the same street to go to the garden center, we stopped in at the Burger King for lunch. I think I am developing an allergy to American-style fast food. I started coughing after I was done eating, and I just couldn’t stop. I think it was all the grease coating my throat. And I only ate 4 of Hannah’s fries and 2/3 of a Whopper. You would think the coke would have cut right through it. Then in the garden center, pushing around 50 pounds of dirt and plants, my stomach informed me that the whole trip might have been a bad idea. I didn’t end up being sick, but I hate having a stomach-ache. Hence the cranky-pants attitude mentioned above.

Hannah disappeared yesterday afternoon as soon as we got home from the garden center to spend the night with her friend and has only been by long enough to pick up her car seat on their way to the JumpInn. I am telling you, that place is on one of the lower levels of hell, right next door to the Chuck E Cheese. The place itself is not *that* bad, but it is almost impossible to get there from our house. I know that sounds stupid, but it is on the opposite side of town, across the train tracks, and all the streets in the area have been under construction for years. We have been there a couple of times now, and we have never been more lost, even when trying to find our way on the autobahn. I’m just glad it is the friend’s parents and not us taking them there, because that is another source of cranky-pants in Nee’s family.

Hannah Fannah Po Pannah

Some days it seems like Hannah is growing up in one of those nature films with the action speeded up. We let her ride the bus into town with her friend recently (after a test run of riding alone to meet me at the bus stop), and they only went a little out of bounds (of course, that means next time we say ‘no’). She has her own set of house keys, and we can trust her not to lose them and to use the crosswalk alone to go to her friends’ houses on our street. And she cleaned her room all by herself last weekend with only a little prodding/threatening from John.

But then other days I can still see the little kid in her. Now that she’s on summer vacation, we can catch the morning programming on Nick; she still talks back to Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer. She sometimes takes her doll to the store, but only in the stroller, not in the grocery cart. And she rereads her beginner reader books at bedtime.

And there are some things that are just pure Hannah. Like the game she invented with her dad: I didn’t catch all the rules, as I was weeding out my email, but it involved dice, little toys as place-markers, our tile floor, play money, and claiming and naming floor tiles/countries. It was the map game.






After watching Dungeons and Dragons with us last night (I will never get those brain cells back), she started a “What I Did on Summer Vacation” essay: “I watched a film, and at the beginning it was pretty bad, but the ending was good.” Despite declaring that she does not want to attend Swedish school next year, she said that maybe they could use it in their mini-newspaper they put out twice a year.

She has also declared that she doesn’t want to attend ballet, yet when we leave her lessons, she dances all the way to the car, doing fancy jumps and twirls. Next year she will get to wear a black leotard instead of the pink with the ruffle on the butt, but even that has not been much of an enticement. Her class has two boys in it, and they recently started lifts (well, the girls are jumping and spinning, and the boys give them a little boost as they go by), which Hannah really seemed to enjoy, so maybe I can remind her of that when the *agony* of going back to lessons seems too much for her in September.

When we first made our plans to go to Sweden for a week of vacation, Hannah was adamantly against it. On principle, I think. But we dangled the sweet, sweet carrot of a trip to Astrid Lindgren’s World and to Legoland (the original in Denmark!), and she has come around. To the point that she has already started packing, even though we aren’t leaving for 3 weeks. At least she’ll be well-prepared to entertain herself in the car, if she can even carry her suitcase by then.

HAPPY DANCIN'!

I made straight Bs on my qualifying exams, so I get to start upper-division coursework next semester! I know in my heart that my paper was not B-worthy, but at least it is over. I have a sense of limp-bodied relief now that my grades are in. Whew!

Ketch-Up

I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to get back into blogging. When I was doing school stuff at the end of the semester, I totally blocked my normal impulse, which is to mentally tell stories to you about stuff I come across. I've managed to turn that back on, but the next step of putting it in blog format is not coming so easily to me as before. Oh, well, I am sure that a couple of crappily useless posts like this one will see me back to my old, mile-a-minute blogging.

While I was gone from here, Germany hosted the World Cup. John and I are not exactly what you would call sports fans, but we actually watched a good bit of it. I think that in the early rounds, John probably watched one match a day. Germany played really well, so the whole country was at fever pitch for most of the month. We knew not to count on getting to sleep at a decent hour on the nights Germany was playing, because our neighbors would be yelling and celebrating, and then a couple of hours later the drunk ones would stagger home, stopping for a loud, drunken chat right under our balcony. This was even a problem (not so much the drunks) during one of my late-afternoon classes; there are pubs (televising the games) within walking distance of the building, and it was boiling hot, so the windows had to stay open--needless to say, it was hard to concentrate on Toni Morrison with all the shouting and cheering.

During the World Cup, everyone put flags out. This is Germany, not America: *no one* keeps a flag outside their home. I guess Germans are very touchy about coming across as nationalist, so those kinds of displays are limited to sporting events. But during the World Cup, people hung the German flag from their windows, painted it on their arms and faces, wore it as a cape, attached it to their car windows, wrapped their babies in it, you name it. It was quite touching, really.

George Bush came to Germany, and I saw on the news that he had mastered the European kiss greeting. John and I have had trouble with that one, because we are just not kissy people, but I declared that I would be damned if George Bush could do it and I couldn't, so I have redoubled my efforts at not looking like a social retard to our close friends. Then Shrub affronted the German chancellor with unwanted physical contact. *sigh* What kind of role model is that?

[At about this point last night, Blogger ate the rest of my post. I tried everything I could think of this morning to reconstruct or find it--the one time I typed directly into my Web browser--and I ended up with a bit of lame at the end (well, lame-er than before). But then I remembered that I activated the setting to have my own posts emailed to me, so the original was in my email. Ka-Ching!]

Our cat had a couple of bladder infections, so John took her to the vet for a shot. We were supposed to give her two more at home, but I managed to squirt one of the them onto her fur instead of under her fur thanks to her squirming, plus I poked myself in one finger and scratched another finger with the damned tiny hypodermeric needle, and that hurt like a bitch for about a week. Stupid cat. The other cat has continued with her whiny ways, and one night I threatened to cram her down the throat of a neighborhood dog who was barking all night. She's fluffy--she'd definitely dampen all the sound.

As much as I would like to think of this as vacation time, I just can't seem to get into that mind-set. Saturday I spring-cleaned the upstairs bathroom, and you have *never* seen grout that clean (the whole room is tile). Sunday I did the downstairs bathroom, which includes moving out the washing machine and cleaning under it. I also repotted some plants, did a little laundry, shopped for groceries, vacuumed under our bed (and the furry cat had shed the equivalent of a mink coat under there--ick!), and sorted through the piles and piles of papers and books that were drifting through our living space like academic tumbleweeds. Today I took a few photos on my way to pick up Hannah from school, but I haven't done anything with them yet. So look around at my photo links in a day or two for something new.

Hannah's superpower of kicking over coffee cups has expanded to breaking thermometers (4 at last count) and losing her school supplies.

We were having such hot weather that people were talking about another "summer of the century" (the last one was in 2003), but a cold front has come in, so we're saved! Yesterday the highs were in the 80s, but with about 1000% humidity, so it didn't make much difference. This morning we woke up to temps in the low 70s and light rain, and John is in heaven (except he has to ride his bike into town later this morning). And Hannah is going on an outing today, so she'll be hiking around in the woods up above the castle in the muck. I told her not to get eaten by a wild boar, or a swarm of slugs.

Grades and Food

Yesterday I took Part 3 of my qualifying exams in German linguistics. I won’t find out my scores on the other 2 parts until next week at the earliest, but the examiners were kind enough to tell me at the end of my oral exam that I had made a B+. I was so happy I felt like barfing.

Yesterday evening was spent in a giddy state while we put together homemade individual pizzas and I prepared for tutoring this morning. After tutoring, I tackled the mountain of papers that had accumulated over the semester and managed to get them all sorted and put into a binder—but not until the wind blew all but 5 of the 500 or so sheets of paper off the table while I struggled to get the jammed window closed. Good times.

I poked around in the fridge and came up with ingredients to make stuffed mushrooms. We once had a neighbor who was a prep cook for a very chichi restaurant in Austin, and she told us their recipe. Which I can’t remember in its entirety, but here’s what I’ve reconstructed:

white mushrooms (the kind with a cap)
Town House crackers
cocktail shrimp
chives (I used shoots from some garlic cloves I planted—yum!)
melted butter
salt/pepper/dried parsley

Clean the mushrooms. Pull out the stems, chop up about half of them, and throw away the other half. Crush the crackers and chop up the shrimp and chives. Use about equal parts shrimp, mushrooms, and crackers, then add enough melted butter to make it all stick together. Season. Spoon mix into mushrooms and bake at 400F for about 20 minutes or until stuffing starts to brown and mushrooms have shrunk somewhat.

Hannah got her final report card today. She got an A in English, a C in PE, and Bs in everything else. So she didn’t get the keyboard we’ve been using as the carrot for good grades this year, but she’ll have a chance at it again in the fall. (No, we don’t demand that she bring home straight As, but we could see that she wasn’t putting in the effort we knew she was capable of, and that was reflected in her grades. It’s hard to break the habit of laziness, so we wanted to try to nip it in the bud now.)

I am pretty sure that one of my mystery plants is cucumber. It has put on little yellow flowers that match the ones in a garden across the street. Those plants are already putting out cukes, but I don’t know if my flowers will get fertilized. The bees are much more interested in John’s flamboyant plumbagos in the next pot over. Oh, well. I’m just happy to have some green on the balcony.

Here's some fish porn for those of you who might be into that. LilSis caught it in the lake behind her house a couple of weeks before her surgery. She's quite the sportswoman.

She also told me a handy trick for getting rid of fish-smell (or garlic or onion) on your hands: wash your hands with toothpaste. I found out the hard way that gel toothpaste (at least not Colgate kid toothpaste) does not work; your hands just smell like bubble gum and stink. It has to be the white *paste* kind.
 

Tests, Tents, Etc.

I’m supposed to be studying for a test in my class on changes in English over the last century, and I am bored out of my skull. Some of the topics I have found pretty interesting (like the formation of new words or changes in meaning for established words), but sound change is likely to put me in a coma. zzzzzzzzz... Fortunately, I don’t think it will come up on the test, because we didn’t go into great detail on it in class, and we’re also mainly dealing with written language. At least I have my fingers crossed.

John is feeling a little Hannah-withdrawal this evening, but not as bad as last night. Right after school yesterday, she went to hang out with a friend, and has basically only been home since then to get her stuff and to play on the computer/with her sewing machine with said friend. The friend’s parents put up a 3-room tent in their back yard, so the whole family slept there last night, and the kids are planning to have another go at it tonight. We got a refreshing little shower earlier, but I don’t think it will rain overnight again.

TMI alert!
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.
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I suspect I may have expelled my IUD. You’d think this is something I would have noticed, and not to go into too many details, I suspect it happened during Aunt Flo’s last visit. It was exactly like her visits to me a year-and-a-half ago before I got the IUD, and this month I am definitely feeling blue while she’s here. Which is really a drag. I have found myself occasionally acting like my father* (minus the cheating and putting down), and I want to shoot myself. But at least I am aware of it and can consciously force myself to STOP IT.

* John knows he has crossed the line into insufferable asshole-ism when I call him my father’s name, and I am cringingly waiting for him to return the favor.

A Pinch of This, A Dash of That

The construction guys came by and finished dismantling the scaffolding around our Winter Garden (BTW, this is basically a sunroom, but ours happens to be not completely glassed-in, if that makes sense). So the inside (minus one light fixture) and the outside are done! We can now officially move back in. Woot! We actually wanted to use it last weekend, since one of John’s grad-school colleagues was going to be in town and we had invited her and her husband to coffee, so John called up the landlord to see if we could clear out the last of the workman’s stuff. (At this point, everything was done but the light fixtures.) No problem, he said. Then an hour later, after John had huffed and puffed up and down the stairs 5 or 6 times (did I mention we live on the fourth floor?) to take out all the tools and put the garden furniture back in, the electrician came to put in the lights. So we had to scootch everything around to make room for the ladder, then we had to dust bits of drywall off the tablecloth before we could set the table for the coffee. That’s typical around here. Anyhoo, I added the last photo to the yahoo album (link on the right), if you are so bored as to want to look at it.

In other local news, Europe is experiencing a heat wave right about now, but I have only found it oppressively hot when I have to get on a bus, or if I have to walk along the sidewalk next to the street here in our village (no shade most of the way). If you can get in the shade, it is really not too bad, as opposed to my experience in West Texas (you all know the 100F-in-the-shade-type summer weather there). Luckily, we don’t have to worry about water restrictions, so a tepid shower often does the trick when it gets too hot. Looking out the window now, it is starting to cloud up, which automatically knocks the temps down. We got up in the mid-90s yesterday, but I don’t know if we will today, despite the forecast for even higher temperatures. The other part of the forecast said something about bad thunderstorms, so we might actually be catching the edge of that.

I am down to one written final exam, one 20-minute oral exam (part of my qualifying exams), and one 15-page paper which is not due until September 30. I know I need to buckle down a little more on studying, but at this point I feel like I have a good head start on it. The wish for a sudden, speedy death that gripped me during the height of the paper-writing ordeal has gone, leaving me feeling giddily upbeat (except when I think about the grade on my paper, but let’s not worry about that until the grade actually comes in), but I can’t become blasé about my workload now.

On the occasion of an anniversary that marked the beginning of a period of her life that was, let’s say, interesting in a life-lesson kind of way, WesTexGirl recently posted about how that wild and crazy period actually helped to shape her into the person she is today. And it occurred to me that I am boring, and that I have probably always been boring. My wild and crazy? Can be counted on one hand in single events. Hers? In months. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have traded places with her for anything, but I’m thinking that maybe I have been in a middle-aged mind-set since I was, oh, 16. John would probably think so, but I hope only in the quiet, honest recesses of his soul. Oh, well.

Hannah has been an interesting study lately. One day she is formulating a theory that Betty Crocker was a space alien, and the next she is weeping over the fighting in the Middle East. She has already been begging to shave her legs (and arms) because some boys tease her, but at least one of her girlfriends sticks up for her and points out that she herself also has hairy legs (kid hair—that’s nothing!). I checked out Babette Cole’s book on puberty, Hair in Funny Places, for Hannah, and she has pulled it out of the book basket a couple of times. John finds Babette Cole’s books mildly repulsive, but I like them (as the aunts and uncles in my family can attest, because I think at least one kid in each family has gotten a copy of Dr. Dog.) Like I said, John is a little iffy on it, but I think it is a very straightforward and funny approach to explaining “your changing body.” Hannah’s friend is a little older and is already going through it, and Hannah’s turn is probably right around the corner (she hasn’t even lost all her baby teeth yet!), so I wanted to start introducing the topic gradually, and it seems to be working. She’s asked a couple of questions, and open communication is exactly what I’m aiming for. There’s no room for squeamishness.

As I sat in the English Department library while writing my paper, surrounded by the works of Nick Hornby and Herman Melville and Aphra Behn, I felt very sad that I couldn’t just pick up one of them and dig in. Plus someone on a email list not in any way affiliated with Harry Potter made a comment about The Half Blood Prince that has had me in a flutter of discontent that I don’t have time (at least until the end of July) to find what she was talking about and see if it says what she claims it does. So I am counting down the days until I can read for pleasure again (the stack of Terry Pratchett is calling to me...).

Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of fun had at the carnival to share, so here is basically the highlight of the outing--the port-o-head. The picture on the side pretty well says what it's for, don't you think? 

This box contains every article, every handwritten page, every printed page of the paper I just completed. The paper itself ended up being only 15 pages + 2 pages of bibliography. 

Rumors of my death were premature...

I survived the term paper and the written exam (parts 1 and 2 for admission to upper-division coursework)--passing is possibly a different matter, but I won't know for a while. Now I just have a translation exam (English into German), a seminar exam (ongoing change in English), and a 20-minute oral exam in linguistics (part 3) before the end of the semester in two weeks. After the first two things, though, I somehow feel more confident about the other ones. I spent several late nights last week working on the paper, which was due at noon on Friday, then had to cram for the exam on Saturday morning (I had actually already been preparing, but it had been a couple of weeks since I had worked really steadily on it), so by Saturday afternoon I was beat and barely even coherent. But I got a good night's sleep last night and have already pulled out my materials for the next round of tests.

Since my life has been terribly boring recently, I don't really have much of interest to post right now. I'll dig through my Palm later, though, and see if I can't cull out any notes I've been hoarding for the post-exam period. But to give myself a running start, I weeded all the gardening and construction photos out of this blog and put them in photo albums, so there are new photo links on the right.

After a bite of lunch, we're taking the afternoon off to go to our village's annual carnival, so look for more another photo album chock full of fun tomorrow or so.

Harry and the Potters

God bless Mimi Smartypants for turning me on to these guys. For the 5 minutes I was reading their Wikipedia entry I did not feel the death of a thousand cuts by Term Paper. (Which is my own stupid fault. Really.) Off to cut #1001.

Nee is a sack of pissed

Today has basically been a shitter of a day. I slept badly last night, going to bed late but waking up frequently between dreams of my sister’s Baroque underwater-resort wedding and Kermit the Frog overcharging me at the buffet and Antonio Banderas outwitting some spies on a sunken boat.

After my meeting with my Term Paper advisor this morning, I wanted a cup of coffee but only had 70 cents, so I chanced the coffee automat in the department. Fucking machine. Last time it only gave me half a cup of coffee, this time it gave me a cup with a hole in the bottom. I was so pissed I poured it down the sink (after dripping a large portion on the floor while I figured out where the leak was coming from). Can you imagine? Too mad to drink cheap, bad, leaky coffee? I’m officially through with that coffee machine.

I bumped something while making copies, and many more than I actually wanted started shooting out of the machine. I got that under control, turned in the book I was copying from, and only realized later that I had copied one page wrong. I can’t recheck the book until tomorrow. Then I couldn’t find some other info I was looking for in the library.

And to top it off, on the ride home, we were stuck for about 20 minutes because I think our bus driver witnessed an accident (I was in the back of a double-length bus) and had to stick around until the cops, the ambulance, and the emergency doctor on call showed up. By the time I got home, I was a sad sack. I turned off my brain and did the last of the dishes I started last night.

At least I managed to get through my meeting with my T.P. advisor without 1. embarrassing myself or 2. him berating me. He’s a really nice person—basically the Mr. Rogers of Linguistics (including the cute little sweater in the winter). Very encouraging and supportive and non-threatening. I also managed to turn in another translation homework without bursting into flames, but it was a close thing.

At least the workmen came out to do *something* on the roof again. We had a pretty big storm blow in last night, and water was pouring out of 2 spots in the ceiling. We haven’t seen the guy who was supposed to be finishing out the inside of the Winter Garden, but we would like to be able to use the room, if only to open the windows to catch some more breeze up here in no-air-conditioning land.

Sorry that I've shown up only to bitch and moan, but what else is this thing for? :-)

Here's to LilSis

LilSis had surgery yesterday, so I started my period in honor of her no longer having them (as of yesterday). Please brush off your mind-meld techniques and send her good wishes for a speedy recovery and a return to good health.

Bring out the Beach Boys--Summertime is here

My brain is still full of one of those spousal anger dreams (where your spouse does something horrifying and out of character, and you wake up breathing heavy and totally pissed), so I have nothing coherent to say, but here are some photos of summer for you to enjoy.

Barbies on Parade

Hannah has put up a Barbie fashion show over on her blog. Eighty percent of the text is verbatim per her dictation. I even managed to leave out all the snarky comments in my head.

Enjoy.