And Lame-O Was her Name-O

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

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

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

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

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

Home Safe!

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

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

Walking in a Summer Wonderland

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

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



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



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



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



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

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



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



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

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

No Rest for the Weary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nee the Cleaning Lady

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

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

My Dirty Secret

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

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

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

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

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

It's always fun and games around here.

I am a gardener. Really!

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

But in other news, my tomatoes are thriving.



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



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

Ode to My Office Supplies

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

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


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

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

This isn’t looking so sexy anymore, eh?

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

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

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

Stop—Hannah Time!

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

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



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

All That and a Bag of Potato Chips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in about a week!

Happy 500th Post to Me!

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Hannah, Better Than TV

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

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

She’s got you there, John.


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


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


and here


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


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

Over the Hump

It seems like whenever I don’t blog for a week or so (well, with real content), it is that much harder to come up with something to post, without it sounding like a letter to my grandmother. Suffer, Pope!

Hannah's class went to camp for 2 days last week. I was a little worried about their travel plans because there was a transportation strike called for this week, but it turns out that it was a one-day event, so it was a non-problem. Unfortunately, it was cold and wet the whole time they were gone, so they didn’t get to swim or do as much as they wanted to outdoors, but they did hike 2 hours up a mountain to tour a castle. Hannah was put out that one of the teachers got to drive there while they had to walk, but that teacher is also 7 months pregnant... Anyhoo, Hannah had not really been looking forward to the trip because of the roommate she ended up with and had cried herself almost sick over it the night before. But on the way to meet up with her class at the bus stop, she was little miss sunshine and roses, and she had a good time. We went to a birthday party on Thursday night, where there was a surprising number of parents of 4th graders, and one of the other parents asked if we had called the camp yet to check on Hannah. She hadn’t either, but she was tempted. I think it was a good experience for both the kids and the parents.

Not that I got a lot done while Hannah was gone. You would think that would be the perfect time, but I just didn’t feel like doing much. The yahoo photo service finally got around to letting me automate the change-over to Flickr, so that has sucked up a lot of time with fiddling with the results. I also added a Flickr badge over on the right, so you can get to my photos by clicking on it. I’ll probably have to go back into my blog archives and fix a bunch of broken links thanks to yahoo photos going south, but I’ll get around to it when I have something pressing to avoid. *g*

It is often not the big differences between the US and Germany that bother me, but the little ones. For instance, I have not been able to find a cloth dishrag anywhere. I don’t care for using only a sponge for all our dishwashing and counter-wiping needs, and our dishrags are wearing thin. See? How sad.


It seems dumb to ask our family to send a care package with dishrags in it, so I have been trying out other alternatives. First, I cut up a large dish towel, but John complained that I made them too small, and I don’t care for the texture of the fabric (the pink one below). Then I crocheted one (the yellow one).


It seems kind of dumb to have to make dishrags, but it keeps me from going mad in my spare time. I am also crocheting a baby sweater for Hannah’s teacher. The closer it gets to the end of the semester, the less I feel like working. So I guess I have actually felt like working for a total of about 2 weeks this semester. It’s a record!

I just wrote my grandma a postcard complaining about the cold, wet weather, and 5 minutes later the clouds blew off and the sun came out. I guess that is as good a method for influencing the weather as Hannah’s—she wears summery clothes, even if it is raining when we leave the house, and by the time we get where we’re going, it has stopped and holds off the entire time we’re outdoors. At least, that is what happened at the midsummer party.

All the rain has been good for the plants in general, but the flowers have been looking awfully soggy. Maybe they will perk up if it stays sunny for more than one afternoon. It has even been too wet to get out and take photos of the flowers, which you know I love to do. You’ll just have to imagine them: roses in every color, beautiful pink and purple hortensia, lilac, and daisies.

We’re going to Shrek 3 this afternoon, not necessarily the perfect activity on a sunny day, but it was planned in advance.

*insert sound of hysterical laughter*

I was scrolling through my favorite blogs just now, and came across the latest entry by Naomi Kritzer. She in turn has linked to some *bizarre* artwork featuring Jesus, but her labels are what had me laughing hard enough to pee my pants. Enjoy!

Pimping my other blog

New post up at the travel blog.

Nothing new here: just rain, sun, rain, sun, ad nauseum. Sorry.

Books R Us

Modern technology is a wonderful thing. John and I took his photos from his trip to Texas for his grandfather’s funeral and put them up at Snapfish. Then we organized them into a photo album; Snapfish will print and bind them and mail the finished album to his grandmother, without us leaving the semi-comfort of our desk (have you seen our crowded, cramped Hobbit-hole office?).

I can’t wait until I am able to order laminated versions of my favorite books. The advantage of plastic pages is obvious when you think about cookbooks (I’m drooling just thinking about Beard on Bread and The New Basics Cookbook laminated and ring-bound), but consider the fate of my copy of Pride and Prejudice: right now the pages are falling out and the ink is fading from so much handling. (I re-read P & P 3-4 times per year.) But a super-sturdy version—an adult version of board books, if you will—might actually survive life on Nee’s bed-side table.

My idea of ordering books bound to my personal specifications is not entirely a new one. At the Herzog August Bibliothek (Duke August Library) in Wolfenbüttel, John and I once saw how one of the dukes had had all of the books re-bound in matching white (I think) leather covers. The result was a thing of beauty, if ridiculously expensive.

I don’t doubt that my idea will someday be feasible. Right now, people in highly specialized fields are already working to make rare, out-of-print books available via print-on-demand services. The scanned or re-typed materials are stored electronically, to be printed and bound in very small batches, which normal publishers don’t do. At least one publisher has already seen how this could be profitable for them in the future, when the technology for producing books at home has become as simple as the current technology for printing photos from your computer. (See an excellent entry by The Rejecter for more details.) Unfortunately for that publisher, their attempt to change their standard contract to give them the electronic rights to a work in perpetuity (*gag*) was met with outrage, and I believe they have since withdrawn that clause. With so many other personalized items available via the Internet—see Cafe Press for an example of an online mug/t-shirt/mousepad printer—I don’t see why not books (as long as the authors are properly being compensated, which brings us back to the publishers, I guess).

I am Texan, Hear Me Yell

You Are 52% Texas

At first, you seem Texan... but just because a chicken has wings don't mean it can fly.

How Texas Are You?

This may be true for their definition of "Texan", but I am one anyway. When people ask me where I am from, I usually say "Texas", not "the US". Now if Kee's husband took this, he would get a 100%...

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

Hannah just told me: "You're the biggest nutball in the world, except that guy on Spaceballs, and that's just a movie."

Nee Leaves the House--News at 11!

I would reinstate the weather-bitching level, but I can't remember how it is supposed to go. Suffice it to say, I am not happy with the level of rain recently. Rain should be a good thing: it makes the plants grow, etc etc. It's starting to feel like the UK or something, though. We have a heavy shower in the morning (luckily after Hannah's walked to school), then it turns gloriously sunny, so I run out to the library, and then a huge wind-and-rain storm hits while I am waiting for the bus (luckily there was a shelter, because I had no jacket or umbrella with me (see glorious sunshine, above)). Very annoying. Mother Nature, please take note that we are no longer amused.

Ahem.

We have been keeping busy with Hannah's multiple ballet recitals (ok, two). The first was for the whole ballet school, so we got to see tap-dancing adults, teens in tutus, and nose-picking pre-schoolers. Their recital this Sunday was a benefit to raise money for housing for the parents of children being treated at the local (big-time) cancer center, so the tiny tots were left at home. Hannah's class and a parallel class were the youngest there, and they all did a good job. I was chief hairdresser for Hannah's class again; she suggested that maybe I could do it for a living. Ha ha! *wipes tear from eye* That was a good one, honey. I am the least frou-frou woman you are ever going to meet, so the idea of me helping other people be beautiful...

This morning I went out to the balcony to get the laundry out of the dryer, and I had to bust out laughing at the sight of our neighbor across the street jumping up and down *in his trashcan*. This poor retiree has nothing better to do with his time than to reorganize the garbage cans on a regular basis so that everything fits in efficiently. In Germany, there is a stereotype about that kind of person, who noses into his neighbors' business where the upkeep of the yard and house is concerned; our friend was able to mark this neighbor as one of the "petty bourgeois" on sight.

My favorite formal-wear shop (for disparaging) has some new crap-tastic displays. I don't know if it is the mannequins or the dresses, but every one of them has bullet-boobs. I can't imagine who they are planning on selling those dresses to--Anna Nicole Smith is obviously no longer in the market, but they must have someone in mind. One dress is actually kind of kooky-cute, but it has boning on the outside of the bodice, and it sticks up over the edges, then there are these golden stars on the ends of them. It's like they were going for the "sparkler" look. Maybe it's a Miss Universe dress?